A Handful of Summers Read online

  And talking of remarkable tennis players, what of Orlando Sirola? Why he never became an unbeatable player, I could never quite work out. He was a giant of a man, with huge hands and feet, yet with deft ball control and fine strokes. It was my private opinion that he was a little self-conscious about his size, for he never really seemed to exert himself. At Wiesbaden in 1955 he almost casually beat Tony Trabert in straight sets, and Trabert had a huge and rocklike game which could normally be cracked only with high explosive.

  With Pietrangeli, Sirola formed the nucleus of an Italian Davis Cup team that twice reached the challenge round, losing to the dreaded Australians – always on grass. He could play tennis all right, could Sirola; there was no doubt about that! But the size of him! He used to hold three balls in a row in his hand and you couldn’t see any of them. He downed plates of spaghetti literally at a gulp, and, it was said, he could release at will Italy’s most monumental winds. Once, the story went on, when Drobny was co-opted to train the Italian team, it soon became apparent that he was a late riser. Usually, Davis Cup trainers are supposed to be up early and do brisk things before arousing their teams. Not Drobny. With him in charge, the whole camp used to sleep till mid-morning, and then it was some member of the team who would have to awaken Drobny.

  One such morning, I was told, one of the Italian players, with the accumulated gases of the previous night still unreleased, wandered into Drobny’s room, stood beside his bed and let fly with wind like a thunderbolt which rattled the windows and left echoes to die away like the roll of thunder. Thereafter, Drobny made sure that he was the first to rise, in case the incident was repeated.

  Pietrangeli, of course, played superbly. He came very close to being a genius at the art of playing tennis; and, like Santana, he had that deftness of touch that made the average player look clumsy. In addition, he was a world-class soccer player, a follower of high society, and the possessor of supreme self-confidence. Nicki, for instance, was the first tennis player to learn to do the twist, an accomplishment extracted from the nightclubs of Rome. He always escorted good-looking girls, and where ladies were concerned, was never at a loss for words.

  We sat at dinner one evening in the Kursaal at Baden-Baden, swapping stories and talking of tennis. Suddenly I saw Nicki’s eyes focus, and his face take on the rapt look of a bird-dog that senses pheasant. A girl had entered; no ordinary girl, but a tall beauty, with cascades of auburn hair and the kind of liquid form that gets the blood up – movements under silk. She was on the arm of an older man, bashed-up, to be honest, but rich, with that honed and polished look as though he’d been set upon each day by a team of valets and mechanically buffed up. On his fingers rings flashed, and he smelled of several layers of expensive smells as though decades of lustrous interiors, expensive aftershave lotions and cigar smoke had coated him from head to toe.

  ‘Beautiful lady,’ I said wistfully. ‘I wonder how that old guy copes.’

  ‘He’s got his own private winch,’ said Abie brutally. ‘Gives it a wind and up she goes. Then his butler lowers him into position and gives him a bounce to start him going.’

  ‘She needs,’ said Nicki, ‘a young tennis player.’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ I said, thinking of the awful vengeance of the very rich.

  ‘Can be done, Forbsey,’ said Nicki.

  But I, for one, doubted the viability of this claim. Presently the couple got up to dance, moving to the languid German strings in a bored and distant way, the girl resting her chin on the top of his polished head. Nicki’s plan of attack was brilliant in its simplicity. First he wrote the number of his room on the palm of his hand. Then he innocently asked Sandra Reynolds to dance, moving expertly into an attacking position. With fine timing, he caught the eye of the girl, winked, then showed her the palm of his hand, at which she glanced with an imperious eye and a toss of her head. Nicki returned with a gleam in his eye.

  ‘The trap,’ he said incorrectly, ‘is struck.’

  ‘Sprung,’ I corrected him. ‘Ten Marks says it doesn’t work.’

  In the dawn hours that followed, Nicki lay in wait, and at last came the quiet little knocking – tac, tac, tac. I envied Nicki his coup, and for a while afterwards used to write my room number on the palm of my hand, just in case. But it was no good. The only girl I ever showed it to probably thought it was my phone number, because she never knocked on my door. In any case, such schemes must be spontaneous and always fit exactly into spontaneous situations. The ingenuity that tennis brings!

