Eamon Evans - Grand Slams of Tennis: Legends, feuds, tennis dads & one-slam wonders

About the author

Eamon Evans is the author of four works of nonfiction: Smalltalk, Lord Sandwich and the Pants Man, The Godfather was a Girl and David Boons Funniest Sporting Moments (co-written with David Boon). His first novel, The Mild Colonial Boy, will be published in 2015. You should buy it!

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Pam Brewster at Hardie Grant for commissioning this sucker, and to Rihana Ries and Penelope Goodes for editing it.
Love and kisses to Jenny, Henry and Eliza (and pats to Bertie the dog).

Contents

Chapter One
The Grand Old Game

Chapter Two
The Grand Slams

Chapter Three
The Tour

Chapter Four
The Grand ChampionsMen

Chapter Five
The Grand ChampionsWomen

Chapter Six
The Grand Rivalries

Chapter Seven
The Grand Games

Chapter Eight
The Grand Tantrums

Chapter Nine
Life off the Court

Chapter Ten
The Grand Prizes

I have always considered tennis as a combat in an arena between two gladiators who have their racquets and their courage as their weapons.Yannick Noah

Thanks for that, Yannick. I myself believe its more like a game.

A good game, though, I hasten to addand for a while there, I wasnt half bad. Like most child prodigies, I discovered tennis at the age of six or seven, after coming across an old wooden racquet in the back of a cupboard. After a year or so of hitting a ball against a wall, I enrolled in lessons at my local tennis club, and at ten I started entering tournaments. Passers-by used to marvel at my unconventional service action, while my backhand was hailed by experts as being both memorable and unique.

When I hit sixteen, it was time to turn pro. Or, rather, it would have been but for one slight problem. Unlike most child prodigies, it had slowly emerged, I was in fact deeply crap. The thrill of a well-placed forehand, the rush of a crisp half-volley: both these sensations remain foreign to me, though I can tell you all about double faults. Walt Disney once said, All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them, but believe me, folks, hes wrong.

Fortunately, tennis superstardom wasnt my only childhood dream: I also wanted my very own television. And now that I have one (sorry to boast), I can watch superstars play whenever I want. Which, of course, means that I watch them four times a year. During the Australian Open and the French Open, then during Wimbledon and the US Open.

Most tennis tournaments, lets be honest here, are about as important as pumpkin soup. If your favourite player happens to lose the Paine Webber Classic one week, hes got the Birmingham Open the next. If she happens to miss out on the BNP Paribas Masters, then theres always the Ameritech Cup. Not too many children would dream about winning the Western & Southern Financial Group Womens Open. Or indeed be able to spell the Aegon Classic.

But the Grand Slams, they are different. They are, well, grand. The big four tournaments on the tennis calendar are big in every sense of the word: they feature the most players and they fork out the most prize money; they have the shiniest trophies and the noisiest crowds. To win one is to win a ridiculous number of rankings pointsand a ridiculous number of headlines all over the globe. Its at the Grand Slams that reputations are won and lost, and its at the Grand Slams that legends are made.

So why are they such a big deal? Well, that, my friends, is a complicated question, and for an answer, youll need to read the whole book. But lets just say that these four tournaments involve a whole lot of history: a whole lot of great players playing great matches, or having great rivalries or great dummy spits. They involve a whole lot of fans going coo coo bananas, and a whole lot of sex, drugs and fun.

In this book, I give you the best bits of Grand Slam history (along with all the basic whens, wheres and whos). If you want to know how some obscure Bulgarian fared in the 1973 French Open, then Google might just be your go. But if you want to know which world number one has always been unfaithful to her boyfriends, then grab a drink, take a seat and read on. In Grand Slams of Tennis youll also discover which player has been in and out of jail, and which one became a nun. Youll learn who liked to play without underpants, and who never changes her socks. Youll hear who slept with whom, who wore a wig and whose game was once held up by a gun.

From bankruptcy and battery to bitchiness and brandy, a great many threads have gone into the tapestry that is the history of tennis. But where exactly did that first thread come from? Who actually invented the thing? Its time to travel back in time to eleventh-century Europe, and find out how the grandest of all games began

- 1
THE GRAND OLD GAME

The divine birth

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earthbut who the hell created the tennis? The Bible isnt much help in answering that question and nor, it has to be said, are historians. Some of them would have you believe that the game started with cavemen, who used to hit rocks back and forth with their clubs, while others say that racquet-and-ball games were played in Turkey two or three thousand years ago, before spreading to Europe and beyond.

What none of them say, unfortunately, is And whats more, I have proof. Most likely, this is because none exists. While the word racquet probably comes from rahat, an Arabic word meaning palm of the hand, thats about it for evidence of the games possible origins in the Middle East.

Which brings us to the monasteries of medieval France. Whether or not God did indeed create the heavens and the earth, some of His employees definitely helped invent tennis. With nothing to do but pray all day, and try very hard not to masturbate, its perhaps not all that surprising that some red-blooded Godbotherer eventually invented a sport to help pass the time.

A sort of cross between squash and handball, jeu de paume was played indoors and didnt involve any racquetsor, necessarily, a net. We dont know too much about the rules (if, indeed, there were many) but we do know that when a player was getting ready to serve, he would cry out Here you are! to alert his opponent, just as a golfer might yell Fore! today. Only, being French, it would come out as Tenez!, a much snappier, and more adaptable, phrase.

Yes, thats right: tennis is a French wordand our language lesson doesnt stop there. When both players had won three points each, there were no English-speaking monks to say all square. So someone would instead say that the score was deux le jeu (two points to the game), a rather cumbersome phrase from which we later got deuce.

The strange score of love may also come from French. Some scholars tell us that it comes from loeuf (egg)eggs being much the same shape as a zero. This theory isnt as far-fetched as it sounds (a duck in cricket started out as a ducks egg) but theres just one problem: todays French tennis umpires actually use the word zro. Love most likely came to England just a few centuries ago, when a wave of Dutch immigrants arrived from the Low Countries. A player stuck on zero points, the theory goes, would joke that they played for lofthat being a Dutch word for honour and glory.

There is no glory in tenniss scoring system, however, just strange numbers and needless confusion. For the 153040 system, as with so much else thats wrong in life, we must again blame the French. While the leap from love to 15 and then 30 was most likely inspired by a convenient church clock wound by a monk to keep track of the score, its never been entirely clear why the winner of the next point should then arrive at 40, rather than the infinitely more logical 45. The most common theory is that logic