It’s a measure of how busy the last four months in tennis have been, with three Grand Slams and an Olympic week between them, that much of our regularly scheduled weekly programming here has had to be suspended. That included Catching the Tape, a weekly look at a tennis-related video on YouTube.
To get it restarted, let me direct you back to an entry from the spring, called “At Home with Andy,” which featured a clip of Andy Murray when he was a dedicated, if untidy, 18-year-old student at Barcelona’s Sanchez Casal Academy. The more I watch the video, which was made for a British TV news program, the more I think it was secretly directed by the great mockumentarian Christopher Guest—it feels like the Spinal Tap of junior tennis. On the serious side, the clip shows a young and insecure Murray, who wonders whether devoting his life to tennis is “the right choice.” Now we can say for sure that it was.
In honor of his U.S. Open win, I’ve embedded a quick clip of the last British man before Murray to win a Grand Slam, Fred Perry. Or, as the film reel is titled, “Winners at Wimbledon: Packed Centre Court sees strenuous struggles for Championships.” In it we see a few points from the 1934 men’s and women’s finals, which were won by two Brits, Perry and Dorothy Round. Here are a few notes on Fred in particular.
—This was Perry’s first Wimbledon title, and like Murray, he was ending a long home-country drought. The last British man to win on Centre Court had been Arthur Gore in 1909. Rather than cheer their native son, though, the All England crowd sided with his opponent, Gentleman Jack Crawford of Australia. In British tennis circles, Perry, the son of a cotton spinner from Stockport, was looked down on as a brash blue collar upstart.
Worse, from Perry’s point of view, was what happened afterward. There was no trophy ceremony in those days, so Perry walked off the court and straight into a bath—“I was the proudest bloke in a bathtub anywhere in England,” he said. There he awaited his award from the club’s officials.
“Suddenly, out in the dressing room,” Perry said, “I overheard the distinctive voice, Brame Hillyard, All England Club committee man, talking to Crawford. “‘Congratulations,’” Hillyard said, “‘This was one day when the best man didn’t win.’”
Hillyard handed Crawford, rather than Perry, a bottle of champagne. “Instead of Fred J. Perry the champ, I felt like Fred J. Muggs the chimp. All my paranoia about the old-school-tie brigade surfaced with a vengeance.”
—This wasn’t the only day that the best man didn’t win. The previous year at Forest Hills, Perry had spoiled Crawford’s chance at the calendar-year Grand Slam. It was the Aussie’s quest that year that inspired a <em>New York Times</em> columnist to come up with the term “Grand Slam”—he took it from bridge. In the final in New York, Crawford went up two sets to one. During the 10-minute break that followed the third set, Perry went to change his clothes. As he was leaving the court, he noticed Crawford, who was an asthmatic, talking to his wife in the stands while smoking a cigarette. Crawford must have thought he had the match, and the Slam, in the bag, but Perry came back to win the last two sets 0 and 1.
—The differences between then and now in old tennis clips is always a little startling. The most surprising thing to me here is the complete lack of knee bend on either player’s first serve; from the vantage point of today, it looks like they both have leg injuries.
Perry was famous for his athleticism, and he shows it off in his foray to the net. He was a world ping-pong champion as a teenager, and he brought an ability to take the ball early and on the rise over to the tennis court. Perry, unlike many of his amateur colleagues of that time, played to win at all costs. Before the Wimbledon final of 1936, he got a tip from the club’s trainer that his opponent, über-gentleman Baron Gottfried von Cramm, had a groin strain. Perry made Cramm run to his forehand side whenever he could and won 6-1, 6-1, 6-0 in less than 45 minutes.
“Fred never missed a trick when it came to the psychology of winning,” his contemporary Ted Tinling said. “In the locker room he had a sharp tongue and took every opportunity to make cutting comments, with the aim of getting a psychological advantage over an opponent. England always likes good losers, but he was the first Englishman to see tennis as a battle rather than a game."
—Perry may have been Britain’s greatest tennis champion, but by the end of the 1930s he had become a naturalized American citizen who would serve the U.S. in World War II. While he was never comfortable at the All England Club, he loved the tennis scene in Southern California, because it gave him entree to a world that would have been otherwise out of reach: i.e., Hollywood. Perry dated Marlene Dietrich and married the actress Helen Vinson.
—Factoid: Perry and an Austrian soccer player produced the first sweatband, in the late 1940s. Their next project was the white Fred Perry Sports Shirt, with a laurel wreath based on an old Wimbledon logo. The rest was sporting-good history for this shrewdest of athletes.
—Perry’s most famous detractor was Jack Kramer, who called him a “selfish and egotistical person” who, even after turning pro, never helped the cause of professional tennis.
Worse, Kramer claimed that Perry had, unwittingly, “Screwed up tennis in England...The way he could hit a forehand, snap if off like a ping-pong shot—Perry was a physical freak. The kids there copied his style, and it ruined them.”
So, it seems, the reason, before last week, that there hadn’t been a British Grand Slam winner since Fred Perry was...Fred Perry. He knew how to keep his name alive, and, whether he meant it or not, he may have had the last laugh on the country he left behind.
