Net Loss

Organized tennis involves “leveling up, rather than leveling down,” an apt description formulated by the late E. Digby Baltzell, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and tennis historian. His Sporting Gentlemen (1995) combined both history and social analysis, virtually scripture on both.

In 1935, at age 19, Budge played his first year of world-class tennis. At Wimbledon, the great German champion Baron Gottfried von Cramm begged for a word with Budge and they sat on a club porch bench. The baron told Budge he had shown bad sportsmanship in throwing a point when he thought an opponent had received a bad call. Many players did that: Bill Tilden, for example, with an irritating theatrical flourish. Budge had thought throwing a point to be good sportsmanship.

Cramm explained. Budge had embarrassed the linesman before a large Center Court crowd. After all, the linesman had been trying to do his job. Implicit here was the view that the entire game–players, linemen, umpire, ball boys–were part of something much larger: The Game.

That also was the meaning of the lines from Kipling’s poem “If –” inscribed on a sign over Center Court entrance: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same . . . you will be a man,” that is, a gentleman, congratulating your opponent for a well-played game, and meaning it. A similar sign once hung over the entrance to the Stadium court at Forest Hills, the American Wimbledon.

During the winter of 1937, Budge perfected strokes he had seen Fred Perry use in a professional match against the great Ellsworth Vines, taking the ball on the rise and so achieving a great deal of added power. With Budge’s physical strength, this was devastating.

On July 20, 1937, in the Davis Cup interzone final on Center Court at Wimbledon against Germany (the winner was expected to defeat Great Britain, the defending holder, and win the Davis Cup), Don Budge, the poor boy from Oakland, and Baron von Cramm, the Prussian aristocrat, played in what experts then and as long as they lived said was the greatest match in the history of tennis.

In 1937, international relations were tense. Just before going on Center Court, the Baron was called to the phone. It was Hitler. From Berlin. Wishing Cramm the best of luck. I myself, age seven, listened on my tiny plastic radio. Indeed, everyone my parents knew was listening, many rooting for the blond and blue-eyed, almost too-handsome baron. (After this match, I seized my father’s old tennis racket and began practicing against a wall.)

Perhaps never before nor since in a world-class match has the placement-to-errors ratio been anything like this, two winners to every error. As perfect as tennis can get. The Baron, playing at his peak, went up two sets to one, Budge battled back and forced a fifth set, which went to 7-6, Budge serving. On Budge’s fifth match point the Baron hit a strong cross-court forehand. Budge sprinted to his right, stretched to hit a forehand down the line and, falling forward, did see the ball fly down the line past Cramm’s outstretched racket.

Budge lay stretched out on the grass, not knowing whether the shot had gone in. Then he heard the rising cheer of the crowd. The ball had landed just inside the line. The Cup would go to the United States.

Cramm waited at the net to congratulate Budge: “Don, this was absolutely the finest match I have ever played in my life.” (Hitler’s reaction can be imagined.)

At the net, Cramm congratulated Budge–there it is. The match, The Game, was the thing, not triumph, not disaster. It had been a triumph for both players. Bill Tilden greeted Budge as he walked off the court and said it had been the greatest match he had ever seen. Much later, when Budge came out of the club house, he noticed that most of the crowd remained in their seats at Center Court, apparently shocked by what they had seen.

The Baron, despising the Nazis, knew many of the conspirators in the July 1944 bomb plot that almost killed Hitler, but was not implicated. The poor boy from Oakland, with the dirtiest tennis shoes Perry Jones had ever seen, now had become a paradigm, a gentleman, and indeed never played in shorts but in long white flannels and imported polo shirt. He later became a statesman of the sport, which had been more than a sport. Perry Jones and the baron had been part of the process of “leveling up, not down.”

The Gentleman was an English invention, and it is not too much to say that the invention of the gentleman was the reason England did not have its own version of the French Revolution.

The gentleman was a new social form on which the aristocrat and the wealthy commoner could meet, minimizing their differences as both became gentlemen. The aristocracy had to temper its manners. No more strutting, spitting on the floor, dueling, chasing women all over the place in the manner of Lord Rochester or Don Juan. The aristocracy had to be permeable by the wealthy commoners, marrying their wealthy daughters, as the commoners improved their manners and acquired polish and some learning, also buying country estates. The aristocrats went into respectable businesses.

