As Fred Perry came back into the dressing room after becoming the first
Englishman to win Wimbledon in twenty-five years, he heard a club official
murmur to his opponent, Jack Crawford: “The better man lost”. Crawford, a
popular, easy-going Australian and the outgoing champion, was given a bottle
of champagne. Perry claimed that he was left empty-handed. The All-England
Club members’ tie, automatically awarded to the new champion, was left
unceremoniously draped over the back of a chair, as though nobody on the
committee could actually bear to present it. When Perry turned professional
in 1936 after retaining the title for the next two years, his membership was
immediately withdrawn, with almost audible relief exhaled from blazered
breasts.
This was, it is true, an automatic consequence of the venomous war between the
amateur officials and the professional promoters that continued to rage in
the world of tennis for over thirty years. “Swapping glory for gold” was
only slightly less bad than abandoning British citizenship and becoming an
American three years later, which Perry also did. The American officials
were just as fanatical. Their greatest champion of the period, Ellsworth
Vines, having turned pro, was strong-armed out of Forest Hills when he
arrived to do a radio commentary. But there was something about Perry that
provoked especial animosity from the half-colonels and commanders who ran
British tennis then.
It was mostly a question of snobbery and class hatred, twin contagions which
had their epicentre in SW19. Perry was not forgiven for having gone to
Ealing County School rather than Rugby or Repton, or for his father having
been a Labour MP. Sam Perry was the most upright and honourable man
imaginable. He started work in a Cheshire cotton mill at the age of ten on a
shilling a week, devoted his life to the Co-Operative movement and declined
a peerage. Yet even this patriotic and moderate-minded public servant had to
put up with Young Conservatives in dinner jackets yelling at his election
meetings, “Which flag do you stand for, Perry, the red flag or the Union
Flag?”.
Fred was a far more abrasive, driven and unscrupulous character than his
father. What he was also not forgiven for was his determination to win
whatever it took. This included not only intense physical preparation
scarcely known among his fellow players, but also a willingness to twist the
truth and, not least, outrageous gamesmanship. He would try anything to
demoralize his opponents from the moment they came on court, and then he
would grind them into the dust after they were beaten.
After defeating Crawford, he turned a cartwheel and hurdled the net to show
how little the match had taken out of him, the first example of this
triumphalist gambit since copied by the jockey Frankie Dettori and every
centre forward who can manage it without doing in his knee. When his
opponent played an ungettable shot, Perry would say “Very clevah” in a
sarcastic tone. Quite early in the knock-up, he would call out to his
opponent “any time you’re ready”, indicating that he needed scarcely a
minute’s practice. Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque, then a little past his
prime but still a formidable opponent and gamesmaster extraordinaire, liked
to make great play of swapping between a number of berets that he brought on
court before strolling over to talk to the pretty girls in the crowd.
Playing him on his home clay at Roland Garros, Perry followed him to the
umpire’s chair where he himself put on a silly big peaked cap, then chased a
smash from Borotra over the barrier to finish in the lap of a gorgeous model
who had been brought along for the purpose. He jeered at umpires as rudely
as any Connors or McEnroe. When he fell down, he rolled over on his back as
exaggeratedly as any Chelsea striker diving for a penalty. Although normally
immaculate, he irritated the finicky Baron Gottfried von Cramm in their
Wimbleon final by leaving the lining of his trouser pocket hanging out – and
won the most one-sided final ever. Nothing, though, quite equalled his
bribing the court marker in El Paso to move the service line three inches
nearer the net, so that the big-serving Ellsworth Vines thundered down a
series of faults.
But Perry kept on winning. He was the first man in the modern era to retain
his Wimbledon title, the first man to win all four Grand Slam tournaments.
He and Bunny Austin (also stripped of his All-England membership, for
joining the Moral Rearmament movement, and becoming a conscientious
objector) held the Davis Cup for four years, with Perry never losing a
match. If he had not turned pro, his tally of titles would surely have
equalled that of Rod Laver and Pete Sampras and Roger Federer.