  Six

  Manchester: 1955

  Manchester was the first big grass court event of the season. That was the year that Teddy Tinling got to play against Lew Hoad. In those days Teddy designed tennis gear for both men and women, and, whereas in the realms of women’s wear he was undoubtedly top dog, he had tremendous competition in the men’s section from Fred Perry. Both strove to get the best players to wear their clothes. Perry used the green laurel wreath as his emblem, while Teddy had a sort of red rose affair (which sometimes ran into the white of the shirt). That season, to Teddy’s profound delight, Hoad had agreed to wear his clothing. And in Manchester, when Teddy arrived for the tournament, he found that if he was able to win the first round, he would play Hoad (the number one seed) in the second. He was, simultaneously, ecstatic and deeply anxious. His first-round opponent was a venerable but wily English veteran; a Lord someone-or-other, with whom, in those days, English tournaments often abounded.

  From experience in county matches, Teddy knew that he would be hard pressed to win.

  ‘I have the better forehand,’ he said to me. ‘But Lords can be damned crafty. Play all day long, you see. Don’t have to make dresses for a living.’

  Yet to reach the second round, to walk onto the court with the great Lew Hoad, the pair of them dressed all in white Tinling gear, was an opportunity ‘too horrible to contemplate missing’. By the time Teddy’s first round match was due on court, word had got round, and although it was scheduled for a back court, many players went along to watch. It was a typical Manchester day. Gusty wind, rain clouds hurrying across leaky skies, and British spectators opening and closing umbrellas, looking upwards at the clouds and saying: ‘Oh, it’s bound to clear up after tea.’

  ‘Tinling to serve,’ the umpire called. ‘Players ready. Play!’

  Teddy got the ball well and truly airborne with his left hand, while his right, attached to the handle of his racket, began the devious swing which would, if things went according to plan, bring the head of his racket round in a final sweep to meet the ball on its downward journey. From the very outset, it was clear that the elements were against him. The wind was whistling directly down court, so that serving against it, Teddy found himself bent over backwards like a bow, while with it he would be leaning far in-court, struggling to keep his feet in contact with the fair territory behind the baseline while hitting the ball without falling flat on his face.

  With the business of serving over, play became very brisk. Teddy effectively brought his forehand to bear, directing his shots to his opponent’s backhand. His opponent, meanwhile, had a good crosscourt backhand, which he employed to get the ball back to Teddy’s backhand side, forcing him further and further over to the left. Extraordinary reverse crosscourt rallies developed.

  ‘I spent half the match with my backside interfering with play on the court next door,’ said Teddy later.

  Occasionally, diabolical down-the-line direction changes kept both players on tenterhooks. It was a desperate, even encounter.

  At set and 4-5 Teddy found himself down 30-40, match point on his own service, with the wind behind him. To make matters worse, a series of terrific gusts shook the court, causing Teddy to miss with his first service. He paused, and stood scowling at the one remaining ball in his hand, waiting for the wind to abate. It wouldn’t. A tense hush fell. His first toss-up with the second ball blew so far into the court that he wa
lked after it and caught it. This happened three times. On the fourth attempt, Teddy, by now desperate, stepped into the court after the ball, gave it a desperate whack, and served an unlikely ace. Everyone, including Teddy, was dumbstruck. A foot-fault call seemed inevitable, but none came.

  ‘Deuce,’ called the umpire.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Teddy’s opponent, ‘surely that was a – I mean to say, surely –? Mr Umpire, do you wish to call a foot-fault?’

  ‘Deuce,’ repeated the umpire with a stoicism achieved only by umpires who are determined that they are correct.

  ‘Mr Umpire,’ persisted the peer, ‘do you wish to call a foot-fault?’

  ‘I do not wish to call a foot-fault,’ said the umpire flatly. ‘The score is deuce.’

