The game of love
‘BY THE TIME I WAS THIRTEEN I was madly in love. It was a blinding, choking, loyal love, filled with devotion and dedication. Obvious to all, it was understood only by a few.’1
The object of Ricardo Pancho Gonzales’ affection was his tennis racquet. He even took it to bed with him. A Mexican–American from a humble background, he was to have a troubled, passionate relationship with the game. The scar on his cheek gave his Latin looks a dangerous edge; he was no stereotype of the languid, white-clad player. Nor was he alone in falling in love with a game.
The placid Dan Maskell, who also came from a working-class family, but was a far different character from the fiery Mexican, started as a ball boy, and ‘thus began a love affair with lawn tennis that has never faded’.2 The British pre-war star, Fred Perry, felt the same. Indeed, in no other sport than tennis has the relationship of players and spectators, the game and its followers, been so often discussed in terms of romantic love. Even hard-bitten journalists fell for tennis. A. L. Laney, a sports writer between the wars, entitled his autobiography Covering the Court: A Fifty Year Love Affair with the Game of Tennis, and confessed: ‘I had fallen in love with tennis and this book is the account of that love affair’. He loved the players too. The first time he saw the early American star, Little Bill Johnston, he immediately fell in love with him, ‘completely and without reservation’. He had previously ‘worshipped from afar’ the Californian, Maurice McLoughlin, a ferocious serve-volleyer who won the United States National tournament in 1912 and 1913, when he also reached the challenge round at Wimbledon. But Laney’s passion for Little Bill was different from his hero worship of McLoughlin. It was love, and ‘once I had fallen, little else seemed to matter so much as seeing him again and seeing him win. Many had this same experience and the younger they were the more they were smitten.’3 And in the twenty-first century, it was not uncommon for a manly voice to shout from the stands, ‘I love you Roger,’ when Federer was playing.
‘Love’, the word, is at the centre of tennis. It is embedded in the unique and eccentric tennis scoring system. Love meaning nothing – zero. Playing for love. That it was, uniquely, a sport in which women and men played together made it a ‘love game’ in a social and romantic sense. Yet the feminine element in tennis was always controversial. As was that troublesome ‘love’. It was not a manly word. When a friend introduced the seventies American star, Chrissie Evert, to her future husband, the handsome British player, John ‘Legs’ Lloyd, she was immediately attracted. As he left, he said, ‘Lovely to meet you.’ Chrissie turned in dismay to her friend: ‘Oh no! He’s gay!’4 Such was the association of love with effeminacy, at least in the American mind.
The love of which Laney wrote and Gonzales spoke was akin to what the ancient Greeks termed agape: an intense admiration and more: something spiritual and almost religious. Yet the rhythm of tennis was also erotic. The cleanly struck shots that streamed off the racquet, the ball exploding off the court and the body’s leap from gravity and time – these were inspirational. The player pressed with stroke after stroke and built to the final unanswerable shot and this was repeated in game after game, climax and anti-climax building ever higher, all leading to the point of no return. For player and spectator alike the game provided no guaranteed orgasmic moment, no certainty of a win. The game enacted an unpredictable dialectics of desire – and the spectator’s desire is focused on the player.
The tennis star is subjected to intense scrutiny. Tennis matches can last for hours and during them the spectators’ gaze is relentlessly trained on the player’s body, movements and moods, as happens in no other sport, certainly not to the same extent. (The attention paid to footballer David Beckham is the exception rather than the rule.) This is even more the case in the age of the close-up, the replay and the slow-mo. These place the tennis player alongside the film star as an icon of glamour and beauty.
The erotic body of the player is deployed in a sport discussed in terms of artistry; the performer whose body is her instrument is considered a creative genius. Sports writer Frank Deford questioned whether a sportsperson could be an artist in the full sense of the word. A sporting performance, he thought, might be beautiful, but a great athlete was more like some natural wonder – a flower, a waterfall or a snow-capped mountain.
