Days of Grace (11 page)

In 1980, I was well aware that I was taking over the U.S. captaincy at a particularly significant time in the eighty-year history of the Cup, with its national and international prestige waning. The best players did not care to play, and attendance had dwindled at many matches. As much as I regretted its loss of prestige, I knew that I had certainly had something to do with the evolution in tennis that had weakened the Davis Cup. I had been one of the leaders in expediting changes that had altered the face of tennis.

Tennis had needed to change, because the world had changed. When my international career began around 1963, very few players earned a living from the sport. Amateurs could not play with professionals, who were shut out from the Davis Cup and from all the major tournaments. After mounting pressure, all of that ended one day in April 1968 in Bournemouth, England, when Mark Cox played Pancho Gonzalez in the British Hard Court Championships, the first sanctioned tournament for both professionals and amateurs. The Open era of tennis began. Later that year, when I won the first United States Open and received only $280 in expense money, I was still an amateur and a gentleman player, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army happy to be able to make the payments on my beloved Ford Mustang. Tom Okker lost to me in the final, and took home $14,000. Tom was a gentleman, too; but he was also a professional who could accept prize money.

Between 1968 and 1981, professional tennis exploded in popularity. As a leader of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the players’ union founded in 1972 (I was president in 1974–75), I saw the fireworks intimately. No one was well prepared for the transition from the closed amateur (or “shamateur,” as some called it) to the open era—not the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), as it was then called, nor the Big Four (the governing bodies of the American, French, Australian, and British championships). Fearful that they would lose control of the game and the players, the ILTF (later shortened to ITF) and the Big Four pursued a reactionary strategy, impeding us at almost
every turn. In my judgment, they resisted change in defense of privilege and a stuffy conception of the traditional. In the end, they lost control.

If the governing bodies were not ready, neither were most of the players. For many of us, the deluge of money led to confusion and an unholy scrambling after dollars. Certain values and standards that had bonded players in my earlier years as a professional—certain codes of honor and a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie—disappeared. In some ways, the youngest players arrived in a world in which the very concept of values and standards was unknown or quaint and obsolete, like wooden racquets or the white tennis balls on which Wimbledon insisted long after the superiority of color had been demonstrated.

I wonder how much we, the leaders of the players during this transition, contributed to the fall. I can’t forget, for example, in light of my concern for the Davis Cup, that one of the main blows struck by the ATP in the name of freedom for players was at the expense of the Davis Cup. In 1973, we boycotted Wimbledon after Nikki Pilic of Yugoslavia was barred from taking part in the tournament by his country because he refused to play in a particular Davis Cup match. The ILTF, reactionary to the core at the time, backed the Yugoslavian Tennis Federation’s banning of Pilic. Our view in the ATP was that a tennis player had the right to play or not to play in the Davis Cup. The ILTF and Wimbledon would not budge from their position of supporting the suspension, and the British courts refused to intervene. We carried out the boycott.

Aided by private promoters such as Lamar Hunt and power brokers such as Donald Dell and Jack Kramer, we prospered. The number of tournaments increased to such an extent that it was difficult to keep track of them. The prize money grew amazingly. (Some people would say obscenely; I wouldn’t. Although I missed out on most of the huge purses of later years, I have never heard of any prize money in tennis that I consider excessive, certainly not
compared to what individuals make in other sports and activities, such as rock music.)

Meanwhile, the top players were expected to play Davis Cup for expense money only. Increasingly, they found reasons to be elsewhere or flatly refused to play. At last, starting in 1981, the Davis Cup leadership decided to award prize money. A giant Japanese electronics firm, Nippon Electric Company (NEC), put up one million dollars to sponsor the competition in 1981. This piece of news, striking in itself, was followed by the announcement that NEC intended to give $2.5 million dollars to the Davis Cup in 1983. The winning team would collect $200,000, plus its usual share of the gate receipts. The U.S. committee announced that after meeting our expenses, we would distribute most of the remaining money to the players.

