Cetre Court

a fortnight on the lawns of wimbledon

Hoad on court five, weathered and leonine, has come from Spain, where he lives on his tennis ranch in the plains of Andalusia. Technically, he is an old hero trying a comeback but, win or lose, with this crowd it is enough of a comeback that Hoad is here. There is tempestuous majesty in him, and people have congregated seven deep around his court just to feel the atmosphere there and to see him again. Hoad serves explosively, and the ball hits the fence behind his opponent without first intersecting the ground. His precision is off. The dead always rise slowly. His next serve splits the service line. Hoad is blasting some hapless Swiss into submission. As he tosses the ball up to serve again, all eyes lift above the court and the surrounding hedges, the green canvas fences, the beds of climbing roses, the ivy-covered walls--and at the top of the ball's parabola, it hangs for an instant in the sky against a background of half-timbered houses among plane trees and poplars on suburban hills. Rising from the highest hill is the steeple of St. Mary's Church, Wimbledon, where Hoad was married 16 years ago. He swings through the ball and hits it very deep. "Fault." Hoad's wife, Jenny, and their several children are at the front of the crowd beside the court, watching with no apparent dismay as Hoad detonates his spectacularly horizontal serves.

Smith, in a remote part of the grounds, is slowly extinguishing Jaime Fillol. Tall, straightforward, All-American, Stan Smith is ranked number one in the United States. He grew up in Pasadena, where his father sold real estate. A fine basketball player, Smith gave it up for tennis. He is a big hitter who thinks with caution. Under the umpire's chair is his wallet. The locker rooms of Wimbledon are only slightly less secure than the vaults of Zurich, but Smith always takes his wallet with him to the court. Fillol, a Chileno, supple and blue-eyed, says "Good shot" when Smith drives one by him. Such remarks are rare at Wimbledon, where Alphonse would have a difficult time finding Gaston. The players are not, for the most part, impolite, but they go about their business silently. When they show appreciation of another player's shot, it is genuine. There is no structure to Fillol's game. Now he dominates, now he crumbles. Always he faces the big, controlled, relentless power of the all-but-unwavering Smith. Smith does not like to play on these distant courts close to the walls of the Wimbledon compound. The wind rattles the ivy and the ivy sometimes rattles Smith--but hardly enough to save Fillol.

John Alexander has brown hair that shines from washing. It hangs straight and touches the collar of his shirt in a trimmed horizontal line. The wind gusts, and the hair flows behind him. Not yet 20, he is tall, good-looking, has bright clear eyes and could be a Shakespearean page. In his right hand is a Dunlop. He drives a forehand deep cross-court. There is little time for him to get position before the ball comes back--fast, heavy, fizzing with topspin.

In Alexander's mind, there is no doubt that the man on the other side of the net is the best tennis player on earth. He hit with him once, in Sydney, when Laver needed someone to warm him up for a match with Newcombe. But that was all. He has never played against him before, and now, on the Number One Court, Alexander feels less the hopeless odds against him than a sense of being honored to be here at all, matched against Laver in the preeminent tournament of lawn tennis. The Number One Court is one of Wimbledon's two stadiums, and it is a separate closed world, where two players are watched in proximity by 7000 pairs of eyes. Laver is even quicker and hits harder than Alexander had imagined, and Alexander, in his nervousness, is over-hitting. He lunges, swings hard and hits wide.

Laver is so far ahead that the match has long since become an exhibition. Nonetheless, he plays every point as if it were vital. He digs for gets. He sends up topspin lobs. He sprints and dives for Alexander's smashes. He punches volleys toward the corners and, when they miss, he winces. He is not playing against Alexander. He is playing against perfection. This year, unlike other years, he does not find himself scratching for form. He feels good in general and he feels good to be here. He would rather play at Wimbledon than anywhere else at all, because, as he explains, "It's what the atmosphere instills here. At Wimbledon things come to a pitch. The best grass. The best crowd. The royalty. You all of a sudden feel the whole thing is important. You play your best tennis."

Laver, playing Alexander in the second round, is in the process of defending the Wimbledon title. In the history of this sport, no player has built a record like Laver's. There have been only three grand slams--one by Budge, two by Laver. Wimbledon is the tournament the players most want to win. It is the annual world championship. Budge won Wimbledon twice. Perry won it three times. Tilden won it three times. Laver has won Wimbledon four times and no one at Wimbledon this afternoon has much doubt that he is on his way to his fifth championship. There are 128 men in this tournament, and 127 of them are crowded into the shadow of this one small Australian. Winning is everything to tennis players, although more than 99 percent of them are certain losers--and they expect to lose to him. Laver, who has a narrow and delicate face, freckles, a hawk's nose, thinning red hair and the forearm of a Dungeness crab, is known to all of them as Rocket. Alexander, who is also Australian and uses a Dunlop no doubt because Laver does, has just aced the Rocket twice and leads him 40--love. To prepare for this match, Alexander hit with Roger Taylor, who is left-handed, and practiced principally serving to Taylor's backhand. Alexander serves again, to Laver's backhand. When Laver is in trouble, fury comes into his game. He lashes out now and passes Alexander on the right. He passes Alexander on the left. He carries him backward from 40--love to advantage out. Alexander runs to the net under a big serve. A crosscourt backhand goes by him so fast that his racket does not move. In the press section, Roy McKelvie, dean of English tennis writers, notifies all the other tennis writers that beating Laver would be a feat comparable to the running of the first four-minute mile. The match is over. "Thank you," Laver says to Alexander at the net. "I played well." A person who has won two grand slams and four Wimbledons can say that becomingly. The remark is honest and therefore graceful. Alexander took four games in three sets. "I've improved. I've learned more possibilities," he says afterward. "It should help me. The improvement won't show for a while, but it is there."

Roger Taylor leans against the guard-rail on the sun-deck roof of the Players' Tea Room. He is 25 feet above the ground--the Players' Tea Room is raised on concrete stilts--and from that high perspective he can see almost all the lawns of Wimbledon. There are 16 grass courts altogether, and those that are not attended with grandstands are separated by paved walkways ten feet wide. Benches line the edges of the walkways. Wimbledon is well designed. Twenty-five thousand people can move about in its confined spaces without feeling particularly crowded. Each court stands alone and the tennis can be watched at point-blank range. The whole compound is somehow ordered within ten acres and all paths eventually lead to the high front façade of the Centre Court, the name of which, like the name Wimbledon itself, is synecdochical. "Centre Court" refers not only to the ne plus ultra tennis lawn but also to the entire stadium that surrounds it. A three-story dodecagon with a roof that shelters most of its seats, it resembles an Elizabethan theater. Its exterior walls are alive with ivy and in planter boxes on a balcony above its principal door-way are rows of pink and blue hydrangeas. Hydrangeas are the hallmark of Wimbledon. They are not only displayed on high but also appear in flower beds among the outer courts. In their pastel efflorescence, the hydrangeas appear to be geraniums that have escalated socially. When the Wimbledon fortnight begins each year, London newspapers are always full of purple language about the green velvet lawns and the pink and blue hydrangeas. The lawns are tough and hard and frequently somewhat brown. Their color means nothing to the players or to the ground staff, and this is one clue to the superiority of Wimbledon courts over the more lumpy but cosmetic sods of tennis lawns elsewhere. The hydrangeas, on the other (continued on page 246) Centre Court (continued from page 104) hand, are strictly show business. They are purchased for the tournament.

