The Game

Kramer, Jack and Deford, Frank. The Game: My 40 years in Tennis. New York: Putnam 1979. Print.

First Sentences:

 

While I have spent a great deal of my life traveling -- and still do, to my wife's annoyance -- I live a very settled life in many respects. 

Description:

Since attending the Tennis Hall of Fame ceremony last summer at the classic tennis casino in Newport, Rhode Island, my interest has been peaked about the history of tennis, especially the early days of the original rag-tag pro tours and the evolution to Open tournaments. To satisfy my curiosity I went right to the source: writing by the men who led the first pro circuits and eventually championed the switch to Open tennis (where pros could play with amateurs in Grand Slam and other tournaments). Those two men were Jack Kramer (early professional player and pro tour organizer) and Richard Evans (writer, mover and shaker for Open tennis - a link to his book is below). 

 

I started with Jack Kramer (with Frank Deford) and his fascinating, insightful, cocky, and thoughtful account of his life as one of the first tennis professionals, The Game: My 40 Years in Tennis. The famous names of tennis legend just flow out of his story-telling, some familiar and some relatively unknown today. Pancho Gonzales, Bobby Riggs, Don Budge, John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Rod Laver, and Ken Rosewall I knew about. Figures lesser remembered by me, but still great players are fleshed out  by Kramer as his worthy playing opponents and friends: Ellsworth Vines, Pancho Segura, Bitsy Grant, Bob Falkenberg, Gussy Moran, Helen Wills Moody, Pauline Betz Addie, Frank Parker, Fred Perry, and Gardnar Mulloy. Don't worry if you don't recognize some of these players either; Kramer will help you picture them as he weaves them into tournament and travel stories throughout his captivating memoir. And he carefully analyzes them all. And in the end, he lets you know who was the best (besides himself): Don Budge.

It's difficulty to compare players you did see in their prime. But then it's difficult to compare players you did see in their prime, because rarely did two of the best have their best years at the same time 

Kramer played them all. In his amateur days at the L.A. Tennis Club, he developed a serve-and-volley power game, learning to play strategic, percentage tennis which involved using strong forehand and backhand strokes, conserving energy, and never losing his serve. It was "a man's game" as he called it, while his amateur opponents played a more conservative "boy's game." Kramer won ten Grand Slam men's singles, doubles, and mixed titles in the U.S. Championship (now The Open) and Wimbledon from 1941-47, as well as led the U.S to Davis Cup victories in 1946 and '47.

 

At that time, top amateurs survived on appearance money paid under the table by the tournament promoters to assure a good field of players which would attract paying customers.

In the winter the best a top player could make was about $400 a week in Florida...for a good Texas tournament the Number 1 player might get $750, and for the Pacific Southwest in L.A....the top could draw as much as $1,200. 

With no other goals to conquer after winning Wimbledon for the second time and seeking to be paid for his tennis efforts, Kramer joined Riggs' tour of professionals after being offered $50,000 guaranteed or 35% of the gate receipts. The book then focuses on these fledgling tour pros, their lives on the road, the competitions and rugged conditions they faced each night, the uncertain finances, and the players' subsequent ostracization from all major tournaments because they were now paid professionals, not amateurs.

 

Since he played against them all, Kramer is perfectly suited to analyze the major players of that era, both professional and amateur: their personalities, strengths and weaknesses of their games, and the demands on their mental capabilities of grueling competition. For example, he comments on the great Spaniard Alex Olmedo, a dominate figure in the amateurs:

Then Olmedo signed with me, and he could hardly win a set. All of a sudden, from the top of the world to being a stiff -- number nine or ten out of twelve players on the tour...Nothing in the world prepares you for losing day in and day out, and surely it is a hundred times worse to be losing every time when just last week you were the champion. It tears you apart. 

Later, as the Executive Director of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), Kramer oversaw the 1973 boycott of Wimbledon, which, in his words, was "the only time in the history of any sport...where the players have boycotted the world championship." This event led to the open tennis era, where previous futile efforts to get the best (pro) players in the same tournament as the amateurs had failed.

 

He also has strong opinions on such wide-ranging topics as:

• The Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs - "Riggs...figured [after he beat Margaret Court] he could beat any of the dames without training...he completely miscalculated Billie Jean, who has always risen to the occasion; 
   
• World Team Tennis - Could never succeed on the grand scale it sought because tennis is too much an individual sport; (Note: Riggs and Kramer tried to form a similar WTT league in 1950, but "arena owners had no interest since there were not enough name pros to stock a league.")

• The then-new metal racquets - A marketing advance, not a competitive one;

• Practice techniques - Kids today never practice to improve their weaknesses, What they call practice is really just warming up.

It's a fantastic book, full of tennis history, personalities, competition, and opinions from the man who lived them during those early professional days. Highly recommended for anyone interested in any aspect of tennis and the people who shaped in on and off the court. 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Evans, Richard. Open Tennis: The First Twenty Years, the Players, the Politics, the Pressures, the Passions, and the Great Matches

   

Inside view from Evans (who was a key participant) about the background, negotiations, administrators, directors, and players involved with making tennis tournaments open to professionals and amateurs alike.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

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