The ancient unwieldiness of the Cup format was also a problem. Up until 1972, the defending champion did not play until the other nations had fought among themselves for the honor of meeting the previous winner. Then the challenger met the defending champion in the final, called the Challenge Round.

Reaching the Challenge Round could take the greater part of a year of sometimes rough campaigning. Matches were normally scheduled without any regard for the players’ plans. Many of the ties were totally uncompetitive (resulting in 5–0 scores) and unprofitable for the more powerful nation involved; yet they had to be played. And after all that effort, the final result was actually quite predictable. From the first match in 1900 until 1973, only four nations had ever won the Cup: the U.S., Britain, France, and Australia. Between 1937 and 1973, only the U.S. and Australia had won it. Under the venerable captain Harry Hopman, the Australians had played in the finals every year from 1950 to 1968. Fortunately for the rest of us, Hopman retired that year. Since 1974, there has been greater diversity among the winners, with the Cup going to South Africa, Sweden, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, as well as to the Aussies and to us.

In 1980, the system was overhauled. When I assumed our captaincy, under the new rules only sixteen countries would play for the Cup—the top four nations in each of four international zones formed for the competition. The following year, twelve of the sixteen spots would be taken by the eight first-round winners from 1981 and the four winners of a relegation match between the eight first-round losers from 1981. The remaining four spots would be taken by 1982’s four zonal winners. Now the winning country would have to play only four ties to claim the Cup. And every effort would be made to schedule matches at sensible times, to avoid any conflicts with lucrative tournaments elsewhere. The main pieces were now clearly in place for a revival of the Davis Cup.

Despite Trabert’s solid record, the United States effort in the Cup also needed revitalizing. Between 1968 and 1972, the U.S. had won the cup five straight times. Since then, we had lost to Australia, Colombia, Mexico (twice), and Argentina. Between 1976 and 1981, the U.S. had won the Cup only twice, most recently in 1979. In 1980, the U.S. had lost to Argentina in Buenos Aires, a defeat that hastened Trabert’s departure. We needed a win in 1981.

MY INITIAL TASK
as captain was to select a squad to play the first match, against Mexico in Carlsbad, California. I was determined to field the strongest team possible. I needed two singles players and a pair of doubles players. Everyone knew that the two best singles players in the United States were John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Whatever trouble Trabert had experienced with the fiery McEnroe, I fully expected McEnroe to be the mainstay of the new team. Connors was a more difficult proposition. McEnroe had committed himself from the start of his career to the Davis Cup concept; Connors had not. He had played in two Davis Cup matches in 1976 but had stayed off the team since then. I soon discovered that he would not be available against Mexico. To play the four singles matches, I named McEnroe and another left-hander (and at that time the possessor
of perhaps the fastest serve in professional tennis), Roscoe Tanner. To play the doubles match, I selected Stan Smith and Bob Lutz, who had compiled a Davis Cup record of fourteen victories and only one defeat. When Smith developed arm trouble, I named another veteran duo, Marty Riessen and Sherwood Stewart, to play instead.

As our squad assembled in Carlsbad, I began to see that the job was more challenging than I had imagined. I had to instruct the players but also keep them happy, respond to their questions and requests, supervise practices, and be ready to make instant decisions during the matches. I soon discovered that even players who believed wholeheartedly in the team concept had egos that sometimes required the balm of special favors. The squad was a collection of individuals, each of whom was something of a star in his own right. To emphasize the team concept, I never spoke about “my” team, but always about “our” team and what “we” hoped to accomplish or had accomplished. I found myself being called upon to apply both diplomacy and psychology to keep everyone happy. I also found that I did not enjoy this aspect of my job much. Dutiful myself, I disliked being a nursemaid or a babysitter for my fellow adults.

Assuredly, McEnroe was the center of attention, as befitting the kind of tennis player the world might see only once every fifty years. Several other players also had his amazing array of shots, but no one else could consistently select each shot at precisely the right moment under intense match pressure, execute the shot, and make it look as easy as John routinely did. No one had the disguised swerve of his highly unorthodox left-handed serve, or the tantalizingly soft touch of his volleys and drop shots. No one was more genuinely self-confident, or could raise his game on demand with the smooth, swift overdrive that John commanded.

