The Art of Tennis, page 1
also by nicholas fox weber
Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute
The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism
Anni and Josef Albers
iBauhaus
Wayne Thiebaud
Freud’s Trip to Orvieto
Le Corbusier
The Clarks of Cooperstown
Marc Klionsky
Balthus
Cleve Gray
Patron Saints
The Art of Babar
Warren Brandt
Leland Bell
Louisa Matthiasdottir
The Drawings of Josef Albers
Published in 2025 by
GODINE
Boston, Massachusetts
www.godine.com
Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Fox Weber
all rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Weber, Nicholas Fox, 1947- author.
Title: The art of tennis / Nicholas Fox Weber.
Description: Boston, Massachusetts : David R. Godine, Publisher, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024060026 (print) | LCCN 2024060027 (ebook) | ISBN 9781567928310 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781567928327 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Tennis.
Classification: LCC GV995 .W414 2025 (print) | LCC GV995 (ebook) | DDC 796.342—dc23/eng/20250417
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024060026
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024060027
For Lucy
Contents
prologue The Tennis Court Is Home
chapter one Charisma
chapter two Tennis in the Art of Bonnard and Vuillard
chapter three The Curious Case of Claude Anet
chapter four Alice Marble
chapter five Bill Tilden
chapter six Dressed to Win: Katharine Hepburn and René Lacoste
chapter seven Suzanne Lenglen
chapter eight Pierre
chapter nine The Song and Dance of Tennis
chapter ten “Green or Yellow?”
chapter eleven Helen Wills
chapter twelve Vladimir Nabokov
chapter thirteen Tennis Chic: Jean Patou
chapter fourteen Althea Gibson
chapter fifteen Tennis in the Work of Eadweard Muybridge
chapter sixteen Bunny Austin
chapter seventeen A Fabergé Tennis Trophy
chapter eighteen Anyone for Tennis?
chapter nineteen Guillermo Vilas
chapter twenty Oleg Cassini
chapter twenty-one Henry McBride
chapter twenty-two Caravaggio
chapter twenty-three Mantua
chapter twenty-four Henry V
chapter twenty-five Nick Ohly
epilogue The Magic of It All
notes
credits
acknowledgments
Prologue
The Tennis Court Is Home
When my wife and I were in Guangzhou, in 2006, as soon as I saw public tennis courts I resolved to see if I could drum up a game. Although I spoke not a word of Cantonese, I managed to borrow a racquet and make it clear that I hoped one of the people standing around would play with me.
Soon enough, I found myself on the court with a stranger who indicated, after I pointed to myself and said “Nick,” that his name was Pang.
Our common language was tennis. I quickly realized that Pang was more than your everyday player. It’s not that he was a champion, but he played with panache. He could retrieve the ball from the ground by tapping the face of his racquet on it and making it ascend as if guided by a wand. He hit his groundstrokes deftly, with a stylish follow-through that resembled the bow of a gondola. Pang served with the energy of a turbine engine. Trim and pleasant-looking, he exuded charm.
When we changed sides, Pang hopped over the net with a scissor kick—making the acrobatic act look effortless. When he was receiving serve, he was in perfect position with the engagement of a gladiator, as present and concentrated as Rafa Nadal. During a break between sets, he casually juggled four balls. He lit up at everything he did. His energy was one hundred percent, and his congenial personality was such that when he lost a point, he applauded my winning shot by clapping his free hand against the racquet strings and smiling broadly. Although we had met just half an hour earlier, he was happy for me.
We communicated as needed despite the language barrier. We knew the score although we announced it differently. There were a couple of long rallies that exceeded our expectations and we showed our excitement. We shared the enjoyment of a good game, surprisingly equal for players who had met by chance. Tennis is understood by all who play it. It releases endorphins and inspires stories, reflections, and artistic expression, well beyond the confines of the court.
✦
i had gone down the hill to that court in Guangzhou without any trepidation. For me, the tennis court is home. It both cossets me and enables me, securely and happily, to spread my wings. But I knew I was fortunate to encounter someone as companionable as Pang, and as quietly magnetic.
Playing with him enhanced an experience that is already for me one of life’s glories. The court provides reassurance and memory, the ideal essence of what “home” should be. The moment I set foot on one, I’m on familiar territory, a place to which I’ve always gravitated. And because I’m lucky, it’s where I encounter fine people I’d never otherwise meet.
