Quote of the Day (Althea Gibson, on Successfully Defending a Title)

“In sports you simply are not considered a real champion until you have defended your title successfully. Winning it once can be a fluke; winning it twice proves you are the best. I was passionately determined that there wasn't going to be any 'one-shot' tarnish on my Wimbledon championship."—U.S. tennis great Althea Gibson (1927-2003), after winning both the U.S. and Wimbledon titles for a second time in 1958, quoted by Stephen Bierley, “Gibson the Pioneer Passes On,” The Guardian (U.K.), Sept. 28, 2003

This week, as the U.S. Open tennis tournament reaches its climax, many past victors may very well be remembered by commentators and spectators, but let’s hope one in particular is recalled: Althea Gibson, who proved she was a “real champion” 65 years ago this week.

But her achievement occurred not just because she had defended the title successfully, but because she did so at a time when the barriers to African-American accomplishment in sports as well as the rest of American society were so high.

As tennis writer Allison Danzig wrote after a New York ticker-tape parade in Gibson’s honor in 1957: “The girl who was playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem some fifteen years ago, found herself, at the age of 30, at the pinnacle of tennisdom.”

Quote of the Day (Anne-Sophie Mutter, on What Musicians Can Learn From Roger Federer)

“Art has to do with self-doubt, renewing yourself, being open to all the possibilities of perceiving music, pursuing music, having great joy on stage, sharing music. That should be the goal above anything: communicating being there in the moment, giving it your all. Of course, you are aiming for technical perfection because that’s the groundwork from which you can take off like a bird. That’s like being an athlete. [Retired Swiss tennis great] Federer has been exemplary and a great inspiration for me personally because he always brought so much passion, precision, joy and persistence to his game. That pretty much sums up what being an artist is about.”— German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, quoted by Ariane Todes, “Master of the Strings: Mutter on Tennis’s Roger Federer,” BBC Music Magazine, June 2023

The photo accompanying this post was taken of Roger Federer serving during the Qatar Exxonmobil Open in Doha, on January 4, 2012, by Vinod Divakaran.

This Day in Tennis History (Death of Bill Tilden, Fallen ‘Golden Age’ Great)

June 5, 1953—He had dominated his sport as few if any athletes have ever done, before or since. But when Bill Tilden died at age 60 in a Los Angeles boarding house, he was alone, down to his last $88, and shunned by a tennis community that once lionized him. More than 60 years before Jerry Sandusky, he had shocked sports-mad America by being arrested and jailed twice for illicit relations with youths. 

In the 1920s “Golden Age of Sports,” “Big Bill” ranked with baseball’s Babe Ruth, golf’s Bobby Jones, boxing’s Jack Dempsey, and football’s Red Grange as undisputed masters. His arsenal—chops, slices, spins, along with a “Cannonball” serve all the more devastating for being so uncommon and unexpected—utterly unnerved opponents.  His record atop his sport was astonishing:

 * the only man to have won the American singles title six years in a row;

* America’s top-ranked player every year between 1924 and 1934;

* the first American to win at Wimbledon, which he did on three times, the last occasion at age 38.

The physical grace with which he carried himself on court was belied by his determination to reach the top. Unlike many of today’s players, he not only started late in the sport, but even then did not display particular ability for a while. (He couldn’t even make his college team at the University of Pennsylvania, and did not reach the finals at Forest Hills until he was 25.) 

Once he became a champion, Tilden was intent on playing “my own sweet game," which could involve:

*deliberately making mistakes and falling behind to make his matches more competitive;

*imitating his opponent’s game just to see if he could do it better; and

*giving points away when he felt a line judge made a mistake in his favor.

The tennis court was never really a big enough arena for Tilden. He also aspired to the stage and screen, even though his acting ability was, at best, limited. (He only got to play Dracula on Broadway by ponying up the money himself.) He counted stars like Charlie Chaplin, Katharine Hepburn, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as friends, and even gave some tennis lessons.

In one of his avocations, author, Tilden inadvertently anticipated his own fall, in a novel called Glory's Net (1930), when the protagonist’s career and personal life disintegrate. For a long time, he had managed to repress his homosexual instincts. But after his travels in his late 30s, particularly in Weimar Berlin, his associations with youths became more noticeable—and dangerous. 

One who had taken note of this was Vladimir Nabokov. His novel Lolita features a former tennis champion that Humbert Humbert allows to teach the title character knowing that this gay instructor will never seduce the girl. As if the circumstances surrounding this former pro hadn’t been enough of a clue to the inspiration, Nabokov planted a clue in his name, Ned Litam – a characteristically wicked bit of wordplay, “Ma Tilden” spelled backwards.

His reputation was becoming so bad into the Forties that teenage boys who practiced with him were advised not to get into a car or a room alone with him. Then, within three years, he was jailed twice—first for engaging in a sexual act with a teenage prostitute on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, then for groping a teenage hitchhiker.

