Are you ready for the Great Depression, Part Deux? Will we soon be standing in soup lines at Trader Joe’s and doing the Charleston all night to keep the blues away? That last thought may not be as terrible as it sounds. The dances of the 1930s gave us the Big Bands we still listen to today. Maybe it’s not an accident that my favorite musical purchase of 2008 has been a reissue of the best of them, Lester Young with Count Basie, 1936-’40. Not that I’ve been listening to it all that much since the market tanked and my Wachovia stock sank to the bottom of the ocean. Looking at my iPod today, I see that the last song in the “Recently Played” section is a little angrier than the Charleston: It’s the Dead Kennedys' “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and it sounded about right on the subway this morning.
Now maybe it won’t get that bad, maybe we’ll still love our landlords, maybe we'll wait in sushi lines at Trader Joe's instead, but since the 1930s are suddenly in the air, I was curious to see what happened to big-time tennis during that era. As much as any sport, it has mirrored the historical patterns of the last 100-odd years. It began as an upper-class diversion and followed the fortunes of the country’s ruling establishment through the amateur era, until both were blown up in 1968. One example: In 1929, the market tanked, the ’20s stopped roaring, the Golden Age of Sport ended, and East Coast WASPs, who had ruled that decade like no other, were kicked off their pedestal. Tennis followed in lockstep: 1929 was also the year that a 36-year-old Bill Tilden, a product of the Philly elite and the last champion to come from an old-line East Coast cricket club, won his final title at Forest Hills.
So what happened to this rich man’s game when there were a lot fewer rich men around? I went to the best one-stop source for this kind of information, E. Digby Baltzell’s indispensable (and of course, out of print) Sporting Gentlemen, a sociological history of tennis from, as the subtitle says, “the age of honor to the cult of the superstar.” As you might gather from that phrase, old Digby didn’t have much use for the Open era and its “mercenary” touring pros.
But he did have a great love for the American men's champions of the 1930s. In the chapter, “The Grass Court Circuit Becomes a Melting Pot,” Baltzell identifies the Depression as a Golden Age for tennis in this country. “America produced—in Ellsworth Vines, Don Budge, Bobby Riggs, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez (plus Ted Schroeder, Budge Patty, Gene Mako, and others)—the greatest generation of world-class tennis players in the history of the game. This great generation, whose stars were all bred in California, was also the most democratic one to play for glory on the clean-cut lawns of the staid and snobbish cricket and tennis clubs along the Eastern Seaboard.”
The guy’s got a way with words, eh? He sounds like he could be reading out a list of legendary warriors from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Still, Baltzell isn’t wrong; that’s about as impressive a group of players to come from one state, let alone one country, in any era. As far as I can tell, this was the first real democratization of tennis in the U.S. (The second would come in the public-court boom of the 1970s.) Kramer, Riggs, and Gonzalez were not upper-class kids, and they came from egalitarian California, with its public hard courts rather than private grass-court clubs. In this decade the balance of power in tennis shifted West and would never return to the Northeast. (Incidentally, the 1930s also produced Britain's first and perhaps only working class tennis champion, Fred Perry.)
What’s interesting is that these players weren’t molded at an academy—they would have gone to Bollettieri’s star-making factory today—but by the local representative of the sport’s national ruling body, Perry Jones of the Southern California Tennis Association and the Los Angeles Tennis Club. “Mr. Jones,” as he was known to his players, ruled “with an iron hand,” according to Baltzell: “Perry T. Jones loved tennis with a single-minded passion which overshadowed any need he might have had for women or money. . . . His talent lay in his ability to discover and foster budding tennis talent.”
More than that, Jones was a stickler for what was proper. L.A. sportswriter Jim Murray titled his posthumous tribute to him “Last of the Victorians”: “He wore bow ties and tinted glasses," Murray wrote, "and no day was too hot for him to appear with his collar unbuttoned or sleeves rolled up. He made Southern California the tennis incubator of the world—by providing the best competition, facilities, cooperation, and instruction.”
Jones was closer to Australia’s Harry Hopman than he was to our Nick Bollettieri. Like Hopman, he loved everything about the sport, including its (now-outdated) dress and manners. He may sound ridiculously fussy to us now, but part of his mission was to make these middle-class 1930s kids respectable enough to represent Southern California in the East Coast private club circuit that was still the major leagues of U.S. tennis at the time.
