A Handful of Summers Read online

  ‘We made it, Forbsey,’ he said. ‘But you can have these Iron Curtain deals. Boy! They’re like bein’ in a horror movie.’

  It soon became clear that Cliff was destined to become one of the best South African players. That year we reached the semi-finals of the European Zone, defeating Switzerland, Romania, France and Germany before losing to Sweden. All the matches were close and, as Abie said fairly often, I had ‘plenty of things to shout about in the night’.

  Cliff played his first major Davis Cup singles match at Roland Garros in our match against France. Their team consisted of Pierre Darmon, Gerard Pilet, and the new and untried doubles team of Jean Claude Barclay and Jacques Renevand. We had Abe, Cliff and me; and of course the steadfast and long-suffering Claude Lister, who had to cope with us and to put up ‘a good show’ with the rather mixed battery of strokes and strategies that, between the four of us, we could muster.

  Davis Cup ties consist of five matches – four singles and one doubles, spread over three days. Order of play in the singles matches is decided by drawing the names of the players out of a hat.

  In the match against France, the draw stipulated that Cliff play Gerard Pilet in the first match, and that I play Pierre Darmon in the second. The following day, Abe and I were to play Renevand and Barclay, and on the final day the singles order was reversed, with Cliff playing Dannon, first match, and me playing Pilet in the final match of the tie.

  Of all types of tennis competition, I found that Davis Cup ties imposed upon me the most exacting form of tension. Other players with whom I spoke agreed with me. Playing ‘for your country’ somehow emphasised the point-of-honour thing, and added to your own private tensions and ambitions the burden of obligation to your country and to your teammates.

  Vital tennis matches are, at best, filled with tension and a kind of painful excitement, with the thrill of the game itself hidden under many layers of anxiety; of fear, almost, of your opponent; of the turns of fortune; of your own ability to cope with cliff-hanger situations; of the feeling of despair when, for all your efforts, you feel the game slipping away from you.

  And even when a match goes well, and you build up a healthy lead, there is always the little lurking anxiety that things might suddenly change – because some time in the past you have seen such things happen, or because they have happened to you.

  Perhaps the one word which best describes such matches is ‘lonely’. And Davis Cup matches were, for me, infinitely lonelier than those in which only my private ambitions were at stake.

  Often in my diary I wrote introspective little passages about the emotions of tennis matches. The most succinct entry is written in heavy black, angry writing, and has a page to itself:

  All tennis matches are lonely. But:

  Moods for Winning:

  Loneliness plus Courage,

  Patience, Optimism,

  Concentration,

  A Calm Stomach, and

  A deep, quiet fury.

  Moods for Losing

  Loneliness plus Fear,

  A Hollow Stomach,

  Impatience,

  Pessimism, Petulance, and

  A bitter fury at yourself.

  For me, both moods were in evidence during our tie against the French. Cliff played and won a superb match against Gerard Pilet, a match which lasted nearly three hours, and which contained all the classic ingredients of dramatic occasions.

  The Junior against the Veteran; tactics against steadiness, bad calls, fine tennis, attacks of cramp, and the emotions of a stadium full of French aficionados. It was also a match in which fortunes fluctuated amazingly, so that while waiting in the locker room and trying to gauge when the match would end, I went through all kinds of agonies and premature preparations: having lunch too early; then two bouts of tea to compensate; three warm-ups; a jog in the nearby woods and about fifty glucose tablets.

  When finally I walked on court with a remarkably calm-looking Pierre Darmon, I felt full of fluids, irritations and sinking feelings. From the moment that the first ball hit the strings of my racket, I was fighting adversity. There was a swirling wind blowing, and Pierre played a kind of mixed, darting style of tennis that, try as I might, I could not fathom. To make things worse, he seemed totally at ease, clear of eye and at one with the conditions.

  We played and I had to endure the discomfort of losing, coupled with the despair of knowing that my game had fallen apart, but not knowing why.