The stage never changes, wherever I am in the world. The layout is invariable: The length is seventy-eight feet, the width is thirty-six. If you look for a precise system, however—everything divisible by two, for example, or one dimension being exactly twice the other—you won’t find it. Yes, the width and length are even numbers, but the twenty-one feet from net to service line and the thirty-nine from net to baseline are both odd numbers. Those measurements impart a sense of inevitability but also an essential element of variety.
It is all heartening and comforting: the way the court is what it is, whether it is surfaced in clay, grass, asphalt, or Astroturf. The scheme is a mirror image, the net its divider. This exactitude is part of what makes you know yourself whenever and wherever you are, whether it is an autumn day in Norway, when your fingers are so cold that you can barely grip the racquet, or a sweltering afternoon in Dakar, when you are so soaked with sweat that you wonder how you will ever get your shirt off afterward.
It is always the same: a reduction of straight verticals and horizontals and impeccable right angles. Diagonals belong only to the action that lies ahead. You can hardly wait to angle those shots, to lace a crosscourt backhand at a sharp trajectory, to vary the destination of your serves unpredictably from one back corner to the other, but when you set foot on the court, you start with the calm and sense of inner balance that come because of the flawless grid.
It’s a home to which I can always return, knowing that everything is as I remember it—and, moreover, it will always remain that way.
At any location and under any conditions, even if I am thousands of miles from where I live, I imagine the voice of my Cameroonian friend Pierre Otolo urging me not to stop the stroke before a full follow-through—“Laisse partir, Nicholas!” We all have our own albums of memories that come back whenever we stand on the court. When I play, wherever it is, days when the air is cool and crisp take me back to afternoons at Tamarack Tennis Camp, the haven in a mountain valley where I worked every summer during my college years. We maintained the nine red clay courts, rolling them, spreading calcium, sweeping them with the large, yoked broom unique to tennis, cleaning the lines. The campers and counselors wore whites; it was all very 1960s. I can picture Mrs. Whitehouse Walker, the grandmother of one of the campers, arriving in her Ford Mustang, wearing a flowered dress, saying, with impeccable British diction, “The air is so pure you could drink it!”
How trustworthy those 2,808 square feet are! In Quito—when I was fifteen, on a summer trip that started with a coup d’état, when we were told that if we were still in the city after sunset, we risked being shot at—the court from which we could see volcanoes was a comfort. It took awhile to get used to the ball bouncing so much higher at Quito’s elevation than it did at sea level, and the sprint to net initially left me more breathless than I was used to, but still, the court was a safe harbor.
The memory of Guangzhou, however, looms largest. In one way, everything was foreign—the pagoda shapes, the rickshaws, the appearance of most of the people I saw. Pang’s skin and hair and eyes differ from mine, but those are surface characteristics. What was striking was that in character and personality, he had qualities that made it feel as if we were members of the same family.
✦
the thrill of the thwack of ball against the racquet and the perpetual state of suspense about what is coming next appeals to individuals from every walk of life. Tennis has been the basis of ballets and symphonies, the stuff of poetry and inner flights of fantasy. The game—its setting, the
The purpose of this book is to present some examples of the reach of this remarkable sport. In it, I show tennis as the manifestation of the elusive quality we call charisma, and how it opens our eyes to the ways that the sport has been the inspiration for world-class painting, literature, music, dance, and photography. It considers the impact of the sport on human style, in both appearance and behavior, and provides a sense of tennis as a source of transformation. It also portrays tennis as an art form.
Tennis can be central to one’s existence or it can be peripheral; in either case, it provides constancy and continuity. The perfect functioning of the racquet, the aptness of the scoring system and the shifts from “deuce” to “advantage,” have been a springboard for individual pleasures as well as cultural masterpieces. Tennis takes us on a rich journey that is diverse in its scope. The sport is a catalyst for some very different manifestations of human greatness. The chapters that follow celebrate them.
1
charisma
The oscar winner, the Nobel laureate: We like to focus our sights on the champion who vanquishes everyone else in the field. Who is the ne plus ultra in the history of tennis?
Novak Djokovic—the thirty-seven-year-old player who, as of June 2024, was ranked the world’s No. 1 for a record-breaking 438 weeks—has been called the best tennis player of all time. Many current experts are in agreement, but the same thing was said of Bill Tilden, who held top ranking in 1920–26 and was the first American to win Wimbledon.
How do we measure who was better? Are we to assume Djokovic, because the equipment is more effective and because he has tuned his body to a level of fitness such that his serve and groundstrokes are harder and placed with greater accuracy than Tilden’s? Or should we consider the possibility that a champion of a century ago was every bit as good as, perhaps better than, one who plays now?