Taylor is watching a festival of tennis from the roof of the tearoom. Szorenyi against Morozova, Roche against Ruffels, Brummer against O'Hara, Drysdale against Spear--he can see 14 matches going on at the same time, and the cork-popping sound of the tennis balls fills the air. "This is the greatest tournament in the world," he says. "It is a tremendous thrill to play in it. You try to tune yourself up for it all year." Taylor is somewhat unusual among the people milling around him on the sun deck. For the most part, of course, they are aliens and their chatter is polyglot. Hungarians, Japanese, Finns, Colombians, Greeks--they come from 40 nations, while home to Taylor is a three-room flat in Putney, just up the road from Wimbledon. Taylor is a heavy-set man with dark hair and a strong, quiet manner. His father is a Sheffield steelworker. His mother taught him his tennis. And now he is seeded 16th at Wimbledon. It took him five sets to get out of the first round, but that does not seem to have shaken his composure. His trouble would appear to be in front of him. In the pattern of the draw, the 16th seed is the nearest seeded player to the number-one seed, which is tantamount to saying that Taylor's outlook is pale.

On the promenade below, a Rolls-Royce moves slowly through the crowd. It contains Charlie Pasarell, making his appearance to compete in singles. Is Pasarell so staggeringly rich that he can afford to ride to his matches in a Rolls-Royce? Yes--as it happens--but the Rolls in this case is not his. It is Wimbledon's and it has been sent by the tennis club to fetch him. Wimbledon is uniquely considerate toward players, going to great lengths to treat them as if they were plenipotentiaries from their respective nations and not gifted gibbons, which is at times their status elsewhere. Wimbledon has a whole fleet of Rolls-Royces--and Mercedes, Humbers and Austin Princesses--that deploys to all parts of London, to wherever the players happen to be staying, to collect them for their matches. Each car flies from its bonnet a small pennon in the colors of Wimbledon--mauve and green. Throughout the afternoons, these limousines enter the gates and murmur through the crowd to deliver to the locker rooms not only the Emersons, the Ashes, the Ralstons and the Roches but also the Dowdeswelles, the Montrenauds, the Dibleys and the Phillips-Moores.

In the Players' Tea Room, the players sit on pale-blue wicker chairs at pale-blue wicker tables eating strawberries in Devonshire cream. The tearoom is glassed-in on three sides, overlooking the courts. Hot meals are served there, to players only--a consideration absent in all other places where they play. Wimbledon is, among other things, the business convention of the tennis industry, and the tearoom is the site of a thousand deals--minor endorsements, major endorsements, commitments to tournaments over the coming year. The Players' Tea Room is the meat market of international tennis. Like bullfight impresarios converging on Madrid from all parts of Spain at the Feria of San Isidro, tournament directors from all parts of the world come to the Players' Tea Room at Wimbledon to bargain for--as they put it--"the horseflesh." The tearoom also has a first-rate bar, where, frequently enough, one may encounter a first-rate bookie. His name is Jeff Guntrip. He is a trim and modest-appearing man from Kent. His credentials go far deeper than the mere fact that he is everybody's favorite bookie. Years ago, Guntrip was a tennis player. He competed at Wimbledon.

In the Members' Enclosure, on the Members' Lawn, members and their guests are sitting under white parasols, consuming best-end-of-lamb salad and strawberries in Devonshire cream. Around them are pools of goldfish. The goldfish are rented from Harrods. The members are rented from the uppermost upper middle class. Wimbledon is the annual convention of this stratum of English society, starboard out, starboard home. The middle middle class must have its strawberries and cream, too, and--in just the way that hot dogs are sold at American sporting events--strawberries and thick Devonshire cream are sold for five shillings the dish from stalls on the Tea Lawn and in the Court Buffet. County representatives, whoever they are, eat strawberries and cream in the County Representatives' Enclosure. In the Officials' Buttery, officials, between matches, eat strawberries and cream. An occasional strawberry even makes its way into the players' locker rooms, while almost anything else except an authentic player would be squashed en route. The doors are guarded by bobbies eight feet tall with night sticks by Hillerich & Bradsby. The ladies' dressing room at Wimbledon is so secure that only two men have ever entered it in the history of the tournament--a Frenchman and a blind masseur. The Frenchman was the great Jean Borotra, who in 1925 effected his entry into the women's locker room and subsequently lost his Wimbledon crown.

The gentlemen's dressing room is sui generis in the sportive world, with five trainer-masseurs in full-time attendance. Around the periphery of the locker areas are half a dozen completely private tub rooms. When players come off the courts of Wimbledon, they take baths. Huge spigots deliver hot waterfalls into pond-size tubs, and on shelves beside the tubs are long-handled scrub brushes and sponges as big as footballs. The exhausted athletes dive in, lie on their backs, stare at the ceiling and float with victory or marinate in defeat. The tubs are the one place in Wimbledon where they can get away from one another. When they are finally ready to arrange themselves for their return to society, they find on a shelf beneath a mirror a bottle of pomade called Extract of Honey and Flowers.

Smith comes into the locker room, slowly removes his whites and retreats to the privacy of a tub closet, where, submerged for 25 minutes, he contemplates the loss of one set in the course of his match with Fillol. He concludes that his trouble was the rustling ivy. Scott comes in after a 14--12 finish in a straight-set victory over Krog. Scott opens his locker. Golf balls fall out. Scott runs four miles a day through the roughs of the golf course that is just across Church Road from the tennis club--The All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Wimbledon. Other players--Graebner, Kaloge-ropoulos, Diepraam, Tiriac--are dressing for other matches. Upwards of 60 matches a day are played on the lawns of Wimbledon, from two in the afternoon until sundown. The sun in the English summer takes a long time going down. Play usually stops around eight P.M.

Leaving the locker room dressed for action, a tennis player goes in one of two directions. To the right, a wide portal with attending bobbies leads to the outer courts. To the left is a pair of frosted-glass doors that resemble the entry to an operating amphitheater in a teaching hospital. Players going through those doors often enough feel just as they would if they were being wheeled in on rolling tables. Beyond the frosted glass is the Centre Court--with the BBC, the Royal Box and 14,000 live spectators in close propinquity to the hallowed patch of ground on which players have to hit their way through their nerves or fall if they cannot. There is an archway between the locker room and the glass doors, and over this arch the celebrated phrase of Kipling has been painted: "If You Can Meet With Triumph And Disaster And Treat Those Two Impostors Just The Same."

Rosewall is on the Number Eight Court, anesthetizing Addison. Rosewall wears on his shirt the monogram BP. What is this for? Has he changed his name? Not precisely. Here in this most august of all the milieus of tennis, here in what was once the bastion of all that was noblest and most amateur in sport, Rosewall is representing British Petroleum. Rosewall represents the oil company so thoroughly, in fact, that on the buff blazer he wears to the grounds each day, the breast pocket is also monogrammed BP. There is nothing unusual in this respect about Rosewall. All the tennis players are walking billboards. They are extensions of the outdoor-advertising industry. Almost everything they drink, wear and carry is an ad for some company. Laver won his grand slams with a Dunlop. He has used a Dunlop most of his life. His first job after he left his family's farm in Queensland was in a Dunlop factory in Sydney, making rackets. Recently, though, he has agreed to use Donnay rackets in certain parts of the world, and Chemold (gold-colored metal) rackets elsewhere, for an aggregate of about $30,000 a year. In the United States, he still uses his Dunlops. Donnay has him under contract at Wimbledon; however, the word among the players is that the Rocket is still using his Dunlops but has had them repainted to look like Donnays. Roche and Emerson are under contract to Chemold. They also have golden rackets. All things together, Ashe makes about $125,000 a year through such deals. He gets $50,000 for using the Head Competition, the racket that looks like a rug beater. He gets $25,000 from Coca-Cola for personal appearances arranged by the company and for drinking Coke in public as frequently as he can, particularly when photographers happen to be shooting him. Lutz and Smith are under contract to consume Pepsi-Cola--in like volume but for less pay. Ask Pasarell if he likes Adidas shoes. "I do, in Europe," he enthuses. He is paid to wear Adidas in Europe, but in the United States he has a different deal, the same one Lutz, Graebner, Smith and King have, with Uniroyal Pro Keds.

