‘What about the outlook for the game?’
‘Never been better. It’s huge,’ he said. ‘We’re going into Poland, the Low Countries, North Africa, Valhalla, you name it.’
‘Russia?’
‘Ah! Now you mustn’t get me on that one. See our legal people about that sort of thing.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘See Gayle.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Have a word with Gayle, she knows all about these things.’
There were mixed fortunes for the French on an exciting opening day in ideal conditions. Sarah Bernhardt was businesslike against English hope Enid Blyton and two US-born Parisians Jo Baker and Sylvia Beach had good wins, the exotic Baker seeing off brilliant Canadian Beatrice Lillie who played the match in skates and very nearly won it. Bernhardt described her match as ‘a good hit-out although the real battle here will be against the Germans’.
Baker agrees but is also wary of the Americans. ‘If you’re black and a woman,’ she says, ‘you can’t be too careful of the Americans.’
In the early match on Centre Court, pocket battleship Henri Toulouse-Lautrec accounted for little-known Hungarian Attila József, who played in bare feet and may have thrown himself by taking issue with the custom of taking new balls after five games. ‘There is no need for new balls,’ he said. ‘It is completely unnecessary. These balls are perfectly all right. There are people starving half a kilometre from the stadium and we’re using new balls because they look fluffier? Don’t give me the shits, please.’
And there was a regulation workout on Court 15 for Marcel Duchamp, the rostered sparring partner on this occasion being the tidy Englishman Alan Milne. Milne has a wonderful capacity for rhythm but Duchamp spotted this and jumped him. Bending his knees to hit the ball late in the first set, standing up and taking it early in the second, Duchamp bewildered his opponent at every turn, waiting for him to mount an attack and then systematically dismantling it. Milne understood exactly what had happened:
‘I have rhythm when I play tennis.
We finished the first set, Duchamp and I.
Why am I losing, Duchamp? I asked him.
You need variation, Duchamp replied.
But nursie wouldn’t like that, I said to Duchamp.
Nursie wouldn’t know, he said. Tell a little lie.
I lost the second set when we were out playing
And then I lost the third and saw the rhythm in the score.
Nursie would be pleased. Nursie would be saying,
Alan lost to Duchamp, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4.’
Duchamp had a heavily strapped thigh and was delighted to win in three. He has been practising with versatile doubles partner Sam Beckett, the Irish cricketer, cyclist and chess player. Seeded 2 in the doubles, they claim to be incapable of winning but impossible to defeat. Their practice session today consisted of a brief discussion, some drawings on a napkin and a good-natured dispute about whose turn it was to get the cigarettes.
In less sparkling form was French Davis Cup specialist Jean-Paul Sartre, lucky to scramble to a win over talented American Duke Ellington on Court 2. Ellington made a lot of friends today, Sartre very few indeed. He refuses to compete outside France and even in his own national championship has been known to issue alternative statements of results. He contested line calls, corrected the umpire’s interpretation of the rules and on several occasions smashed the ball straight at his opponent.
Ellington doesn’t predict great things for Sartre. ‘I don’t think he can see properly,’ he said. ‘Look at the way he played. I nearly beat him and I took up the game only six months ago. I’m really in Paris because I want to check out a side-man, and if you’ll excuse me I’m already late.’
Earlier in the day warm favourite Albert Einstein never got out of a trot in dispatching the abstracted Frenchman Jean Arp. Described by friends as a thinker, the affable German with exploding hair had a meteoric career as a junior, highlighted by a win in the Swiss Open two weeks short of his seventeenth birthday.
‘His ground strokes are miraculous,’ commented sometime doubles partner, Italian Enrico Fermi. ‘And he seems to have all the time in the world to play them.’
Einstein has a ballistic first service, unofficially clocked at 400 kilometres per hour, which he refuses to use in competition. ‘Someone could get hurt,’ he said. There is a joke on the tour that one of these days he’ll be seeded twice in the same tournament, which he concedes is a little unusual ‘but not impossible, provided the seedings are moving with a uniform velocity’.
Even though he double-faulted sixteen times today and triple-faulted once in controversial circumstances, he never looked like being broken, while Arp’s service was under constant pressure. In the third set Einstein persistently ran around his forehand and flicked the ball back over Arp’s head as he rushed the net. ‘There’s a blind spot just behind the left shoulder as you’re moving in. If you can land the ball there, your opponent can’t see it at all.’
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Arp later. ‘I’d serve and come in and the ball would disappear. I couldn’t tell where the hell it had gone.’
‘It hadn’t gone anywhere,’ said Einstein. ‘You just couldn’t see it.’
‘I could hear it,’ said Arp.
‘Ah, then it hadn’t gone,’ said Einstein.
‘I didn’t say it had gone,’ said Arp. ‘I said I couldn’t tell where it had gone.’
‘That’s my point,’ said Einstein.
‘I think you’ll find that’s my point, Albert,’ said Arp.
‘Fifteen-all,’ said Einstein and began to giggle.
On the outside courts, the slightly eerie Fred Hitchcock was bundled out in straight sets by a handy black American luxuriating in the unlikely name of Fats Waller, who played like a young man in a big hurry.
But perhaps the biggest news was Willie Maugham, beaten by American Bill Fields in a see-sawing match notable more for the number of shots
