Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar is a 1995 book by distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell that explores the history and social ethos of men's lawn tennis.

Sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell

Sporting Gentlemen

by E. Digby Baltzell (Author)  Format: Paperback

Tennis is a high-stakes game, played by prodigies identified early and coached by professionals in hopes of high rankings and endorsements. This commercial world is far removed from the origins of the sport. Before 1968―when Wimbledon invited professional players to compete for the first time―tennis was part of a sportsmanship tradition that emphasized character over money. It produced well-rounded gentlemen who expressed a code of honor, not commerce.

 

In this authoritative and affectionate history of men's tennis, distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell recovers the glory of the age. From its aristocratic origins in the late ninteenth century, to the Tilden years, and through a succession of newcomers, the amateur era and its virtues survived a century of democratization and conflict. Sporting Gentlemen examines the greatest players and matches in the history of tennis. Baltzell explores the tennis code of honor and its roots in the cricket code of the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American upper class.

 

This code of honor remained in spite of the later democratization of tennis. Thus, the court manners of the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers at the Old Wimbledon were upheld to the letter by Don Budge and Jack Kramer as well as Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Arthur Ashe. Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money. For all who love the game of tennis, Sporting Gentlemen is both fascinating history and a badly needed analysis of what has made the sport great.

Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar is a 1995 book by distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell that explores the history and social ethos of men's lawn tennis.

Core Themes and Overview

• The Code of Honor: Baltzell traces the roots of tennis etiquette back to the gentlemanly cricket code of the late-19th-century Anglo-American upper class.
• Amateur Era: The book highlights how traditional court manners survived through generations of players, from early figures like the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers to later greats like Don Budge, Jack Kramer, Rod Laver, and Arthur Ashe.
• The Open Era Critique: The final chapter delivers a critical look at modern professional tennis, arguing that commercialization and the "cult of the superstar" replaced traditional values with monetary class distinctions.

As described on Amazon, “Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money.”

 

Barbarians on the Court

 

By Stephen G. Smith

July 9, 1995

Barbarians on the Court

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/09/books/barbarians-on-the-court.html?eafs_enabled=false

July 9, 1995, Section 7, Page 11Buy Reprints

 

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

 

IN late August 1881, 25 gentlemen traveled to Rhode Island to compete in the first official lawn tennis championship of the United States. It was played at the Newport Casino, a graceful tennis complex designed by Stanford White, on Bellevue Avenue, the main strand of high society's summer capital. The players, mostly undergraduates at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn, wore trousers or knickers and long-sleeved shirts, with belts, hats and stockings bearing their club colors. For the next three decades, E. Digby Baltzell writes in "Sporting Gentlemen," the cricket-club aristocracy dominated the championships much as television does today. Play was limited to the morning hours so as not to interfere with other leisure activities; crowds were kept to 3,000, with the best seats reserved for Mrs. Astor's 400 and old-line families from Philadelphia and Boston.

 

But tennis was quickly outgrowing the cozy and complacent confines of exclusive clubs along the Eastern Seaboard and in England. By 1914, the talk of tennis was the Davis Cup, which was being contested by six nations. In what turned out to be a pivotal moment in the history of the game, the challenge round was played at Forest Hills, the new home of the West Side Tennis Club in New York. On the final day of the match between the United States and Australia, the stadium was packed with more than 12,000 cheering spectators. Their boisterous enthusiasm turned to pandemonium when Norman Brookes of Australia dropped his racquet and stuck a finger in each ear. Bottles were thrown from the stands and fans spilled onto the court, with policemen in pursuit. Tennis had been emphatically democratized. The next year the United States championships were moved from Newport to Forest Hills, and the game began an evolution that would culminate, in 1968, in the opening of the major tournaments to professionals.

 

Mr. Baltzell and Peter Bodo both view the changes with regret. In "The Courts of Babylon," Mr. Bodo, a senior writer at Tennis magazine, finds that a "new barbarism" has taken hold of the tour, reducing players from "gentlemen to jerks." Mr. Baltzell, an emeritus professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a well-known chronicler of the WASP aristocracy, longs for the dreamy days when players used wooden racquets, hit white balls and behaved like gentlemen. In his new work of "historical sociology," he sees the ruination of tennis as a portentous social metaphor. "As I write, in our increasingly classless and bureaucratic world, the gentleman's descendants in America and England have abdicated authority, not only over their wives and children but also over their nations and the world," he declares.

 

Mr. Bodo has obviously spent a good deal of time talking with Mr. Baltzell and calls him "the single most important influence on my interpretation of the game." But where the professor brims with intellectual confidence, the journalist is somewhat self-conscious about his pronouncements. "An opinion can be a terrible thing to have," Mr. Bodo writes at the end of his author's note. He spends the rest of the book testing this proposition, with a resulting mixture of genuine insight and inadvertent hilarity. As he writes of Mr. Baltzell: "The sociology of the professional game comes to life like a 3-D comic book when you look through his magic glasses."