Players endorse nets, gut, artificial court surfaces and every item of clothing from the jock on out. Some players lately have begun to drink--under contract--a mysterious brown fluid called Biostrath Elixir. Made in a Swiss laboratory, it comes in small vials and contains honey, malt, orange juice and the essences of 90 kinds of medicinal herbs. Others have signed contracts to wear copper bracelets that are said to counteract voodoo, rheumatism and arthritis. Nearly everyone's clothing contract is with one or the other of the two giants of tennis haberdashery--Fred Perry and Rene Lacoste. When Pilic appears in a Perry shirt and Ashe in a Lacoste shirt, they are not so much wearing these garments as advertising them. Tennis is a closed world. Its wheeler-dealers are bygone players (Kramer, Dell). Its outstanding bookie is a former player. Even its tailors, apparently, must first qualify as Wimbledon champions--Lacoste, 1925, 1928; Perry, 1934, 1935, 1936. Rosewall has somehow escaped these two. He wears neither the alligator emblem of Lacoste nor the triumphal garland of Perry. However, he is hardly in his shirt for nothing. In addition to the BP, Rosewall's shirt displays a springing panther--symbol of Slazenger. All this heraldry makes him rich before he steps onto the court, but it doesn't seem to slow him up. He is the most graceful tennis player now playing the game, and gracefully he sutures Addison, two, four and zero.

The Russians advance in mixed doubles. Keldie and Miss Harris have taken a set from the Russians, but that is all the Russians will yield. Keldie is a devastatingly handsome tall fellow who wears tinted wrap-around glasses and has trouble returning serve. Miss Harris has no difficulty with returns. In mixed doubles, the men hit just as hard at the women as they do at each other. Miss Harris is blonde, with her part in the middle and pigtails of the type that suggests windmills and canals. She is quite pretty and her body is lissome all the way to her ankles, at which point she turns masculine in Adidas shoes with three black bands. The Russians show no expressions on their faces, which are young and attractive, dark-eyed. The Soviet Union decided to go in for tennis some years ago. A program was set up. Eight Russians are now at Wimbledon, and these--Metreveli and Miss Morozova--are the outstanding two. Both use Dunlops. They play with balletic grace--remarkable, or so it seems, in people to whose part of the world the sport is so alien. Miss Morozova, a severely beautiful young woman, has high cheekbones and almond eyes that suggest remote places to the east--Novosibirsk, Semipalatinsk. The Russians, like so many players from other odd parts of the earth, are camouflaged in their playing clothes. They are haber-dashed by Fred Perry, so they appear more to come from Tennis than from Russia. Think how bad but how distinctive they would look if their clothes had come from GUM. Think what the Indians would look like, the Brazilians, the Peruvians, the Japanese, if they brought their clothes from home. Instead, they all go to Fred Perry's stock room on Vigo Street in London and load up for the year. The Russians are not permitted to take cash back to Russia, so they take clothing instead and sell it when they get home. Perry has a line of colored garments as well as white ones, and the Russians take all that is red. Not a red shirt remains in stock once the Russians have been to Vigo Street. Miss Morozova fluidly hits a backhand to Keldie's feet. He picks it up with a half volley. Metreveli puts it away. Game, set and match to Metreveli and Miss Morozova. No expression.

Graebner and Tiriac, on Court Three, is a vaudeville act. The draw has put it together. Graebner, the paper salesman from Upper Middle Manhattan, has recently changed his image. He has replaced his horn-rimmed glasses with contact lenses, and he has grown his soft and naturally undulant dark-brown hair to the point where he is no longer an exact replica of Clark Kent but is instead a living simulacrum of Prince Valiant. Tiriac hates Wimbledon. Tiriac, who is Rumanian, feels that he and his doubles partner, Nastase, are the best doubles team in the world. Wimbledon disagrees. Tiriac and Nastase are not seeded in doubles, and Tiriac is mad as hell. He hates Wimbledon and by extension he hates Graebner. So he is killing Graebner. He has taken a set from him, now leads him in the second, and Graebner is fighting for his life. Tiriac is of middle height. His legs are unprepossessing. He has a barrel chest. His body is encased in a rug of hair. Off court, he wears cargo-net shirts. His head is covered with medusan wires. Above his mouth is a mustache that somehow suggests that this man has been to places most people do not imagine exist. By turns, he glowers at the crowd, glares at the officials, glares at God in the sky. As he waits for Graebner to serve, he leans forward, swaying. It is the nature of Tiriac's posture that he bends forward all the time, so now he appears to be getting ready to dive into the ground. Graebner hits one of his big crunch serves, and Tiriac slams it back, down the line, so fast that Graebner cannot reach it. Graebner throws his racket after the ball. Tiriac shrugs. All the merchants of Mesopotamia could not equal Tiriac's shrug. Graebner serves again. Tiriac returns, and stays on the base line. Graebner hits a backhand that lands on the chalk beside Tiriac. "Out!" shouts the linesman. Graebner drops his racket, puts his hands on his hips, and examines the linesman with hatred. The linesman is 72 years old and has worked his way to Wimbledon through a lifetime of similar decisions in Somerset, Cornwall and Kent. But if Graebner lives to be 90, he will never forget that call, or that face. Tiriac watches, inscrutably. Even in his Adidas shoes and his Fred Perry shirt, Tiriac does not in any way resemble a tennis player. He appears to be a panatela ad, a triple agent from Alexandria, a used-car salesman from central Marrakesh. The set intensifies. Eleven all. Twelve all. Graebner begins to chop the turf with his racket. Rain falls. "Nothing serious," says Mike Gibson, the referee. "Play on." Nothing is serious with Gibson until the balls float. Wimbledon sometimes has six or eight showers in an afternoon. This storm lasts one minute and 22 seconds. The sun comes out. Tiriac snaps a backhand past Graebner, down the line. "Goddamn it!" Graebner shouts at him. "You're so lucky! My God!" Tiriac has the air of a man who is about to close a deal in a back room behind a back room. But Graebner, with a Wagnerian forehand, sends him spinning. Graebner, whose power is as great as ever, has continually improved as a competitor in tight places. The forehands now come in chords. The set ends 14--12, Graebner; and Graebner is still alive at Wimbledon.

When the day is over and the Rolls-Royces move off toward central London, Graebner is not in one. Graebner and his attorney waive the privilege of the Wimbledon limousines. They have something of their own--a black Daimler, so long and impressive that it appears to stop for two traffic lights at once. Graebner's attorney is Scott, who is also his doubles partner. They have just polished Nowicki and Rybarczyk off the court, 6--3, 10--12, 6--3, 6--3, and the Daimler's chauffeur takes them the 15 miles to the Westbury, a hotel in Mayfair that is heavy with tennis players. Emerson is there, and Ashe, Ralston, Pasarell, Smith, Lutz, van Dillen. Dell and Kramer are both there. Dell, lately captain of the American Davis Cup Team, has created a principality within the anarchy of tennis. He is the attorney-manager of Ashe, Lutz, Pasarell, Smith, Kodes and others. Dell and Kramer sit up until three A.M. every night picking lint off the shoulders of chaos. Their sport has no head anymore, no effective organization and is still in the flux of transition from devious to straightforward professionalism. Kramer, who is, among other things, the most successful impresario the game has ever known, once had all the power in his pocket. Dell, who is only 32, nightly tries to pick the pocket, although he knows the power is no longer there. Every so often they shout at each other. Kramer is an almost infinitely congenial man. He seems to enjoy Dell in the way that a big mother cat might regard the most aggressive of the litter--with nostalgic amusement and, now and again, a paw in the chops.

