A Handful of Summers Page 11

  We played together in the doubles of the Paris championships in 1956. Not the French championships, but the Paris ones; the ones that Budge Patty always used to win. Larsen and I were put together in the doubles, and after many adventures found ourselves in the finals against the wily French Davis Cup team, Paul Remy and Marcel Bernard. I was young and eager, and, apart from being excited about the opportunity to play doubles with Larsen, I badly wanted to win the tournament. Although I am sure that he, too, wanted to win, I think that the urgency of the thing escaped him. Besides, he greatly enjoyed devising surprises during the course of matches and seldom missed the opportunity of ending points with extraordinary strokes – like making sliced dropshots come back over the net, or turning what appeared to be enormous smashes into the softest of pats. The more important the point, the more excited he became when one of his tricks succeeded, sometimes bowing to his partner, tapping the net with his racket and nibbling at his shirt collar before continuing. I was far too young and nervous to fool about with cheeky style, and ruthlessly bludgeoned even the easiest of sitters, never daring to try clever things. As it was, Larsen’s tricks badly scared me on a number of occasions.

  ‘Don’t you think, Art,’ I said to him once, tentatively, ‘that you should maybe just knock off the easy ones?’

  ‘Don’t be crazy, kid,’ he replied, ‘we have points to spare. There’s no fun going about killing balls like a butcher!’

  As far as I was concerned, I never had points to spare. With me, even at 5-1, forty-love and my serve, I was still barrelling about, looking for things to kill.

  The score in our doubles final crept along, dead even. At one set all and about 8-8, the match was balanced on a knife-edge. I held my service from 15-40 down, and Larsen muttered something about it ‘never being in doubt’ as we changed ends, although he’d picked up a fluky half-volley from somewhere between his legs at 40-30. We fought to deuce on Remy’s service and eventually got a set point at our ad. Larsen’s chipped return developed into a flurry of volleys out of which, to my infinite relief, came a mishit lob volley, straight to Larsen. A sitter to end all sitters. With a typical display of Gallic despair, Remy and Bernard turned their backs, dropped their heads and walked towards the baseline. Larsen, meanwhile, sensing an irresistible opportunity, began stalking the ball, waving his racket in circles like a sword and baring his teeth. Dumbstruck, I watched the ball bounce, watched him close in for a mighty smash, then suddenly check his swing and, with the end of the handle of his racket protruding beyond the heel of his hand, like a billiard cue, he tapped the ball over for a tiny dropshot winner.

  The spectators leapt up with a roar of delight and Larsen waved his racket to them and, turning to me, said: ‘Scared you badly, eh kid? Thought I was going to foul it up, eh?’ and laughed the happy laugh that he used when things were going according to plan.

  On the way to the centre court that day, Tappy got stuck in the door – hung up, really, with no visible obstruction. He just stood there, nibbling his shirt collar and saying: ‘God damn, buddy, get me through this thing.’ I had to unhook him from nothing – and finally, as I lifted his foot over some last invisible obstruction, he burst free and ran onto court calling to me: ‘OK, kid, take it away, swing it wide, baby, and play the net on my service; we got beers waiting!’

  He never trained, seldom practised, smoked a lot, drank beer, sat in damp clothes and cold winds after his matches, stayed up all night, slept in locker-rooms, and had difficulty changing into tennis gear – often getting stuck in his shorts when they were halfway up his legs, then having to hobble all over the changing-room and chat to people about their matches before the shorts would slide up and fit him. Sometimes his sweater would jam, and he would walk onto the court with only one arm in a sleeve, and the rest of the sweater wound round his neck like a scarf. On the court he would either have to step on lines, or not have to step on them, and was able to cross over on only one side of the net, usually the umpire’s side, where he could give the fellow a tap or two in passing. He had numerous cameras, all expensive, including one movie one, and on one day each week he would hang all of them around his neck and shoulders and go out taking millions of shots, sometimes peering through the viewfinder of one, while pressing the button of another.

  ‘This is for colour, this for black-and-white slow film, this grainy, this fast, and so on,’ he would explain proudly. ‘You want me to take a colour shot of you? Sure. Just stand over there. That’s the boy. Over there!’