With relatively little effort, McEnroe won his first singles match. Then Roscoe Tanner lost a long, five-set match to the cat-quick veteran Raul Ramirez. Suddenly the doubles match became far more important than I had anticipated. In
selecting my doubles team, I had relied on the theory that the singles players should be kept fresh to play singles; they should avoid playing doubles if at all possible. Thus I had discounted the wisdom of a little joke that had been making the rounds of the tennis world:

“Who is the best doubles team in the world?”

“McEnroe and Peter Fleming.” Fleming was McEnroe’s regular partner.

“Who is the second best?”

“McEnroe and anyone else.”

No matter how good he was as a singles player, McEnroe was probably the best doubles player who had ever lived. His court sense was uncanny. And yet, after the withdrawal of Smith and Lutz, I had stuck to my theory and turned to Riessen and Stewart, who promptly fell in five sets to Ramirez and an unknown seventeen-year-old player, Jorge Lozano. We were down 1–2. What was supposed to be a breeze was now a cliff-hanger. Fortunately, Tanner then won his match and McEnroe easily defeated Ramirez in straight sets to win the tie for us.

We broke out the champagne to celebrate not only the win but also the fact that the tie against Mexico had been a sellout, with the stadium packed for each match. Ever since McEnroe had joined the team, Davis Cup tennis had become a popular attraction once again.

Among those present at Carlsbad was Pancho Gonzalez. At one point, he took me aside for some words of advice concerning my theory about not mixing singles and doubles play.

“Your theory is bulldust, Arthur,” said Pancho. “Nothing but bulldust. You should play your best doubles players even if they are playing singles. If they are fit, they are not going to be too tired. McEnroe would not have lost that match.”

Gonzalez had a point. I needed to be more practical, less dogmatic perhaps.

“And another thing, Arthur.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got to be more involved in what’s going on on the court.”

“But I
am
involved, Pancho,” I said. “Sometimes my heart was thumping away out there.”

“Well, we don’t want your heart to thump too much, Arthur. But you have to
look
more involved, I guess.”

Far more than my doubles theory, which I was ready to alter, this business of seeming to be involved would be a sore point over the coming years. I did not want to interfere with the play of international tennis stars by seeking to coach them on camera. I had been Tanner’s first doubles partner when he turned professional, and he welcomed my advice; other players seemed to resent it. Tanner, whose powerful game could suddenly become erratic, needed hours of practice to groove his strokes; McEnroe found anything more than two hours of practice redundant. I had to indulge both players. At courtside, I tended to be restrained. I did not intend to leap up at every point during a match merely to assert my presence or authority. And I was determined not to join the players automatically in their protests and tantrums, as football and basketball coaches routinely do. I would back the players if I thought they had a point, but I wouldn’t become enraged on demand.

Connors created a stir when he showed up in Carlsbad and offered to practice with McEnroe and Tanner. We took him up on his offer. His arrival was a significant development because of his repeated refusal to play on the Davis Cup team since 1976, when he lost a deciding fifth match to Ramirez. That defeat of the United States by Mexico had been one of the most ignominious in U.S. Davis Cup history. Soon after I accepted the captaincy, I had called Connors and asked him to join the team, and he had said that he would do so, but not against Mexico. No matter; I knew that he would be invaluable against our next opponent, Czechoslovakia, and its best player, Ivan Lendl, whom he had beaten in all seven of their matches.

Watching Jimmy and John hit at Carlsbad, I was looking
at not only the two best players in American tennis but also the two most brash and stormy personalities in our tennis world. In some ways, as a tennis phenomenon, Connors was by far the more extraordinary. Unlike McEnroe, who came from the affluent community of Douglaston, Queens, in the city of New York, Connors had been born in Belleville, Illinois, a town adjacent to East St. Louis, a name now almost synonymous with urban blight. If Connors was sometimes ill-mannered, brusque, and downright truculent, he seemed to have the approval of his mother, Gloria Connors, and her own mother. The women had obviously wanted to shape a fighter, and they succeeded brilliantly.