Ashe goes off to Trader Vic's for dinner dressed in a sunburst dashiki, and he takes with him two dates. Ralston joins them, and raises an eyebrow. "There is no conflict here," Ashe says, calmly spreading his hands toward the two women. Later in the evening, Ashe will have still another date, and she will go with him to a casino, where they will shoot craps and play blackjack until around one A.M., when Ashe will turn into a tennis player and hurry back to the hotel to get his sleep.

In his flat in Dolphin Square, Laver spends the evening, as he does most evenings, watching Western films on television. Many players take flats while they are in England, particularly if they are married. They prefer familial cooking to the tedium of room service. Some stay in boarding-houses. John Alexander and 15 other Australians are in a boardinghouse in Putney. Dolphin Square is a vast block of flats, made of red brick, on the Embankment overlooking the Thames. Laver sits there in the evening in front of the television set, working the grips of his rackets. He wraps and rewraps the grips, trying for just the right feel in his hand. If the movie finishes and some commentator comes on and talks tennis, Laver turns him off and rotates the selector in quest of additional hoofbeats. He unwraps a new grip for the third or fourth time and begins to shave the handle with a kitchen knife. He wraps the grip again, feels it, moves the racket through the arc of a backhand, then unwraps the grip and shaves off a little more wood.

Gonzales sometimes drills extremely small holes in his rackets, to change the weight. Gonzales, who is not always consistent in his approach to things, sometimes puts lead tape on his rackets to increase the weight. Beppe Merlo, the Italian tennis player, strings his own rackets, and if a string breaks while he is playing, he pulls gut out of his cover and repairs the damage right there on the court. Merlo likes to string his rackets at 30 pounds of tension--each string as tight as it would be if it were tied to a rafter and had a 30-pound weight hanging on it. Since most players like their rackets at 60 pounds minimum, Merlo is extremely eccentric. He might as well be stringing snowshoes. When someone serves to him, the ball disappears into his racket. Eventually, it comes out and it floats back toward his opponent like a milkweed seed. Merlo's game does not work at all well on grass. He is fantastic on clay.

Many players carry their own sets of gut with them. Professional stringers do the actual work, of course, using machines that measure the tension. Emerson likes his rackets at 63 pounds, very tight, and so does Smith. Since the frame weight of "medium" tennis rackets varies from 13 to 13-3/4 ounces, Smith goes to the Wilson factory whenever he can and weighs and feels rackets until he has selected a stack of them. He kills a racket in six weeks. The thing doesn't break. It just becomes flaccid and dies. Strings go dead. too. They last anywhere from 10 to 28 days. Smith likes a huge grip--4-7/8 inches around. Some Americans wrap tape around their handles to build them up, and then they put new leather grips on. Australians generally like them smaller, 4-5/8, 4-1/2. As Laver whittles away beside the television, he is progressing toward 4-1/2. When he is ready to go to bed, he switches off the television and, beside it, leaves a little pile of wood chips and sawdust on the floor.

Dennis Ralston carries his own pharmacy with him wherever he goes--Achromycin. Butazolidin, Oxazepam, Robaxin, Sodium Butabarbital. He is ready for anything, except sleep. The night before a match, he lies with a pillow over his head and fights total awareness. At three A.M., he complains bitterly about the traffic on New Bond Street, outside the Westbury. There is no traffic on New Bond Street outside the Westbury. Mayfair is tranquil in the dead of night, even if the tennis players are not. All over London, tennis players are staring open-eyed at dark ceilings. Some of them get up in the night and walk around talking to themselves--while Laver sleeps in Dolphin Square. Laver can sleep anywhere--in cars, trains, planes. He goes to bed around one A.M., and always sets an alarm clock or he would oversleep, even before a final.

Laver becomes quieter before a match. He and his wife, Mary, ordinarily laugh and joke and kid around a lot together, but he becomes silent as a match draws near. "The faster the pace, the more demands there are upon him, the better," she says. So Laver goes out in the morning and does the shopping. He drops off the laundry. Sometimes he washes clothes in the bathtub. He goes to his favorite butcher and buys a steak. He also buys eggs and greens. Back in the flat, two and a half hours before the match, he cooks his training meal. It is always the same--steak, eggs and greens. He likes to cook, and prefers to do it himself. It keeps him busy. Then he gets into his car--a hired English Ford--and drives to Wimbledon. He ignores the club limousines. He wants to drive. "If he weren't a tennis player, he'd be a road racer," Mary says. "He has a quick, alert mind. He's fast. He's fast of body, and his mind works that way as well. The faster the pace of things, the faster he moves." He particularly likes driving on the left-hand side of the road. It reminds him of Australia, of which he sees very little anymore. His home is in California. Each day, he plots a different route through Greater South London to Wimbledon. This is his private rally. It is a rule of the tournament that if a player is so much as ten minutes late, his opponent wins by a walkover. Laver knows his labyrinth--every route alternative, every mews and byway, between the Embankment and the tennis club, and all the traffic of London has yet to stop him. He turns off Church Road into the parking lot. His mind for many hours has been preoccupied with things other than tennis, with cowboys and sleep and shopping lists and cooking and driving. He never ponders a draw or thinks about an opponent. But now he is ready to concentrate his interest on the game--for example, on Wimbledon's opening day, when the defending champion starts the tournament with a match in the Centre Court.

Laver walks under the Kipling line and through the glass doors, and 14,000 people stand up and applaud him, for he is the most emphatic and enduring champion who has ever played on this court. He stacks his extra rackets against the umpire's chair, where the tournament staff has placed bottles of orange squash and of Robinson's Lemon Barley Water should he or his opponent require them during change-overs. There is plain water as well, in a jug called the Bartlett Multipot. Behind the umpire's chair is a green refrigerator, where tennis balls are kept until they are put into play. A ball boy hands him two and Laver takes the court. He swings easily through the knockup. The umpire says, "Play." Laver lifts his right hand, sending the first ball up into the air, and the tournament is under way. He swings, hits. His opponent can barely touch the ball with his racket. It is a near ace, an unplayable serve, 15--love. Laver's next serve scythes into the backhand court. It is also unplayable. Thirty--love.

The man across the net is extremely nervous. His name is George Seewagen. He comes from Bayside, New York. This is his first Wimbledon and his friends have told him that if you don't get a game in the first round, you never get invited back. Seewagen would like to get two games. At Forest Hills 34 years ago, Seewagen's father played J. Donald Budge in the opening round. The score was 6--0, 6--1, 6--0. When Seewagen, Jr., arrived in London, he was, like nearly everyone else, tense about the luck of the coming draw, and before it was published he told his doubles partner, "Watch me. I'll have to play Laver in the Centre Court in the first round." The odds were 111 to 1 that this would not happen, but Seewagen had read the right tea leaf, as he soon learned.

"It was hard to believe. I sort of felt a little bit upset. Moneywise, London's pretty expensive. First-round losers get a hundred pounds and that's not much. I figured I needed to win at least one match in order to meet my expenses, but now I'd had it. Then I thought of the instant recognition. People would say, 'There's the guy that's opening up Wimbledon with Laver.' At least my name would become known. But then, on the other hand, I thought, What if I don't get a game? Think of it. What if I don't win even one game?"

Seewagen is an extremely slender--in fact, thin--young man with freckles, a toothy grin, tousled short hair. He could be Huckleberry Finn. He looks 19 and is actually 23. His credentials are that he played for Rice University, that he beat someone named Zan Guerry in the final of the 1969 amateur championship in Rochester and that he is the varsity tennis coach at Columbia University. There were, in other words, grounds for his gnawing fears. By the eve of Wimbledon, Seewagen's appearance was gaunt.

