The Wimbledon Final That Never Was . . .: And Other Tennis Tales from a By-Gone Era
200
The Wimbledon Final That Never Was . . .: And Other Tennis Tales from a By-Gone Era
200eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780942257915 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Chapter Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Wimbledon Final That Never Was ...
... And Other Tennis Tales from a Bygone Era
By Sidney Wood, David Wood
New Chapter Press
Copyright © 2015 David WoodAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-942257-91-5
CHAPTER 1
Who Am I?
People tend to remember my tennis name (if at all!), not as one of the top three or four American players of my time, but for the uniqueness of being Wimbledon's only winner by default. Even so, I was its youngest men's singles champion at the age of 19 for over 50 years and its youngest male competitor at the age of only 15.
I had never given much thought to remedying this impression until I started digging up a bunch of old records that Tennis magazine had requested for a story. I had retained draw sheets of most major tournaments from time immemorial, and when I fished out those of our U.S. Nationals, now the US Open, and saw myself seeded four years at No. 3, twice at No. 4, and once each at No. 5 and No. 6, over an eight-year span. I literally wondered for a moment whether some kind of crazy misprint had occurred. When I then got curious about my international record against the world's top 10, I was again startled and admittedly aglow at finding my one-on-one numbers were a lot more favorable than I'd realized. The only discovery that might top this would be something like a missing birth certificate materializing with a decade-later-than presumed nativity date.
In our day, to be chosen as one of your country's two Davis Cup singles players was every player's ultimate hope. As a married, depression-years' breadwinner from the time I was 21, paying the rent came before putting trophies on the shelf. Most all of my top-ranked U.S. opponents were holding down tennis-related jobs, permitting practice and tournament play for a good part of the year, but even as a full-time working stiff (though my own boss since 22), I did manage to steal away four times to Wimbledon or on Davis Cup team junkets, but never got within half a globe of Australia.
Most years, I would head east for our late August National Championships from my California gold and sulfur diggings, barely ahead of the first day of the tournament, figuring to adjust to the grass during the first round or two. But let me tell you, more than once I got bounced before I knew where I was. The clanking, metal-body 14-passenger Ford tri-motor planes, replete with sick bags, and ammonia capsules, rarely made it in even twice the 29 hours advertised, usually with risky Rocky-Mountain weather sleepovers on wooden benches at tiny airports. No alibis, only reciting one of the reasons I thought of myself as an underdog against my more frequently competing peers -- though I now may just consider re-writing my epitaph! Striving to maintain whatever tennis eminence one managed to attain in those no-pay-for-play years can't sound too glamorous, but I wouldn't trade a single season's memory for whatever goes for achievement and camaraderie today.
CHAPTER 2Early Years
I was born on November 1, 1911 in a place called Black Rock, Connecticut, near Bridgeport. I don't remember much about the years before moving to California, but I was told that I spent four years on my back. I was a very sick young man with a variety of childhood diseases that in today's world of medicine is not serious. But back in the days when I was an infant, they were often fatal.
My father owned a mine out in Arizona which called for my early family life to be spent out West. As a youngster, I started to play tennis because I couldn't play other sports competitively. My mother took me out to play. I remember the first court I ever played on was at the mining camp made of crushed stone. I don't know if that influenced me to develop a short swing but that was the only way you could hit the ball.
My first racquet that I used to practice against the house wall, or I should say the windows (and I broke one occasionally), was one that my uncle Watson Washburn left in the closet when he went to Australia to play on the U.S. Davis Cup team with Bill Tilden. (Uncle "Watty" subsequently became captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team.) His racquet was sitting there in the closet and I picked it out. That heralded my departure from being a budding pianist (my mother was teaching me music at that time). I was never sure if she was totally happy with the change, but I was.
My tennis was played almost all in California until I was about 13. The first time I saw my uncle Watty, I was fifteen and about to play in the National Junior Championships. My first real competition was in California and one of the most thrilling prizes I won was a turkey, which probably described the way I played in those days, but, this was a handicapped mixed doubles tournament in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and I lived in Berkeley. I won the prize to everyone's dismay because I was literally as high as the net. I was an infant in size. I really didn't grow into my final huge stature of 5' 9 3/4 until I seemed to get out of all these physical problems.