  There was one aspect of tennis which, throughout my whole career, never ceased to amaze me. No matter how well prepared I was for any given match, I could never tell whether I was going to have an ‘on day’ or an ‘off day’ until I actually walked onto the court and began to play.

  After the first two singles matches we were thus poised at one match all. The following day Abie and I dealt in a ruthless manner with the untried team of Renevand and Barclay, and completely neutralised what the French had smugly considered to be their secret weapon.

  That left us uneasily poised with a 2-1 lead, Drysdale having to play Darmon and I Pilet in the final match. We didn’t dare hope that Cliff could beat Dannon, and I had grave doubts about my ability to beat Pilet, as he was a net-rusher’s nightmare on slow clay – one of the ‘virtually impossibles’ on my list. With this state of truce at hand we attended a gala dinner, a grand function in the combined honour of our match, as well as the annual lawn tennis encounter between the British and French International Club teams. These teams were filled with noble and venerable names, such as Borotra, Brognon, Destremau and Lacoste on the French side, and a selection of Britons of the very first order – Mottram, Paish, Barrett et al.

  Conditions were absolutely ideal for speeches. They cropped up punctually with the coffee and for two hours literally flooded the room with extravagant clichés. Honours, thanks and good fellowship poured forth. To make things even worse, an official from the South African Embassy got to his feet and after some particularly trite verbiage, solemnly congratulated us on having won the match, having apparently mistaken our 2-1 lead for glorious victory.

  We were dumbfounded, and for once even Claude Lister was put out. I returned to the hotel depressed, feeling myself to be in one of those tennis troughs that infect all tennis players from time to time. It vanished without warning during the morning of the next day. I practised with Malcolm Fox during Cliff ’s match against Darmon, and suddenly my spirit lifted and by some miracle everything shifted back into place – like a cinema lens, suddenly corrected. I don’t remember much about that match, except the sublime relief of seeing a crisp white ball again, and knowing exactly where it was.

  Cliff lost, and I won, and we had defeated the French 3-2. The previous night’s gaffe was forgotten, and a party was given for us at the South African Embassy. Here the ambassador – rigidly be-crutched and with his leg in plaster from heel to thigh, the result of a skiing accident – and his attractive wife welcomed us as heroes. We overdid the celebration, there is no doubt about that.

  About halfway through the evening, Abe began singing snatches of The Nearness of You, and a little later threw in a few soft-shoe routines for good measure. Cliff was going about removing strange ladies’ shoes and filling them with champagne. Sometimes he removed only one shoe, filled it up and drank it himself. At others, he would become very gallant and insist that both shoes be removed, filled up, and a toast drunk to the owner of the shoes. (The next day, in a more sober mood, he confided to me that one of the ladies’ shoes had given the champagne ‘a most peculiar taste’.) We were nearly the last to leave, joining the end of the line which filed past the host and hostess to shake their hands. It was then that Abie, while grasping the hand of the ambassador, struck him such a blow on the shoulder blades that his crutches fell out and he stood swaying precariously, like a nearly knocked-over skittle. He would have gone over for sure had Claude Lister not caught him, as by then Abie h
ad moved on to kiss his wife.

  It was a famous celebration! The next morning I found, slashed across a page in my notebook, a poem which I had only the faintest recollection of having written. I remember being agreeably surprised that, in spite of the influence of champagne, the metre of the thing was reasonably good!

  A miracle

  A turn of fate. Shout: Ho for Victory!

  (Victory Ho)

  An urgent

  Need to celebrate. Shout: Ho for Victory!

  (Victory Ho)

  The French amazed

  Claude Lister dazed

  Myself surprised

  Abe mesmerised

  Shout Ho for Victory, Victory, Victory

  Ho for

  Victory Ho!

