Only A Game: Recollections From A Bygone Era
by Amos N Wilder
First published in 1991 in Racquet Magazine’s special anniversary Issue, “The Best of a Decade.”
Life changed forever in the 20th century-and so did tennis. In a series of delightful anecdotes, Amos Wilder captures a sense of what the sport was like in a more innocent age.
Amos N. Wilder, age 20, in summer 1916. Likely taken at the New England Championship Tennis Tournament, Hartford Cricket Club.
During Wimbledon's centennial tournament in 1986, attention was drawn to my having played on Centre Court in 1922. It appeared that I, as a nonagenarian, was the eldest survivor they could find who had enjoyed the privilege. Bud Collins therefore included me in an interview, broadcast rom London on the day before the tournament opened, entitled Wimbledon: 100th Rehearsal. Although I was never a player of the first rank, my early experiences provided a background for that early period of amateur play. I recalled many memories of the sport for Collins, but have since found myself prompted to go behind those brief reportings and flesh out the record of those unique and nearly forgotten days.
"At Wimbledon in those pre-professional days, one felt the English ambiance and ceremony of the Meeting."
In October of 1916, I went abroad for ambulance service with the French. Passing through London, I went out to see the hallowed precincts of Wimble don. The site was not in use, but on the walls posters announcing the matches of June 1914 with Norman Brookes and Anthony Wilding-who had already perished in the fighting-were still prominently displayed.
When the United States entered the war, I was assigned to an artillery unit that ventured as far east as Macedonia, and then returned to Germany after the armistice. In the Spring of 1919, many like my self were assigned to army "school detachments" in French and British universities. I was sent to the University of Toulouse, whereI joined a seven-man tennis team made up of officers and enlisted men. We had the pleasure of traveling in uniform to play against our counterparts at other schools.
The following year I was back at Yale, where I found myself part of a strong team which, captained by Charles Gar land, had won the 1919 lntercollegiates.
We were hard pressed to defend our title in 1920 against the strong teams from the University of Texas and the University of California. It was the beginning of a decade, in fact, that would see the longtime supremacy of Ivy League schools give way to the college players from the West, who were able to play all the year round. In Yale tennis annals, 1920 was the last year in which we won both the singles and doubles titles. The higher quality of the competition no doubt reflected the increasing pop ularity of the game throughout the country.
The Intercollegiates were held early that year in June rather than September-at the Merion Cricket Club. Our annual spring trip, however, served as partial compensation for the brevity of the 1920 season. We played successful matches against the Country Club of Virginia at Richmond, the Navy at Annapolis and the Norfolk Country Club.
The high spirits of such a group of cubs were in evidence throughout our Southern excursion. Our pranks and histrionics kept coach Bill Hincliffe and team manager C. 0. Patch in a state of anxious vig ilance. I remember my father's account of similar larks and effervescence in his Yale glee club trips of 1884. In our case, it began with our departure from Pennsylvania Station in New York. Here, Jerry Webber rolled two suitcases down the long flight of steps leading to the lower platform, scattering the travelers below. Arriving in Charlottesville the next day, we found the courts too wet for play, so we took "the local" to Richmond. In spite of the late hour we found the Southern hospitality so warm that we wanted to stay there indefinitely. Garland and two others returned at two in the morning. The rest of us stayed.
The next morning, our club manager received a phone call, supposedly from a member of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, reporting that two members of the Yale tennis team were under arrest. The informant, speaking with a lazy drawl, confided that he wished to hush the matter up, and urged Patch's immediate attendance at police headquarters. Patchand Hincliffe had visions of headlines in the New Haven papers. In the upshot, it turned out that Webber had been amusing himself with various impersonations via telephone.
I cite these instances because I can see in retro spect that they had some bearing on my own addiction to tennis in the postwar years.
Coming out of two years of military service in France and Macedonia, I found the transition back to academic and civilian pursuits anticlimactic. There was also a great letdown in passing from the ardors of Woodrow Wilson's crusade to Warren Harding's "normalcy." In this period of disenchant ment, such minor dramas as intercollegiate tennis represented a salutary kind of release.
In that light, the pinnacle of my tennis experi ence came during the summer of 1922. I took up my theological studies the previous fall at Mansfield College in Oxford. Although this non-Anglican seminary was not one of the old colleges of the Uni versity, I matriculated in another college there, which made me eligible to take part in university sports. Arrangements for visiting students at Oxford and Cambridge were very generous. We were al lowed to play on their teams even after college grad uation at home.