 

When Mr. Bodo puts on the magic glasses of sociology himself, he tends to go completely over the top. "New York is full of flesh-eaters," he writes. "It's a thumbs-up, thumbs-down kind of town. Start spreading the news, but watch your back. The dude's got a Glock." Or: "Show me a true Parisian, and I'll show you a man whose veins are clogged with cholesterol sludge and whose heart harbors a secret passion for the accordion. I'll show you a woman who's got a little thing for Rodney Dangerfield. Don't ask why, c'est la vie." Mr. Bodo becomes even more expansive when he strays into psychology. He strolls telepathically through the mind of Gloria Connors as she watches her son Jimmy play: "Perhaps she was entranced by Jimbo's status as an Oedipal avenger come to life, a raging, mother-loving, foulmouthed son who unabashedly, even gleefully, fondled himself like an infant in front of his mother." Hunter S. Thompson never strung his racquet any tighter than Peter Bodo.

 

Mr. Bodo draws freely on the two decades he has spent covering tennis, and he is at his best when analyzing styles of play or relating an anecdote that never made it into the newspapers. He produces a haunting portrait of Bjorn Borg after conducting a routine interview at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan in 1978. The blinds in the lavish suite were drawn tight; the coffee table was littered with half-eaten fruit and dirty dishes; Borg was wearing a track suit that looked slept in; his face was unwashed and his hair hung in oily strands. On impulse Mr. Bodo asked the champion what he thought of Howard Hughes. "I don't know him," Borg replied. "He has a lot of money, huh? Anyway, he seems like a nice guy."

 

Having watched thousands of matches, Mr. Bodo writes not just with an expert's eye but with a finely tuned ear, as in this observation on John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl: "If you closed your eyes during a match between McEnroe and Lendl, it was easy to tell which man occupied either side of the court. McEnroe's footfalls were as silent as those of a cat, while Lendl made an astonishing amount of noise -- as if he were moving furniture."

 

Sizing up Chris Evert's success, Mr. Bodo makes clear that her metronomic stroking and "Ice Maiden" demeanor were only partly responsible. A key ingredient was her unique sense of where she was and where she had to be: "She sure made the court look small." Steffi Graf's "big secret," Mr. Bodo writes, "was that she couldn't play tennis," at least not in the technical sense. But her superior athletic ability and raw power more than compensated for a bad hitch in her serving motion and a defensive underspin backhand -- until the arrival of Monica Seles, "who used two hands off both wings to hit remarkably flat, hard, accurate strokes." Rivals hoped that "as Seles matured she would develop wide hips, substantial thighs and enough height and bulk to cause her problems." Instead, she grew to a well-proportioned 5 foot 9 and reeled off seven victories in ten Grand Slams between 1990 and April 1993, when she was stabbed in the back by a deranged fan wielding a nine-inch-long boning knife. The psychological damage caused by the attack has kept her off the court -- and prevented her from becoming what many experts thought she would be, the greatest woman player ever.

 

MR. BODO loses his way when he writes about the lives of women players off the tennis court. He asserts that the "degeneration and corruption" of the women's tour "has been the most underreported story in tennis in our time," and he sets out to rectify this oversight with three chapters irritatingly titled "The Gals of Babylon." He writes: " 'Now' is a crisis point in women's pro tennis, and now is about stabbings, child abuse, teen-age drug abuse and a shocking rate of attrition." On no fewer than three occasions he says that many or most of the top women players are lesbians. His proofs are few and far between. Andrea Jaeger serves as a flimsy buttress for several of his sensational assertions: she was a teen-age wonder who flamed out early; she "took to carrying a switchblade" ("I didn't even mind," Mr. Bodo says. "Shoot, I was 18 once, too"); and she was supposedly encouraged by her fellow players to embark on a lesbian relationship. Mr. Bodo recounts the familiar story of Jennifer Capriati's sad decline and drug bust. And he does the standard recitation of Martina Navratilova's lesbian lovers. (News flash: Judy Nelson demanded visitation privileges with Navratilova's dogs after the two women split up.) Mr. Bodo's sense of outrage is unconvincing until he comes to the subject of "tennis dads." These sorry creatures, many of them failed athletes, strut in the reflected glory of their teen-age daughters and often sponge off them as well. They can be aggressively exploitative (Stefano Capriati), feckless (Peter Graf) or abusive and potentially dangerous (Jim Pierce).

 

MR. BODO and Mr. Baltzell agree that most of the problems in tennis today can be traced to the amount of money sloshing around the game. Winning a singles title at Wimbledon is worth more than $500,000 -- which, Mr. Bodo reports, is roughly what Pete Sampras was guaranteed for merely showing up at a tournament in oil-rich Qatar, where he promptly lost his first-round match to somebody named Kareem Alami. In financial terms, playing tennis is something players do to get endorsements. As Mr. Bodo points out, Andre Agassi was earning $1 million a month in endorsements before he ever won a Grand Slam event. Small wonder, then, that players sign "patch deals" that make them look, in Mr. Bodo's words, like "a stock car plastered with sponsor logos."