  The French championships followed the Davis Cup tie. Although I lost in the early rounds of the singles, Abie and I reached the doubles finals, beating Hewitt and Stolle on the way. In our quarter-final match, an extraordinary thing took place, which I later found that I had faithfully recorded in my diary:

  Diary Notes: Summer 1962

  A long, tense match today. Abie believes we have a real chance of winning our first major title. At 9-8 in the third set, we at last got a set point. Abie played a great return and I got an easy one right on the net. It was a perfect set-up – an absolute sitter. I got up to give it a colossal nudge and looked straight into the blazing sun. My nudge just nicked the ball and sent it straight upwards. There it hung, suspended for so long and spinning so fast that a wild thought flew through my head about me inventing some new kind of counter to gravity. Our opponents began advancing with alarming speed while the spinning ball hovered. At last, it began to descend. It fell at their feet, about a yard inside their half of the court and then, as though powered by some demon inside it, it leapt backwards onto our side before anyone could move. Four jaws dropped.

  ‘Holy Jesus Christ,’ said Abie, with strong religious fervour, ‘that was one hell of a way to knock off a set point!’

  ‘Relax,’ I said tensely. ‘We won the point, didn’t we?’

  ‘“Relax,” he says,’ mused Abie wearily. ‘Forbsey says that I must relax!’ He turned to me: ‘That’s right, buddy, we won it, only next time you make a shot like that, let me know in advance so I can take a couple of tranquilisers.’

  Later on in the dressing-room, after we had won the match, Abie collapsed on the bench and stared at his feet.

  ‘With you,’ he said, ‘a man’s lucky if he doesn’t get that stuff that makes your heart stop.’

  ‘Thrombosis,’ I said absently. I was tired of the ‘heart attacks’ that Abe was always on about.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Thrombosis. When I see you go up for one of those crappy shots of yours, I can actually feel thrombosis startin’ to creep up.’

  ‘It doesn’t creep up,’ I said perversely. ‘It strikes without warning!’

  Abie looked at me, shook his head, and said that one thing about playing with me was that, ‘There’s no way a man’s goin’ to get bored out there!’

  It’s been quite a week for odd happenings. In the plate event, playing Warren Woodcock, I missed an easy volley to give him his advantage and match point. ‘Bloody pissed off’, as the Australians say, I gave the net a whack with the edge of my racket and it collapsed into a tangle in the middle of the court. Woodcock walked up to the umpire and in his slow and deliberate way said:

  ‘Mr Umpire, I don’t think the net is the right height.’

  We had to wait a while for the net to be repaired, during which time Warren practised random serves into the back fence and made remarks to casual onlookers about it being ‘a bad time to have a net collapse’, or ‘that there should be a rule somewhere’, and that ‘play was not being continuous’. When we finally resumed, he served a double and I eventually won the match.

  There was a whole new crop of young Australians at Roland Garros that year – John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Ken Fletcher and others – all potential champions with the fire and determination of Australia embedded in their souls. Life for older players, I remember thinking, was not going to be easy. Ken Fletcher was a real card, chatting to himself on court, loosing the odd indignant yell, and generally inventing all manner of schemes to make life more interesting.

  There was a little groundsmen’s shed situated near courts six and seven that made that part of Roland Garros seem more like a shady garden than a major tennis venue. While the shed housed clay court maintenance tools, Torben Ulrich occasionally took it over to practise the clarinet that had become a permanent part of his equipment. The trouble was that if he forgot to close the doors and windows, complicated little jazz phrases would leak out to float about amongst the trees. That first week, Ken Fletcher was put on court six to play against a young Frenchman, who, like many other Frenchmen, was better than he looked. So, for a while, Fletch made heavy weather of the match with frequent muttering and shouting. Torben, meanwhile, having finished his tennis for the day, had decided to put in some clarinet practice, unaware that others were still struggling to win matches.

  At a critical stage in one of the sets, after a long point, Fletch’s opponent threw up lob, and just as Ken went up to kill it, some of Torben’s notes came floating out of the shed. Fletch missed the smash, came back to earth, stood quietly for a while and said in a surprisingly calm way, ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ beating time to the words with his racket head on the court surface. One is not supposed to use blatantly bad language, so the umpire naturally glared at him and wagged a finger. Glancing up at the man in quite a friendly way, Fletch added, still thoughtfully, ‘And fuck it!’ Then he walked back to serve, and just before tossing up the ball, he paused and shouted, ‘Hey Torben! Will you kindly stop blowing air into that bloody instrument!’