This is clearly wrong. To suggest that an athlete is some kind of natural phenomenon is to ignore the hard work and intense dedication that goes into the development of any outstanding performer. There is nothing ‘natural’ about becoming the best tennis player (or the best dancer) in the world. To an inborn gift of eye-hand coordination the player must bring the capacity to devote herself to endless repetitive practice of the same movement. To that must be added the ‘feel’ outstanding players have for their game. This, it has been suggested, is ‘an affinity for translating thought into action’. Players ‘see’ the visual field in a manner differently from those less gifted and this enables them to discern subtle patterns unrecognised by others. Chess masters, artists and athletes have this special awareness. They can break down their field of operation into clusters of patterns and, often without conscious thought, translate them into movement. This is a form of creative expression in which the athlete’s body is the instrument. Her split-second movements are those of an artist and may indeed display originality amounting to genius.5
There is the further uncertainty whether the performance arts require creative genius in the way that, say, composing music is said to do: whether the cellist Rostropovich – the performer who brings music to life – is a genius on the same level as Beethoven or Shostakovich, who created that music. It is problematic to rate a bodily performance by comparison with a ‘work’ created out of random words or sounds.
The performance of a dancer is as ephemeral as that of an athlete. The difference is that dance is, by long tradition, acknowledged as art, supported by music, narrative and mise en scène. The athlete lacks such supports, but, like the dancer, creates through movement. You could even argue that tennis is more creative than dance, since the dancer usually follows choreography designed in advance, whereas the tennis player must always improvise.
Tennis appears to be closer to dance than to any other performance form (with the possible exception of figure skating). The great 1920s champion Bill Tilden excelled at dancing and skating and on court his movement was astonishingly graceful. His fleet-footedness was legendary: the Spanish player Manuel Alonso thought it was like seeing Nijinsky dance across the stage. He perfected the art of taking a little half-step just before he turned, enabling him to make a perfect stroke with perfect spin.
Tilden himself certainly believed he was an artist. He quoted his friend, the opera singer Mary Garden, as providing him with the concept of athlete as artist. ‘You’re a tennis artist and artists always know better than anyone else when they’re right. If you believe in a certain way to play, you play that way no matter what anyone else tells you. Once you lose faith in your own artistic judgement, you’re lost. Win or lose, right or wrong, be true to your art.’ 6
Helen Wills Moody, eight times Wimbledon champion, agreed that tennis was ‘in its way an art. Tennis encourages the player to express himself and his personality,’ she wrote. ‘Into his game he puts something of his personality so that his play becomes a unique expression.’ 7
Gianni Clerici, the Italian historian of tennis, endorsed this view: ‘I had always thought of tennis, from the very moment of my childhood when I chose it as my game, as something different. I sensed that there was another way of looking at the sport: as a work of art.’ 8
Tennis, art or not, is unquestionably a sport, if sport is defined as a competitive game involving physical exertion. It is the tension between art and sport that makes it so special, but, unique as it is, tennis has always existed and evolved within the wider culture of sport. Sport has played a central and increasing role in international culture from the mid-nineteenth century onward, until in today’s globalised world it dominates. It offers the panaceas religion was once thought to provide. It combines spectacle and warfare, nationalism and obsession, passion without consequences.
Tennis, while seeming to summon just such allegiances and devotions, has never quite fitted into this picture. The Victorian game was invented by sportsmen who were also sports writers, but it was played at garden parties. Its social elaboration does not sit easily with the common idea of sport. In particular, it challenges the sporting ethos. The tennis match may seem at one level like a duel or a fight, but it is also a dance, with its own elaborate courtesies, and its rhythm of pauses, etiquette and protocol; and it takes place within the wider ritual of the tournament, an expansive social environment distinct from the football stadium or boxing ring. In this, it is closer to an opera or music festival than a sport – going to Wimbledon is more like a day at the opera at Glyndebourne than an afternoon of football at the Emirates stadium.
Those in charge of tennis have, however, especially since the Second World War, endeavoured to fit it ever more closely into the pattern of other sports. Tennis was, and is, less dangerous than some sports: boxing, say, motor racing, cycling and skiing. Nor is it a contact sport. But the sport’s promoters have increasingly emphasised physical exertion and the pugilistic aspects of the game, rather than elegance and beauty.
This has been within a world in which the sporting ethos is so dominant and so little challenged that the attempt to locate tennis at least partly outside it may seem eccentric or downright perverse, but this is necessary if the eccentricity and richness of the game itself is to be fully understood. The contemporary conventional sporting perspective is itself a kind of tunnel vision; a more expansive, cultural viewpoint may provide a better appreciation of the ‘game of love’.
To approach tennis with ‘love’ may be dangerous if, as Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ – whether because that love is too obsessive or too critical. Many critics, as we shall see, believed that ‘love’ in tennis was dangerous – that the very fact of this word being used in the scoring system rendered it unmanly. But love is also a hopeful word, a word of celebration; and in the end, the point of writing about tennis is to celebrate the beauty, the glamour and the joy of this unique game.