  The players loved him to the point of adoration and never missed watching his matches. In Rome he beat Andy Stern 6-0, 6-0, 5-7, 6-0 because, he said, a set off him was a ‘good result’ for Andy (which it was), but that he shouldn’t ‘spoil him’. Larsen verged on greatness and won many large tournaments, including Forest Hills. His accident was a tragedy and deprived tennis prematurely of one of the great individualists of the game.

  In Rome that year, I also met an American called Wayne Van Voorhees, who used to travel the circuit and practise a great deal, but who could never quite get it all together. He was memorable, for me, because one day I happened to say to him:

  ‘Hi, Wayne, how are you playing?’

  ‘Nearly great,’ was his reply. ‘I feel that my real good game is only about two weeks away!’

  To this day I have carried about in my head the image of a player patiently doing the tennis circuits, year after year, with his best game about two weeks ahead of him! And yet, in a way, to get within two weeks of a good game isn’t that bad. I know many players who haven’t even got within six months of anything worthwhile!

  In the fifties, tennis equipment was in short supply in many European countries. In fact, all sporting gear was hard to get, and the selection very meagre. Nearly all the players, except the Americans, used Dunlop or Slazenger rackets. Endorsements were unheard of. One got rackets and gut free, and that was all. In Paris, the good players received Lacoste tennis shirts, and in London, nearly everyone got a few Fred Perry shirts and shorts; also Teddy Tinling’s gear was flashed about while he was still making stuff for men. But, basically, good gear was in short supply and expensive if one had to buy it. Especially in countries like Spain, Germany, all the Iron Curtain places, and even Italy. Thus were born the traders of the circuit.

  While all of us used to sell the odd item from time to time (I once ate good dinners for one full week in Barcelona from the proceeds of one Maxply racket), some players traded far more extensively. Like Don Candy, for instance. The lower region of his enormous travelling case was packed with the impedimenta of the game – new stuff, like coils of gut, frames, clothing, wristlets, and sometimes more sophisticated merchandise like golf balls or Hong Kong cameras and watches. In various dressing-rooms throughout Europe one would come upon him festooned with his wares, conducting brisk auctions:

  ‘Gut!’ he would say, peering about through his spectacles. ‘Gentlemen, I give you gut. From India. Now how much am I offered for gut from India! Did I hear two thousand lire?’ (Whether or not a bid was forthcoming, he always invented one to get things off.) ‘Of course I did. Good thinking.’ Here he would nod warmly to an unsuspecting onlooker. ‘Excepting, of course, that this Indian gut is worth much more. It’s tough. Tough, you see,’ and he would loosen a strand and give it a mighty tug. ‘And when it does wear out, which doesn’t happen very often (only once), you can cut it out of your racket and make a very good curry with it!’

  He would fix his onlookers with a penetrating gaze and say:

  ‘You understand. Vous comprehend? A very good curry!’

  All sales were made for cash, and all bills were added to an ever-growing roll which was usually kept in his trouser pocket, except during matches, when it was put into a well-guarded racket cover. This racket cover was even taken along to the shower cubicle after Donald’s matches, so that the inside of the roll became dampish and occasionally had to be aired against mould.
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  ‘Don’t give me one of your rotten bills,’ Mervyn Rose once said to him after a poker game. ‘Give the damp ones to Segal. He won’t keep them long enough to spend them anyway!’

  While Don ran what he regarded as a ‘sophisticated trading set-up’, involving a ‘wide range of quality articles’, other players were less imaginative. One Polish player ran a straightforward tennis ball racket between London and Barcelona, where balls fetched a fortune apiece – at least a dollar. He had two mighty suitcases in which a thin layer of clothing concealed hundreds of balls, removed from their packing to take less space and to enable him to say that they were ‘for practising’ if he was searched. He got away with it for months, until one day the catch of a case flew open and tennis balls flooded the customs hall. Whistles were blown, policemen with dogs appeared, one of which picked up a ball between his teeth and dashed around the hall, further adding to the excitement. Chaos reigned. Above the hubbub could be heard the anguished cry, ‘They are for practice – they are for practice!” But it was no use.