Everyone goes to Hurlingham on that ultimate Sunday afternoon. All through the previous fortnight, the tennis players of the world have gradually come to London, and by tradition they first convene at Hurlingham. Hurlingham is a Victorian sporting club with floor-to-ceiling windows, 16 chimney pots and wide surrounding lawns--bowling lawns, tennis lawns, croquet lawns, putting lawns--under giant copper beeches, beside the Thames. Some players play informal sets of doubles. Others merely sit on the lawns, sip Pimm's Cups under the sun and watch women in pastel dresses walking by on maroon pathways. In the background are people in their 70s, dressed in pure white, tapping croquet balls with deadly skill across textured grasses smooth as broadloom. A uniformed band, with folding chairs and music stands, plays Bow, Bow, Ye Lower Middle Classes while tea is served beneath the trees--a strawberry tart, sandwiches, petits fours, fruitcake and a not-so-bitter macaroon. Arthur Ashe, eating his tea, drinking the atmosphere, says, "This is my idea of England." On a slope a short distance away, Graham Stillwell, Ashe's first-round opponent, sits with his wife and his five-year-old daughter, Tiffany. This is the second straight year that Ashe has drawn Still-well in the first round at Wimbledon, and last year Stillwell had Ashe down and almost out--twice Stillwell was serving for the match--before Ashe won the fifth set, 12--10. Reporters from the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch now come up to Ashe and ask him if he has been contacted by certain people who plan to demonstrate against the South African players, at Wimbledon. "Why should they contact me?" Ashe says. "I'm not a South African." Mrs. Stillwell rises from the sloping lawn and stretches her arms. "My God! She's pregnant again," Ashe observes. Jean Borotra, now 72, is hitting beautiful ground strokes with Gardnar Mulloy. Borotra wears long white trousers. Two basset hounds walk by, leashed to a man in a shirt of broad pink and white stripes. The band is playing the music of Albéniz. The lady tennis players drift about, dressed, for some reason, in multicolored Victorian gowns. Laver, in dark slacks and a sport shirt of motley dark colors, stands near the clubhouse, watching it all with his arms folded. He seems uncomfortable. He looks incongruous--small, undynamic, unprepossessing, vulnerable--but every eye at Hurlingham, sooner or later in the afternoon, watches him in contemplation. He stands out no more than a single blade of grass, but no one fails to see him, least of all Seewagen, who stands at the edge of the party like a figure emerging from a haunted forest. He wears an old worn-out pair of lightweight sneakers, of the type that tennis players do not use and sailors do, and a baggy gray sweater with the sleeves shoved far up his thin brown arms. Veins stand out on the backs of his hands and across his forearms. He grins a little, but his eyes are sober. His look is profoundly philosophical. Gene Scott informs him that players scheduled for the Centre Court are entitled to a special 15 minutes of practice on an outside court beforehand. "Good, I'll take McManus," Seewagen says. McManus, from Berkeley and ranked tenth in the United States, is left-handed. He is also short and redheaded. He has the same build Laver has, much the same nose and similar freckles as well. Players practicing with McManus easily fantasize that they are hitting with the Rocket himself, and thus they inflate their confidence. McManus is the favorite dummy of everyone who has to play against Laver. Ashe speaks quietly to Seewagen and tells him not to worry. "You'll never play better," Ashe says. "You'll get in there, in the Centre Court, and you'll get inspired, and then when the crowd roars for your first great shot, you'll want to run into the locker room and call it a day."

"I hope it isn't a wood shot," says Seewagen, looking straight ahead.

Game to Laver. He leads, one game to love, first set. Laver and Seewagen change ends of the court. Laver went out to the Pontevecchio last night, on the Old Brompton Road. He ate lasagna and a steak filet with tomato sauce. He drank Australian beer. Then he went home and whittled a bit before retiring. At Chesham House, in Victoria, Seewagen fell asleep in his bed reading Psycho Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz. After one game, Seewagen has decided that Laver is even better than he thought he was. Laver is, for one thing, the fastest of all tennis players. He moves through more square yards per second than anyone else, covering ground like a sonic boom. In his tennis clothes, he is not unprepossessing. His legs are powerfully muscled. His left forearm looks as if it could bring down a tree. He is a great shotmaker, in part because he moves so well. He has every shot from everywhere. He can hurt his opponent from any position. He has extraordinary racket-handling ability because his wrist is both strong and flexible. He can come over his backhand or slice it. He hits big shots, flick shots, spin shots and rifle shots on the dead run. He lobs well. He serves well. His forehand is the best in tennis. He has one weakness. According to Gonzales, that is, Laver has one weakness--his bouncing overhead. The bouncing overhead is the shot a tennis player hits when a bad lob bounces at his feet and he cannon-balls his helpless opponent. Gonzales is saying that Laver has no weaknesses at all. Seewagen walks to the base line, visibly nervous, and prepares to serve. He is not pathetic. There is something tingling about a 700-to-1 shot who merely shows up at the gate. In the end, at the net, Laver, shaking hands, will say to him gently, "You looked nervous. It's very difficult playing in here the first time over." Seewagen begins with a double fault. Love--15. Now, however, a deep atavistic athleticism rises in him and defeats his nerves. He serves, rushes and punches two volleys past Laver, following them with an unplayable serve. Forty--15. Serve, rush, volley--game to Mr. Seewagen. Games are one all, first set.

"His topspin is disguised," Seewagen notes, and he prepares, with a touch of unexpected confidence, for Laver's next service assault. Game to Mr. Laver. He leads, two games to one, first set. Seewagen now rises again, all the way to 40--15, from which level he is shoved back to deuce. Tossing up the ball, he cracks a serve past Laver that Laver can barely touch, let alone return. Advantage Seewagen. The source of all this power is not apparent, but it is coming from somewhere. He lifts the ball. He blasts. Service ace. Right through the corner. The crowd roars. It is Seewagen's first great shot. He looks at the scoreboard--two all--and it gives him what he will describe later as a charge. ("At that moment, I should have walked off.") 6--2, 6--0, 6--2.

Hewitt, in anger, hits one into the grandstand and it goes straight toward an elderly lady. She makes a stabbing catch with one hand and flips the ball to a ball boy. There is nothing lightweight about this English crowd. Ted Heath, Margaret, Anne, Charles, Lady Churchill and the odd duke or baron might turn up--diverting attention to the Royal Box--but withal one gets the impression that there is a high percentage of people here who particularly know where they are and what they are looking at. They queue for hours for standing room in the Centre Court. They miss nothing and they are polite. The crowd at Forest Hills likes dramaturgy and emotion--players thanking God after chalk-line shots or falling to their knees in total despair--and the crowd in the Foro Italico throws cushions. But the British do not actually approve of that sort of thing, and when one of the rogue tennis players exhibits conduct they do not like, they cry, "Shame!"

"You bloody fools!" Hewitt shouts at them.

Hewitt has the temper of a grenade. He hits another ball in anger. This time it goes over the roof and out of sight. "Shame, Hewitt, shame!"

Rain falls. Umbrellas bloom. Mike Gibson's mustache is drooping from the wet, but he says, "Play on. It's not much." All matches continue. The umbrellas are black, red, green, yellow, orange, pink, paisley and transparent. It is cold at Wimbledon. It often is--shirt sleeves one day, two pullovers and a mack the next. Now the players are leaving water tracks on the courts, and Gibson at last suspends play. Groundsmen take down the nets and cover the lawns with canvas. The standees do not give up their places, in the cold rain. The groundsmen go in under the grandstand to the Groundsmen's Bar, where they drink lager and offer one another cigarettes. "Will you have a smoke, Jack, or would you rather have the money?" The sun comes out for exactly three minutes. Then more rain falls. Half an hour later, play resumes.

Dell is supposed to be on Court 14, playing mixed doubles, but he is still in a phone booth talking to the office of Guntrip the bookie. Dell bets heavily on his own players--100 pounds here, 200 there--and even more heavily against Laver. Dell is a talented gambler and he views the odds as attractive. Besides, Dell and Laver are the same age, and Dell can remember beating Laver when they were boys. Shrewd and realistic, Dell reasons that anyone who ever lost to Donald Dell cannot be invincible. In the end, he repeats his name to the clerk at Guntrip's, to be sure the clerk has it right. "Dell," he says. "D as in David, E as in Edward, L as in loser, L as in loser."

