American know-how

I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember an American phrase which came into popular usage in the wake of the Second World War. It was 'American know-how' and it summed neatly the American inventive ingenuity, from, you could say, the invention of the first refrigerated railway cars for keeping fruit fresh during the Civil – that's right – the American Civil War, up through the zipper and on into the rip-roaring improvisations of the Second War.

Certainly, Air Marshal Goering, the fat overlord of the Nazi's Luftwaffe, made a fatal mistake of judgement in calming Hitler's fears that President Roosevelt could ever fulfil his promise of supplying the allies with 60,000 airplanes a year, a boast that even Charles Lindbergh called 'hysterical'. Goering assured his Fuhrer that the Americans 'can not build airplanes'. They're very good at refrigerators and razor blades.

Well, Roosevelt was wrong. Within six months, a stretch of pasture near Detroit had been transformed into an enormous room which, alone, produced nearly 9,000 planes a year. In all, Roosevelt's boast was modestly short of the mark. America, in 1943, turned out not 60,000 but 86,000 planes. The morale of the nation was bucked by other marvels, by bulldozing airstrips in impossible jungles, by meeting America's desperate need of rubber with, in one year, a whole synthetic rubber industry, and so on, and so on.

When the war was over, the United States was acknowledged as a technological giant humanised by happy touches of good old Yankee ingenuity. Well, those are long-gone days and the phrase 'American know-how' has quietly vanished before the recognition – by Americans as much as anybody – that, in the past 30 years, the Italians, the Germans, the British and, most of all, the Japanese, also know how.

The phrase is so dead and gone that I was startled when it was used the other week by an American and, moreover, was used with high sarcasm. He was talking about the shift in the past two years of the American Open Tennis Championships from their old stand on Long Island at Forest Hills, a bosky suburb, an almost deliberate imitation of Wimbledon, with fake Tudor gables and ivy round the walls, to a new and huger site, physically just on Long Island because you have to cross the East River to get there, but technically in the New York City borough of Queens, close by LaGuardia Airport. In fact, many spectators of the tennis matches maintain that the new tennis centre is built on LaGuardia Airport and on the tarmac at that.

It is, in fact, on the meadows adjoining LaGuardia. Everything that leaves or lands at LaGuardia is roaring up or down about a hundred feet overhead and just to the south is John F Kennedy International Airport, so we get all its thundering jet traffic, too.

On the first day that a whole match was televised, somebody counted 76 jets screaming throughout the two sets it took one dripping woman player to beat another dripping woman. Somebody held a thermometer outside the sports commentators box that overlooks the stadium court. This was while the 18-year-old Hana Mandlikova was darting around like a firefly in her defeat of the lady in distress, Martina Navratilova. It registered 124 degrees. The spectators, with handkerchiefs around their hair or holding newspapers over their heads, sat through it all and if they were lucky enough to be in any discoverable shade, they could bask in the comparative cool of 95 degrees.

In a word, this damnable heatwave which started in mid July is still at it and, if the learned tennis commentators will forgive me, there may be a simple, stark reason why, of the eight women in the quarter finals, there were two 18-year-olds, a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old. I don't think anything like that has happened before in the history of tennis and when somebody jokily reminded Mandlikova – for purists, by the way, that's how SHE pronounces it – when somebody reminded her that she was the oldest of this quartet, she sighed, with no apparent irony, 'Yes, it's true. I'm getting old'. How does poor Mrs Lloyd feel in the twilight of her life in the mid-twenties?

Mandlikova went on to say, with that directness that seems characteristic of the new young crop tennis stars, including old man McEnroe, a 20-year-old, 'Young players aren't affected by the pressure yet which is why they are beating the older ones. We have nothing to lose now and everybody in the crowd is rooting for us.'