The idea and the ideal of the gentleman began to be shaped by the Spectator, written mostly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, a single sheet printed on both sides, and appearing daily between March 1711 and December 1714. The essays dealt with a wide range of subjects in a way that made them available for polite conversation, and the style was the gentleman’s style, educated but not bookish, though each essay had a Latin epigraph, perhaps useful for other occasions for readers lacking classical education.

The Spectator was urbane and confident, and when condemning, did so with a deadly smile. As his Tory enemy Alexander Pope wrote, Addison was “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, / Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.” It was enough. The Spectator deplored fanaticism and political partisanship, but essay Number 69 was a prose poem in praise of the Royal Exchange (or stock market). The Spectator was quietly Whig.

The core of the Spectator consisted of a series about Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Andrew Freeport, and their Club, a congenial group, the idea of the gentlemen’s club launched as a key institution.

Sir Roger, a Tory, lived in Coverley Hall, a landed estate, had been a rake during the Restoration, loved, dueled, and now was an expert on the infinitely complex and also absurd Game Act. His clothes were out of date. Kindly, picturesque, loved by his servants, he was “rather beloved than esteemed.”

The serious member of the Club, representing the economic future, was Sir Andrew Freeport, successful but crude. His “ships always return a handsome profit,” but he said things like “a penny saved is a penny got” and “the sea is the British Common.” He believed that commerce creates more lasting dominion than arms. Sir Andrew was vulgar, but right. He needed to study the Spectator, find civilized things to talk about, have opinions about Milton and Locke. In the end, Sir Roger died, but Sir Andrew bought a country estate.

If the Spectator provided the paradigm, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) was the epic, an enormous best-seller and a warning of what could happen if the social compromise on the gentleman did not work. Sir Richard Lovelace is a Rochester or Don Juan. Pursuing the wealthy Clarissa Harlowe, he does not marry her but, refused in his advances, kidnaps her and locks her in a room. She resists him through most of six volumes. Desperate, he drugs and rapes her; she lingers for many pages, dying of a broken heart.

Justice requires that Lovelace (loveless?) must die. Clarissa’s relative, a Colonel Morden (death), catches up with him and kills him in a duel that takes place in socially stratified France. Duels cannot disgrace English soil, but apparently are permissible for an English military man who is really an executioner. That blade will be the guillotine during the revolutionary Terror. Among the causes of the Revolution had been the rigid class system and the exclusion of wealthy commoners from the upper ranks of French society.

C.S. Lewis (see his essay “Addison”) thought it still difficult for a Frenchman to become a gentleman, a social role remaining English. As the contemptuous French word “bourgeois” suggests, the French did not successfully create a gentleman class; and in fact, France had no Victorian period, no Dickens and Tennyson but, rather, Flaubert and Baudelaire.

No consideration of the American gentleman would be complete without mentioning the remarkable Hobart Amory Hare (Hobey) Baker, the beau ideal of the gentleman class before the Great War. From a Philadelphia Main Line family, he went to St. Paul’s and Princeton, and is in both the football and hockey Hall of Fame. He held the Princeton scoring record in football until Cosmo Iacavazzi broke it during the 1960s. (Baker’s record is remarkable because of the rounder shape of the old ball.) Baker kicked field goals, and was a spectacular runner, especially on punt returns. When he was fouled on the field, he sometimes wept, not because he was hurt, but because the game had been; and once he carried an injured opponent off the field. After an especially good game, he went into the opponents’ locker room to congratulate them.

Not surprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald hero-worshipped Baker. In one of Fitzgerald’s variations on the gentleman theme, James Gatz tries to invent himself as a gentleman named Jay Gatsby, “old sport,” who has even gone, sort of, to Oxford (the English Princeton). As a gentleman, Baker fought in the skies over the Western Front but was killed after the Armistice while test-flying a repaired plane. Though the gentleman Arthur Ashe won the men’s U.S. Open in 1968, tennis was assaulted beginning in that same antinomian era by such talented vandals as John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, whose manners were unacceptable, atrocious. But today the gentlemanly ideal is reasserting itself, notably in Roger Federer, who understands his place in tennis history, and so is aware of something much larger than any individual or any match. He shows this awareness in all aspects of his behavior: his tennis clothes, for example, and his flawless demeanor.

Jeffery Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, is the author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: The National Review and Its Times.