Just as remarkable was Perry’s already having won the world table tennis
championships in Budapest at the age of nineteen, in front of an incredulous
crowd who had never seen a Hungarian beaten. Perry had taught himself the
game and had never won any tournament before. Admittedly, the world
championship was still fairly rudimentary. It had only started three years
earlier in Memorial Hall off Fleet Street and had initially been billed as
the European championships, but eight Indian students turned up and asked to
take part. Some of the competitors did not bother to change out of their
suits and shoes.
When Perry took up lawn tennis, again he taught himself, with the result that
he played the game pretty much like ping pong, with a backhand like a
butcher chopping liver and a forehand which came over the ball almost on the
half-volley and smothered it with top spin. Peter Ustinov, a lifelong Perry
fan, remarked that “he took the ball so early that it seemed almost as
unfair as bodyline bowling to those who regarded tennis as a kind of
prescribed choreography in which the strictest orthodoxy was de rigueur”.
Jack Kramer, champion of a later generation, believed that Perry’s forehand
was such a pernicious stroke that it “screwed up men’s tennis in England for
generations to come”. When I played a few games forty years later with two
ex-Davis Cup players who had played with and against Perry, I was startled
by the jerky, abbreviated swings with which they dispatched the ball to the
most unlikely corners of the court. I assumed then that this was their
technique for coping with old age, but perhaps it was Perry’s influence
which turned the 1930s into the era of clipped swings just as it was the era
of clipped accents.
The Last Champion was no doubt conceived not only to celebrate the centenary
of Perry’s birth but in the hope that this year at last there might be
another British player with the grit, speed and ingenuity to win Wimbledon.
It is striking that Andy Murray has, like Perry, come a long way without so
far winning the public’s heart. The book is worth reading, in any case, not
just for the portrait of the unstoppable Fred but for the easy-flowing
manner in which Jon Henderson, the doyen of tennis correspondents, evokes
the glamour of the sporting 1930s, a much needed counterpoint to the low
dishonest side of the decade. Perry was perhaps the first modern sportsman
to take full advantage of his celebrity, making a splash in nightclubs from
Paris to Hollywood and marrying into showbusiness four times, in between
stepping out with Marlene Dietrich, Loretta Young, Bette Davis and even Jean
Harlow, who suggested they give dinner a miss.
Henderson is good on the smoking too. Bunny Austin was so nervous when Perry
was playing a crucial Davis Cup match against the French that he
chain-smoked throughout, while his wife, the actress Phyllis Konstam, found
herself puffing at two cigarettes at once. When Perry won the first of his
three US titles, his opponent, again Jack Crawford, wandered over to chat to
his wife during the break players then took after the third set, and they
relaxed with a cigarette. Perry himself preferred his pipe, which became
almost as much his trademark as it was for Stanley Baldwin and Harold
Wilson. When he went into sportswear, he suggested that the pipe should be
his emblem, following Lacoste’s crocodile, which Henderson says was the
first brand icon on a garment. Perry reluctantly accepted the LTA’s laurel
wreath instead. That too became an instant hit. I recall the pride with
which I wore my first Fred Perry shirt and being put out when the art master
said “what’s that seaweed round your nipple?”. It seems somehow appropriate
that, fifty years later, the Fred Perry logo (now owned by a Japanese firm),
like the Burberry check, should have become a must-have for hoodies and
skinheads, an indispensable emblem of classless class.
Perry was not the only sportsman of his day to foreshadow the transition to
ruthlessness. Don Bradman, Douglas Jardine and Gordon Richards also believed
in winning at all costs. But Fred lacked the dourness of modern
professionals. He had an innocent gaiety, and ultimately he didn’t give much
of a damn. What he believed was that you should be able to go anywhere and
do anything. Which he more or less did. In his way Fred, like his father,
turned out to be an example to us all.
Jon Henderson
THE LAST CHAMPION
The Life of Fred Perry
292pp. Yellow Jersey. £18.99.
978 0 224 08253 2
Ferdinand Mount’s most recent novels include The Condor’s Head,
published in 2007. A memoir, Cold Cream: My early life and other mistakes,
was reissued in paperback earlier this year.