After that, Tilden became a pariah—blackballed by clubs that once threw wide its doors for him, and even erased from the register of graduates maintained by his alma mater, Penn. As late as last year, an attempt to erect a plaque honoring his accomplishments at the entrance of Tilden’s home court, the Germantown Cricket Club, was rejected. His case, not unlike the Metropolitan Opera's James Levine, throws into sharp relief the question of how much to continue to honor a figure of major accomplishments whose conduct exceeds social norms and the law.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Ashe, on ‘True Heroism’)

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost." — American professional tennis player, author, activist—and yes, true hero—Arthur Ashe (1943-1993), quoted in Bob Kelly, Worth Repeating: More Than 5,000 Classic and Contemporary Quotes (2003)

Quote of the Day (David Foster Wallace, on the 1996 Wimbledon Champ)

“Richard Krajicek, a six-foot-five-inch Dutchman, ...wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.” —David Foster Wallace, “The String Theory,” Esquire, July 1996

Well, Krajicek won at Wimbledon that year, didn’t he? So I guess something in his method must have worked.

Still, quite a description of an athlete—and probably part of the reason why Wallace remains a major reader favorite nearly eight years after his tragic suicide.

(Photo of Richard Krajicek taken at Aegon International Tennis Eastbourne, June 2011, by Andrew Campbell.)

Quote of the Day (Tennis Great/Brat Jimmy Connors, With No Apologies)

“I make no apologies for the way I played tennis. I wasn't out there to win a popularity contest—I was out there to win—and entertain at the same time. The thing is, I was good at being a bad boy, a real one.  Not like some of the pretend bad boys who said sorry after every little incident. Face up to it or don’t do it.  I always accepted the fines, suspensions and screaming headlines that followed my spontaneous assholery. That is a word, right? Well, it is now.”— Jimmy Connors, The Outsider: A Memoir (2013)

This Day in Tennis History (McEnroe Expelled From Grand Slam Event)

January 21, 1990—Nobody gets through organized baseball without knowing, “Three strikes and you’re out”—but John McEnroe, not realizing that this was a new rule in professional tennis, ended up being ejected from the Australian Open, the first player to be disqualified from a Grand Slam event in more than a quarter century.

The player, heading into the twilight of a great career, was actually ahead of opponent Mikael Pernfors in the fourth round when his on-court slide into insanity began. When it was over, a crowd of 150,000 in Melbourne booed at the astonishing results—McEnroe disqualified after scores of 1-6, 6-4, 5-7, 4-2—but he had only himself to blame.

When I began college, rumor had it that my school was one of McEnroe’s choices after he graduated from Manhattan’s Trinity School. (He ended up accepting an offer at Stamford before touring pro.) Given the publicity already circulating about his career, several of us in my freshman class decided that tennis’ loss was Columbia’s gain.

(Sometimes, in my more fanciful moments, I imagine McEnroe confronting one of our Contemporary Civilization instructors about an assigned text. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents seems appropriate, I think, don’t you? “Where does this jerk come up with the idiotic ideas about the ego and superego?” I imagine him saying, then, leaving classmates with jaws agape, turning on the instructor himself: “And where do you get off, assigning this shit?”)

By the time the young player had gotten to Wimbledon, the British tabs were all over him, calling him “Super Brat” and—it’s hard to shake the implication of a jibe at his ethnicity—“McNasty.”

I can’t say that I am an inveterate tennis watcher, but it seemed that every time I watched Wimbledon or the U.S. Open from about 1974 to 1984, either McEnroe or Jimmy Connors was competing in the finals—attacking the net, grunting loudly as they chased balls all over the place, leaving themselves utterly spent at the end of their games. I marveled at the skill and never-say-die spirit they brought to the game. Well, all but one aspect of it, anyway.

Every time McEnroe turned on an umpire—which seemed to happen more and more as the years went on—I shook my head. I had that same feeling I would get just while watching Earl Weaver (or, just a few years later, his brother in spirit, Lou Piniella) go toe to toe with a baseball ump—spewing curses and spittle, circling his quarry, turning his cap completely around so he could go eyeball to eyeball, kicking dirt everywhere, even, in moments of most sublime madness, throwing an offending base into the outfield.

One of McEnroe’s classic moments came at Wimbledon, when he berated one ump as “the pits of the world.” But this incident could easily be multiplied.

The following are the three strikes that led to McEnroe’s epic Blunder Down Under:

* glaring at a lineswoman for making a bad call, all the while bouncing his ball meaningfully—and perhaps menacingly—on his racket;

* smashing his racquet—twice—after two wide forehands; and

* complaining about chair umpire Gerry Armstrong for citing him for racquet abuse, then, after calling for the Grand Slam chief of supervisors, Ken Ferrar, swearing at him, loud enough so fans courtside and on TV could hear.

Suddenly, McEnroe heard the unexpected—and dread—words from Armstrong: “"Default Mr. McEnroe. Game, set, match."

In a way, this epic cranial meltdown had been coming for more than the last several minutes. I’d say the road that took McEnroe to this point began six years earlier, when Bjorn Borg withdrew from active participation in tennis.

Suddenly, the person who had forced McEnroe to raise the level of his game—to be Bill Russell against Wilt Chamberlain—was gone. With it went motivation. A volatile marriage to actress Tatum O’Neal didn’t help keep his head straight, either.

In the press conference after the Australian Open catastrophe, McEnroe admitted he had had made a mistake, not realizing that under the new Code of Conduct, the path to disqualification was shortened by a step: first a warning, then a point penalty, then a default.

"I can't say I'm surprised," said McEnroe. "It was bound to happen."

An interesting remark, if you stop to think about it. McEnroe had been gambling that he had, in effect, one more professional chance of winning through intimidation. He miscalculated, ending up losing his first chance at a major in six years.