  Diary Notes: 1955

  Alvarez talks to his racket. Sometimes when he’s playing badly he throws it on the ground and walks round it in a circle, scolding it. His racket, it seems, is responsible for nearly all of his bad shots. I envy him his alibi. How about going into the dressing-room after a match and saying, ‘I played great! My racket was awful!’?

  The greatest single trading coup was said to have been performed by William Alvarez of Colombia. William apparently crossed into Prague with a vast new suitcase crammed with merchandise. In Prague he played an exhibition match, probably against Drobny, then sold all the merchandise, his own tennis clothing and rackets and, finally, even the suitcase. He then converted the cash into East German cameras and lenses and returned, triumphant, with only his loot and the clothes he stood up in.

  Even Abie was a trader. He used to be a partner in a business which manufactured ladies’ coats. Wherever we went, therefore, he kept an eye open for new ideas, fashions, or samples which might lead him to his fortune by a shorter route. In Oslo he came upon a store which sold furs; seal, mainly, but with a sprinkling of other varieties – reindeer, fox and other tundra creatures. Abie was ecstatic. He, in the professional voice he used to use when he spoke of the objects of his trade, called them ‘pelts’.

  ‘Great pelts, Forbsey,’ he said to me. ‘From all those furry buggers they got runnin’ about in the snow up there’ – gesturing northwards. ‘Wait till my uncle gets a look at these!’ he exulted. ‘He’ll go even further out of his mind. Pussy hair! Wait till he sees this lot.’

  Abie’s uncle, also a partner in the business, was obsessed with fur collars.

  ‘Coats mit some pussy hair around the neck,’ he would insist to Abie. ‘Vomen are med about pussy hair. You listen to me! Give them a bit of pussy hair and they pay double mit-out asking vhy!’

  So Abie purchased pelts and, as was nearly always the case with his projects, he purchased too many. I was called in to assist with transportation.

  ‘Just wait ’til we get to London, Forbsey,’ he said. ‘From there my shippers will handle them. Jesus. Who’d have ever thought that six dozen pelts were so many?’

  We reached Paris, somehow, but in Paris, what with Heather’s clothing purchases and Abie’s further collection of coat samples, there was no way the skins would go into our cases. To make things worse, the other players were reluctant to assist us, muttering things about contamination and confiscation, and quarantine.

  ‘We’ll carry them,’ said Abie determinedly when it was time to leave. ‘We’ll string ’em together and carry them round our necks and over our shoulders.’

  I viewed the mountain of fur with some trepidation, as we set to work tying the skins into bundles.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Abie as we finally surveyed each other. ‘We’re like Trader Horn. One thing . . . if people ask us where we got them, we can say we traded ’em for beads.’

  At Paris airport, the French averted their noses and gave us a wide berth. At London airport we approached customs like two people recently arrived from Alaska. Inevitably the customs men beckoned us over.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said one. ‘What’s all this, then?’ Abie paused and peered about with a worried look.

  ‘Mush! Mush!’ he said at last.

  ‘Mush mush?’ repeated the startled customs man.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Abie, ‘Mush! Mush! We’re trappers. We’re lookin’ for our team of dogs.’

  ‘Team of dogs, sir?’ said the customs man.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Abie. ‘If you see a team of dogs pulling a sledge, they’re ours.’

  ‘Haven’t seen no dogs, sir.’

  ‘That’s very funny,’ said Abie. ‘We should have dogs.’ He peered about again, his eyes low, searching underneath things, saying ‘Mush mush’ and snapping his fingers.

  ‘Lot of hides you have there, sir,’ the customs man said to me.

  ‘We traded them for beads,’ I said, a little weakly. I was never quite sure about using Abie’s methods, especially when Her Majesty’s Customs were involved.

  ‘Beads, sir?’ said the customs man.

  ‘We’re traders and trappers,’ said Abie, coming back into the attack.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about all this, sir,’ said the customs man finally. ‘You better come along with me.’

  By the time the explanations were made, Abie had promised Wimbledon tickets to half the customs staff, and the skins were examined and passed as clean.

