A Contempt of Court

By Tom Callahan

Tennis sometimes seems as much a scandal as a sport

In consecutive weeks, major sports events an ocean and a world apart stepped ("one leg at a time," as the sportswriters say) into trouser controversies. Early last week, during the final round of the U.S. Open Golf Championship at Oakmont, Pa., Forrest Fezler ducked into a portable comfort station after finishing the 17th hole and emerged to play the last hole historically (also horrendously) in shorts. Last week at Wimbledon, England, where tennis shorts have been customary since 1946, Trey Waltke competed in long white Bill Tilden-like flannels, complete with an old school tie for a sash, until Ivan Lendl excused him in the second round, 6-4, 6-2, 6-3. "Nice pants," Lendl said as they shook hands.

The different stirrings caused by these incidents were intriguing. Fezler's fellow golfers, presuming that he was merely tweaking the dandruffy officials of golf, were actually surprised to learn that Fezler, in fact, had an endorsement contract with a company that makes shorts. On the other hand, or leg, everyone in tennis, the players, the tournament directors, the promoters, the agents, the sponsors, the groupies, the drug dealers and the reporters, were flabbergasted to find out that Waltke did not have a clothing contract, that he had done it just for fun. Hardly anyone could recall the last time a tennis player did anything for fun.

As Waltke's costume signified, the decidedly un-Victorian game of tennis is visiting its past again, spending a 97th fortnight at Wimbledon. Last week, on just one typical afternoon at the old club, eighth-seeded Vitas Gerulaitis lost, chucked his racquet into the stands and refused to talk to anybody. Fifteenth-seeded Hank Pfister, able to put more top spin on his racquet, bounced it off the spongy grass court 15 ft. into the sky, across a fence and into the audience. He also lost, owing to a warning for "racquet abuse," a point's deduction for "an audible obscenity" and a delay of game penalty that cost him a tie breaker and a set. "You cannot default the No. 1 or No. 2 seed because they are the life of the tournament," complained Pfister afterward. "Tournaments don't need a guy like me."

Nobody could argue with that. By the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds, he means Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, but especially McEnroe, who almost at that precise moment was coiled at the foot of an umpire's chair threatening to walk out of the tournament. In an injured voice, McEnroe said later, "I was warned for delay of game just for trying to put grass back into the hole I made." By the way, he had just gouged the turf with his racquet.

Connors worries about tennis authorities being too inhibiting to the free-spirited. "Don't corral the guy," he pleads, meaning McEnroe. "If you cut down [Ilie] Nastase, if you cut down McEnroe"--if you cut down Connors--"you are cutting down the most entertaining personalities in tennis. It's got so that every time you do something, you're fined, you're suspended. It's tough to breathe. I can't take the weight on my back." Since Connors is frequently described as having matured at 30, it is surprising to hear that he is straining so terribly under the pressures of civilization. "Mature is a bad word," he says. "I never want to grow up. I always want to stay the way I am."

Perpetual adolescence is the tennis players' manifesto, but the bad news is that it might not even be the worst problem in the sport. In fact, it may not even be seeded. Though Britishers might be shocked to think that there is anything in tennis less becoming than McEnroe, the game probably is at its prettiest for Wimbledon. It is possible that there are only three moments of legitimate professional tennis all year: the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. The rest may well be Roller Derby.

Recently the Men's International Professional Tennis Council levied two loud penalties that have rattled the business. Frenchman Yannick Noah was suspended for 42 days and fined $20,000 for failing to show up at a tournament last May. Guillermo Vilas, an Argentine who lives like a prince ($932,150 official winnings last year) and sometimes dates princesses, was suspended one year and fined $20,000 for accepting appearance money to play in a tournament in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The players seem shocked that anyone is shocked by appearance money. Gerulaitis is unusually eloquent on the subject: "If a tournament uses his name, his picture, shots of his matches for the past six months, what's wrong with McEnroe getting a fee?" For one thing, it is against the Grand Prix rules. Harold Solomon, president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, likens it to political "graft." If a player is assured of a sum larger than the first prize just for showing up, his incentive to win is naturally lessened. Gerulaitis answers brightly, "What's the difference in prizefighting? Say a tennis player gets $100,000 every tournament he plays, do you think he'll get it the next year if he loses? If you're ranked 20th, your exhibition money goes down too."

Exhibition matches are an other murky story. In his recently published book on the tennis tour, Short Circuit, Michael Mewshaw quotes M. Marshall Happer III, administrator of the Pro Tennis Council, as saying, "I think all exhibitions are fixed." Excerpted in Harper's magazine and elsewhere, Mewshaw's book has replaced the weather as the common subject at Wimbledon. It is the account of a tennis buffs disillusionment when he discovers that everything in men's tennis is rotten: the strong-arming for appearance money, the dubious clinics and commercial deals to launder the money, the cooperation of umpires in protecting the investment, the splitting of prizes, the prearranging of exhibition results, the "tanking" of unlucrative doubles matches merely to catch a plane.

As for the women, the picture is slightly less corrupt but hardly more attractive. The gaudy pay has induced the parents of female children not to wait for bones to mature before turning them out as professionals. Before there was prize money for the major tournaments (1968), there was under-the-table money, but looking back, it was a charming chicanery. Now there is both, but no charm and no honor.

--By Tom Callahan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.