By Bill Simons
For months, we’ve been writing about war and tennis. Here are a few final items bouncing about our notebooks:
MOST INTRIGUING WAR TALE: The story of the glamorous champion Alice Marble, who became a World War II spy in Switzerland, seduced her former lover, but eventually was shot by a Russian agent.
A LINGERING QUESTION: Some still wonder what would have happened to tennis and the USTA if the 9/11 attack occurred 40 hours earlier, as the 2001 Lleyton Hewitt–Pete Sampras US Open final was winding down.
HEEL, HITLER: Thomas Muster refused to accept the Freedom of the City Award from his hometown of Leibnitz, Austria, because the last person to be so honored was Hitler … Years ago, after Russia came back from an 0-2 deficit to beat Germany in the Davis Cup, writer Mark Winters joked, “The loss leaves the Germans 0-3 against Russia in meaningful competitions (the last two Davis Cup titles, and World War II)” … Pete Sampras‘ first coach, Dr. Pete Fisher, always felt his prime pupil was like his Doberman, Hitler, because, “You’ve got to hit him with a 2-by-4 to get his attention” … In the slopes surrounding Hitler’s mountain getaway in Bergisgarten, there are superb, finely-manicured clay courts … Powerful Boris Becker refused to take on the nickname “Boom Boom” because it was too militaristic and suggestive of the Luftwaffe’s blitz of London.
THE KEY TO VICTORY ACCORDING TO THE CHINESE CLASSIC THE ART OF WAR: Deep thinking and long preparation.
GEE, WE’VE NEVER HEARD OF THAT WAR: As the Sampras–Agassi rivalry began to wind down, Curry Kirkpatrick observed, “We’re witnessing the downside of the Samprasagassian Wars.”
LITERARY HUMMERS: The best books on war and tennis are A Terrible Splendor by Marshall Jon Fisher, a gripping account of the match between American Don Budge and German Gottfried von Cramm on the eve of World War II; and The Sporting Statesman: Novak Djokovic, by master journalist Chris Bowers, which details Novak‘s emergence from war-tattered Serbia.
LITERARY BUMMER: Arthur Koestler, the famed author of Darkness at Noon, recalled his World War II imprisonment at Paris’s French Open stadium: “At Roland Garros,” he wrote, “We called ourselves the cave dwellers, about 600 of us who lived beneath the stairways. We slept on wet straw, because the place leaked. We were so crammed, we felt like sardines … It smelled of filth and excrement, and only slits of light found their way inside. Few of us knew anything about tennis, but … we could see the names [of the great French champions [Jean] Borotra and [Jacques] Brugnon on the scoreboard.”
BEST PLAYER TO DIE IN WAR: Tony Wilding, supposedly the Rafa Nadal of his day, was said to be the fourth best player of the first half of the 20th century. He won Wimbledon four times, but lost his life on the front In World War I.
BEST AMERICAN PLAYER TO DIE IN WAR: Heartthrob Joe Hunt, America’s hunky No. 1 player in 1943, who was killed in a World War II training crash.
THE SIDE-SPLITTING WHIZ WHO SPLIT IRAN: When the Islamic Revolution came to Iran in 1979 it was curtains for tennis. After all, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini saw the game as decadent, pro-American, and capitalist. So young Mansour Bahrami, a top Iranian player, realized that he had a narrow window to split to France. An invaluable visa in hand, he took refuge in Paris, reached the ’89 French Open doubles final and, despite a lifetime of sorrows, went on to crack up millions of fans as tennis’ most hilarious court jester.
TENNIS AS A WAY TO WORLD PEACE: Before reaching the Wimbledon finals in ’46 and”47, Tom Brown was a soldier in General Patton‘s army. Throughout the war, he carried his racket beneath the boards of his half-track personnel carrier, and in his book, As Tom Goes By, the late San Franciscan wrote, “I truly believe in tennis as a way to world peace … You can have games with allies and former enemies and nothing matters but the match.” BTW: Brown also claimed that the Germans were more upset by the Allies taking over their local beer supplies then taking over their towns.
HEROES IN OUR MIDST: Fred Ferguson was one of the better prospects of his 1940s generation. But after enlisting in the Army at age 17, he was captured by the Japanese, during one of his endless missions to rescue his fallen buddies. He proved to be one of the few survivors of the infamous Battan Death March. After the war, looking twice his age, he lost any hope of being a truly elite player. Eventually Ferguson became a bank teller who lived in a trailer in the small Sacramento Valley town of Le Grand (population: 1659). There, he tirelessly and rather brilliantly taught tennis in his off hours. Tennis observer Jack Sheely noted, “Nobody has given more to this country and asked for so little in return. He gave up his future as a player, his life in many ways, and never once complained.”
CLUB NEWS: Want a touch of militarism? Just pull up to the San Diego Racquet Club for your morning game and catch a macho cadre of Marines jog by in formation, barking out their marching rhythms.
WORLD LEADER MOST INTO TENNIS: Russia’s first post-Soviet President, Boris Yeltsin, adored tennis and did much for the game.
