They Just Took Over Over There

Deutschland Uber Alles! Spell Wimbledon with an umlaut. Never mind saying, “Nice shot, Boris!” Wunderbar! is the operative word now. Make the whole thing into a Wagnerian opera. Let’s hear it for sauerbraten and sauerkraut.

The Wimbledon finals read like a Berlin phone directory. They should have paraded in behind a glockenspiel and a chorus of oompahs. Today, Germany, tomorrow--no, never mind.

Let’s just say Baron Von Cramm would be proud. So would Von Bismarck. To take over the world with tennis rackets beats guns.

With Steffi Graf, Boris Becker and Michael Stich vying for one of the most prestigious titles in the world of sport, you could hardly ask for anything more to administer to national esteem and pride.

I’ll tell you who wouldn’t be proud. Perry T. Jones wouldn’t be at all overjoyed. He’d be outraged.

Perry T. Jones used to be the autocrat of the tennis court around these parts. He took the position tennis belonged to him. The greatest tennis players in the world came to him. You almost couldn’t play unless this Emperor Jones gave the word. He ran the L.A. Tennis Club about the way Ivan the Terrible ran Russia. And the L.A. Tennis Club, in a sense, ran tennis. Players came from all over the world.

Jones’ power began to decline about the time they started to let them wear shorts on court. In Jones’ time, men wore long pants and women wore long skirts. And you didn’t dare let your shirt hang out.

Andre Agassi probably never would have gotten off the public courts in Jones’ day. Perry had no tolerance for rebels. It didn’t matter how good you were. Pancho Gonzalez (Jones always called him by his given name, Richard) could not play on Jones’ turf, the L.A.T.C., till he went back to school. No dropouts need apply.

They all passed through the Jones fiefdom--Don Budge, Jack Kramer, Fred Schroeder, Gonzalez, Tony Trabert, Budge Patty, Gene Mako, Bobby Riggs. Connors and Ashe came along as Perry’s sun was setting. Perry wasn’t a teacher or a coach, he was an organizer. He arranged for society to play host to big-time tennis. Perry wasn’t rich. He just knew everybody who was. He made them think it was their duty to support tennis.

“I would have to beg, borrow, juggle, steal to keep my tennis tournaments going,” he once told me. “People think the game is shot through with gold. It isn’t. It’s a lot of work to get a kid to Wimbledon.”

Professional tennis wiped out Perry Jones. He couldn’t cope with (ugh!) tradesmen. When players became (by his lights) ruffians and hired hands, Jones lost his hold over them and the game.

You couldn’t throw tantrums in Jones’ day. You got paid under the table or under a bridge, but you didn’t get paid at all if Jones didn’t vouch for you, approve of you. Tennis was a citadel of hypocrisy, so Jones was right at home. When you went to a tournament, you had to stay at the home of a rich sponsor. You couldn’t afford a hotel.

You didn’t stay anywhere if Jones didn’t arrange it. Tennis players had to go in with their hats in their hands and a smile on their faces and wipe their feet and call everybody “Mam” and “Sir.” The way Perry wanted it.

Jones took it personally if America didn’t win the Davis Cup and an American didn’t win Wimbledon. He would be insulted to find three Germans and no Americans in the Wimbledon men’s and women’s singles finals. He would be combing the colleges to find candidates to redress these impudences.

Jones’ last hurrah came when he took our Davis Cup team to Australia to get the Cup back. Alex Olmedo, the linchpin of that team, was born in Peru but Jones could ignore such inconsequentialities, with the Cup at stake. Olmedo became as American as pizza-with-everything or George Washington with a wig when he won the trophy back from the dreaded Aussies. Jones never could abide the way the Aussies took over his beloved game. Upstarts. (Australia lost its edge, too, when it lost its Perry Jones--Harry Hopman.)

But there are no Perry T. Joneses anymore. There’s probably no one to care to that extent. And tennis is only one of the sports we are losing to Europeans. Golf is falling to them. So is auto racing. We don’t even dominate the Olympics anymore. It’s probably not fair to note--the franchises were full of American players, of course--but the World League of American Football title was played off between London and Barcelona, for crying out loud.

It’s hard to tell whether Wimbledon champion Michael Stich is the real article, a future multiple Grand Slam winner, or just caught up in one of those competition trances where everything that falls off the racket lands in the right places--being “in the zone,” tennis players call it.

No one knows if Stich is going to become another Pat Cash or another Bjorn Borg. If Stich can remember how he did it, tennis may have a German accent for a very long time. Stich has that long lean Gary Cooper look the great ones do--Big Bill Tilden, J. Donald Budge, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez, Bjorn Borg.

He appears to have the other requisite for championship tennis--a temper. But the good news is, maybe we will get outbursts such as Donnerwetter! or even Ach! or Gott Im Himmel! when things go wrong, instead of something favored by John McEnroe, “*%&!”

In any case, it’s nice to know he won’t die on the steppes of Russia as another fine German tennis player, Henner Henkel, was to do or get tossed into prison as the great Von Cramm was.