It is moving to recall how short a time had elapsed between the war years and the carefree dis portings of 1922. In the playing fields of Oxford and Cambridge we were especially haunted by these recent memories. The college lawns and gardens still echoed with the voices of our predecessors, youths who, like Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, had gone to the front and not returned, or had been shipped home to ivied halls that had been conver ted into convalescent wards.
Most of the Oxford and Cambridge players of that season had no difficulty in being admitted to the draw at Wimbledon, which had just been moved from Worple Road to its current location on Church Road. Charles Kingsley and I drew the eventual winners, Randolph Lycett and John Anderson, in the first round of the doubles, and we were astonished to find that the match was slated for Centre Court. Two considerations may have weighed with the committee in this assignment. On the one hand, a tradition was establishing itself that the reigning champions should always play their first match onCentre Court, however much it mor tified their outclassed opponents. Lycett had won the doubles in 1921, although with a different partner. On the other hand, Kingsley and I had beaten a good number of the better English players during our spring matches at Oxford. Perhaps the commit tee thought these Oxford cubs would give the Australians a spirited game.
"The college gardens still echoed with the voices of our predecessors who had gone to the front and not returned."
It should be recalled that this was the first tournament of the New Wimbledon. After the war, the limitations of the old clubhouse and stands on Worple Road had been recognized, especially with the new popularity of the game. The new site, with a concrete stadium that accommodated fourteen thousand spectators, was dedicated by King George V.
At Wimbledon in those pre-professional days, one felt not only the prestige of the old All-England Club, but also the typically English ambiance and ceremony of the Meeting. Matches and tourneys in England, as I recall them, partook of the character of a delightful lawn party, and Wimbledon was only a more extended example of such bucolic diversions. It is not irrelevant that the All-England Club began as a croquet and cricket club. On one occasion, I was a guest at a great country house surrounded by wide expanses of lawns, gardens and paddocks where ten nis, croquet, cricket and lawn bowling went on si multaneously, where guests came and went on horseback, where crowds in summer attire moved from this playing ground to that, and where festivi ties continued through the long twilight.
Walking onto Centre Court, Kingsley and I felt a momentary panic, but were soon caught up in the match. In such situations, focus and concentration are enhanced. Moreover, we had everything to win and nothing to lose, whereas our opponents found themselves in the opposite situation. I knew from my own embarrassing experiences that the superior team can easily lose its edge if it suffers a few re verses, and thus forfeit the advantage of its greater versatility. Meanwhile, the underdog becomes ex hilarated and comes on strong. In our case things did not go so far, but we played over our heads and took the second set 6-2 to the cheers of the gallery. We lost the final two sets, 6-1 and 9-7. I never re turned to Centre Court as a player. Every dog has his day-but only once.
In the singles, I was beaten on an outside court in the second round by the ranking Briton, Theodore Mavrogordato, but I was eligible for the consolation event known as the All England Plate. Here I reached the semifinals after three victories, in the last of which I defeated Frenchman Alain Gerbault after he had match point on me. Gerbault, a veteran of the war, had gained notoriety for sailing solo across the Atlantic. It was not uncommon for survivors of the Western Front-ill adjusted to the flatness of civilian routines-to seek excitement and drama in some new theater, such as sports. As a player he could not find real danger, of course, but he did seem always to take matches to the edge.
I lost the semifinal to the Australian Wertheim after I had match point on him. Had I been able to closehimout,Iwould havehadthe pleasureoffac ing "Babe" Norton in thefinal. Norton wasaSouth African, well known for his antics. In the North London tournament at Hendon,whereIalsoplayed that summer, Norton was in the midst of a five-set match on the first court adjoining the clubhouse. Afterthe thirdsetthe playerswereallowed thecus tomary IO-minute interval before continuing. In stead ofresting, Norton exchanged his tennisshoes forslippers and took part in the tea dance that was going on inside the clubhouse.
Tennis in the 1920's, one must remember, was an elitist game. Professionalism helped to make it more popular and to democratize both players and galleries, but it no doubt had its drawbacks. My reminiscences stop well short of this period, and I am glad to recall a time in which tennis was not at all commercialized. When sports, like children's games, were spontaneous and when their competition was unmotivated other than by pleasure, they took on more resemblance to the arts. Indeed, there are some sports like fencing, equestrian skills and bullfight ing that are still akin to the arts and have retained a ritual character. Tennis in its proper context is one of these-as I claimed in my Wimbledon broadcast with Bud Collins, a tennis racquet is truly a stringed instrument!