Published Apr 22, 2009
!A Terrible Splendor - Cover ImageThis 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
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Hi Steve,
Are sports determined by world events? Yeah, nothing like a nice easy question to get started. Reminds me of the time my high school history teacher ended the final class of the semester by telling us about his own high school history exam, which consisted of one question: Do men shape history, or does history shape men?
Needless to say, we spent more time freaked out about how we could possibly have answered that question than studying for the stuff that was actually going to be on the exam.
Like the tireless GOAT debate, the fun is all in contemplating the complexity of the topic itself.
Basically, though, I don't really think that world history shapes tennis history. It's simply that their edges are so ragged we can put them side-by-side and see some kind of fit. There may be one great force behind it all, but so diffuse we can't really trace it with any coherence.
But world affairs do affect tennis — just like they do every other sphere of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Players, people, equipment, tournaments and even court surfaces are all a product of their times, affected by wider trends and prevailing characteristics.
More than anything, international events, tennis, and all manner of other things operate in the same types of patterns and cycles, so parallels are common. History repeats itself, after all.
Still, whether coincidence or destiny, it's true that the confluence of events in A Terrible Splendor is remarkable. World War II looms, and in Davis Cup it's U.S.A. vs. Germany, Don Budge vs. Gottfried von Cramm. A drained Britain leading to a standoff between the Americans and Germans for world supremacy. Initially, American hope that the battle could be avoided altogether. A passive beginning, going down two sets. Then a spur to action, with a fightback in the third and fourth sets turning the contest around. High drama in the fifth, with Germany coming very close to victory before going down to a sudden charge from the other side. (Note to history enthusiasts: Yes, this is dramatically simplified. But let's spend more time on the tennis than lend lease or Yalta.) But I think von Cramm could just as easily have held serve twice and ruined the whole analogy. Just in that case, it might not have been called the greatest match of all time and there might not be a book being written about it now.
A few quibbles aside, I did like the book — several chunks of it enormously. I knew the outlines because I'd read Budge's own entertaining account of the match, but there's enough in the topic that it's overflowing even out of Splendor's much lengthier treatment.
I'm glad the book is good because the excellent prose and evocative subject matter would probably have guaranteed it positive reviews in general publications anyway, even if the integrity of the material hadn't been there. The German side is mostly new to me, so I can't really judge it, but I see a lot of meticulous stitching elsewhere. I agree with you that the story would have worked without as much Bill Tilden, and maybe even been neater — but Tilden is so compelling that I can understand not being able to resist writing him at length, and he also pads out certain themes that Fisher seems to want to focus on.
The other short player portraits in the book were very enjoyable too — I never knew that Alice Marble and Frank Parker's lives were quite that dramatic. And all the famous non-tennis name-dropping — Alistair Cooke, James Thurber, Ed Sullivan, etc. — adds a bit of mainstream glamour but also helps show that the match was really a happening event.
I did have to laugh when I first saw the cover, which has the subhead, "Three extraordinary men, a world poised for war, and the greatest tennis match ever played."
It was just a few days earlier that I'd finished Jon Wertheim's Strokes of Genius — "Federer, Nadal, and the greatest match ever played."
Seems like you can't get anywhere these days unless you're writing about the greatest match ever played, so there are a lot of them about, just like there are a lot of "fifth Slam"s and "second-oldest tournament in North America"s. And "greatest player of the all time"s, of course.
The simultaneous release of Splendor and Strokes of Genius seems apt (or is it fate? :). Aside from being about the greatest match ever played, they also share a common structure, borrowed from Jon McPhee's Levels of the Game, which details the U.S. semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Using the match as the base of the narrative, it weaves the story of the players' lives in between detailed description of the play.
Throughout Splendor, I kept waiting for my favourite anecdote about the end of the Budge-von Cramm match. Since it was about the only thing that never arrived, here it is from Budge's memoirs:
Remebering this, it was delightful to read in Strokes of Genius that umpire Pascal Maria's wife was attending the Wimbledon final as her very first match. "You don't need to watch tennis again," he told her afterwards.
In some ways, I had the same reaction as Jack Benny when I first read Levels of Game, at a time when I hadn't read many tennis books. I kind of assumed they were all like that. Eventually, though, I realized exactly what it had accomplished.
The difference between Levels of the Game and its two successors is that in the former, the structure of the book is determined by its purpose: to show all the things that go on and into a match -- the levels of the game, in fact. In Splendor and Genius, this same structure is adopted more as a concept. There's no question that the execution in both cases is impressive. But has this has become the only way to write a book about a match, or can there still be others?
The other thing Splendor and Genius have in common with each other and in contrast with Levels of the Game is limited access to the protagonists. In Fisher's case, too much time has passed; in Wertheim's case, not enough for the still-active players to be available for long interviews.
The biggest impact of this is on the match description. That might seem counterintuitive, but to really explain a match in that kind of detail, you have to get inside the players' heads. Biography and anecdotes are a little easier to get second-hand.
Jon mentions in his acknowledgments that McPhee was actually able to sit down with both Arthur Ashe and Graebner separately to go over a tape of the match, and there's no substitute for that.
It's ironic, too, because Levels of the Game is about a relatively mediocre match, really a bit of an ace fest. Splendor and Genius are about incredible matches, and yet they have to do more detective- and guesswork when describing the contest.
In Splendor, one of the times where the match play is strikingly alive is in the description of the doubles rubber a day earlier, where a sore-shouldered Budge asks Gene Mako to take all the overheads despite the fact that Mako's service swing was decimated by a severe injury a few years ago. The description was so natural and detailed, the quotes so beautifully fitted, I had to flip to the notes to see the source material. Turns out it was from a direct interview with Mako, one of the few player interviews Fisher was able to do.
Fisher wraps up by saying that "the book's structure came to almost simultaneously with the initial idea," and refers to Levels of the Game as the "germinating agent that lies deep within the mind of every tennis-loving writer."
What do you think, Steve? Are all such books just destined to chase Levels of the Game? Or are there other paths to forge?
Kamakshi