Bad behaviour in tennis and chivalry in golf - 3 July 1998

An American historian has just written a book about the decline, perhaps the death, of a code of conduct that in some matters and in sport particularly, bound all of us together and was taken for several generations, maybe for hundreds of years, to be a guide to, or guarantee of, social stability.

He might just as well have been tracing the history of the medieval tradition of chivalry, an ethical ideal that started in France and Spain and spread to England and was embodied in a code, a fusion it has been defined, of Christian and military conduct and still forms the basis of the ethics of gentlemanly conduct that was written about 60 years ago.

Well Professor Digby Baltzell is charting the rise and fall of what's left of the idea of a gentleman in a sport. For two or three centuries of an organised sport, the rules of those old medieval ideals have been followed, though with a great deal less flourishing of swords and halberds and no more proclaimed devotion to the mistress of one's heart, who used to have to be a virgin or the wife of another man, a standard of devotion that at all times encouraged, shall we say, genteel monkey business on the Lancelot-King Arthur variation. What has been bothering our historian since his retirement – as professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania – is the gross social jolt to his favourite sport of tennis, by what he calls the rise of the super-brat and the decline in the idea of civility.

Let me briefly sketch in the background of this grim period by reminding you that there are, for professional tennis players, about 25, 30 tournaments a year, played in different countries, but there are only four major tournaments which represent the national championship of each country. First, in January, the Australian Open, then the French Open, then at the end of June, the British, known in Britain as simply the Championships and at the end of August, the United States Open.

This spring, on the last day, the Sunday of the French championship, there was a rare and heartening scene. The two finalists were Spaniards, not surprising, when you consider that they were playing on a clay surface and that Spaniards are brought up on clay. After the last stroke was played and the winner ran to the net, his opponent ran with equal joy. They embraced and the loser cried, "Tonight we celebrate together".

An old tennis watcher who remembers other times, other manners, wheezed on a pipe and said, reminds me of Super-Brat and Old Nasty. Well, New York City, August 1979 is a date that will live in infamy. John McEnroe, American, was to meet Ilie Nastase, Romanian, in the second round of the US Open. I will not disgust you with all the details, though if you'd been there you might well have been terrified.

To distil the awful occasion to its nasty essence, it was a breathtaking demonstration of superlative tennis and – granting that by that year the Romanian and McEnroe were the leading exponents of tantrums and snatches of foul language, tossed usually at linesmen – from time to time, they addressed a ripe obscenity at the chair umpire.

In the fourth set, McEnroe served to Nastase, who at once protested that he was not ready to receive but the umpire gave the point to McEnroe. The umpire listened to Nastase's protest and to a rising storm of clamour from the ten thousand spectators. It didn't help that the crowd decided that Nastase was their boy. The umpire, applying the regular point penalty system, awarded the game to McEnroe, at which point, as Othello said, who was there, chaos is come again.

Seventeen minutes of uproar and disruption, trash hurled on to the court, fighting broke out, police came trotting, the umpire brought in the top man, the referee, who ordered Nastase to serve for the next game. Nastase, in colourful words, said No. Now a rebellious player, according to the rules, can be given 30 seconds to repent and get on with it. The umpire waited just under a full minute and declared that Nastase had forfeited the game, set and match. Now that, in practically any other sport in the world, would have been the end of it but now the crowd was seething and the tournament director, an old champ himself, could see ahead a bang-up, bloody riot. He overrode the official decision, put a new man in the chair and the match was played out and McEnroe won.

Professor Baltzell declared that scary night in August 1979 to mark the symbolic beginning of the roughneck age of tennis. For the next ten years, Nastase found a worthy, if that's the word, successor in boorishness in one Jimmy Connors and McEnroe grew in talent and brattishness, to the despair of the tennis establishment and the pleasure of a new breed of tennis fans who came, to the US Open especially, looking for more mischief than great tennis and accordingly got it. To allow that to happen, over a whole decade, was the sin of the tennis establishment and the people who ran the sport, both in America and in Britain.

