Don’t miss L. Jon Wertheim’s description of Il Foro Italico and its sunken stadium court, the Pallacorda. Jon provides some great background on the Italian Open’s colorful history, and it’s great to see Jon give props to that gifted and mischievous Italian journalist Ubaldo Scanagatta. The Italian reporter-writers are a colorful crew of rogues, tennis nuts, slumming aristocrats, and stat freaks like Rino Tommasi—the first man I know in tennis who tried to come up with a statistics-based ranking, back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the ATP had neither Greg Sharko nor a trustworthy computer-ranking program.
It’s hard to believe now, but as recently as the late 1970s nobody put much stock in the computer rankings—they were considered strictly a rating and seeding device. The most prestigious year-end rankings were still the ones issued by any of two or three panels representing institutions like this magazine or the now-defunct World Tennis. So, some years there was no agreement on the No. 1. The outstanding example was 1977, when you could make a pretty good case for Guillermo Vilas, Jimmy Connors, or Bjorn Borg being the top player. Connors was “official” year-end No. 1 (on the computer), but he won no majors that year; Borg had one (Wimbledon) and Vilas had two (the French and U.S. Opens), but Borg owned Vilas head-to-head.
It’s funny nobody trusted the computer back in those days, but in all fairness there were still significant glitches in the system. It’s also possible that we either simply couldn’t resist or were overpowered by the ultimate reality of digital logic. Over time, software simply wore us down and took control. You know you’re getting old when you yourself want to type: Times sure change. . .
By the way, I have another story to go with Wertheim’s tale of Mussolini’s insistence on calling tennis pallacorda (translation: string ball) on the grounds that the Italians had a superior language and culture to the British.
Mussolini, as all of you voracious readers of world history well know, was a Fascist—an extreme right-winger (left-wing dictatorship was more than amply personified by Mussolini’s tyrant-in-arms, Joe Stalin of the Soviet Union). He also had a truly lousy backhand. So he was constantly ordering his stable of tennis pros to feed his forehand side. He used an exhortation that also doubled as one of his political rallying cries: Dritto, sempre, dritto . . .
Translation: Straight on, always straight on . . .