  I eventually won the plate event, but Abie and I lost the doubles final to Emerson and Santana and were bitterly disappointed. We had another exciting tie against Germany in the next round, and won it after being down two matches to love, Cliff beating Wilhelm Bungert in the final match. The tie was played at the Rott-Weiss Club in Berlin; a very old and special place, smelling of cigars and coffee.

  Thinking back, I am now sometimes appalled by our lack of interest in the great old cities to which we travelled.

  Mostly we would beat a path from our hotel to the tennis courts and back, only occasionally sallying forth to explore. Fortunately the tennis authorities often organised sightseeing tours for us in the hope, I suppose, that they might contribute towards the broadening of our minds. In Berlin that year a bus was arranged to take us to see the famous wall.

  Now Abie had a deep aversion to group organisation, to the extent that he could hardly even be persuaded to stand in line for his players’ lunches. On the morning of the bus tour he suddenly announced that he was not going to ‘sit on a crappy bus all day like a peasant’, but that he and I were going to see the wall in a taxi.

  ‘You’re off your head,’ I said. ‘The bus is especially for taking us to the wall. A taxi will cost a fortune and probably take us to the wrong wall.’

  ‘OK, Forbsey,’ he said, ‘you go sit on the bus. I’m takin’ a taxi. I want to be back by twelve so I can practise.’

  To keep the peace, I finally agreed to the hiring of a cab, and we set off.

  The driver, inevitably, was a rogue, and took us to the furthest section of wall that he could think of, while the meter ticked feverishly away, rattling up the Marks and pfennigs in a way which infuriated me. We reached the wall at last, and stared for a few minutes at a forbidding section of barbed wire and concrete and a half-hidden sentry-box. We then got back into the cab.

  ‘That,’ I said to Abie, ‘is your biggest balls-up to date. There’s sixty-nine D-marks on the meter and we’re halfway to Russia.’

  ‘Look, Forbsey. A wall’s a wall. What did you expect? A firing squad, so yo
u could see an execution?’

  ‘We could have seen a better piece of wall from the bus.’

  ‘An’ listened to all the horses jabberin’ about their shopping!’

  We got more and more heated until, in a fit of temper, I yelled: ‘Stop the cab, I’m getting out!’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ said Abie. ‘We’re miles from nowhere!’

  ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m getting out.’

  Faced with my dreadful fury, even Abie was taken aback. Before we could consider our move rationally, and having paid an immense cab fare, we found ourselves standing on the wide and bleak Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse. In the distance was the Brandenburg Gate. The cab drove away.

  ‘Now you’ve really fucked things up,’ said Abie. ‘There’s no way another cab’s gonna come.’

  ‘We’ll walk to the gate,’ I said. ‘At least I can photograph that.’

  The scale of the approaches to the Brandenburg Gate is so immense that we found ourselves faced with a walk of several miles. We trudged and I grumbled, and at last Abie blew his top.

  ‘Damn you, Forbsey,’ he cried, ‘you’ve been complaining for hours. You want to see the wall? Right, I’ll show you the bloody wall! Follow me!’

  After some time I realised that he was making for the military establishment near the mighty Gate. Jeeps carrying British soldiers were coming and going, and Abie hailed one.

  ‘Listen, General,’ he said to the driver who was, in fact, a corporal. ‘How does a man get to have a good look at this wall?’

  ‘Aren’t you Abe Segal?’ asked the other occupant, who was a lieutenant.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We watched you chaps playing tennis against the Jerries,’ said the lieutenant. ‘What can we do for you?’ The celebrated Segal luck had struck again.

  We told them of our abortive attempts to look at the wall, and they laughed.

  ‘How would you like to see the Reichstadt?’ the lieutenant asked. ‘It’s in our zone. We have our main lookout on the top of it. From up there you can see the bloody lot, including the Russkies on the other side!’