Winner Take All

THE CLUBHOUSE looks out over a square mile or so of grass courts banked by ridges of trees and hills beyond. It is a quiet, sedate club for the Boston mainline. You can spot some of the members by their leathery tans, squared postures and clothes in conservative good taste. The others you know by their familiarity with the place--an owners' familiarity.

Everybody else is the public. The public is of a different breed than the natives. It is made of outsiders, invaders, barred access to the club lest they overrun it. But this is no motley ball-park public. It is a public with money, or at least with pretensions to it. The men wear Fred Perry sportshirts and the women have tennis tans. They have come, not just to see the pros, but to see Longwood, and to mix with it.

The elitism, you see, has hardly gone out of tennis. Yes, TV is giving it a vast public audience. Yes, tennis has become booming big business. Yes, professionalism has taken much of the "gentlemanliness" out of the sport. And yes, it is bigger--it has from Southhampton to Palm Beach to Grosse Pointe become the sport of the suburbs.

Now any serious tennis player grows up in the shadows of this elitism. Most of the biggest tournaments are held in the richest spots of the country--Marion, Piping Rock, Orange, Lake Forest. Week to week the players are passed from one plush club to the next, mannikins for the wealthy onlookers.

But this other life, the world he travels through, never matters much to a tennisplayer. He doesn't really understand all its old money; the only part that touches him is its love of a winner. This world bothers for him, recognizes him, only as long as he wins, and he is made comfortable by its patronage. Winning, then, is the tennisplayers stake in an identity. Losers count for nothing.

* * *

SIX YEARS AGO, Jimmy Connors (20 year old winner of Longwood, 1973) was a winner in the making. Straight out of Bellevue, Ill. Connors had money, but he was not a rich boy. Because Connors needed to win. A rich boy is reared in the tradition of the gentleman sportsman--where it is gauche to want to win too badly, and where giving all to one sport at the exclusion of the others is missing out on the good life. He doesn't need to win because he is already there. But Connors was brought up under the pressures of the insecure new money., getting there.

His parents were classic "tennis parents"--his mother, a small birdlike woman with platinum hair piled high, accompanied him everywhere on tour, watching his every match, fretting over every bad call, bugging officials, scouting out the games of other players. She waited by each court he played on ready with a towel or clean shirt, advice or encouragement, as if afraid her Johnny would be gypped. But the anxiety with which she so jealously supervised the progress of her son went deeper than this--it was as if she could capture through his success a dream that had eluded her.

If Connors' parents pushed him to win, they at least pushed positively. Dickie Stockton's (21 years old from N.Y.) father, practically literally, whipped him into winning. Mr. Stockton was maniacal about it, maniacal to the point of disowning his son for defeat. When Dickie was 13, playing the semifinals of the 14 & under Nationals in Chattanooga, he went three sets in a match he could have won in two. Back then, when he almost never lost a set, it caused him a good sulk. So after the match, going dogtailed to find his father who had disappeared from courtside in the middle of the third set, he was glowering a bit, in sore need of congratulation. And everybody else was congratulating him. But he found his father raging upon the roof. Mr. Stockton turned his back on his son and left Chattanooga that day, refusing to speak to him, refusing even to wish him luck for his final.

* * *

THE ATTENTION Connors got from his mother must have embarrassed him. Most of the other players travelled alone. They were disdainful of such nursery stuff, and they braved their freedom like lone fighters. And when they would talk, between matches, about who lived wildest, who had drunk the most or screwed the most the night before, Jimmy would be in there with the noisiest. A skinny kid with a loud edge to his voice, you knew his mother had got him to bed early. He talked cocky and played the man to convince himself that he was.

Connors was molded straight, all American. Stockton was never as readable. He was usually sullen-faced, as if nursing some hatred or hurt inside. He didn't swagger when he walked like the others, or hang about in packs looking for Action. At tournament dances he would stand quietly with his hands in his pockets and watch the band. He'd answer congratulations with gruff monosyllabics and then avert his eyes. But his growl wasn't hostile, neither was it shy. His slowness to make friends came out of something deeper. He acted like someone angry inside, all the time. You respected Stockton, you laughed with Connors.

