ALTHEA THE FIRST
While the British monarch—who prefers horse racing—watched, in a torrid heat which shriveled the courts, knocked out a thousand spectators and cost the athletes an average loss of weight of 10 pounds in a five-set match, Wimbledon last week elected its two crowned heads. Lew Hoad and Althea Gibson both won in a canter, as the Queen of England might like to put it, but immediately afterward tennis fans found themselves crying, "The King is dead, long live the Queen!" For King Lew abruptly abdicated his claim to the amateur throne by joining Jack Kramer's professional circus at the fattest fee ever offered a tennisman ($125,000 for two years). And Queen Althea thereby became the amateur game's leading personality.
Hers, it should be said, was not a personality which particularly appealed to Wimbledon crowds, who like their heroes to be chivalrous to a fault and noticeably human. Actually, Althea Gibson was human enough. She suffered from center-court nerves and the self-imposed responsibility of representing the whole Negro population of the United States of America.
The crowd handled her with silent respect until the semifinal, and then prepared to be partisan. Her opponent was a new star at Wimbledon, a shy, 16-year-old, statuesque, 5-foot-11 schoolgirl with amber-colored hair called Christine Truman. Christine has shown promise since she was 11 and for the last three years has been under the wing of the Lawn Tennis Association.
This was her first year at Wimbledon. She expected to get to the third round, perhaps. But at the end of the first week she electrified Wimbledon with an almost impeccable display which knocked out England's top-seeded Shirley Bloomer. Shirley is a baseline operator, a good all-round player but with no positive attacking strokes. Christine, reaching sudden tennis maturity, waded into Shirley, using a particularly zipping, probing forehand drive which had professionals comparing her with Helen Wills. The forehand was almost the only stroke of championship standard that Christine possessed. Her service was average country-club, her backhand unreliable and inclined to balloon and she frequently missed sitters when she got up to smash. Against Shirley Bloomer she had nothing to lose, and in this match brought out strokes which even she did not know she possessed. In the next round, the quarter-finals, she beat Betty Pratt, and the center court went wild. The more optimistic thought here at last was an English Little Mo. A more moderate school realized she had no chance of beating Althea Gibson but that she might put up a good show.
For the semifinals the center court was packed to its 17,000 capacity. Thirty-four thousand fingers were crossed when Truman and Gibson walked on. But this time Christine couldn't do anything right, and Gibson never let her think she could. From the beginning she crowded Truman, covering the net like a daddy longlegs. Christine's forehand drive never got into gear. She seemed to have feet of lead. Pop went Christine's service; bang went Gibson's. It was like matching kitten against leopard. The center court hadn't even the heart left to cheer its young favorite, but watched the slaughter in shuddering silence.
Gibson's final against stocky little Darlene Hard was equally one-sided. Gibson wasn't playing at the top of her form, but she bulldozed her way through two sets, volleying superbly. She was the first representative of the Negro race ever to win a Wimbledon title, but the center court raised only an apathetic cheer when the Queen presented her with the big gold salver and Darlene hugged her with sisterly enthusiasm.
MAKING HISTORY
While Miss Gibson was making come kind of sociological sporting history, Lew Hoad was breaking new ground for an amateur. It emerged that his $100,000 contract with Jack Kramer was to be swollen by $25,000 if he won at Wimbledon. In fact, this then-amateur won his bonus on finals day in exactly 55 minutes, thus playing at approximately $455 a minute—surely the most expensive game of tennis ever known. Hoad straddled the tournament like a colossus. He showed the center court tennis such as no one remembered seeing before. It had the experts fumbling for comparisons in the limbo of championships long forgotten, dredging up names like Tilden and Vines. It left the center court gasping. It had watching competitors on their feet. It had the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, with Ashley Cooper as the poor suffering mortal and Hoad as an impersonal Zeus hurling down his thunderbolts. The golden boy at last completely fulfilled the potential he had shown at Wimbledon back in 1952.
Hoad's path to the finals was direct enough but showed no promise of the great things to come. Out in the sticks, the 13 other courts which flank the center court, where sometimes a lady umpire climbs the steep green ladder, Hoad sulked his way through the opening rounds. He objected to linesmen's voices, sneered at umpires, but most of all he hated himself. Netted shots, failed aces, ballooned returns, all sent him into a frenzy of self-reproach.
