As with Charles V, the sun never seemed to set on Bill Tilden’s reign. It was Jean René Lacoste, a tennis player from Europe, who forced him to abdicate. But it was a gentlemen’s battle
by Raffaello Esposito, translated by Bianca Mundo
Emile Lesieur raised the fur collar of his coat to fend off the wind that was sweeping through Paris in that dark winter of 1928. Months before, he had threatened not to shell out any more money if the stadium was not named after his friend Roland, and his rugby grit had finally got the better of the Stade Français board. A lonely tear fell from his brow and immediately froze on his cheek. Nine years had already passed, the pain had lessened but never subsided. She had known him as a student at the Ecole HEC in Paris and they had bonded in a friendship that was only possible at that age, ‘ … when hope is still long and memory is short’.
In an uninterrupted and chaotic flow, Emile relived the muddy rugby battles, those on his bicycle, the countless laughs and the conspiring glances. Then August 1909 came and Roland discovered the aeroplane and became a creature of the sky. Emile was there on the field at Frejus on 23 September 1913, when his friend took off in that rickety Morane-Saunier type G with 200 litres of petrol and 60 litres of castor oil as lubricant on board aiding to Bizerte, Tunisia, crossing the Mediterranean. Almost eight hours of suffering alongside his wife Marcelle and Jean Cocteau before the news of success blew the cork off the first bottle of Crystal.
Afterwards, the war, the pride at his heroism, the despair at his capture in 1915, the relief at knowing he was alive. The last time they had seen each other, in that late Parisian summer, Emile could hardly recognise him.
Roland Garros, the god of the air, the intrepid hero with the Douglas Fairbanks moustache, struggled to breathe and secretly wore a pair of glasses to read. In vain Clemenceau himself had begged him to stay on the ground, but there was no way. In early autumn he joined the ‘Storks’ group, on 2 October he scored his last victory against the terrible Fokkers and on the 5th he was shot down near Voiziers in the Ardennes. He would have been 30 years old the next day and still rests there today.
In a few months, he reflected, Roland would have its own tennis stadium, but this would not have been possible without René’s exploit the year before. As president of the Stade Français, Emile had been able to watch from a privileged box that gruelling battle, which in the end did not let the blood spilled by the contenders stand out from the red earth of the court. No doubt, he thought, Roland would have liked Lacoste too, had he been able to meet him. Same grit, same inventiveness, and above all the courage to believe in the impossible and succeed at all costs.
Because at the time in tennis the impossible looked like a patrician from Philadelphia. Nobody could beat Bill Tilden with a racket in his hand, but he did. And then again and again. Because at that time tennis was Big Bill and Lenglen, the Patrician from Philadelphia and the Divine from Paris. They never loved each other and never concealed it.
“…I hope there isn’t a bull around,” he said when he saw her playing in her scarlet bandeau and just before infllicting a crushing 6-0 win in a set that was not meant to be competitive. There were angry tears from Suzanne as she left the court but the revenge of French honour was already on the way.
It had the appearance and attitude of a privileged Parisian, the son of the owner of the Hispano-Suiza car company, the Ferrari of that time, and in some ways he was the European mirror of the US champion. For both of them the quote from Alfieri ‘I wanted, I always wanted, I strongly wanted’ would apply.
5 June 1927, Stade Français, Paris
René Lacoste b. W. Tilden 6-4 4-6 5-7 6-3 11-9
Slender, dark skinned, with deep eyes and coiffed hair, Jean-René Lacoste was born on 2 July 1904 in Paris under the zodiac sign of Cancer, a water sign, an element in which the crocodile moves to perfection. He is one of the immortals of tennis, but a book would not be enough to list the multifaceted interests of a mind as sharp as a blade and incapable of stopping.
In a single lifetime, René will be a champion, a globally successful entrepreneur, a fine writer and an inventor. The realisation of one of the first ball-throwing machines in the 1920s was his idea, he patented in 1964 a metal racket that Wilson hastened to acquire and that Jimbo Connors made iconic. In the late 1980s he designed and suggested to Forget a strange racket in the shape of a guitar. Guy was puzzled but with that racket he defeated Pete Sampras in Lyon in the deciding singles match, bringing the Davis Cup back to France after 59 years.
He held racket for the first time at the age of 15, imitating his sister Alidà. He already possessed the spirit of the inventor he was to become, and to grip the racket better, he filed down the handle until it broke… That same year, overseas, Tilden lost the US Championships final to Johnston because of his weak defensive backhand. Bill (not yet Big) then would retire for six months at wealthy friend’s who owned one of the few existing indoor courts, and during that winter he spent eight hours a day hitting only backhands. In his spare time he chopped wood to strengthen his forearm and wrist.