The field of women players is so thin that even some of the women themselves are complaining. Chubby little girls with orange ribbons in their hair hit parabolic ground strokes back and forth and seem incongruous on courts adjacent to an Emerson, a Lutz or a Pasarell, whose ground strokes sound like gunfire. Billie Jean King slaps a serve into the net and cries out, "That stinks!" Billie Jean is trimmer, lighter, more feminine than she was in earlier years, and somehow less convincing as a challenger to Margaret Court. Yet everyone else seems far below these two. Miss Goolagong is still a few years away. "Have you seen the abo, Jack?" says Robert Twynam, head groundsman, to his assistant, John Yardley. The interesting new players are the ones the groundsmen find interesting. They go to watch Miss Goolagong and they notice that her forehand has a tendency to go up and then keep going up. When it starts coming down, they predict, she will be ready for anybody, for her general game is smooth and quite strong and unflinchingly Australian. Australians never give up, and this one is an aborigine, a striking figure with orange-brown hair and orange-brown skin, in a Teddy Tinling dress and Adidas shoes, with a Dunlop in her hand. Margaret Court is breaking everything but the cool reserve of Helga Niessen, the Berlin model. Between points, Miss Niessen stands with her feet crossed at the ankles. The ankles are observed by a Chinese medical student who is working the tournament with the ground staff. "Look at those ankles. Look at those legs," he says. "She is a woman." He diverts his attention to Margaret Court, who is five feet, eight, has big strong hands and, most notably, the ripple-muscled legs of a runner. "Look at those legs," says the Chinese medical student. "The lady is a man."

Hoad, in the Centre Court, is moving so slowly that a serve bounces toward him and hits him in the chest. The server is El Shafei, the chocolate-eyed Egyptian. Hoad is in here because all Britain wants to see him on television. Stiffened by time and injury, he loses two sets before his cartilage begins to bend. In the third set, his power comes, and he breaks the Egyptian. The Egyptian is a heavy-framed man, like Hoad, and in the fourth set, they pound each other, drive for drive--wild bulls of the tennis court. Hoad thinks he is getting bad calls and enormous anger is rising within him. The score is three all. Shafei is serving, at deuce. He lifts the ball and blows one past Hoad for a service ace. Hoad looks toward the net-cord judge with expanding disbelief. He looks toward Shafei, who has not moved from the position from which he hit the serve--indicating to Hoad that Shafei expected to hit a second one. Slowly, Hoad walks forward, toward the officials, toward Shafei, toward the center of the court. The crowd is silent. Hoad speaks. A microphone in Scotland could pick up what he says. "That goddamned ball was a let!" The net-cord judge is impassive. The umpire says, "May I remind you that play is continuous." Hoad replies, repeats, "That goddamned ball was a let!" He turns to the Egyptian. Unstirring silence is still the response of the crowd, for one does not throw hammers back at Thor. "The serve was a let. You know that. Did you hear it hit the tape?" Hoad asks, and Shafei says, "No." Hoad lifts his right arm, extends it full length and points steadily at the Egyptian's eyes. "You lie!" he says slowly, delivering each syllable to the roof. A gulf of quiet follows and Hoad does not lower his arm. He draws a breath slowly, then says again, even more slowly, "You lie." Only Garrick, possibly Burton, could have played that one. It must have stirred bones in the Abbey, and deep in the churchyards of Wimbledon, for duels of great moment here have reached levels more serious than sport. This is where Canning fought Castlereagh, where Pitt fought Tierney, where Lord Winchelsea fought the Duke of Wellington. Ceawlin of the West Saxons fought Ethelbert of Kent here, when the terrain was known as Wibbas dune--home of the Saxon, Wibba (Wibbas dune, Wipandune, Wilbaldowne, Wymblyton). Hoad returns to the base line, and when the Egyptian serves again, Hoad breaks him into pieces. Game and fourth set to Hoad. Sets are two all. In his effort, though, Hoad has given up the last of his power. Time has defeated him. Twice the champion, he has failed his comeback. His energy drains away in the fifth set--his last, in all likelihood, at Wimbledon.

Ralston, at the umpire's chair, pries the cap off a vial of Biostrath and sucks out the essences of the 90 medicinal herbs. Dennis has no contract with Biostrath. He is not drinking the stuff for money. He is drinking it for his life. Beside him stands his opponent, John Newcombe, the second-best forehand, the second-best volley, the second-best tennis player in the world. Dennis follows the elixir with a Pepsi-Cola, also without benefit of a contract. The score is 4--5, first set. Ralston and Newcombe return to the base lines, and Ralston tosses up a ball to serve. The crowd is chattering, gurgling like a mountain stream. Prince Charles has just come in and is settling into his seat. "Quiet, please," says the umpire, and the stream subsides. Ralston serves, wins--six all. Seven all. Eight all. Nine all. Ten all. There is a lot of grinning back and forth across the net. Newcombe drives a backhand down the line. Ralston leaps, intercepts it and drops the ball into Newcombe's court for a winner. Newcombe looks at Ralston. Ralston grins. Newcombe smiles back. It is an attractive match, between two complete professionals. Newcombe passes Ralston with a forehand down the line. "Yep," says Ralston. Ralston finds a winner in a drop shot overhead. "Good shot," calls Newcombe. Eleven all. When they shout, it is at themselves. Newcombe moves to the net behind a fragile approach shot, runs back under a humiliatingly good lob and drives an off-balance forehand into the net. "John!" he calls out. "Idiotic!" Ralston tosses a ball up to serve, but catches it instead of hitting it. He is having a problem with the sun, and he pauses to apologize to Newcombe for the inconvenience the delay might be causing him. Small wonder they can't beat each other. Grace of this kind has not always been a characteristic of Ralston--of Newcombe, yes, but Ralston grew up tightly strung in California, and in his youth his tantrums were a matter of national report. He is 27 now and has changed. Quiet, serious, introspective, coach of the U.S. Davis Cup Team, he has become a professional beyond the imagination of most people who only knew him long ago. He plans his matches almost on a drawing board. Last night, he spent hours studying a chart he has made of every shot Newcombe has hit in this tournament. 13--12. Dennis opens another Biostrath and another Pepsi-Cola. He knows what the odds have become. The winner of this set, since it has gone so far, will in all likelihood be the winner of the match. Ralston has been a finalist at Wimbledon. But he has never won a major international tournament. In such tournaments, curiously enough, he has played Newcombe ten times and has won seven, but never for the biggest prize. Newcombe has a faculty for going all the way. Ralston, meanwhile, has pointed his life toward doing so at least once, and, who knows, he tells himself, this could be the time. He toes the line and tosses up the ball. He catches it, and tosses it up again. The serve is bad. The return is a winner. Love--15. He has more trouble with the sun. Love--30. Catastrophe is falling from nowhere. Love--40. Serve, return, volley. Fifteen--40. He serves. Fault. He serves again. Double fault. Game and first set to Newcombe, 14--12. Ralston looks up, over the trigger of a thousand old explosions, and he forces a smile. 14--12, 9--7, 6--2. When it is over, the ball boys carry out seven empty bottles of Pepsi-Cola and four empty vials of the 90 medicinal herbs.