 

Whatever remained of the amateur ideal disappeared on Aug. 30, 1979, in a match at Flushing Meadow, a venue that could be mistaken, Mr. Bodo writes, "for a coal-fired hydroelectric facility somewhere in the Ukraine." The contest pitted John McEnroe, who at the age of 20 had not yet won a Grand Slam, against the 36-year-old Ilie Nastase. As his coach once said, "Ilie doesn't have a brain, he has a bird flying around inside his head," and on this night the bird was more agitated than usual. Egged on by 10,000 beery fans, the players screamed expletives at each other and at the umpire. Nastase was penalized a point, then a game, for protesting calls for minutes at a time; ordered to serve, he simply stood at the base line, prompting the umpire to disqualify him. Amid flying trash and catcalls, the tournament director, William F. Talbert, removed the umpire and ordered play to resume; McEnroe then defeated the distracted Nastase for the second time.

 

The lessons of "the Thursday night massacre" were not lost on McEnroe. "I'll be the first to admit that I did play the system," he told Mr. Bodo. "I manipulated it more than some people realized. . . . In most cases I was fully aware of what I was doing on the court during an outburst, and I knew how I was -- or wasn't -- going to have to pay a price for it." The ruling bodies in tennis ought to heed McEnroe's simple advice: "Really, tennis should be more like baseball. If you go too far, you should get thrown out. And if you really go nuts, you should get suspended."

 

Reading Mr. Baltzell's book is like eavesdropping on a couple of Old Grotonians as they polish off a bottle of port at their club. "But who, I should like to ask, is to say that class snobbery is any worse than classless snobbery?" he writes. "For snobs are often the product of leveling upward and confident ages, while reverse snobbery or slipshod snobbery (in dress, manners, grammar, professional pride and craftsmanship in general) are insidious social diseases of leveling downward and despairing ages such as our own." Mr. Baltzell is also a scholarly cat who keeps getting caught in family trees. For example, the lineage of Richard D. Sears, winner of the first American title in 1881, is traced all the way back to Richard (the Pilgrim) Sears, who settled on Cape Cod in 1637.

 

While Mr. Baltzell may be an unabashed snob, he is by no means a bigot. He comes down hard on well-born WASP's for their frequent anti-Semitism and racism, and correctly notes that these prejudices contributed to the decline of upper-class authority after World War II. He realizes that gentlemen are of all colors and creeds, as he demonstrates when writing about Arthur Ashe. "In the increasingly uncivil quarter-century between his victory at Forest Hills, in 1968, and his tragic death, in 1993," Mr. Baltzell says, "the moral life of Arthur Ashe has constantly renewed my faith in the staying power of the gentlemanly ideal."

 

Bill Tilden presents a quandary for Mr. Baltzell. On the one hand, he came from "pure English stock" (breeding is mentioned so often that "Sporting Gentlemen" sometimes reads like a program for the Westminster Kennel Club show); he was educated at good schools (Germantown Academy and Penn); he was a devotee of the arts, especially music; and, most important, he was "the last cricket-club-bred gentleman to win our National Tennis Championship" (a point made three times). On the other hand, Tilden engaged in "blatant showmanship, occasional outrageous tantrums, unreasonable arrogance, and quarrelsome and intimidating behavior towards linesmen and tennis officialdom in general"; he was also twice convicted and sent to prison for molesting young boys. So much for the good old days; as Mr. Baltzell concludes, "the gentleman and the genius were always at war" in the person of Big Bill Tilden.

 

TENNIS missed a great opportunity in 1933, Mr. Baltzell believes, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association was denied its petition to hold an open tournament at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia. "Like golf, tennis today might have still been a class game," he writes, "held in classy surroundings like the Merion or Germantown cricket clubs rather than in such tasteless surroundings as the Philadelphia Spectrum, the Cow Palace in San Francisco or vulgar Flushing Meadow." Mr. Baltzell insists, improbably, that it's not too late: "The American tennis establishment must concentrate on remaking tennis into an elite and quality game by increasing the quality of the audience by decreasing the stadium size and the money take."

 

A better bet to straighten out tennis, or at least its prima donnas, might be Steve Denton, a touring pro from Texas who, in Mr. Bodo's words, "took it upon himself to be a one-man jerk patrol." He grabbed one jerk by the throat after a match and threatened another with a licking if he came into the locker room (the player went to his hotel without showering or changing). The Association of Tennis Professionals gave Denton its Sportsmanship Award for 1982. In this day and age, that's a bigger victory than a Grand Slam.