Jones liked the well dressed and polite Ellsworth Vines and Jack Kramer but struggled with the rebellious Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. That’s right, King and Riggs, the eventual combatants in the Battle of the Sexes, were both diminutive non-conformists from religious families in Southern California, and both learned under and fought against Perry Jones over successive generations. But whereas Riggs forgave Jones his snobbery (Riggs jokingly said he wanted half of his ashes spread over the L.A. Tennis Club, the other half over Forest Hills), King couldn’t. And her resentment extended to Jack Kramer. King made sure that the Battle of the Sexes was played in Houston at the same time as the Pacific Southwest Open, the prestigious tournament that Perry Jones founded and Kramer ran in L.A.
Whatever his foibles, Jones produced a generation of champions and complete tennis players—this was also a great era for U.S. doubles. Beyond that, he produced a group of memorable, even towering American sports personalities. Vines was the ultimate athlete, Kramer was the soul of the game for years, Riggs the jester, Gonzalez the tough lone wolf. As much as some of us may miss the “personalities” of the 70s, the Connorses and McEnroes, they’re exposed as spoiled brats when compared to the 1930s generation. Kramer and Co. strike us today as men’s men, guys who Hollywood could have cast as the solid American kids who lived through the Depression and eventually won the war. They eventually fought their own battles, against the amateur establishment, by forming the great pro tours of the 1940s and 50s that led to tennis becoming a big-money sport around the world.
No one was truer to that simple, solid American image than the best player of the 1930s, Don Budge. A tall, strong, redhead from Oakland, Calif., he didn’t learn the game from Perry Jones, but he was influenced by him in one way. “I won my first match and as I came off the court there was Perry Jones waiting for me,” Budge wrote in his memoirs of their first meeting. “I hustled over to pick up a compliment. Instead, with a distinct frown, he looked me up and down. ‘Budge,’ Mr. Jones finally snarled, ‘those are the dirtiest tennis shoes I ever saw in my life. Don’t you ever—don’t you ever—show up again on any court anywhere at any time wearing shoes like that.’ I nodded and slunk off. . . . I know he made an impression on me, for I’ve never gone on court since that day with even scuffy shoes.”
Like the L.A. greats, Budge improved himself, not just his game, through tennis. Baltzell describes him as “one of the finest sportsmen-gentlemen to play the game.” That’s also the description he gives Budge’s opponent in one of the most famous matches of all time, Germany’s Baron Gottfried von Cramm. As any serious fan knows, Budge beat the Baron in a fifth rubber in the 1937 Davis Cup tie between the two countries, held on Wimbledon’s Centre Court. It was the Federer-Nadal epic of its day, instantly hailed by Bill Tilden as the greatest match ever played.
More impressive to me now, though, was that Budge and Cramm, the California democrat and the German aristocrat, were lifelong friends. When I think of them and their long-gone gentlemanly era, I think of the following anecdote.
Budge had upset Bunny Austin in his first Wimbledon in 1935. Cramm, his next opponent, introduced himself and they started talking. Cramm said that the American had showed poor sportsmanship because he had thrown a point after a linesman made a bad call against Austin. Budge was appalled; he considered himself a sportsman first and foremost. Cramm explained that to throw a point was to embarrass the linesman before a large crowd. It was better sportsmanship to play each point as it was called.
Budge never questioned another call, and wrote this in his memoir:
I had grown up learning tennis on the courts at Bushrod Park in Oakland, California, Gottfried had learned with such people as King Gustav of Sweden. But his real nobility was in his human qualities, rather than his lineage. From the first day I met him he became one of the greatest influences on my life. Gottfried Cramm’s ideals bordered on being beautiful.
Cramm was jailed in 1938 by the Nazis on a “morals” charge of having a homosexual relationship. When he was released, Wimbledon denied him entry into the Championships, and the United States wouldn’t allow him into the country to play at Forest Hills. As for Budge, while Cramm was in prison his friend gathered signatures from other athletes and wrote a letter in protest to Hitler. Tennis had helped teach Budge to judge this man, so different from himself in so many ways—and even an enemy in political terms—as an individual, a competitor, a friend. He knew the German's true personality from the way he conducted himself on a court. This supposedly snobbish sport had served him in the most democratic way possible.
The 1930s may have been a hard era for most, but not for tennis lovers, because it gave us great men—and great players: check out the photo at the top of this post if you doubt the elegance and athleticism of the old champions—like Don Budge.