'How about,' somebody said, 'the heat?' 'The what?' she said, 'Oh, sure! That, too!' She meant – and it had to be so if you saw her darting and dashing after impossible retrieves – that playing in 124 degrees is maybe a touch bothersome but not really a factor. She was not complacent, mind you. She knew that if she got through her next match she might have to face the real competition, the number one seed, the 17-year-old Tracy Austin or the 15-year-old terror, Andrea Jaeger. Even a year ago, it would have been totally unpredictable that a cool-headed 18-year-old could recognise as the stumbling blocks to her throne a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old and be actually talking sense.

It's odd, for instance, that in the newspaper coverage of the Open Championships, there's been very little, indeed, about the veteran matron, Chris Evert-Lloyd who has gone serenely on winning 38 of her last 39 matches, that fatal 39th being her defeat by Mrs Cawley at Wimbledon. But, as I talk, anyway, several days away from the final, the young tigers or tigresses are not thinking of Mrs Lloyd.

As a long admirer of Chris Lloyd – all of eight years – I am prejudiced in seeing crabbed age win over brash youth but at this stage it seems unlikely to happen. Austin, Jaeger, Shriver and Mandlikova are outrageously fit and aggressive. They don't feel the heat. They forget to mention the airplanes. These things are just part of the normal commotion of life, like the bawling of three-year-olds in a school playground. The unflappable Mandlikova, with never a cautious bow in the direction of Chris Lloyd, went on, 'If I beat Barbara Hallquist in my next match, I think I can beat Jaeger in the semi-finals. I've beaten her before and I know how to play Austin. I have a good chance to win here.' We shall see. Maybe by now you will have seen.

Well, how about our sarcastic American and American know-how? Apart from what to us oldsters – that would be anybody over 30 – apart from the remarkable feat of building a championship tennis layout by an airport, there's one other feature that provoked my friend's remark. The American officials who supervised the building of the stadium and its surrounding courts decided that this should be one national centre where tennis not only could, but must, be played at night. Bjorn Borg, by the way, hates the place and his wily manager did everything he could last year to help Borg bypass a night game. He didn't succeed and, you may recall, Borg was blasted off the court by Roscoe Tanner, the man with the thunderbolt serve.

So they built a huge, flat column of lights. It looks like one wall of a yet unfinished, small skyscraper. When the sun goes down, this great grid flashes on and bathes everybody in a Drury Lane theatrical glare but before the sun goes down, the grid has been so placed that the sun sinks slowly behind it and throws a dark shadow obliquely across one half of the championship court. To say that this was an error of foresight is to be put it mildly. This is what caused my friend to say, 'Put it down to typical American know-how. No wonder we're screaming for tariffs against the Japanese.'

I don't know who said it, maybe me, that sports today confer a special blessing on our times. They offer not just the relaxation of getting your mind off your own troubles, they've always done that, they offer a useful fan of idealism in an oven of reality. More and more, both in the real world and the world of make-believe, nobody wins. We've come to feel this about wars and in the movies it's rare for the boy to get the girl with any prospect more rosy than a tough marriage ahead or a parting, or an unwanted baby. But in sport there's always a winner and if it's said, and it often is, that sport, in moderation of course, like alcohol, is an escape, well then so it is and I suspect an essential safety valve for everybody.

I'll say no more about this except to add that looking over the people I've known who take no interest in any sport whatsoever, they are with a couple of glaring exceptions, more fretful than most and tend to be perfectionists in politics, marriage, whatever. They're still looking for a hero or a heroine. We know they don't exist in life but we can except this because we have our heroes. We are more sympathetic to the people battling with reality. I don't expect Mrs Thatcher to be Chris Lloyd and I don't, at the moment, anticipate that Jimmy Carter will turn into Jack Nicklaus.

I suppose I ought to mention, for the record, that the American presidential campaign started officially, as it always does, on Labor Day. There was one notable break with tradition which promises some dirty work ahead. Presidential candidates always start by saying they will scorn personalities and argue the issues and, usually, it takes about a month for them to start on each other's character. This time they pretended to no such delicacy. Mr Carter, the first day, was off picturing Mr Reagan as a glib and dangerous character and Mr Reagan was picturing Mr Carter as a bumbler and a failure.

Well, it's a change and it promises a hot time in a hundred old towns before the next two months are out.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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