  ‘That’s hardly cricket,’ cried the peer.

  ‘My dear chap, I quite agree!’ cried Teddy. ‘After what we’ve been through, I can’t imagine a purer conclusion.’

  ‘It appeared to be a foot-fault.’

  ‘I can’t comment, because I was too busy at the time,’ said Teddy. ‘Besides, I had nothing to do with the whole incident. In order to hit the ball, I was forced to station myself in the area in which I expected it to descend. An unfair advantage couldn’t have been further from my intentions!’

  This probably rates as one of the purest altercations in tennis history! Teddy went on to win the match, and the next afternoon, splendid in his white Tinling clothes and with the good wishes of the entire locker room ringing in his ears he went out to take on the world number one player. In no more than thirty minutes he arrived back, having lost 6-0, 6-1.

  ‘How did it go, Ted?’ asked someone cautiously.

  ‘He was better on the day,’ replied Teddy emphatically.

  It was a very British reply. English players, I discovered, very seldom got ‘crushed’ or ‘killed’ or even just ‘beaten’. When they lost it was almost always because their opponents were simply ‘better on the day’, leaving, I supposed, other days open for more encouraging results. On that particular day, however, Teddy must have felt that further explanation was needed, for he sat dejectedly on a wooden bench with a towel over his head, muttering away.

  ‘Mentally,’ he said, ‘I thought I was fully prepared. But, you see, mental ability alone was not enough. Throughout the match I kept feeling that I was faced in the wrong direction. Lew was very polite. “Are you ready, Ted?” he asked several times, and I kept saying that I was, but of course I wasn’t. Not once in the entire match was I ready’!

  Ted would no doubt have felt less depressed had he considered all the other men who had played entire matches against Lew Hoad with the feeling that they were ‘not quite ready!’

  At tennis tournaments, Teddy dressed himself up in the most superb clothes and moved about, glowing like a beacon. His afternoons were made up of the odd tennis match and various witticisms and pleasantries while he admired his designs on the women players who wore them. He had his favourites – ‘White Ladies’, he called them – girls such as Karol Fageros, ‘a golden goddess’; Maria Bueno, ‘a panther of a woman’; Heather Segal, ‘straight off some glamorous island beach’; Angela Buxton, a ‘vision of purity’; Sandra Reynolds, ‘enchantingly feminine’; Renee Schuurman, ‘a full-blown rose’; Virginia Wade, with ‘ice-blue eyes’; and the Buding sisters, Isla and Edda, with ‘soft, female allure’. There were many others of course, for above all, Teddy dearly loved the women of tennis.

  Occasionally his observations were less complimentary. ‘What little waist she has, dear boy,’ he once said to me, ‘is much too high. Even I can’t spirit up a garment to deal with a shape like that!’ And on another occasion: ‘Too much backside! You have no idea of the vast amount of fabric required to conceal an object so large!’

  He loved all kinds of music, and in particular the voice of Frank Sinatra, from which he extracted much of the inspiration necessary to make fashion plates out of tennis girls. On one particular morning, I remember, he arrived at the tennis courts straight from his studio, excited and flushed with the look of the true creator.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said fervently, ‘I have just had seventy-two straight inches of Frank Sinatra – and I’ve invented hipster shorts for dear Angela’ (Angela Mortimer, later Barrett, who always wore shorts instead of skirts). He was a character all right, was Teddy – safe to say the only one of his kind ever born.

  As a confirmed woman tennis-player addict, I finally decided, after years of careful observation, that as a species, they were completely unclassifiable – presenting to the world the widest possible variety of female shapes and sizes. In the random notes I kept I found all kinds of references to them – words such as stylish, alluring, puckish, quiet, lovely, distant, impossible, and so on, apparently dependent upon the climate of my most recent flirtations. There was even a ‘foxy girl with a seductive backhand volley’, an elusive combination that one doesn’t come across every day of the week.