Maybe there is a computer program or a form of AI that can set up a match between Tilden and Djokovic and determine how Djokovic would have returned Tilden’s famous cannonball serve. Or re-create what Tilden would have done with Djokovic’s lacing groundstrokes. But how about Tilden’s unique sense of strategy? Would that have enabled him to defeat Djokovic, despite the Serb’s incredible fitness? Tilden could plot and anticipate. He could hit the ball crosscourt and deep to his opponent’s backhand knowing the return would then enable him to deliver a deft dropshot to the forehand, which, if it did not win him the point, would elicit a shot he would receive midcourt from where he could next hit a winner. His control and ability to summon surprises might have gotten the better of even the tennis machine that is Djokovic.
René Lacoste, an established tennis champion well before his name became associated with polo shirts, wrote about Tilden playing an exhibition match against “a wonderful Spanish player” named Manuel Alonso in the mid-1920s:
Seemingly, in two steps Tilden covers the whole of the court; without any effort he executes the most various and extraordinary strokes. He seems capable of returning any shot when he likes, to put the ball out of the reach of his opponent when he thinks the moment has come to do so. Sometimes he gives the ball prodigious velocity, sometimes he caresses it and guides it to a corner of the court whither nobody but himself would have thought of directing it.1
Could Djokovic have trounced Alonso as easily as Tilden did? What would Tilden and Lacoste himself—as well as such greats as Jean Borotra and Jack Kramer and Rod Laver and Pancho Gonzales—have been like if they had the nutritional and training advantages of the hot players of today? Before the current era, tournament players were largely on their own. Now the superstars have an entourage supporting them. Each seems to have a primary coach, a trainer for strength and another for conditioning, a sports psychologist, a massage therapist specializing in the back and buttocks and another who works on the legs, arms, and shoulders, a strategist, a nutritionist, and even a wardrobe master. There are first-class hairdressers next to the locker rooms. Would it have mattered to our greats from the past if they had had all that backup?
And then there is the equipment. The racquets of today, with their high-tech materials and perfectly calibrated stringing, are of a different breed from the old wooden racquets strung with sheep gut. Champions’ shoes have inner soles designed by specialist doctors who have studied how the human foot is used in racquet sports. The clothing facilitates movement and flexibility. The technology of the new balls makes them more effective ammunition than the old ones were. So if we were to compare, say, Helen Wills and Serena Williams—two amazing players, both winners of the same major tournaments but almost a century apart—do we factor in the difference in racquets or should we mentally equip Wills with the most tensile graphite?
There is one characteristic, however, that cannot determine the issue of who might win or lose, for which there is no issue of “better” or “best.”
At Wimbledon at the end of the nineteenth century, at Roland Garros in the 1920s, behind the scenes of Forest Hills in the aftermath of World War II, on a public court in Guangzhou or a leased one in Yaoundé, the tennis players in this book, some current and some from the past, have cast their spells. They may not beat the “No. 1’s,” but they have or had that something extra, that inexplicable force for which there is no measure: charisma.
The quality we call “charisma” is tough to define. The synonyms provided by the thesaurus are just stabs in the dark. These are approximations, absent the oomph of the real deal. Allure seems superficial. Glamour is too close to bling, which is too conspicuous. Fascination is too mild, dazzle too opulent, flash is just obnoxious. Witchcraft and witchery are, even if Roget mentions them, out of the question. The vaguer ones, such as something and it, are getting closer; drawing power may be closer still. The quality we call “charisma” is really a combination of the most apt of these—that is, attracting attention in a positive way.
A friend has pointed out that the concept is both as rich and as amorphous as love. Charisma is that elevating characteristic you cannot quite put your finger on and which endows a few individuals with star quality. It is beyond excellence, deeper than mojo, and exhilarating to witness. Those who possess it have a certain spirit. Their smiles come from deep within. Their body language is different from other people’s; they seem to celebrate their own aliveness.
The impact on others is an essential element of this characteristic. Charismatic people have a magnetism that is revealed during an encounter, whether with another person or a large audience; their intensity boosts our endorphins. We thrill to it; we behold a grace that makes us happy although we are not sure why. Even if we cannot name its constituents, we know it when we feel that frisson.
The philosopher Max Weber writes, “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader.’”2 The concept of charisma derives from the Greek χάρισμα (chárisma), which means “favor freely given” or “gift of grace.” In Christian theology, the giver of the extraordinary endowment that was “charism” is identified specifically as “Holy Spirit.” Whatever its source, charisma is a form of charm that, as Weber explains, has “a mysterious, elusive quality.”