The differences in their personalities showed up in the different games they played. Connors was a brassy player, a big hitter who missed a lot. He played a wild game, laying it all on the line on every shot, high on a devil's dare. Down 6-5 and receiving in the third set he would hit out and go for winners. And on match point he'd rush the net on a straight line and curve short to crosscourt an underspin backhand off his toes. He spiced up his play with plenty of theatrics on the side--yelling, swearing, screaming red-faced, slamming balls into the net and over the fence. He smashed several rackets a season and was usually a borderliner for a bad behavior disqualification. He was anything but cool.

Stockton's temper was just as evil, but he controlled it better. He didn't explode, he boiled. And so did his game. He played to a tempo, tuning it, gaging it, then throwing it out of kilter to come in for the big one. He was a heavy hitter who didn't rush his points, or throw-away shots with chancy acrobatics. He played like a wolf stalking his prey, always the challenged, never the challenger. And he was 17 before anyone his age really could put up that challenge.

* * *

WHY STOCKTON has stuck it out as long as he has is a puzzle. Certainly his father has not let up his ugly pressure--as late as Dickie's last year in the juniors Mr. Stockton was still mortifying him in public. And the whole family has felt the trauma of the tension. Mrs. Stockton has fought her husband's tyranny with everything in her. At the Canadian Nationals five years ago, while Dickie's younger sister, Donna, was playing, Mr. Stockton stuck a racket through the fist of his tousle-haired three year old and was tossing tennis balls at him, trying to get this kid who half-crawled to swing a flat forehand. Meanwhile Mrs. Stockton kept trying tried to intercept the tosses with mad clutching movements. And she kept shrieking, "You're not going to get this one! You're not going to wreck this one like you wrecked the others!"

* * *

AT LONGWOOD, Stockton met Connors in the quarterfinals. Connors had upset Smith in the first round, and the winner would meet Richey in the semis. They were playing for maybe the fiftieth time, but this one counted for more than most. Stockton never got started. Both were edgy, hitting too soon. But Stockton was taking his misses more to heart than Connors. He let them wear down his pace, and he trudged ever heavier from side to side on game changes. He grew cautious when his anger should have triggered an offensive--hugging the backcourt when he should have attacked from the net, trying to outhit with loping topspins when he needed bullets. Connors wasn't beating him, he was eating himself out on the court. He played like the old Dickie grown tired too soon.

He was stormy faced when he lost. And Mrs. Stockton, sitting anonymous in General Admissions, tried to hide the tears she cried. A half hour later Connors, high on his success, is surrounded in the pressroom. The Stockton family, minus Mr., waits for Dickie on the clubhouse porch, looking out over the grass now singed dusky by the sun's going down. He barely acknowledges them as he trudges by, towel draped around his neck for a shower. How do you greet a beaten Stockton when all the customary reassurances, the buck ups, the next times, the good fights, come as so much rubbing in of failure?

IN THE CLUBHOUSE the dining room fills up with club members, USLTA officials, players in street clothes. The players stick together. The talk everywhere is tennis, but the players talk it differently than the rest. The interchangers are curt as if in code -- Connors is hot, Lutz out, Smith down, Richey tight, Ashe loose, Graebner coming back up, Alexander pushed, Reissen clutched, Sullivan is a fish, Connors is on top. It is a language that comes out of living though a life together, knowing from the inside all the levels of the game. And knowing that they all will at one time or another have to face each other as opponents, that tennis is a merry go round of short lived success. It is knowing finally - the knowing at the heart of big time tennis - that the winners win alone. But where will they play to win, especially the ones like Connors who need to win, once they are finished in the game?

In a corner Ashe jokes with two pot bellied bearded black men. When they leave he sits silent beside his blonde wife. It is understood between them that there is to be no talk. Ashe is 30 now, and he is waiting to play his semifinal against Graebner. He has played Graebner maybe 100 times - they grew up together. They've got 11 years more experience behind them than Connors or Stockton, and they have played a whole history on the revolving wheel that Connors and Stockton have just begun to ride. Ashe looks distant, self-absorbed, steeling himself to concentration. After fifteen years he faces another match with another bout of pre-game nerves. He is called, jumps up skittishly and disappears. Then Graebner, big and bull-boned, saunters in and sinks heavily into the chair Ashe just vacated. He stares into space slowly tapping his foot.

The author is an ex-tournament tennis player who played for 9 years the same national circuit that Connors and Stockton travelled.