War Stories

The other morning, I went round to the Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, just a few miles down the road from the site of the Pacific Life Open. I went to visit with Dennis Ralston, a former U.S. No 1, Wimbledon finalist (1966)  and Davis Cup captain for the U.S. squad’s bright and shining moment (the epic win over Romania, on clay, in Bucharest in 1972 – perhaps the most storied Davis Cup tie, ever).

Before there was Connors and McEnroe, there was Ralston – a redheaded and hotheaded kid from Bakersfield, Ca. He had a world-class game and galaxy-class glare. Ralston was human gunpowder, ever looking for a match.

“Well, at least I was G-rated, that was one difference,” he said yesterday, shortly after finishing a lesson with a promising youngster from Colorado. Ralston recently joined the Mission Hills Country Club tennis program, where he will run tennis camps (you can find the information at the club’swebsite). This is a good fit, for the MHCC has great tennis credentials as well, dating all the way back to the early Open era, when it hosted Davis Cup ties, the tournament that morphed into the Pac Life (the American Airlines games),  and the Colgate Championships (for women). More recently, the U.S. played a Davis Cup tie (vs.Chile) at the club on grass, in 2006. The club, incidentally, has 27 courts featuring all three surfaces: hard, clay and grass.

MHCC doesn’t offer an academy-type experience, although they can provide high-level training (the Aussie doubles genius Mark Woodforde is also affiliated with the club, and Jose Higueras has used it as a base of operations as well). But Ralston himself always has some talented youngsters under his wing. Some of them wind up living with Dennis and his wife, Linda; they have an adoption gene and plenty of couch space. Dennis also coaches a Serbian player, Dusan Vemic who’s closing on 32 and maxed out his ranking at 178 about a year ago. Dennis doesn’t care; he looks after Dusan because he believes he’s a talented and worthwhile kid who’s working his tail off and can use all the help he can get.

Dennis thinks Pancho Gonzalez may have been the greatest player ever. He pointed out that Gonzalez was the top professional player for an astounding 14 years, back when the amateurs got all the publicity for winning Grand Slam events while the pros (barred from competing at Wimbledon and the other Grand Slam venues) tried to create a life after amateur tennis for themselves. "These guys would be winning majors and when they finally got to play Pancho, he just toyed with them."

Dennis told me a few stories that I thought it would be fun to share with you, just to give you additional perspective on the game today - and yesterday. Of the 1966 Wimbledon final he lost to the Spanish master of topspin and touch, Manuel Santana,  Ralston says:

Ralston went on:

Ralston is a no nonsense, tough guy. In fact, you get the sense that he likes tell horror stories more than the kind that end up with him triumphant, holding aloft a gleaming trophy. But that's how it sometimes is; missed chances have a poignancy that realized ones do not - and not just in tennis and romance.

This one occurred in the 1964 Davis Cup final against Australia, in Cleveland, with the Cup on the line. In an attempt to neutralize the grass-court expertise of the Aussies, the U.S. decided to play the tie on clay. The U.S. was up 2-1 after the doubles, and Ralston was facing off against Fred Stolle in the potentially decisive fourth match, after having lost on Day One to Roy Emerson.

Ralston told he that as much as people talk about tennis being different today, and as different as it is, in many ways, some things remain the same, and winning is about the same things as ever: being fit enough to compete, putting balls where you want them to go, showing great mental toughness, and taking advantages of opportunities. He said, “No matter how you cut it, it’s still tennis. The lessons you need to learn are the same ones now as then.”

But my favorite story is the one about the way a couple of USTA suits tried to steal Ralston’s most historic moment in 1972, the year the U.S. became the only squad to date to run the Davis Cup table while playing every match away (and, not coincidentally, they were all on clay; the last three stops were Chile, Spain and Romania). In Chile, Ralston received a death threat by telephone, in the middle of the night. The caller said Ralston would be killed if he showed up at the site the following day. Other than that, Mr. Ralston, have a nice day. Get some sleep now!

Given that at the time, the U.S. government was working to help overthrow the government of Salvador Allende, and that the street was swarming with men bearing machine guns, Ralston had legitimate cause for concern. But ultimately, the U.S. prevailed, and ended up winning the Cup later that fall in Bucharest.

About 25 years later, Ralston got a call from Bud Collins. The veteran tennis journalist  told him that Robert Colwell and Stan Malless, two men who had been USTA officials in 1972, were trying to convince the USTA to change the record as it appears in the official, annual USTA Yearbook, to say that they were the captains for three of those ties, with Ralston serving merely as the coach. The idea was so preposterous to Ralston that he dismissed it as a silly rumor, and the Yearbook remained accurate.

Bumpy Frazer was the next USTA President; so a year after Collins made his first call he was on the horn with Ralston again. “Guess what,” he said. “They did it.”

“Did what?” Ralston asked.

“They took the captaincy.”

Collins sent Ralston the 1993-94 Yearbook, and there it was, in black and white. While Colwell had been at the tie in Spain (although he left before it was over), and Maless had represented Ralston at a function in Chile, the idea that he had been the squad captains was as absurd as it was offensive. Ralston called his attorney, and some sympathetic USTA officials, and he was advised to sue for justice. Ralston had to go and get sworn affidavits from all of the team members, supporting his cause (this was a piece of cake, but a lot of work).

“Where are the egos of these guys?” Ralston wondered aloud, recalling the incident. “They were high-ranking USTA officials not Davis Cup captains, wasn't that enough for them?

Here's the kicker: "After I got all the affidavits, I had to drive to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to file them in federal court. On the way, I got caught in a horrible snowstorm. There were trucks sliding all over, huge snowplows blasting down the road. And I thought, ‘Great, I’m going to die here, because these two guys tried to pull a fast one.”

Ralston arrived in one piece, and soon thereafter the USTA restored corrected the errors and that’s how it stands now. That early Yearbook is some sort of collector’s item, I suppose. But not on Ralston’s bookshelf.

It was good to see Dennis again. War stories are the best stories.