Kramer is in a glassed-in booth at one corner of the court, commenting on the action for the BBC. For an American to be engaged to broadcast to the English, extraordinary credentials, of one kind or another, are required. Just after the Second World War, Kramer first displayed his. Upwards of 50 American players now come to Wimbledon annually, but Kramer, in 1946, was one of three to cross the ocean. "Now it's a sort of funsy, 'insy' thing to do," he has said. "But in my time, if you didn't think you had a top-notch chance, you didn't come over. To make big money out of tennis, you had to have the Wimbledon title as part of your credits. I sold my car, a 1941 Chevrolet, so I could afford to bring my wife, Gloria, with me." That was long before the era of the Perry-Lacoste-Adidas bazaar, and Kramer, at Wimbledon, wore his own clothes--shorts that he bought at Simpson's and T-shirts that had been issued to him during the war, when he was a sailor in the United States Coast Guard. Now, as he watches the players before him and predicts in his expert way how one or the other will come slowly unstuck, he looks past them across the court and up behind the Royal Box into an entire segment of the stadium that was gone when he first played here. At some point between 1939 and 1945, a bomb hit the All-England tennis club, and with just a little more wind drift it would have landed in the center of the Centre Court. Instead, it hit the roof over the North East Entrance Hall. Kramer remembers looking up from the base line, ready to serve, into a background of avalanched rubble and twisted girders against the sky. He slept in the Rembrandt, which he remembers as "an old hotel in South Kensington," and he ate steak that he had brought with him from the United States, 30 pounds or so of whole tenderloins. Needless to say, there was no Rolls-Royce flying Wimbledon colors to pick him up at the Rembrandt. Kramer went to Wimbledon, with nearly everyone else, on the underground--Gloucester Road, Earl's Court, Fulham Broadway, Parsons Green, Putney Bridge, East Putney, Southfields, Wimbledon. He lost the first time over. A year later, he returned with his friend Tom Brown and together they hit their way down opposite sides of the draw and into the Wimbledon final. A few hours before the match, Kramer took what remained of his current supply of filet mignon, cut it in half and shared it with Tom Brown. Kramer was 25 and his game had come to full size--the Big Game, as it was called, the serve, the rush, the jugular volley. When Kramer proved what he could do, at Wimbledon, he changed for all foreseeable time the patterns of the game. He destroyed Brown in 47 minutes, still the fastest final in Wimbledon's history, and then--slender, crewcut, big in the ears--he was led to the Royal Box for a word or two with the King and Queen. The Queen said to him, "Whatever happened to that redheaded young man?" And Kramer told her that Donald Budge was alive and doing OK. The King handed Kramer the Wimbledon trophy. "Did the court play well?" the King asked him. "Yes, it did, sir," Kramer answered. It was a tennis player's question. In 1926, the King himself had competed in this same tournament and had played in the Centre Court. A faraway smile rests on Kramer's face as he remembers all this. "Me in my T-shirt," he says, with a slight shake of his head.

Frew McMillan, on Court Two, wears a golfer's billowing white visored cap, and he looks very much like a golfer in his style of play, for he swings with both hands and when he completes a stroke, his arms follow the racket across one shoulder and his eyes seem to be squinting down a fairway. Court Two has grandstands on either side and they are packed with people. McMillan is a low-handicap tennis player who can dig some incredible ground strokes out of the rough. A ball comes up on his right side and he drives it whistling down the line, with a fading hook on the end. The ball comes back on his left side and, still with both hands, overlapping grip, he hits a crosscourt controlled-slice return for a winner. The gallery applauds voluminously. McMillan volleys with two hands. The only strokes he hits with one hand are the serve and the overhead. He has an excellent chip shot and a lofty topspin wedge. He putts well. He is a lithe, dark, attractive, quiet South African. In the South African Open, he played Laver in the final. Before Laver had quite figured out what sort of a match it was, McMillan had him down one set to nought. Then Laver got out his mashie and that was the end of McMillan in the South African Open. When McMillan arrived in London and saw the Wimbledon draw, he felt, in his words, a cruel blow, because his name and Laver's were in the same pocket of the draw, and almost inevitably they would play in the third round. "But maybe I have a better chance against him earlier than later," he finally decided. "You feel you have a chance. You have to--even if it is a hundred to one." Now the grandstands are jammed in Court 2 and, high above, the railing is crowded on the Tea Room roof, for McMillan, after losing the first set, has broken Laver and leads him 5--3 in the second.

"I got the feeling during the match that I had more of a chance beating him on the court than thinking about it beforehand. You realize the chap isn't infallible. It's almost as if I detected a chip in his armor."

Laver has netted many shots and has hit countless others wide or deep. He cannot find the lines. He is preoccupied with his serves, which are not under control. He spins one in too close to the center of the service box. McMillan blasts it back. Advantage McMillan. Laver lifts the ball to serve again. Fault. He serves again. Double fault. Game and set to McMillan, 6--3.

When this sort of thing happens, Laver's opponent seldom lives to tell the tale. One consistent pattern in all the compiled scores in his long record is that when someone takes a set from him, the score of the next set is 6--0, Laver, or something very near it. Affronted, he strikes twice as hard. "He has the physical strength to hit his way through nervousness," McMillan says. "That's why I believe he's a great player."

Laver breaks McMillan in the opening game of the third set. He breaks him again in the third game. His volleys hit the corners. His drives hit the lines. McMillan's most powerful blasts come back at him faster than they left his racket. McMillan hits a perfect drop shot. Laver is on it like the light. He snaps it unreachably down the line. Advantage Laver. McMillan hits one deep to Laver's backhand corner, and Laver, diving as he hits it, falls. McMillan sends the ball to the opposite corner. Laver gets up and sprints down the base line. He not only gets to the ball--with a running forehand rifle shot, he puts it away. It is not long before he is shaking McMillan's hand at the net. "Well played." McMillan says to him (6--2, 3--6, 6--0, 6--2). "Yes, I thought I played pretty well," Laver tells him. And they make their way together through the milling crowd. McMillan will frequently say what a gentle and modest man he finds Laver to be. "It may be why he is what he is," McMillan suggests. "You can see it in his eyes."

B. M. L. de Roy van Zuydewijn is a loser in the Veterans' Event--gentlemen's doubles. So is the 72-year-old Borotra. Riggs and Drobny, on Court Five, persevere. Over the years, Riggs and Drobny have eaten well. Each is twice the shadow of his former self. The Hungarians Bujtor and Stolpa are concentrating on Riggs as the weaker of the two.

Game to Seewagen and Miss Overton, the honey-blonde Miss Overton. They lead Dell and Miss Johnson five games to four, second set. Dell is not exactly crumbling under the strain. These peripheral matches are fairly informal. Players talk to one another or to their friends on the side lines, catching up on the news. Seewagen and Miss Overton appear to be playing more than tennis. Dell is tired--up half the night making deals and arguing with Kramer, up early in the morning to do business over breakfast with bewildered Europeans, who find him in his hotel room in a Turkish-towel robe, stringy-haired and wan, a deceptive glaze in his eyes, offering them contracts written on flypaper.

The Russians enter the Centre Court to play mixed doubles. Princess Anne is in the Royal Box. The Russians hesitate, and look at each other in their ceramic way, and then they grin, they shrug and they turn toward the Royal Box and bend their heads. The people applaud.

Nastase is Nijinsky--leaping, flying, hitting jump-shot overheads, sweeping forehands down the line. Tiriac is in deep disgrace. Together they have proved their point. They have outlasted most of the seeded pairs in the gentlemen's doubles. But now they are faltering against Rosewall and Stolle, largely because Tiriac is playing badly. Stolle hits an overhead. Tiriac tries to intercept it near the ground. He smothers it into the court. Nastase, behind him, could have put the ball away after it had bounced. Tiriac covers his face with one hand and rubs his eyes. He slinks back to the base line like someone caught red-handed. But now he redeems himself. The four players close in for a 12-shot volley, while the ball never touches the ground. It is Tiriac who hits number 12, picking it off at the hip and firing it back through Stolle.

