The British Empire, in perpetual decline through the first half of the 20th century, had a few symbolic endpoints. One was the Suez Crisis in 1956. I can’t summarize the details of it here, and I’m not sure I even understand them all, but the upshot was that the United States assumed leadership from Great Britain in that trouble spot, assumed de facto jurisdiction over Israel, and has remained, with and without the Soviets, the world’s policeman ever since, an unacknowledged and un-named American Empire to replace the British one.
Nine years later came another, more spectacular, sentimental, and seemingly final end to British world rule: the colossal funeral procession for Winston Churchill. The nation came out and came together en masse to mourn the passing of the man who had personified a passing era, the last link to their World War triumphs, a last public figure with roots in the Victorian 19th century.
But that wasn’t quite the end of the British Empire and those Victorian values, at least as far as sports were concerned. There was still one last bastion, a diamond-shaped 12 acres surrounded by a high wall in the London suburbs, where the old world still held sway: Fittingly, it was called the All England Club.
As of Churchill’s death in 1965, the Club’s most famous event, The Lawn Tennis Championships (otherwise known as Wimbledon) was still run by the old laws of amateurism that had held sway throughout England into the early years of the 20th century. Until 1911, the prime minister and members of the House of Commons worked without pay, and the House of Lords had a real say in the government. That set-up lasted much longer for tennis players; in 1913, the ILTF (now the ITF) was formed in part to make sure that the sport's biggest events, the major national championships and the Davis Cup, remained amateur-only. Somehow, against all the economic laws of the 20th century, they kept their lawns free from the taint of money for five more decades, and tennis remained sealed off from the American-led professional sports revolution. Even as political, economic, and military power had moved from London to the U.S., the All England Club continued to set the standards for international tennis. When Wimbledon unilaterally allowed professionals to play in 1968, the rest of the ILTF and the tennis world fell in line.
Wimbledon was always a kind of last bastion for traditionalists, a refuge for dying values. In 1923, a year after the All England Club moved from Worple Road to its current site on Church Road, a former Viceroy of India, George Curzon, gave the club a signboard with Kipling’s legendary couplet celebrating the stiff upper lip, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” Curzon and Kipling were friends and fellow Victorians who feared the old amateur public school values were dying out in the new century.
But the last bastion of the 19th century couldn’t survive that year of mass upheaval, 1968. Two years earlier the country had watched its soccer team, made up of professionals, win the World Cup; tennis’s amateur system looked pretty creaky by comparison. But it was a U.S. invasion that finally toppled the ancient kingdom (or, as Bud Collins refers to amateur tennis, the Lost Civilization). In 1967, two American promoters signed virtually all of the top remaining amateur players, including the champ at Wimbledon and Forest Hills, John Newcombe, to professional contracts, making them ineligible for the majors. The pro-sports wave had finally rolled over the club walls and swamped the lawns. When Wimbledon went pro in 1968, and began a relationship with Cleveland-based talent agency IMG that same year, the war was over: Jurisdiction over tennis had passed to the American Empire.
Amateur officials likened it to allowing the money-changers into the temple, and that’s what it was. But it was also another sign of the times. As the first pros were walking onto Centre Court, a movie that took Kipling’s poem “If–" for its title was being filmed a few miles away. Its story, however, was not a celebration of the stiff upper lip. In the movie, directed by political radical Lindsay Anderson, a rebellious public school student played by Malcolm McLaren is brutally punished by an upperclassman. McLaren responds, as any good 60s student movie rebel would, be firing a machine gun into a crowd of students on campus. The public school values of Kipling's “If–", the values hung so prominently above the locker room at Wimbledon, were now equated with fascism.
Who was the Malcolm McLaren of tennis? It certainly wasn’t the winner of the first open Wimbledon, the clean-cut Aussie Rod Laver. While tennis had moved into the 20th century that year, it still lagged far behind the cultural times. It took five years for the lawns to welcome their version of the Beatles, when the angelic Bjorn Borg made his debut there in 1973 and was promptly dragged to the ground by hundreds of screaming schoolgirls. Four years after that, the tournament was invaded by a screaming Irish hothead and recent British-style private school grad, John McEnroe.
McEnroe was booed during his debut run at Wimbledon in 1977. But it wasn’t until 1981, after he had realized the year before that he could win the title, that he staged his full-scale rebellion against the Club and its officials. McEnroe came to London that year convinced that the tournament should be his, but unconvinced that he could actually make it happen by dethroning the current champion, Borg, and ending his run of five straight titles, a run that McEnroe knew virtually everyone at Wimbledon and around the world wanted to continue. “The pressure,” McEnroe said about the start of the fortnight, “was incomprehensible,” even if that pressure was only in his own head.
It didn’t take long for McEnroe to let it out. In a notorious ?rst-round match against Tom Gullikson, McEnroe cursed at referee Fred Hoyles. But his schoolboy outrage in that match and over the next two weeks also had a poetic quality. The self-imposed pressure didn’t just produce a touch of genius from his racquet; it also inspired a touch of adolescent genius in his words. “Chalk ?ew up!” “Incompetent fool.” “The pits of the world!” “You’re a disgrace to mankind!” “I’m so disgusting, you shouldn’t watch; everybody leave!” And of course, the game’s most infamous and unnecessary clari?cation: “You can’t be serious. You cannot be serious!” These are the canonical texts of modern tennis literature. But McEnroe would turn out to be the Rimbaud of tennis ranters; his best stuff came in the blinding heat of youth. The anger, the aggression, the irrationality, the foul language, and the embarrassment afterward would all remain, but the caustic creativity would, for the most part, fade.
