PARIS—We’ve heard a lot about the golden era of 1970s tennis lately. I personally like the name “roughneck era,” as coined by one of the sport’s more conservative historians, but "golden" works, too. In the popular American imagination, anyway, those were the years was when the sport was at its best. Three decades after it ended, this writer has a book on the subject at the same time that HBO has produced a documentary about Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe and their very brief—three years, 14 matches—but remarkably enduring rivalry.
That era essentially ended at the 1981 U.S. Open, when Borg drove himself out of a Flushing Meadows facility that had given him so much frustration. But it's hardly a coincidence that before it ended, the period would produce one of the very few great tennis movies, The French, a documentary of the ’81 edition of Roland Garros by the famous photographer William Klein.
It’s a difficult movie to find, but now, through the genius of YouTube, you can see a vast amount of it, maybe all of it if you search long enough. Start with the first 32 minutes above. If you’re a fan of tennis, film, or history in general, you’ll want to see the rest. They show Roland Garros as it was in those heady days for tennis—smaller, more insulated, but also more colorful. Here are a few of the highlights you’ll get in the first 30 minutes.
—The charm of Ilie Nastase, a showman both innocent and vulgar, with a game still lovely to watch even when his body was a paunchy 34. He obviously lived for the sport and the tour, and, as his roving eye tells you in one scene, the women. Also watch him protect a young and half-crazed Eliot Teltscher from a mob.
—A coach’s eye view of a player losing. My favorite scene in the movie is the interview that Harold Solomon’s coach gives as he’s watching Solly lose to Adriano Pannatta. It gives you an idea of how gut wrenching a coach’s life can be.
—Seeing Ion Tiriac hit (he could hit, even if he called himself “the world’s best tennis player who doesn’t know how to play tennis”), and hear him talk. He doesn’t, contrary to popular belief, growl.
—You get Chrissie and Martina backstage, a young and taciturn Ivan Lendl, a passionately youthful Yannick Noah coming of age, Johnny Mac practicing with Jimbo, scenes of fans and administrators—including the Philippe Chatrier—and plenty of rain. The movie tries to paint a picture of an event and moment in time from all angles.
—You also get, right at the start, one of my favorite images in tennis, that of Bjorn Borg practicing on an empty center court, in the morning, with birds chirping around him, in a red sweatsuit. He flits and dances across the court. There was a reason he won six French Opens. This one, hard as it is to believe watching this movie, would be his last. He would never return to Roland Garros.
When this half hour is over, go here to see a scruffy Jimbo (the look suited him) lose, and Johnny Mac go down as well, in an epic meltdown. Klein and his filmmakers understood the slightly depressing beauty of McEnroe well. There’s a fantastic juxtaposition between Mac ranting to the point of near incoherence and then a second later hitting an exquisite bending slice serve as only he could. Notice, also, that McEnroe is shown asking rudely for more towels, and Teltscher is shown asking with equal rudeness for more water, when both players already have plenty of each. A subtle French dig at American entitlement and obsession with service?
Then go here, here, and here for further scenes. Keep going from there; there's plenty of the men's final, between Borg and Lendl, as well as the fabulously talented and youthfully cocky Hana Mandlikova. She's the one player who, when I watch her back in '81, makes me sort of begin to believe that the game really was better, more nuanced and beautiful, back in those waning days of wood.
The French's greatest contribution, though, is not to make you nostalgic for earlier days. What it does best is show you the drama that's inherent in the sport—maybe only a film could emphasize that drama. Where we nornally watch tennis matches to see the result and the competition, here, in these artfully set up on-court moments, we see the personality of the player and the elegance of the stroke first. We see that Borg's silence was a style as much as anything else, that Connors' anger was well choreographed—unpredictable and weird, he belongs in a movie—and that Lendl, along with learning the game at this moment, was also learning how to present himself, his persona, on court and off. He won't let the cameras shoot him getting a massage.
In The French, a Grand Slam, with its cast of characters, its subplots that end surprisingly, and the gradually building drama of its protagonists, is, if nothing else, a great epic tale that goes on for two weeks. Tennis does make for a good movie, all on its own.
And we see that this drama is well suited to Paris and Roland Garros. The fans may be cruel and fickle, but they raise the dramatic stakes here as well. A small scene with Victor Pecci sums it up best. He falls on the clay, then sits on the court for an extra second, milking the drama while the audience rustles and chatters and gasps around him. Would he have sat there for that extra second in practice?