  ‘You got to come up with a story, Forbsey,’ Abie said to me as we caught a taxi. ‘Once you got a story, you got a chance. You just stand there bein’ nervous and they lock you up for sure. So always have a story ready!’

  Story or not, we were back in England, and I was glad. It has always been a second home for me, has England – soft breakfasts, hot smells out of the underground stations and white-stemmed birch trees. London Transport. Camden Town, Notting Hill Gate, Clapham Junction, Hampstead Heath, Battersea, Barnes, Bexhill. I liked the sound, sight and smell of it all, and we were back, staying at the Cumberland Hotel, no less, and wondering, as Abie put it, ‘what the poor people were doing just then’!

  Five

  My first real season on the red European clay had taught me a good many things, including a truer conception of the term ‘slave labour’.

  Having learnt my tennis in Johannesburg at an altitude of six thousand feet, I was a true net-rusher and had only a scanty selection of groundshots, none of which was really well produced, although I felt they were better than Abe Segal’s, and about on a par with those of Mervyn Rose. Rushing the net on a really slow Italian court while using the Pirelli balls of the early sixties was an eerie experience – like being in a movie, half of which was speeded up while the other half was in slow motion. I was the speeded up part. I would come barrelling up to the net, only to arrive there too early and have to hop about in a frenzy of suspense while my opponent (who often seemed to be Pietrangeli or Merlo) decided on which side to pass me. Desperate anticipatory decisions had to be made at the very last minute, resulting in huge lunges either to right or left, staking one’s all on guesswork. To make matters worse, even if one did happen to guess correctly, anything short of a miraculous volley simply put the ball back into play and recommenced the whole awful cycle. Lobs were too terrible to contemplate, and had to be blanked out of one’s mind to preserve sanity. I finally decided, irrevocably and forever, that certain players could never be beaten by net-rushing on slow courts, and made a mental list of them: Santana, Pietrangeli, Merlo, Lundquist, Gardini, Larsen, Drobny and Flam were among the ‘total impossibilities’, and then there was a longer list of ‘almost impossibilities’ that included people like Jovanovic, Tiriac, Woodcock, Mulligan, Couder, Haillet, Darmon, Ulrich and so forth. There was also a secret list of people whom I privately considered ‘very har
d to beat’, but about whom other players spoke contemptuously, with phrases like ‘can’t break eggs’ or ‘can’t beat their grandmothers’. These players gave me nasty scares if they cropped up anywhere near me in the draw, and had to be treated with terrific determination. Of course, there was also a list of ‘impossibilities on any surface’, but no one ever, on grass, was as frightful to contemplate as ‘the clay court impossibilities’. Grass speeded up everything considerably, and gave the groundstrokers less time to pause and consider.

  Jaroslav Drobny was another master of the art of clay court play. Apart from his usual fluent game, he had another style of play into which he used to lapse when the mood took him – a method which inflicted upon his opponent a sort of bend-and-stretch form of torture.

  I have often made sceptical faces at reports of players actually using the dropshot lob technique to win matches. Drobny could and did, not only against second-raters, but against players of the stature of Ken McGregor, Vic Seixas, or people like that. He would start proceedings with soft, feathery little crosscourt dropshots off his left-handed backhand. These floated over to the right-hander’s forehand, where, if one was very nimble and had prodigious acceleration, they could be dug out of the clay. Having dug them out, a tremendous application of brakes was necessary to escape fouling the net, and the only safe counter was a deep recovery back to Drobny’s backhand. (His forehand was a superb and devilish shot which had to be avoided at all costs.) Having made the recovery and having applied brakes, one then had to hit reverse like a madman and back-pedal to stretch for the down-the-line lob which one knew was coming, and which floated over one’s left shoulder to pitch deep in the backhand corner. Again, this recovery shot had to be carefully hit back up the line to avoid the forehand. And so forth. I have seen Drobny subject steady players to miles of this kind of crosscourt roadwork, and on the occasions when I played him on clay, I managed to avoid the torment of it only by suicidal all-or-nothing smashes at the floating lobs. On grass one could obviate the dropshots altogether by barrelling up to net at every opportunity.