I brought the turkey home by ferry, which was then the means of transport between San Francisco and Berkeley, as the Golden Gate Bridge, Bay Bridge or even Alcatraz had not been built yet! I remember my mother completely broke up. She already had a turkey cooked, but nobody could believe that I was going to bring home the bacon, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, or simile. That was a big thrill because it was really an upset that I should win anything at that size. It was a grown-up mixed doubles tournament and I was the only "infant" in it.
I literally lived in tennis shoes at that time. This is what happens when you have had health problems. You're just dying to excel at something to bring you out of the rut that you have been in. To give you a little philosophy, Glen Cunningham, who was the greatest miler for many years, and whom I sold bonds with on a tour once, had his legs severely burned. He was told he would never walk again. He, of course, went on to become the world's greatest miler. There are repeats of stories like this down the line with so many people who are handicapped who overcome their disabilities and become great achievers. Now with so many luxuries – it's hard to get children to do what we found easy to do.
Schoolwork was very sporadic. I never learned multiplication tables, how to write correctly and other things that children ordinarily learn. Going up to the blackboard was always an embarrassment and a struggle. I would finally get sick with worry that I would stay out of school and have to have a tutor, which taught me nothing because you can always con a tutor. In summary, I really learned nothing in school.
I finally went to school in New York one winter, when I was 14. I suffered so much that I lost 14 pounds in the space of three months and was immediately rushed to Arizona because I developed some problems with my lungs.
For four months, I rested and played checkers with some older people in Memorial Park in Tucson. I always wondered why these people would always have colds and be coughing a lot (nobody told me they were there because of tuberculosis).
I learned to play checkers with a passion, but continued to keep up with my tennis. I went off to Phoenix to play in the Arizona State Men's Tennis Championship at the age of 14 and weighing well under 90 pounds. To some surprise, I won the title, beating in the final a young guy who was very frightened because all of my friends from my checkers games came over to watch me play. And I got a headline in the Tucson paper about four inches high "Tucson Boy Genius Returns."
The win got me an invitation to play in the French Championships and Wimbledon. In Paris, I won my first round match 0-6, 8-6, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 over Paul Barrelet de Ricou of France, but I lost in the second round to Jack Condon of South Africa 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.
From there, I played my first Wimbledon. I met the great Frenchman Rene Lacoste, the No. 1 seed, in the first round. (They probably wanted to get this over-precocious American out of the tournament.) One of my nicest memories is that I have a picture of the scoreboard and it shows me leading 3-1 in the second set, either because of his kindness, or carelessness. I lost the match 61, 6-3, 6-1 but entered the record books as the youngest man to ever compete at The Championships at age 15 years, 231 days.
The next year, at the age of 16, I returned to Wimbledon and got to the third round where I lost to Pierre Henri Landry of France in four sets. The next day, Landry lost to Bill Tilden in five sets.
Upon arrival back in the States, the first tournament was Seabright, N.J. I played Fritz Merker, who had just beaten Tilden the week before at the Westchester Biltmore Eastern Grass Court Championships. Weighing less than 100 pounds, I beat Fritz by serving aces (I had a whippy serve). This started a pretty good run of play that year. Even at 16, people didn't take me lightly.
Our family went to California every winter, but there was no one to play with except Ellsworth Vines, the powerful American player who would go on to win Wimbledon once and the U.S. Championship twice. I had a car and I'd go to the Los Angeles Tennis Club and play. Elly and I played tennis but eventually I took up golf and Elly played with me.
Here we were, two tennis players playing golf every chance we got! He subsequently became a golf pro after his tennis career and ranked in the top ten after a couple of years on the tour. I got sufficiently adept at golf, so when they had the Pasadena Open tournament that year, I decided to play even though I'd never broken 80 before. When I hit the ball in the sand trap, I'd putt the ball out – no one ever taught me any differently. But I played and broke 80 in the open tournament and was somewhere in the first 18 scorers on the first day. This was with such standout golf legends as Walter Hagen and Horton Smith in the field. The next day, I asked my friends to come out and watch and, at the end of about 15 holes, I was at 104. I went in every bunker and was a nervous wreck. I went back and got my racquet out of mothballs and started playing tennis again.
