Marshall Jon Fisher - A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played

For Mom and Dad

Fate envelops and overshadows the whole; and under its lowering influence, the fiercest efforts of human will appear but like flashes that illuminate the wild scene with a brief and terrible splendor, and are lost forever in the darkness.

T HOMAS C ARLYLE , on the work of Friedrich Schiller

F IRST S ET

S ECOND S ET

T HIRD S ET

F OURTH S ET

F IFTH S ET

A FTERMATCH

R EADERS MAY WONDER how I came up with actual dialogue and internal thoughts. Speech that is in quotation marks, and thoughts that are italicized, in conventional fashion, are directly from primary sources and are credited as such. At other times, however, I felt a need to dramatize a moment, without knowing for certain exactly what was said or thought. At these times I drew inspiration from Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting, stories of relationships between writers and artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which she often imagines conversations that might have taken place. (She in turn acknowledges an indebtedness for this method of biographical nonfiction to writers such as Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Louis Menand, and a number of others.) To make evident where I have deduced or pieced together dialogue, interior and exterior, from other sources, these lines have no italics or quotation marks. Also, like Cohen, I have tried to make things even more clear by using words like perhaps, must have, or likely. However, it is important to note that none of these passages is fanciful: each is based firmly on my research (as referenced in the notes).

J ULY THE TWENTIETH, 1937, AND Baron Gottfried von Cramm tosses a new white Slazenger tennis ball three feet above his head. It seems to hang there suspended for the slightest of moments, a distant frozen moon, before his wooden racket plucks it out of the electrified air of Wimbledon's Centre Court, rocketing a service winner past J. Donald Budge. The deciding match of the Davis Cup competition between the United States and Germany has begun, a contest that will long be called the greatest tennis match ever. Fourteen thousand onlookersaristocrats out to be seen, sportswriters, any tennis fans who could take off work on a Tuesday; Queen Mary, her entourage, several members of Parliament, and foreign diplomats in the Royal Boxshift in their seats as von Cramm's serve finally splits the fine membrane between anticipation and fulfillment. The thud of tight catgut strings against ball marks the moment: it is 4:57 P.M.

I T WAS ANOTHER UNUSUALLY GLORIOUS SUMMER DAY FOR L ONDON . In fact, hardly a drop of rain had fallen all month, and today was cloudless again, the midsummer sun still high, the mercury steadfast in the mid-seventies, just as The Times had promised. The weather report, however, was the most uplifting part of the newspaper that morningand even the weather had to share its page with the obituary of Amelia Earhart. She had been missing for a fortnight, ever since taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, for Howland Island, some 2,500 miles off in the Pacific. She'd made it three-quarters of the way through what was to be the first around-the-world flight at the earth's full circumference. Encountering unexpected headwinds, however, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan flew for over twenty hours, exhausting their fuel supply, without quite reaching the island. President Roosevelt had authorized a $4 million search effort by nine naval ships and sixty-six aircraft, but on July 18 the search was finally abandoned.

The front page was no more heartening. Londoners propping their morning Times up against their teacups were presented with a palette of ominous headlines: BITTER FIGHTING NEAR MADRID . Almost exactly a year ago, the fascist General Francisco Franco had led a makeshift rebel army of Moors and foreign legionnaires from Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar to revolt against the five-year-old Republican Spanish government. A gruesome civil war had ensued, and a year later there seemed no end in sight.