Watching a Star at Tennis Tourney

The seasoned tournament-goers wore straw hats. I sat there and let the desert sun beat on me like a Chinese gong. My friend Jean Erck, who feels that I need my horizons widened, had asked me to go to the Virginia Slims Indian Wells tennis matches with her. I did and had an interesting afternoon watching the tennis players return balls that I didn’t even see.

Jean comes from a tennis family. Her husband, Marty, played, she plays, and she has two sons who are standouts. Marty Jr. is ranked No. 14 in Southern California.

In tennis, there is the same high premium on style as there is in golf. I have followed golf players around Riviera Country Club at the Los Angeles Open ever since I could walk. You are supposed only to breathe, and that very shallowly, so you don’t break the concentration of the players.

Same thing at the tennis tournament. The entire stadium sat in seemly silence except for an occasional spatter of applause when a player made an impossible shot, or a mass intake of breath at a missed shot.

For my first tennis tournament, I was lucky enough to see Martina Navratilova. She has won in the regal center court at Wimbledon eight times, and is determined to make it nine. She has won three Virginia Slims tournaments this year. Nine wins at Wimbledon would make tennis history. We saw her play Helena Sukova and win.

The referees stand or sit in little square boxes and yell one-word announcements like “Fault,” “Ball,” and a number of other things. I nodded wisely at each call, although most of the calls sounded as if the caller had been unexpectedly pinched. The crowd was with Martina so, of course, I did exactly what everyone else did, clap and sigh. But I was just a beat behind everyone else.

A confection for the spectators in the midst of all that heavy-duty play was a doubles match, Billie Jean King on one side with Sonny Bono and recently retired Chris Evert with Danny Sullivan, an Indianapolis race driver, on the other.

The four players were miked, so the crowd could hear their remarks, and the japes they tossed at each other. Bono did well, considering that he was playing with two of the world’s former women champions. So did Sullivan.

At the end of the Navratilova-Sukova match, Martina was given a check by the Kraft-General Foods World Tennis Tour.

When she received the check, she said Andrea Jaeger, a fine player in the ‘80s who had dropped out because of injuries, had set up a foundation to help very young players financially. She is calling it Kid Stuff. Martina was giving the check to Kid Stuff.

Martina said: “She is following in the footsteps of Billie Jean King, who established a tennis foundation for kids.” Martina, too, has a foundation for young players.

The eight-time Wimbledon winner has a number of dogs. The lucky pooch who travels with her is a toy fox terrier named K.D. The rest of the pack stays home in Aspen. The small dog was sitting in the lap of a friend of Navratilova’s. K.D. seemed to know a good deal more about tennis than I did.