I then entered the Pacific Southwest tournament in Los Angeles and I had one day of practice after the golf tournament. Bunny Austin, Henri Cochet and Keith Gledhill were the top players in the field. I wasn't even seeded, but I beat Keith in the first round to everyone's horror because he was the Southern California hope at the time and I had just come off the golf course. I then beat Johnny Van Ryn and Bunny Austin. Cochet got me in the semifinals, but the results showed me that I had something to offer to tennis, so I started playing again.
That fall, I went consistently to school, attending the Roxbury School in Cheshire, Connecticut, a preparatory school. I was supposed to go to Harvard since my four uncles went there, but I was presumed to be uneducated (which I was with my horrible tutoring). The main reason I went to Roxbury was because Frank Shields was there. Frank and I would not only turn into lifelong friends, but we would be forever linked in tennis history for the matches (and nonmatches) we played against each other in addition to being Davis Cup teammates, doubles partners, business partners and being inducted together into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1964. Although by the end of the century Frank would be better known as the grandfather of model/actress Brooke Shields, he was a legend of a man in his time.
Frank and I went from Roxbury to the summer grass court circuit. This was 1930 and it was among my most exciting years of competitive tennis as I was breaking through in a sport that had been part of my whole life. I was playing with the likes of people that included some of the top international players of the era. I played first at the Longwood Bowl tournament at Longwood Cricket Club in Boston and reached the final before losing 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 to Clifford Sutter, then the collegiate singles champion from Tulane. It was a match I felt I was able to have taken control of, but I was not really match tough at that point in the summer. But I won the doubles with a wonderful friend, Harold Blauer, who was not the greatest singles player, maybe not the greatest doubles player either, but he was for me. He looked so crazy going up to net that sometimes I'd turn around when he was serving to take a look and I'd practically break apart laughing at him. He'd also do whatever I said (in doubles it's good to have one director) and he never missed a forehand in the right court. He never failed to put it down to the opponents' feet and never failed to lob on his backhand. With Harold not being a player of recognized caliber, this was very exciting for me.
After taking a week off, I entered Seabright but was not seeded there with a wealth of good players in the draw. Again, Vines drew all the press notices and got to the final, this time beating Frank in the semis. I almost laughed my way into the final because I was thrilled with the way I was hitting the ball. I beat Sutter in the semis (the last set being a love set), but was practically ignored in the press because Vines had already won the tournament in everybody's eyes. The night before the final, I remember telling Vinnie Richards that I had a formula for beating Vines.
This match was kind of a key point in my career. It confirmed my belief that you could invent an idea and, even if it was faulty in its premise, it was still good to stick with it. If you come into a match with a purpose or idea of how you're going to play a match (even if it's wrong) it stabilizes your psyche and your nervous system. It gives you a direction and purpose and a concentration on one particular thing which seems to take care of all the other problems. Almost all players in the top 20 in the world play with some basic level of execution. It's the guys who dream a little idea up or who know when to gamble on the right point who take things to a higher level.
So I told Vinnie, who believed in my game, that I thought I detected in Vines' game a tendency to overstretch (extend) his arm and that he loved to hit balls that came at him with a lot of pace. He used to hit Frank's bludgeoning first serve back as if he was catching it and throwing it back. So I said, "I'm going to hit outside slice serves and if he starts to move over, I'm going to slice it into his backhand the same way. I'm not going to hit a hard serve in the beginning and I believe he'll float a lot of these and hit the fence with some of them." I told Allison Danzig, the tennis reporter from The New York Times, the same thing.
When you're that age, you are blooming with confidence, but let's just say there may be a little skepticism on the part of your listeners when you recite a crazy program like this. But we went out and the first four games was a feel-out thing and we each held serve twice. Vines was having a terrible time bringing his shots down. He wasn't catching them wrong on his racquet, but he was forced to move the wrong foot forward. In other words, he was forced to take a little skip to get his foot out, and that completely destroyed his ability to pivot. This gave me such confidence and having that singular purpose insulated me from any other problems. I found I was taking his serve as if it were nothing and just putting it back with good control. The minute we got into a rally, I began to spin it. If I got the ball to my backhand on a point that was feasible to do it, I would "violin slice" the ball to his forehand to draw it away. Maybe he just got mesmerized, I don't know, but he was wondering what I was doing and got upset that somebody was doing something different against him.