But he came through the first four rounds against indifferent opposition without losing a set. In the fifth round he met Mervyn Rose. His concentration was at a low ebb that day. He had trouble with Rose's kicking service. And for Hoad there is no such thing as a service ace from an opponent. Said Pat Hughes of Dunlop's, Hoad's guide and mentor in London, "If he doesn't hit that ball, wham, faster than it comes, he reckons he's a failure." Hoad netted more than half his returns during the first two sets, winning the first but losing the second. But then he went into his private mumbo-jumbo routine of willing himself to concentration, banging his racket edge on the ground, staring fixedly at the back line. He won a marathon third set at 10-8, and this seemed to break the back of Rose's resistance. But from his showing that day the experts shook their heads about his quarter-finals to come against Sweden's Sven Davidson. Davidson, they thought, with his telescopic reach at the net, might outfox Hoad. But that wasn't the way it was at all.
Against Davidson, Hoad played what would be superb tennis from anyone else, but what he himself reckoned was just pretty good. From the first game of the opening set, Davidson played like a man outmatched. His service is in no way negligible, but Hoad's forehand returns mercilessly disposed of would-be aces, probed the two corners of the baseline and left Davidson standing helplessly.
Hoad's own services were working like clockwork, a clockwork wound up from 160 pounds of muscle and bone. Sometimes when his first service was out, he aced on the second. One of these second-string aces swerved so violently that Davidson was left with his hand outstretched for a forehand return while the ball kicked past him on the backhand. At the net Hoad was deadly. His looping, sharply angled, topspin backhand kept shaving the net to drop like a wet sponge. And his lobs, during the few rallies which developed, fell regularly with small plops on the worn and thinning baseline of the center court. Hoad won in three straight sets in an hour and a half. And still this was no more than a wind-up for the devastating final against Ashley Cooper.
Cooper won the first point of the match with an ace. But Hoad broke his service during that first game, and many others to follow, with a series of returns which were almost unseeable. His uncanny court sense was working to perfection. He was moving into positions before the ball left the face of Cooper's racket. He was judging out-balls to within an inch. He was playing the same power game as he played against Davidson, but more accurate, deadlier and faster. It was as if the film had been speeded up. His arm flamed out to volley. Often his drives were so fast that the spectators' eyes lagged a split second behind them. He seemed contemptuous of any ball which didn't kick up chalk on base or sidelines, and he was moving and twisting on the court like an eel, making Cooper look like a flat-footed novice. One miracle save rescued a smash from Cooper and turned it into a winning lob even while spectators were applauding a seemingly safe point for Cooper.
It was all over in just 55 minutes, with the score 6-2, 6-1, 6-2, the fastest final since Fred Perry beat Germany's Gottfried von Cramm in 44 minutes in 1936.
"That's Hoad, that was," quipped one perspiring spectator. Players, professionals and press were stunned by Hoad's game, MASSACRE ON THE CENTER COURT, read headlines in the evening papers.
"I've never seen such tennis," said old Wimbledon pro Dan Maskell, who has seen all the greats in action.
Said Sven Davidson, "Hoad is just a class and a half better than anyone else in competitive tennis." "I just don't see what Cooper could have done," said Herbie Flam.
As any man would be who went out for a fight and found he was destined to be nothing but a sacrifice, Cooper was disconsolate. "I was never in the game. It wouldn't have mattered what I did against him today." Hoad admitted it was one of his best matches—"but I feel I've played better in Australia several times."
Just how fast was Hoad? Said Lew, "I felt good and I knew I was hitting them hard. Gonzales was measured serving at 112 miles an hour. I doubt whether I equaled that." But experts began to revise their opinion that Hoad would still be no match for Gonzales. "On this showing," said one pressman, "Hoad would beat Gonzales every day of the week. And if Lew reckons he won't reach his peak until he's 25, there won't be anyone left for him to play. Hoad will just outclass them all a couple of years from now."
Heading blithely for the U.S. and an unprecedentedly bulging bag of loot, Lew Hoad had made the most spectacular exit anyone had ever made from amateur tennis. Wimbledon will long remember him, possibly with more wonder than affection.
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A SMILE BETWEEN QUEENS: First of her race to win a Wimbledon title, Althea Gibson receives her trophy from Elizabeth.
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CONGRATULATIONS FROM THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH AFTER PLAYING AT $455 A MINUTE
BRITAIN'S BIG WEEK
•Tennis history—of two kinds—was made
•The 'butler' won the golf Open (page 14)
•Henley had an all-American finale (page 16)