Tennis and Remembrance

Tennis has been described by more than one of its writers as a “metaphorical duel.” The racquets are the guns, the balls are the bullets, and after the players have fired all of their shots, only one of them is left standing.

The game’s best players, those who know how it feels on court, usually leave out the metaphorical part—it's real to them. They also tend to expand their description of the sport from a duel to something more all encompassing in its brutality: War. The sentiment was best articulated, naturally, by tennis' most battle-hungry champion, Jimmy Connors. “People don’t seem to understand,” Jimbo said, presumably with a growl, “that it’s a goddamned war out there.”

Whoever was in charge of naming the big new tennis center on the edge of Paris in the 1920s had war on their minds as well. To the question Who was Roland Garros?, the answer is usually given, blandly and vaguely, that he was a French aviator. That’s true, but he was also the first pilot to mount a machine gun on an airplane and, during World War I, use it to shoot down an enemy craft.

Garros was eventually shot down himself and imprisoned. After escaping from a German POW camp, he was shot down again and killed, a day before he was to turn 30. Roland Garros the man wasn’t quite an “ace”; he shot down four planes, and it takes five to earn that label. But his name lives on through tennis, even if most of us don’t realize it. In a sense, Roland Garros the facility and Roland Garros the tournament are elaborate, beautiful, and very useful war memorials.

It's not the only monument to battle that you see as you travel the Grand Slam circuit.

In New York, where I live, we pass them every few blocks as we walk the length of Manhattan. At its southern tip, in Battery Park, the island welcomes us with the granite slabs of the East Coast War Memorial. A few blocks north are the empty squares, now constantly filled with water, where the Twin Towers once stood.

Just as somber is the Prison Ships Martyrs Monument, designed by Stanford White, in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. A gravesite of prisoners who died on British ships during the U.S. Revolutionary War, it's topped by a 150-foot Doric column. I can, on occasion, see its crown through the trees as I look up to hit an overhead on the other side of the park. My favorite war monument in New York, though, is one that we normally don’t think of as having anything to do with fighting: the Statue of Liberty. The broken chains at Lady Liberty's feet may be the only reminder that she was given to the U.S. by France to commemorate the end of our Civil War, and our end of slavery.

In Paris, it isn’t a monument to a war that stays with me, but the statue of a warrior. Marshal Ney, sword brandished, mouth in full roar, towers picturesquely under a tree on a corner of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, just outside the Closerie des Lilas restaurant. Ney was called the “bravest of the brave” by Napoleon, but I sought him out as a young man for the same reason that many young Americans seek it out, because of Hemingway’s mention of Ney in The Sun Also Rises: “I passed Ney’s statue standing among the new-leaved chestnut trees in the carlight.”

In London, during a Middle Sunday away from Wimbledon one year, I wandered around a corner, lost as usual in that city, and caught a glimpse of a tall, striking, mysterious, virtually inscription-less stone memorial placed smack in the middle of a street. It was, I learned, The Cenotaph, built originally to honor the nation’s World War I dead. When it was erected, first in wood and plaster for a peace parade in 1919, long lines of people formed, unexpectedly, to leave flowers. “No feature of the Victory March in London made a deeper impression than the Cenotaph,” the Times editorialized that year. “Simple, grave, and beautiful in design, it has been universally recognized as a just and fitting war memorial of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.”

In Melbourne, war can get a little too close, and too loud, for comfort. I’ve been there on January 26 four times, and each time I’ve been stunned by the deafening roar of fighter jets dipping across the city’s downtown in celebration of Australia Day, which commemorates the country’s founding. By the time I recover and look up, the jets are a distant, slightly sinister silver streak at the edge of the sky.

Melbourne is also home to Australia’s best-known war monument, the Shrine of Remembrance. Built in 1934, it’s dedicated to all Australian servicemen in all wars. To walk from the tennis center in Melbourne Park, through a series of green spaces in the city, and to come out on the other end and see this austere complex of classical structures on a hill is a surreally moving experience, a journey from the frivolous to the mournful that cannot be made lightly. I’ll never forget how the sun felt in the dead silence at the city’s center for the few minutes I was there.

War memorials, in these places and others, can generate ambivalent feelings. Are they made to help us remember the soldiers, or to glorify the idea of war itself, to make combat feel like a sanctified and essential part of our world? On Memorial Day in the United States, though, there is no ambivalence. This day is not for war, but for the dead alone.

For me, as I watch the pros slide and swing on the clay at Roland Garros, it will also be a day to recall what tennis is not. It’s not war; the competitors are called players, not warriors, for a reason. For U.S. tennis fans, Monday is a day to remember the dead, and to be happy that, whatever happens in our sports, we can live with the results.