From 2-2 in the first set, I won the match 6-2, 6-0. I took ten straight games. I completely destroyed his shots, and believe it or not, I was castigated in the press by a couple of writers who had already written their story with Vines winning! I was practically accused of cheating by soft-balling, which I wasn't. The balls were going slowly because they had spin on them. I remember a writer from New York, J.P. Allen, actually was furious with me for these tactics. He said I played like my grandmother (I hope she played that way!).
Flush with success, I then went on to play in the event in Southampton at the Meadow Club, where the draw was made before the seedings could reflect the result of my win at Seabright, so I was not seeded as high as I would have been otherwise. Everyone had just come back from Wimbledon - Tilden, who'd won it, Wilmer Allison, who'd lost to Tilden in the final after beating Cochet in the semifinals, and George Lott, who'd won the doubles with Van Ryn. I met Lott in the round of 16 in a match I'll never forget because it was the first time I had had an experience with an adrenaline attack.
We were in the third set and George had me 5-1, 40-0 on his serve and I suddenly felt my hair stand up a little bit. I thought I was having a sunstroke, so I went and sat in a linesman's chair and put some ice on myself. All of a sudden, I wanted to cry and burst into tears. I went back and – this sounds untrue but it's absolutely the way it is and it happened to me again several times – I saw the ball as if it were twice as large, with absolute, total clarity. From the second it left George's racquet, it was like a sphere coming over, like a satellite with a little fuzz around it and there was no way I was going to miss it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Wimbledon Final That Never Was ... by Sidney Wood, David Wood. Copyright © 2015 David Wood. Excerpted by permission of New Chapter Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
INTRODUCTION,1 • WHO AM I?,
2 • EARLY YEARS,
3 • THE WIMBLEDON FINAL THAT NEVER WAS ...,
4 • THE PRIVATE UNDERSTANDING PLAYOFF,
5 • FROM WIMBLEDON TO WALL STREET,
6 • MY FAVORITE MATCH,
7 • DOING LAUNDRY WITH DON BUDGE AND ARNOLD PALMER,
8 • DAVE SELZNICK,
9 • SHOOTING IT UP WITH GARY COOPER,
10 • THE OTHER ERROL,
11 • SCARECROW SERVER,
12 • NEAR IMMORTALITY AT GRAUMAN'S CHINESE THEATRE,
13 • CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN WONDERLAND,
14 • REPLAY WITH FAY WRAY,
15 • GROUCHO GETS BAGGED,
16 • J. DONALD BUDGE,
17 • ROOF TOP TENNIS IN MANHATTAN THE FOUNDING OF TOWN TENNIS CLUB,
18 • THE FULL COUNT,
19 • DAYS OF GRACE,
20 • THE CASE OF ALTHEA GIBSON,
21 • TENNIS WITH BOBBY FISCHER,
22 • THE SHAH AND I,
23 • THE FIRST US OPEN BOX SEATS,
24 • SUPREME COURT,
25 • ONCE I WAS GROSS AT ROLAND GARROS,
26 • FREQUENT FLIER,
27 • NEAR MISS,
28 • DEPUTY WOOD,
29 • THE HOTFOOT,
30 • NUTS TO YOU, MRS. ASTOR,
31 • PRACTICE IMPERFECT,
32 • THE "DOUBLE-HIT" THAT COST JEAN BOROTRA THE 1927 WIMBLEDON TITLE,
33 • HENRI COCHET – THE FRENCH CONNECTION,
34 • FOOT FAULTS ... BEFORE AND AFTER,
35 • FRENCH FRUSTRATIONS,
36 • MARK MCCORMACK – THE ULTIMATE SPORTS MOGUL,
37 • ADRENALINE,
38 • ANALYZING THE GREATEST PLAYERS OF ALL TIME,
39 • THE GREATEST STROKES AND SKILL SETS OF ALL TIME,
40 • FRIENDSHIPS FOR A LIFETIME,
EPILOGUE,