The Drastic Social Change in a Once Genteel Game - 29 August 2003

Some 20 years ago a friend of mine, an American taking a holiday in England, arrived in London during the two weeks of the Wimbledon tournament.

When he was back here, full of impressions of this and that, he happened to throw in an aside.

"By the way," he said, "I never knew but by golly the English are crazy about tennis, aren't they."

"No," I said politely, "they're crazy about Wimbledon. Not the same thing."

At that time I'd just published a coffee table book with a great American friend, who happened to be as fine an aerial photographer as I knew of.

We put out a sort of aerial historical tour of London from east to west, following the whole length of the Thames through the city until it moved far into what then was the placid farmland of Oxfordshire.

One small chapter had eight plates devoted to festivals. Eight plates representing sporting events that once a year transcend their simple definition as a sport and are popular national festivals.

The main ones were the Cup Final, Ascot and Wimbledon.

I'm sure I'm not alone in knowing lots of people who could not name you any of the other 30-odd tournaments on the world professional tour, or for that matter who've seen any of the other four major shows - the Australian, the French and the United States Open - which at the moment is in full blast as I speak.

And more surprisingly it's pretty much the same story about the United States Open - although I should say the US Open here is not the national festival that Wimbledon is but it is overwhelmingly a New York city show or festival or circus, which is a remarkable thing for a minority sport.

So of course is tennis a minority sport in Britain. If you'd care to know exactly how minor let me quote a most useful source, an enterprise specialising entirely in sports statistics.

Since Americans love sport and love statistics more than anybody you can be sure that it's a very busy statistical business.

If you're a golfer or a tennis player I hope you're sitting down.

In the United States - and the ratio is much the same for the United Kingdom - in the United States 6% of Americans have ever played golf, watched golf or read about golf. Slightly more depressing figures for the even more minor game of tennis.

It doesn't bear thinking about that 94% of your population has never heard of Jack Nicklaus or Rod Laver. I can't go on.

But as a gaudy chapter of social history it's fascinating to consider the drastic social change in tennis - this once genteel game whose experts were amateurs, all comfortably off, able anyway to pay their ocean fares and lodgings and their considerable annual costs of playing in the Australian, French, British and American tournaments.

Let's go back to Wimbledon when I first started going there every year in the 1930s.

The courts of Wimbledon were surrounded by open meadows and a small enclosure for the nobs who owned automobiles.

Today the area of the car parks is greater than that of the action. And during the fortnight of the championships the cars, I regret to say, desecrate the golf course in the adjoining Wimbledon Park.

But the difference between Wimbledon then and now cannot match the huge change from the American tennis centre then and now.

For many years the two countries kept pace with each other, Britain setting the proper tone for a very proper game which was called - without a blush when I was a boy - a gentleman's game.

Golf was an old gentleman's game.

The way in which American tennis imitated the setting and atmosphere of Wimbledon was a deferential tribute to the cradle of tennis.

Later the Wimbledon Club added the words "lawn tennis" to its club name and soon the gentry started to watch and play.

The game really took off publicly in this country during the First World War in 1915 when the club which would become the headquarters of American tennis was established in a leafy Long Island suburb called Forest Hills, where there are no hills and certainly no forests - Long Island is as flat a stretch of land as any east of Kansas.

But like Wimbledon Forest Hills was quiet, leafy, traffic-free, genteel - a garden city.

Once a year several thousands came to watch the United States tennis tournament.

When the war was over - the First War - the news fell on Forest Hills that Wimbledon had replaced its wooden stands with a - help! - concrete stadium, just opened by King George V no less. The next year Forest Hills got itself a concrete stadium.

It was during the 1920s that the game took off as a public entertainment, thanks to the dominance of the game by a sensational young French woman and by a handsome American, William Tilden, who was more or less untouchable for five years.

Many more people than the suburban gentry took to tennis, just as the arrival in the mid '20s of Bobby Jones as the unbeatable one made everybody take up golf - from George Gershwin to the Emperor of Japan to Winston Churchill.

Churchill took it up for about four rounds after which he snapped: "Golf! There's a game whose aim is to hit a small ball into an even smaller hole with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose."

The great advance in tennis in the 1930s was the discovery that with so many thousand paying customers coming to watch tennis every year surely there must be money to be made as a professional playing it.

All this time, from the late 1880s, to the mid or late 1930s, all the competing top players in the game - men and women alike - were amateurs.

As late as 1938 the great American world star was a Californian, Donald Budge.

He performed something that had never been done before - he won all the four major singles championships of Australia, France, Britain and the US.

Then - a history book records - a terrible thing happened, bemoaned by all American tennis fans and quietly deplored by the people who ran the game.

"The loss of Donald Budge to the professional game was a severe blow to American tennis."

Yes there was a professional game, lesser lights who nevertheless acquired very comfortable bank accounts.

The same defection occurred to the best in the game right through the 30s. Until - I think in the 1960s - both Wimbledon and the United States Tennis Association decided that their events must go open, meaning open to professionals or - to face reality - open to the best players of the game.

By now in both countries instead of 10,000 showing up for the national championships a quarter of a million come to watch.

Twenty-five years ago Forest Hills closed down as the American tennis centre and a grand centre was built on some meadows on Long Island, right bang up against La Guardia airport. A masterpiece of misplacement.

But it was two or three times the size of Forest Hills and it had a new Centre Court stadium named - why? - after Louis Armstrong. A hint perhaps that tennis was moving from a public game into the world of entertainment.

Years later New York decided it must have the biggest tennis coliseum in the world and set it up for night play with great lights, brighter than ten theatre stages.

Does that mean a quarter of a million tennis fans have suddenly been born? No, the new audience for tennis is for an entertainment that combines the appeal of a rock concert, a heavyweight boxing match and a circus.

And right on cue appeared the clowns - the new type of tennis star. Jimmy Connors was a fine player and so was the incomparable touch player, John McEnroe.

But the new crowd, not great tennis experts, came to see Connors pumping the night air and heaving his Elvis pelvic thrusts and watch McEnroe's screaming protests on line calls and four-letter obscenities tossed at the chair umpire.

They loved it so much the officials, both here and at Wimbledon, were too intimidated to apply the rules.

After 10 years the Australians threw McEnroe out of a tournament. Bad manners were, for the time being, wounded.

But the rock concert setting and atmosphere has grown denser and more flamboyant.

Last Monday Pete Sampras decided to retire from the game.

He didn't just announce it. he had staged for him in the coliseum a royal, a presidential, ceremony - a line of dancing swaying girls, a parade of American flags, a soaring baritone, a marching band, hundreds of beautifully printed placards: "Farewell, Pete" and embossed gold signs: "Pete, we'll never forget".

Veterans came from Europe, mostly from America - Courier, Boris Becker. They trooped before the great man as at a presidential inauguration and paid their solemn tribute till the man himself appeared, was very shy, thanked everybody over and over, including his wife and little baby, whom he stroked - thunderous applause. He wept - more thunderous applause.

The only people who, as the French say, shone by their absence were the Swedes and the Australians who are noted in tennis for their easy manners and good sportsmanship.

At one- or two-minute intervals between this ceremony and a flock of motorcar and other commercials there were snippets of tennis.

I've forgotten who was playing in the main event.

Never mind, we had an evening worthy of a night in Radio City Music Hall.

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