COLD WAR SNUB: When, after 11 years of self-imposed exile, Martina Navratilova returned to Czechoslovakia to play the Fed Cup in 1986, authorities placed her first match on a back outside court.
LEST WE FORGET: The modern game was created by a 19th century military man, Britain’s Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who served in the Dragoon Guards in India. The Davis Cup was created by Harvard’s Dwight Davis who went on to be President Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of War.
THE ULTIMATE IRONY: It turns out that Boris Becker—the first over-the-top international hero in post-World War II Germany—was not exactly (as Hitler would have wanted) of pure Aryan stock. His mother was a Jew who the Nazis sent to a camp in Czechoslovakia during the war. So, according to Jewish tradition, Becker is Jewish.
MARCH OF REMEMBRANCE: The grandmother of Israel’s Shahar Peer spent years in Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, and most of her family died there. After years of silence Shahar’s family opened up and spoke of the freezing temperatures, the scraps of bread, and, of course, the death. In 2010, Peer, Israel’s leading sportsperson, led 10,000 mourners in the annual March of the Living on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
BEST FOR THE VETS: The Wounded Warrior Tennis Camp does extraordinary work for Iraq veterans. For info, contact sddta@yahoo.com or (619) 299-8647.
TEARS IN A HURRY: Andre Agassi is known for his work for kids, but he says that’s nothing compared to the work his wife Steffi Graf does for her charity group, Children for Tomorrow, which aids kids who have been victimized by war. “She makes me feel like the devil with her generosity,” says Andre. “I look at her and think, ‘Why are you putting yourself through this?’ … [But] she’s not that thrilled to talk about it publicly … it brings her to tears in a hurry. She just chooses to live it.”
PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE: After suffering a devastating loss to the little known Peter Doohan at Wimbledon in ’87, Boris Becker said, “I lost a tennis match, not a war” … When Jantzen executive Bart Blout was asked, “What is your biggest concern for the sporting goods industry in 1984?”, he replied, “Nuclear war. The rest is just a game.”
TENNIS’S MOST VIOLENT MOMENT: The stabbing of Monica Seles in Hamburg, Germany in ’93.
COMMENTARY OF THE YEAR: Ukrainian Sergiy Stakhovsky noted, “Our government officials were out of touch with this world … with their lifestyle and money … The price of 70 dead is just too high. Nothing can cost more than human life … They were dying with the hope for a better future where a president is responsible for his people. Where a president is not living the life of a billionaire out of people’s money. … Where dignity and decency are valued. Where bribery is not business as usual … Revolution was the only way to change my country.”
BEST WAR COMMENTARY BY A PLAYER: Monica Seles said, “It’s just sad. Sometimes you just wonder about the whole state of the world and where human beings are going. It’s really mind-boggling what we do to each other. I really believe we are all the same, and I hope the consciousness level of the entire world will come to that, but it’s hard to see that.”
DESTINY’S DAWN
As tennis embraces the French Open semifinals on June 6th, the world will celebrate the 70th Anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy invasion of France in 1944, which turned the tide in World War II. Twelve years ago, we walked those sands and wrote this remembrance:
Touch the sand, a hard cold plain.
Gentle waves break easy, muffling a distant echo within this sea – dark and foreboding.
Lazy lagoons capture still water. A gull swirls free, the sparrow offers a morning song above cruel hills. Waters, so murky, cling to their secrets by this flat, too-wise beach, where a mighty tide was turned.
The surly crimson pools are unseen; still, the knowing grains harbor a bitter truth, beyond our grasp.
This morning, steel clouds hide a horizon like no other; a horizon that wrought a vast gray armada for the ages: 5,423 ships, one goal.
On that day—“The Longest Day”—boys from Moline and Mobile, the sons of Brooklyn and Burbank, Phoenix and Philly, huddled cold in shivering clusters. Wide-eyed, bone-wet, tossed woozy by the uncaring sea—they puffed their last soggy smokes and whispered muted prayers, the final invocations before destiny’s dawn.
What unforgiving fear did they feel? What gut-wrenching terror shook their souls before they strode forth—each one to meet his fate?
Some never reached shore. Packed heavy with battle gear, they sank, a fatal stone descending—an unsparing depth.
Some managed just a single step, dropping to that hard beach. Others scaled storied cliffs, subdued bunkers, or trudged on to wage war in the hedgerow maze, emerging to tell tales—a generation’s pride.
Today, the morning wind is cool. But nothing like the chill of horror that gripped the boys of Omaha on that wide, too wide, beach below cruel hills. Wretched little rises turned imposing peaks; impenetrable bastions raining fire, a fierce explosion, tearing flesh—the sea runs red.
Such agony—dreams and destinies ripped asunder—and a shout of death heard by that distant steeple. The mourning dove flees—the world ablaze—and chaotic flames tell of the madman’s fury, a potent poison.
So step by terrible step, the battle is fought, the beach is won, a continent is conquered. Step by step, the Nazi knot is undone, and we wake from a twisted dream to again embrace that elusive thread, life’s fragile gift.