Well, symbolically, as our American historian puts it, the end of the roughneck era came on the seventh day of the Australian Open, the fourth round, in 1990. One Mikael Pernfors, a low-ranking Swedish player – by the way, there's never been, that I can recall, ever a boorish, a less than well-mannered Swedish player – Mikael Pernfors then was to play McEnroe, who in the previous rounds had been at the top of his incomparable serve-and-volley fine-touch form.

But mark the glorious date, 21 January 1990, mid-summer in Australia, 5.30 in the afternoon. It's odd that the first act of this drama, considering that McEnroe's brattish behaviour had become by now a byword, it's odd that the first rebuke from an umpire should have been given to McEnroe, simply for glaring at a linesman, but then he was penalised a point for smashing his racquet on the court, yet another typical McEnroe temper break, inaudible insults traded, referee brought in, told McEnroe to cool down and turned to leave. At which point the one and only hurled a gutter obscenity at the referee and his mother.

The referee turned back. No player, he said, has ever spoken to me that way. He walked off to the umpire and they talked together for a moment, the umpire nodded, rose to his char and made a stunning announcement, which should have been made on many courts, in many countries, many times during the previous ten years. Verbal abuse, audible obscenity, Mr McEnroe defaults, game, set and match to Pernfors.

This outrage, so McEnroe and his millions of yobby fans around the world thought it so, was printed in every newspaper you can think of. Fire McEnroe? Preposterous. Screaming bad language, stick finger insults to the umpire, that was, by then, what half the crowd had come to see.

Well, the retreat from bratdom was long and rumbling, but the Australians had struck a blow, you might poetically say, for chivalry and very soon more positive cleansing acts seemed to date the age of the super-brat once for all. The next year there arrived on the scene, as the new champion of the lists, a quite new character, who loped around the court doing his business, which was to win tournaments without grimacing, without charging the umpires, without complaint and with matchless talent. His name was Pete Sampras and Professor Baltzell, though still pessimistic about the effect of money, money, money on manners on and off the court, hopes the Nastase, Connors and McEnroe epoch is a part, a disreputable part, of history – of the history of our society, and not just of tennis.

In the wake of the United States Open Golf Championship and on the eve of the British Open, known to Britain simply as the Open, I plainly can't help making an odious comparison with my own favourite game. I dared to make this point on sitting down in Florida, one warm night last March, when I had the honour of taking it up with some of the great old names and minds of tennis.

I was asked by a small, modest man, whom some people think of as the best tennis player there has ever been and himself a model throughout his career of impeccable conduct, why has there not been a nasty brat period, or even flashes of jerky behaviour in professional golf, which has the same incitements of high nervous tension in situations promising equally preposterous amounts of money.

I told him I didn't know. For then, and for now, all I could say was that somehow the etiquette of golf has been taught along with the rules, when promising players spend weeks at the professional qualifying school, trying to get their playing card. Down three centuries the rules have been as binding as those of chivalry, so much so that, to this day, watching a pro tournament, you can't tell who is the son of a truck driver and who is the son of a duke or a tycoon. The very idea of a player exploding over a marshal or a referee's call, is unthinkable.

One thing I do know, if the old code has teeth and is applied strictly at all times and early enough, there will be no obscenities, no screaming at officials, no riots. I think of a player, a regular tournament pro, not absolutely top class but always in the running and once he was seen stumbling over his ball and suddenly it quietly appeared not on the edge of the rough but on the edge of the putting green. He was severely warned. A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. Did he protest? He tried a mumble or two. Was he slapped on the wrist, fined a thousand dollars? He was not, he was suspended from pro golf for life. He's not been heard of since.

The last place in sport where an onlooker, a spectator, might get the impression that he's watching a modern form of the medieval joust, played quietly and strictly, without tantrums, by gentlemen, is, I'm proud to say, the game of golf.

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