When he emerged from his hermitage in the spring of 1920, his tennis had become a block of granite that no one would be able to crack for the next six years. Two years later not even the amputation of the last phalanx of his right middle finger, following an infected cut, would stop the greatest tennis player of the decade. His laurels piled up and until 1927 he would not lose a single match in Davis and practically never in the other tournaments.
While all this was going on Lacoste was learning. He arranged with his father for three years of freedom to devote himself to tennis, and had he not achieved anything by the time he turned 18, he would have gone to work in a factory. He did not waste a single second of the time he was given. His real strength was that he only recognised himself as an average talent, he knew that everything else had to be built from the ground up and he proved to be a sublime architect.
Equipped with every possible publication on tennis, a concrete wall and a racket Jean-René built a cerebral style of play, based on regularity and the ruthless exploitation of opponents’ weaknesses. For years he mainly used a bicycle for his commute, in order to strengthen his legs and calves for the battles that – he was certain – awaited him on the tennis court.
Emile turned his attention away for a moment from the scaffolding that still supported the building, his gaze blurred as he returned to the battle that had turned the tennis world upside down the previous spring. It was being played for the last time – but nobody knew it yet – at the Stade Français club of which he was president.
The 1920s roared loudly in that Parisian June: perhaps in reaction to the horror of war, the West Europe was experiencing an explosion of creativity and enthusiasm that had few equals in its history. Everything could be done, or so it was believed, and to the rhythm of Satchmo Armstrong’s trumpet, modernity crossed the Atlantic to invade Europe. Freedom, freedom and more freedom at any cost and enjoying life with all the novelties of progress and optimism about the future. It was an unrepeatable, fascinating, revolutionary and dazzling era, which in a few years would be swallowed up in the tsunami of Wall Street.
The two tournament finalists were no different. The red clay of the Stade Français turned into a savannah, a never-ending struggle between the old king and the young pretender. Then the outcome that few could have imagined. He remembered well that already during the warmup there was a deep silence, almost as if the thousands of spectators foresaw what was about to happen. But it seemed impossible, Cochet had beaten Big Bill at home the year before, interrupting a domination that seemed eternal, and now the champion’s canines were oozing blood in search of revenge.
At the start of the match a fight broke out in the stands, some spectators improvised a boxing match over seats and it was Tilden himself who intervened to calm the spirits. A perhaps fatal distraction as Bill immediately lost his serve to love and a very cool Lacoste deftly steered the advantage to a 6-4 win that put him ahead.
Tilden reacts, he is 34 years old and his consistency is no longer as it was, but he has glimpses of pure class and sublime technique that no one can match. To break his opponent’s rhythm, Bill begins to play very short chops alternating with shots that land an inch from the baseline. The distraction caused by a dirigible flying over the court costs him three games in a row but not the set.
One set even, halfway through the third set, all seemed lost. The spectators gasped when, in an attempt to reach yet another sliced and short ball, Lacoste slipped near the net, badly twisting his knee. The Frenchman wobbles, he sits at the sidelines in an unreal silence. Then he resumes playing, but Tilden has realised it was time to put pressure and wins the set that now seems decisive.
The fifteen minutes break is distressing for the French fans who do not know whether their star player will return on court. But those hours spent on the bike saved René, his muscles have held up well, there is no real damage to the knee ligament, and this awareness unleashes adrenalin and courage into his veins. On the contrary, Big Bill knows he doesn’t have much left. Age, battles on court and late hours playing bridge have, in the long run, weakened his legendary stamina. The previous three sets were tough, often exceeded fifty-shot rallies, and so he takes the only route that seems possible.
He decides to give up the fourth set easily to play it all at the final roulette and the plan failed for a small detail, a forehand that would have decreed his success. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Both are now at their limits. The crocodile waits for his moment with only his eyes and nose out of the water while Tilden makes full use of his boundless arsenal to look for the winning chink, without abandoning his usual taste for dramatic controversy. Referee Muhr had sanctioned him three foot faults earlier in the day and at 4-5, before serving, Big Bill glares at him and hisses, “Take a good look at my feet now…”. He then fires four aces in a row.
It looks like the final match of “Rocky”, neither of them wants to go down but it is the old lion who has the trump card first. He breaks in the 17th game and takes a 40-15 lead. Two match points, and the first would be enough if the line judge didn’t call out the longline passing shot would have meant the trophy. Tilden glared at the culprit then realised that it was Henri Cochet and let it go. He later explains that, knowing the man, he could have no doubts about his correctness. Other times.
It’s not over yet but it is over. Lacoste survives and shortly afterwards he is the champion thanks to an incredible double fault by an exhausted Tilden. At the end of the battle, surrounded by reporters, his eyes like a skull hollowed out by fatigue, William Tatem Tilden II declares: ‘Please, say that I’m perfectly satisfied with the result of the match. I have no complaint to make, Lacoste played masterly tennis and he is a real kind gentleman’.
Beaten, but never defeated.
