!A Terrible Splendor - Cover Image This week freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I will be discussing “A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher. The book, released this month, delves into one of the sport’s all-time classic matches, the 1937 Davis Cup showdown between Don Budge of the United States and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, played as the world readied for war.
Hi Kamakshi,
Let me start by saying that it’s nice to know that a tennis book can still get published even when it's primary topic is not a player's eating disorder. This is not to say that A Terrible Splendor doesn’t contain its share of disorders, many of which are far grimmer than anything we honor with the term today. But this is a book of history as well as tennis, as absorbing for its narrative of the Nazis' Night of the Long Knives as it is for its description of the five sets between Budge and the Baron.
I’d read much of the information in various places before, whether it was a Bud Collins encyclopedia, Frank DeFord’s Bill Tilden biography, TheRise and Fall of the Third Reich, or our buddy Digby Baltzell’s decline and fall of the WASP tennis establishment. Woven together, though, it all seemed new, other than the background on Tilden, which I thought was the book’s one flaw. Big Bill did figure into the Cramm-Budge story—he was friends with the German, had been a Davis Cup star for the U.S. for years, and attended the match—and he remains the most entertaining character in U.S. tennis history even 50-some years after his death, but I thought Fisher used him to pad out Splendor a little. Not that I didn’t enjoy reading all the stories about Tilden’s comically haughty dominance. It shows how powerful his persona really was. Even in a book about two other tennis players, he overshadows the proceedings.
I’ll begin this book club with a question, maybe unanswerable, but still interesting to me. Are you a believer in the idea that sports, and in particular tennis, very closely mirror world history, to the point where they are almost determined by it? They are to some degree, of course—it’s hardly surprising that the demise of the Soviet Union would lead to an influx of Russian talent into pro tennis. But sports sociology types like Baltzell and C.L.R. James tell us that there is virtually nothing coincidental that happens in professional or international sports—the rises and falls of certain players, certain styles, certain countries are determined irrevocably by social changes. Tennis has been even more closely linked to society at large because of its traditional connection to the ruling classes. (Is there a better term for “ruling class” out there since I went to college? One that’s quite so grad-school righteous?)
In this worldview, the fact that Tilden, the last cricket-club gentleman tennis champion, won his final Slam in 1930 is linked to the stock market crash of 1929 and the demise of his aristocratic class in the 1930s. The rise of Budge, Riggs, Gonzalez and other California public-park champions syncs up with the Great Depression. The lawless era of Connors and McEnroe begins with the end of all traditional standards of behavior in 1968. I’d add two of my own theories in this vein, for fun: Sampras, Courier, and Chang suddenly join Agassi at the top of the sport around 1990, just as the U.S. is becoming the world’s uncontested superpower. And in 2001, a couple months before 9/11, Federer beats Sampras at Wimbledon and the balance of power in the men’s game shifts away from the U.S. again. (No, I don't think of that match as the "9/11 of tennis.")
The connection in Terrible Splendor is, obviously, the battle between the American Budge and the German Cramm on a neutral tennis court in Britain, and the coming war, which would be fought largely by those same three countries. These are the world’s political powers, so it makes sense that they would have the resources and desire to develop the world’s best athletes, if not for pride than at least for propaganda. But part of what makes the story make sense is that the U.S. won on the court, just like it won on the battlefield. Did it have to work out that way? Was the Baron, the representative of the newly powerless European nobility, doomed by history to lose to Budge, the can-do California kid and pure product of democracy? The German was up 4-1 in the fifth, after all. History cut it pretty close.
Or is this all a bit much to bite off in a blog post? You can always just tell me what you liked about the book.
Steve