  There were, of course, the plainer ones – the ‘Horses’ was Abie’s nomenclature. ‘The way she walks, Forbsey,’ he would say out of the corner of his mouth, ‘you could hitch her up to a cart and she’d pull it along.’ And, of course, the girls perspired – some copiously, some discreetly, some seductively, while others simply sweated, sometimes giving off rare and amazing odours.

  Diary Notes: 1956

  Changing for my mixed doubles match I detect the unmistakable sound of Australian voices drifting about the locker room. One of the larger woman players is presently under discussion. ‘Great pair of legs she’s got,’ is one opinion. ‘That’s if you’re thinking of clarmbing bloody Everest!’ is another. A third proclaims, ‘Ar wouldn’t larke to be trapped between tharghs like that. One little spasm of ecstasy and ar’d be crying for mercy.’ An unruly lot, Australians – inclined to use ‘ar’ instead of ‘i’, and be quite graphic in their descriptive conversations . . .

  But loose as locker-room talk might be, I can never remember anyone discussing actual conquests. Any such activity remained strictly private and no one so much as whispered a word. Occasionally you might have overheard remarks, such as: ‘Tennis girls make boring lovers,’ or that their ‘lusts are vented on the court.’ Nearer the mark must be that tennis girls make lovers of every imaginable category. The fact that many of them behave conservatively during tournaments, doesn’t mean that when they put their minds to it they’re not capable of ‘rare and ecstatic flights’!

  Sometimes, late at night, after the functions that the tournaments used to give, you may have come across one of the tennis girls. Soft with wine, on the little dancing floors you may have found them, and you could put your arms around them while the tenor saxophone murmured its breathy notes.

  If you wrap your troubles in dreams

  and dream your troubles away.

  Suddenly you found that they had tumbling hair and scented cheeks, and that they could whisper things, while in your mind’s eye you saw the same hair damp and tied back, and the face tensed up, waiting for the serve returns. You’d give a twisted little smile then, at the surprise of it, and so would they.

  Afterwards you would tumble into taxi-cabs, and let the drivers take you through streets where the lamps made moving shadows, and you both knew that the moments were borrowed ones, pilfered from the mainstream of things, and that the next morning’s sunlight might take them away.

  In spite of the sometimes dubious dressing-room discussions, many tennis friendships turned into romances and some into marriages. Lew and Jenny Hoad; Abe and Heather Segal; Tony and Joy Mottram; Pierre and Rosy Darmon; many others. Husband/wife mixed doubles teams, however, were potentially explosive, and better, like sleeping dogs, left to lie. Jenny and Lew used to have rare old debates. Lew’s classic remark, however, came when Jenny was playing a singles at Bristol in England. Finding herself engaged in one of those eternal baseline duels that girls often get themselves
into, she adopted tactics of running her opponent from one side of the court to the other and, in the process, covering a fair amount of territory herself. Lew was convinced that, while Jenny’s opponent was a good ‘side-to-side’ mover, she was a bad ‘forward-and-backward’ mover. He edged nearer and nearer her court, getting more and more peeved, until Jenny came to the fence near him to retrieve a ball. This was Lew’s chance.

  ‘One short, one long, fathead!’ he growled out of the corner of his mouth.

  No one is supposed to give advice during matches. Jenny looked wounded, but obeyed and started to win!

  After Manchester, we played the tournament at Beckenham. Here I met up with Jack and Jean, who had been playing in England while I had been travelling with the Davis Cup team on the Continent. Jean had been playing extraordinary tennis for her age, and was tipped by everyone as the next Maureen Connolly. She had a superb forehand, and almost magical control on her backhand, which, apart from being deep and accurate, could turn itself into a perfect lob or deft dropshot with no visible change in style. But she had no service to speak of. Big serves were rare among the girls at that time. Several of the top players possessed them, but nearly all the rest of the girls just used their services more or less to get the ball into play.

  In her early teens Jean had already won many major South African tournaments. Now, in England, she seemed likely to repeat her performance. At Queen’s Club, the week after Beckenham, she beat three of the Wimbledon seeded players, Dorothy Knode, Heather Segal and Darlene Hard, before losing to Louise Brough in the final.