Eisenstein has a day to recover before again stepping up to the plate. ‘And I’ll need it,’ he said. ‘I got so tired at one stage I looked up at the crowd in the terraces and they seemed to be moving, running up and down the steps, there were women, old men, children, there was a pram.’
‘I had a similar experience,’ said O’Neill, ‘only everyone up there was my father.’
Cole Porter is one of the few Americans here who hits a single-handed backhand and uses a racquet with a wooden frame. He has no sponsorship and seeks none. ‘Sponsors’ clothing is hideous and their intentions are dishonourable in the extreme,’ he explained. He describes himself as an amateur professional. ‘I don’t do this for a living,’ he said. ‘I play only for money.’ His consistent, elegant tennis today overwhelmed the Argentinian Jorge Borges, who couldn’t see how he could lose.
Borges has won his own national championship a record fifteen times, has always performed well in Europe and has all the shots. ‘There are two types of Borges,’ said Borges. ‘The one who divides everything up into two parts, and the one who doesn’t. It is sometimes difficult to know which one I am being. I don’t, for example, know which of the two is making this statement.’
Two other Americans with strong French connections, real or imagined, were up against each other today when Bill Faulkner, ‘from Jefferson County, Mississippi, get that down, not America, Mississippi’, met Man Ray, whose years in Philadelphia were followed by a lengthy period in Paris, honing new techniques. Ray has many friends here and in some respects is quite a French player. An image of him at the French Open two years ago at the northern end of the court in the late afternoon, outlined in shadow and flicking a gorgeous drive past his opponent, is still posted on the tournament’s website. Faulkner says he was also here as a younger player, with a Canadian airforce team, although there is no record of any Faulkner in the Canadian squad during the period. Ray played some exquisite tennis but Faulkner simply outlasted him.
‘I didn’t outlast him,’ he said later. ‘I beat him.’
André Breton was beaten in five by the rapidly improving Christopher Isherwood, one of the few English players at this event who has never cracked a Davis Cup berth. ‘I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘I live in LA, I’m a gay Hindu. I can’t think what might be holding me back.’ One thing is for sure. It won’t be his tennis.
Day 13
Heidegger v. Marx • Chesterton v. Auden • Rushdie v. Pound • Orwell v. Arlen
The first-round men’s matches were all completed today, roughly on schedule after some were moved to outside courts to make up time lost to rain delays.
When it comes to power serving, German Martin Heidegger is a benchmark. He has a huge shoulder turn and generates enormous height on his action. Drawn against American Groucho Marx, he peeled off a succession of aces to the obvious satisfaction of German administrators. Not much is known about Marx but late in the second set he began to pick the Heidegger serve early and hit it on the up. By the third set Marx was running around his backhand. By the fourth set he was running around his accountant. He was trying to get his accountant to run around his backhand when the match finished. Heidegger was furious and said he thought he was being mocked.
‘Smart fellow,’ said Groucho. ‘Pity we won’t be seeing more of him.’
The very dextrous Englishman Gilbert Chesterton, in the twilight of his career now, gave his countryman Wystan Auden the mother of all surprises on Court 4 this afternoon. He guessed that his best chance against Auden was to come out with his britches on fire. It very nearly worked but Auden is a volume and through-put man and, once he gets his eye in, big Wystan can hit the ball all day. At 2–5 in the third he came out smoking.
‘The way he understood the match rather than the games was interesting,’ Chesterton said. ‘I haven’t seen that before. Most players will get upset if they lose a lot of games. Auden had a much better sense of the match than I did.’
A hastily organised exhibition match between Salman Rushdie and Ezra Pound, planned for tonight and set up as a showcase for a prodigious young talent and one of the great masters of the modern game, has had to be postponed. Pound is openly reviled by many players for remarks he made on Italian radio, although the real problem is the threat from an unnamed group believed to be based in Morocco to ‘take out the entire stadium’ if any match involving Rushdie is broadcast on network television. Pound rejected a proposal to stage the fixture at another venue. ‘I’m not playing in a false beard on some up-country cow paddock just because this guy can’t keep his mouth shut,’ said Pound. ‘You people couldn’t organise a shit. In Germany they’d fill the joint stiff with uniformed police, play the match and anyone who doesn’t like it gets a faceful of footwear.’
‘I don’t think that’s altogether consistent of him,’ said Rushdie. ‘He’s hardly in a position to lecture others on how to keep their mouths shut. He’d have been rubbed out long ago if he hadn’t pleaded insanity, which, if I might assay a purely personal opinion, he’s in a very good position to do.’
‘It’s a terrible shame,’ said Nike supremo Nietzsche. ‘It looks like being one of the great grudge-matches. I’m going to be there, wherever it is.’
And would he care to pick a winner?
‘Too hard. It depends on who is faster. And who is fitter, I think,’ he
