Tennis Is Sparing the Players but Spoiling the Game

It was the most heartening news I’d read since Berlin fell. It should have been on Page 1 of the paper.

There it was, in the sports section. “Tennis Umpire Walks Out on Players,” it said. Hurrah!

I didn’t know whether to throw my hat in the air or throw a party. But I’d been waiting a long time for this day. For the life of me, I don’t know why it hadn’t happened 10 years ago. I know if I’d been in a tennis ump’s chair it would have.

You see, Umpire Luigi Brambilla just got fed up with the bad manners of those pampered popinjays who pass for tennis players nowadays. They had snottily asked the official if he was paying attention. They contemptuously kept playing while he pondered the insulting question.

Brambilla climbed down from his chair, saluted the players--and walked out. Bravo, Signor Brambilla! Way to go, paisano! Molto bene!

Of course, you can hold your applause. The fabric of tennis was not long in getting into its hand-kissing position again. “Umpire Who Walked Out During Match Is Suspended,” read the next day’s headlines.

Well, that’s the way it goes in today’s society. You try to defend yourself against the cretins and they put you in handcuffs. The game is rigged in favor of the tyrants. So is the world. The thugs are in charge.

Signor Brambilla has been demoted and put in charge of new balls or let calls or something. Nobody did anything to the players involved, of course. Can’t have any vigilantism in the umpire’s chair.

“The match was not conducted in the highest standards of officiating,” grandly grovelled Ken Farrar, the chief of supervisors for the tennis council.

We’ll be the judge of that, thank you, Ken. You’re not speaking for us.

“He should have answered the player’s question,” you warn sternly. He probably should have fetched the player a klop in the ear, if you ask us.

Tennis’ craven knuckling under to the Bowery Boys who populate the sport is nothing new. It’s a way of life. They are as responsible for the new wave of vulgarity in the game as any curly-haired Little Orphan Annie with a tennis racket they let get away with it.

The trouble was not that the match was not conducted in the highest standards of officiating, but that it was conducted, as usual, in the lowest standards of sportsmanship.

So, what’s to be done about it? Now that The Umpire Strikes Back as a palliative has failed, and has invoked only swift and sure retribution, does the tennis establishment carry on as before? Does it sit and accept the slurs and sneers and degradations and go on taking it from schoolboy dropouts in gym suits?

I took the problem to Charlie Pasarell, the tennis promoter. You will remember Charlie Pasarell as the best player ever to come out of Puerto Rico and one of the best ever to come out of anywhere. Charlie was No. 1 in the U.S. in 1967, was a member of five Davis Cup teams, twice U.S. indoor champion, and a quarterfinalist at both Wimbledon and Forest Hills.

Charlie’s game was tenacity and indomitability. He played in the longest tennis match in Wimbledon history, a 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9 backbreaker against Pancho Gonzalez in 1969. He played a 6-hour 23-minute doubles match, the longest one ever played.

“The trouble with Charlie is, you have to kill him to beat him,” Jack Kramer once summed up.

Charlie’s trouble was not his game, it was his timing. He came along at UCLA at the same time as Arthur Ashe. That was a little like finding yourself doing a scene with Spencer Tracy, Shirley Temple, and a puppy.

But Pasarell’s career didn’t recede with the last drop volley at the net. Charlie faced life with the same attitude he had at match-point against Pancho Gonzalez.

Now the director of tennis for the Landmark Land Development company, and a renowned teacher and game “doctor,” Pasarell will be staging the prestigious Pilot Pen Tennis event at the La Quinta Hotel Tennis Club in the desert Feb. 18-24. A $375,000 tournament, it is expected to draw more than 42,000, a cable TV audience and one of the outstanding celebrity audiences this side of an Oscar night. The seeding isn’t bad either--Jimmy Connors, Yannick Noah, Johan Kriek and the magnificent Swedes.

But, Pasarell came up in a tennis era when it was not only impolite to throw a tantrum, it was suicidal--career-wise, that is.

“You were kind of the guest of tennis in those days, pre-Open tennis,” he explained. “A little temper was OK, but just a little--10 seconds or so. It was out of the question to hold up the match 15 minutes, denounce the chair, order the linesmen removed, or play the boor.”

When tennists became millionaires, they also became churls. Not the first time that has happened.

But Charlie the promoter isn’t sure what can be done about it. “It’s not like baseball or basketball,” he said. “You can’t kick a man out of a game. In baseball, or basketball, if you do that, a substitute comes in to take his place. There is no substitute in tennis.

“If you kick a player out, what about the people who paid $50 a seat and drove in from the suburbs? Promoters hate to refund money because of umpires.”

Charlie’s solution is simpler.

“Look at it this way: The one thing the top player needs more than money is appearance in the super tournaments, the U.S. Open, Wimbledon. If he doesn’t make those, he’s second rate. You just can’t keep your image as a top player if you don’t play in those. If they were to bar a player from those for conduct unbecoming a gentleman, I think you would see a drastic improvement in manners overnight.”

No one expects to act on Charlie Pasarell’s suggestion. They would rather play without an umpire. In fact, they would rather play without a net.