Lutz crashes and the injury appears to be serious. Playing doubles in the Centre Court with his partner, Smith, he chases an angled overhead and he crashes into the low wall at the front of the grandstands. He makes no effort to get up. He quivers. He is unconscious. "Get a doctor, please," says the umpire. A nurse, in a white cap and a gray uniform that nearly reaches her ankles, hurries across the lawn. The crowd roars with laughter. There is something wondrous in the English sense of humor that surfaces in the presence of accidents, particularly if they appear to be fatal. The laughter revives Lutz. He comes to, gets up, returns to the court, shakes his head a few times, resumes play and drives a put-away into the corner after an eight-shot ricochet volley. Lutz is tough. He was a high school football player in California and he once promised himself that he would quit tennis and concentrate on football unless he should happen to win the national junior championship. He won, and gave up football. Additional medical aid comes from outside the stadium. Another nurse has appeared. She hovers on the edge of play. When she sees an opportunity, she hurries up to Smith and gives him an aspirin.

If Lutz had broken three ribs, he would not have mentioned it as long as he continued to play, and in this respect he is like the Australians. There is an Australian code on the matter of injuries and it is one of the things that gives the Australians a stature that is not widely shared by the hypochondriac Americans and the broken-wing set from mainland Europe. The Australian code is that you do not talk about injuries, you hide them. If you are injured, you stay out, and if you play, you are not injured. The Australians feel contempt for players who put their best injury forward. An Australian will say of such a man, "I have never beaten him when he was healthy." Laver developed a bad wrist a year or so ago, at Wimbledon, and he and his wife together got into a telephone kiosk so that she could tape the wrist in secrecy. If he had taped it himself, no one would ever have known the story. His wife would rather praise him than waltz with the Australian code. His wife is an American.

"Bad luck, Roger." This is what Roger Taylor's friends are saying to him, because he has to play Laver, in the fourth round, in the Centre Court tomorrow. The champion always plays in one of the two stadiums or on the Number Two Court, the only places that can take in all the people who want to see him. "Don't worry, though, Roger. It's no disgrace if Rocket is the man who puts you out. You've got nothing to lose."

"I've got everything to lose," Taylor tells them. "To lose at Wimbledon is to lose. This is what competition is all about. You've got to think you have a chance. You might hope for twenty-five let cords or something, but you always think there's a chance you'll get through."

"Bad luck, Roger."

Roger takes a deep hot bath, goes home to his two-bedroom flat on Putney Hill and continues to work himself up, talking to his mother, his father and his wife, over a glass of beer.

"That's enough beer, Roger."

"I don't live like a monk. I want to loosen up." He eats a slice of fried liver and opens another beer. "All my chances will hinge on how well I serve. I'll have to serve well to him, to keep him a little off balance on his returns. If I can't do that, I'll be in dire trouble. If you hit the ball a million miles an hour, he hits it back harder. You can't beat a player like that with sheer speed--unless he's looking the other way. I plan to float back as many service returns as I can. The idea is not to let it get on top of you that you're going to play these people. There's a tendency to sort of lie down and roll over."

Games are three all, first set. Taylor feels weak from tension. Laver is at ease. "We'd played often enough." Laver will say later. "I knew his game--left-handed, slice serve, better forehand than backhand, a good lob. He's very strong. He moves well for a big man. There was no special excitement. My heart wasn't pounding quite as hard as it sometimes does."

Taylor floats back a service return, according to plan. Laver reaches high, hits a semi-overhead volley, and the ball lands in the exact corner of the court. It bounces into the stadium wall. The crowd roars for him, but he is also hitting bad shots. There is a lack of finish on his game. He wins the first set, 6--4.

"My concentration lapsed continually. I was aware of too many things--the troublesome wind, the court being dry and powdery. I magnified the conditions. I played scratchy in the first set. I felt I'd get better in the next set."

A break point rises against Laver in the first game of the second set. He lifts the ball to serve. He hits it into the net. "Fault." He spins the next one--into the net. "Double fault." "Oh, just throw it up and hit it," he says aloud to himself, thumping his fist into the strings of his racket.

"When you lose your rhythm, serving, it's because of lack of concentration. I found myself thinking too much where the ball should be going. You don't think about your serve, you think about your first volley. If you think about getting your serve in, you make errors. I didn't know where my volleys were going. I missed easy smashes."

Taylor is floating back his returns. He is keeping Laver off balance. With his ground strokes, he is hitting through the wind. There is an explosion of applause for him when he wins the second set, 6--4. No one imagines that he will do more, but it is enough that Taylor, like McMillan, has won a set from Laver--and more than enough that he is English.

"Roger was playing some good tennis. When I played fairly well, he played better."

First game, third set--love-40--Laver serving. There is chatter in the crowd, the sound of the mountain stream. "Quiet, please!" Laver hits his way back to 30--40. He serves, rushes and punches a volley down the line--out. Game and another service break to Taylor. Five times, Laver has hit his running rifle-shot forehand into the net. He has repeatedly double-faulted. His dinks fall short. His volleys jump the base line. Taylor, meanwhile, is hitting with touch and power. He is digging for everything. Laver is not covering the court. Both feet off the ground, Laver tries a desperation shot from the hip and he nets it. Advantage Taylor. Taylor serves--a near ace, unplayable. Game and third set to Taylor, 6--2. He leads two sets to one. Unbelievable. Now the time has certainly come for Laver to react, as he so often does, with vengeance.

"When your confidence is drained, you tend to do desperation shots. My desperation shots, a lot of times, turn matches. I felt something was gone. I didn't have strength to get to the net quickly. I can't explain what it was. If you're not confident, you have no weight on the ball. You chase the ball. You look like a cat on a hot tin roof."

Laver serves, moves up, and flips the volley over the base line. "Get it down!" he shouts to himself. His next volley goes over the base line. Now he double-faults. Now he moves under a high, soft return. He punches it into a corner. Taylor moves to the ball and sends it back, crosscourt. Laver, running, hits a rolling top-spin backhand--over the base line. Advantage Taylor. Break point. The whispering of the crowd has become the buzz of scandal.

His red hair blowing in the wind, Laver lifts the ball to serve against the break. Suddenly, he looks as fragile as he did at Hurlingham and the incongruity is gone. The spectators on whom this moment is making the deepest impression are the other tennis players--40 or so in the grandstands, dozens more by the television in the Players' Tea Room. Something in them is coming free. The man is believable. He is vulnerable. He has never looked more human. He is not invincible.

"The serve is so much of the game. If you serve well, you play well. If not, you are vulnerable. If you play against someone who is capable of hitting the ball as hard as Roger can, you are looking up the barrel."

Laver serves. "Fault." He serves again. "Double fault." Game and service break to Taylor, fourth set. Laver, without apparent emotion, moves into the corner and the shadow that until moments ago seemed to reach in a hundred directions now follows him alone. The standard he has set may be all but induplicable, but he himself has returned to earth. He will remain the best, and he will go on beating the others. The epic difference will be that, from now on, they will think that they can beat him.

Taylor lobs. Laver runs back, gets under the bouncing ball, kneels and drives it into the net. He is now down 1--5. He is serving. He wins three points, but then he volleys into the net, again he volleys into the net, and again he volleys into the net--deuce. He serves. He moves forward. He volleys into the net. Advantage Taylor--match point. The sound of the crowd is cruel. "Quiet, please!" the umpire says. Laver serves, into the net. He appears to be trembling. He serves again. The ball does not touch the ground until it is out of the court beyond the base line.

Photographers swarm around him and around Taylor. "Well done, Roger. Nice," Laver says, shaking Taylor's hand. His eyes are dry. He walks patiently through the photographers, toward the glass doors. In the locker room, he draws a cover over his racket and gently sets it down. On the cover are the words Rod Laver--Grand Slam.

"I feel a little sad at having lost. I played well early in the tournament. I felt good, but I guess deep down something wasn't driving me hard enough. When I had somewhere to aim my hope, I always played better. Deep down in, you wonder, 'How many times do you have to win it?'"