When Tennis Went Electric

Bob Dylan and…tennis? How about Bob Dylan and…Jimmy Van Alen, the visionary scion of wealth from Newport who invented the tiebreaker?

I’m guessing you don’t see the connections between either of these things. Which makes this the perfect time to talk about them. The new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is the story of how the young Minnesota verse-maker went electric, and brought his music to the marketplace in controversial fashion, at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965.

That event is now the stuff of legend. What’s less legendary is the fact that, two weeks earlier, in the same town, a not-so-young Van Alen did the same thing for tennis—right down to the “going electric” part. That summer, he staged the first professional tournament at the Newport Casino, the Victorian era club that had served as the headquarters of U.S. amateur tennis during its beginnings in the 1880s, and which he helped turn into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1954.

Van Alen wrote poetry and played the ukulele, and was dubbed the “Newport Bolshevik” by Bud Collins, but I doubt that he and Dylan ever met. Yet the ideas behind their daring performances were similar, and they were part of the same set of changes that transformed the country over the course of the 1960s. In both cases, a haven from commercialism—amateur tennis in Van Alen’s case, folk music in Dylan’s—was successfully invaded, and a hierarchy between something seen as noble and something seen as crass was broken down. Not long after, those havens and hierarchies would disappear entirely.

All of that, of course, was likely far from Van Alen’s mind on July 6, 1965, when he welcomed 10 male pros—including Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Pancho Gonzalez, and Pancho Segura—onto the courts at the Casino, a first in the club’s 85-year- history. It may be hard to wrap your mind around now, but at the time this was akin to allowing the money changers to take over the temple.

“A lot of people,” said another of those players, Butch Buchholz, “thought the grass would turn brown when we pros stepped on it.”

By that point, Van Alen had been at war with the tennis establishment for at least a decade. More specifically, he had been at war with what he called those “damnable deuce games.” As a tournament director, he had seen too many of his events held hostage by interminable sets, which could only end with a player winning two straight games.

“Any fathead can do better than this,” he said.

With that in mind, Van Alen devised the tiebreaker, which he referred to as “sudden death,” as well as other schemes and experiments that he thought would speed the game up and make it more palatable to the masses. But the “fatheads” of amateur tennis weren’t interested. They thought Van Alen, whose mother was an Astor and who captained the Cambridge (England) tennis team, was a traitor to his sport, if not his class. Finally, Van Alen went to the dark side, and tried his schemes out on the pros.

The event that he put on with them in July ’65 may still stand as the most unconventional in the sport’s history.

Van Alen offered $10,000 in prize money, a princely sum in those days, but the cash came with a catch. The players had to play by his rules, which he called VASSS—Van Alen Simplified Scoring System. That included the tiebreaker, which had yet to be named and was referred to at that point as an “extra game.”

Van Alen was improvising dazzlingly in a jam session of his own invention and comprehension. It was exciting. Bud Collins

VASSS also jettisoned the traditional knock-out tournament in favor of round-robin groups. Games and sets were the next to go; matches were scored point-by-point, ping-pong style, up to 31. Even more risque, the prize money that each player earned—Van Alen awarded $5 per point won—was tallied up and flashed on an electric scoreboard, the first in the sport’s history.

Segura joked that the whole thing seemed pretty “half-VASSS to me.”

Van Alen didn’t leave the court alone, either. He had a new service line installed three feet behind the baseline, to deter the serve-and-volleyers who then dominated the game to an often-boring degree (how things have changed). The pros generally went along with the experiment, though Gonzalez threatened to quit mid-match and yelled, “How did I get myself talked into this?” But the scoring system, in which every point counted, added tension and helped the less-talented guinea pigs stay competitive with the stars. Even the old guard Newporters in the stands had fun.

“Van Alen was improvising dazzlingly in a jam session of his own invention and comprehension,” Collins wrote. “It was exciting.”

The one thing that didn’t change were the winners. Laver finished first in points, Rosewall second. And while only the “extra game,” the tiebreaker, survived from his scoring system, Van Alen did introduce another element to pro tennis that endures to this day: electric lighting for night matches.

That’s where the second part of our Newport saga picks up—with electricity. Two weeks after Van Alen took down his lights at the Casino, another revolutionary figure arrived in town, similarly bent on shocking the traditionalists. On July 25, a 24-year-old Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.

Dylan, along with his partner in pure-minded politics, Joan Baez, had been the darling of that gathering the previous two years, and he was the headline act again in ’65. This time though, he chose the festival to make his break with the folk cult.

Rather than the old socialist-style work shirts and jeans he’d always worn, Dylan showed up in a leather jacket. Rather than strum his acoustic guitar—symbol of all that was anti-commercial and authentic—he plugged in an electric guitar—symbol of all that was popular and capitalist and vulgar—for the first time anywhere.

Rather than harmonize with Baez, he fronted the all-electric Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The group played, loudly, and the crowd booed until, as legend has it, old folkie and former Dylan backer Pete Seeger literally pulled the plug on the whole thing. Dylan, of course, had the last word. After his electric debacle, he wrapped up his later acoustic set with a message to the pure-minded folk cult: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Dylan was officially a star; he had left purity and politics behind. Rock and roll, for the first time, was going to be taken seriously. The quasi-socialist youth movement that had grown up around folk was dead, just as the amateur era of tennis that had lasted for nearly a century would soon be dead.

Tennis, while it was even more of a niche sport than it is now, was running right alongside the rest of 60s history. That decade was about the collapsing of hierarchies and dissolving of boundaries. The inspiration was the end of segregation in the South, but the idea radiated everywhere—all the way to upper-crust and hipster Newport. Van Alen helped erase the boundary between amateur and professional; Dylan did the same for commercial and non-commercial music.

Martin Luther King's famous use of “free” in his speeches made it a buzzword and a theme of the decade. “Open” would become tennis’ version of “free.” Open tennis was a call for freedom from the outdated restrictions of amateurism, and it would finally triumph for good in 1968.

Jimmy Van Alen will almost surely never be the subject of a biopic, but he shouldn’t be a complete unknown either. He made professional tennis more legitimate, showed that the game could survive change, and freed us all to enjoy sudden death.