Before the 1981 tournament, McEnroe voiced his disgust with the conditions at the All England Club. “The only thing ‘championship’ about Wimbledon is its prestige,” he claimed. When the matches began, he said, “This place stinks.” He revised the assessment downward: “It reeks!” He called the fans “vultures.” During his semi?nal, in which McEnroe was given another public warning, Lady Diana Spencer, then engaged to Prince Charles, was quietly ushered out of the stadium. “The wedding’s off; her ears are no longer virgin” one reporter quipped. In a doubles match against the Indian brother team of Vijay and Anand Amritraj, McEnroe objected to a call made by a line judge wearing a turban, “That’s an Indian call,” McEnroe said.
When the fortnight was over, McEnroe told a friend that it had put him as close to “going over the edge as I can imagine. The only way I could make it a positive experience was somehow to win.” To do it, he would have to beat Borg, the man he knew he could, and should, beat. The two faced off before an even more raucous crowd than had watched them in their five-set classic the year before.
The final was up for grabs until the third set, and each man had his chance at it. Borg led 3-1 before McEnroe broke back. Then Borg, with McEnroe serving at 4-5, held two set points. The crowd inside Centre Court was the loudest that one veteran Wimbledon observer could remember; the groundlings seemed to have doubled in the last 12 months. According to American journalist and player Gene Scott, the match was “like broken glass, brutal, deadly, and reckless. Excitement ran like blood from an open wound.” It was McEnroe, rather than Borg, who was now stamping their matches with his signature emotional and playing styles. Down two set points in the third set, he served his way out of danger. The crisis had passed. He was going to be the champion. When his last forehand volley curled inside the sideline and past a dejected Borg, McEnroe’s hair seemed to stand on end, his brain fried by the experience. The Swede was the people’s choice, the Angel who ruled by divine right. His kingdom was an enchanted one, and the vast majority of tennis fans, and even average citizens, never wanted to leave it. Toppling it had required McEnroe to stage a solitary rebellion, against his opponents and against Wimbledon. In the process, he gave the tournament a different kind of angelic ?gure, a dark angel of individualism and self-expression. He felt throughout that he had done it alone.
It wasn’t just McEnroe; there was a generational con?ict at the 1981 tournament that felt like the 1960s on tape delay. It was a con?ict, on one level, between the old tennis empire and the new. Other American players, who were now used to running the pro-tour show, chafed at the high-handed treatment they continued to receive from the committeemen who ran Wimbledon. Jimmy Connors claimed that they treated the players like “nothings.” Peter Fleming got the feeling that “if you didn’t go to Cambridge, you’re zippo.”
The game had been professional for more than a decade by 1981, but it would be a few more years, and many more McTantrums, before its umpires and linesmen followed suit. In those days, each tournament cobbled together its own set of of?cials who were paid a nominal fee and often pulled from the ranks of the retired. Wimbledon, with its mania for authority, liked to use former military of?cers as chair umpires. The man who mistakenly believed he was being called “a disgrace to mankind” by a petulant 21-year-old—McEnroe was actually referring to himself—was former RAF wing commander George Grime. The club’s highest-ranking of?cial, Sir Brian Burnett, went by the title Air Chief Marshal. There was, in that 1960s phrase, a “failure to communicate” around the grounds, between young and old, American and Brit, McEnroe and everyone else.
Before stepping out to umpire McEnroe’s ?rst-round match, Edward James said to him, “I’m Scottish; I hope we don’t have any problems.” The Irish American didn’t know what that meant, but he knew he didn’t like the sound of it. Later, in his inevitable mid-match meltdown, McEnroe screamed, “You’re the pits of the world.” The elderly James thought he had said “piss.” “The guy had obviously never been to Queens,” McEnroe said later. McEnroe’s dark mojo spilled over into the pressroom, where two reporters traded blows after one of his press conferences.
In the end, McEnroe was the ?rst champion not to be offered an honorary membership. He in turn became the ?rst winner in memory to miss the Wimbledon Champions’ Dinner. Years later, the memory of that snub inspired him to one more ?ight of harsh poetry: “I wanted to spend the evening with my family and friends and the people who supported me,” McEnroe said, “not a bunch of stiffs who were 70-80 years old, telling you that you’ve been acting like a jerk.”
In his madman’s solo rebellion against Wimbledon in 1981, McEnroe made people in and out of tennis choose a side: Was he a rebel or just a brat? Did he have the integrity of a perfectionist, or was he a harbinger of a world without authority? Did the unchanging Wimbledon need to change? What authority did this quaint gentleman's event still have inside the big-money American Empire?
Back in New York, two days after the ?nal, the John McEnroe Charity Ball took place at the disco Xenon in Manhattan. McEnroe, looking tragically forlorn in jeans and a T-shirt, the picture of misunderstood youth, donned a pair of sunglasses to play guitar onstage. Emcee Alan King announced that he was declaring McEnroe an “honorary Jew—which honors you to 2,000 years of retroactive persecution.” When asked about the All England Club, the Champions’ Dinner, and the membership snub, McEnroe shrugged. He said he wouldn’t see them for a year anyway, if he even went back.
But he did go back, and Wimbledon, with help and marketing from IMG, did change. The All England Club may no longer rule the sport, but it's once again seen as a beloved bastion of tradition, the tournament that the game’s greatest champions, from Federer to Nadal to Serena to Maria, cherish the most. The healing process can be dated to the season after the Great Rebellion of '81. The following year, Wimbledon relented and gave McEnroe his honorary membership. A year after that, when he won his second title there, the young American rebel joined the old stiffs of the All England Club for dinner.
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For more on combustible, and pivotal, 1981, see my book High Strung. I'll be in SW19 tomorrow night, and back with everyone's favorite, a predictions post, on Saturday morning.
***Update: I've arrived and have been greeted with this [very nice review of the aforementioned High Strung in the Financial Times.*]