50 Years Of Love And Tennis

After our shower Mr. Wallace invited me to breakfast to which I looked forward with my usual hearty appetite. He said that he had something special for me and served the first frozen orange juice I had ever tasted. He had received it as a sample from a company which had just begun to put it on the market. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a first course but was soon to learn to my sorrow that for the Secretary of Agriculture this constituted a "hearty breakfast."

On two of my repeated visits to the Soviet Union I had personal contact with tennis under Communism. Both were in the late '20s. I was in Leningrad on the occasion of a tennis tournament organized by the director of physical culture. In the Soviet Union of that day everything began with a parade, and all the contestants, both men and women, paraded past the Red officials, carrying their tennis rackets on the right shoulder as if they were rifles. They were led by a band and kept fairly good step.

They were then drawn up before a platform to listen to a speech by the sports director. He informed the contestants that as played in other countries tennis was a bourgeois game played by the capitalist class, but that the Soviet Union was determined to make it a democratic game for the masses. They were pioneers in this good cause, and he urged them to perfect their tennis technique so that the Soviet teams might successfully challenge teams from capitalist countries.

When I saw them play later I realized that they had much to learn. They covered court well but relied on hard drives rather than placements to win points. The chief feature of the Russian game of that period was the tremendous force with which they hit the ball. Upon examining one of their balls I found it was much less resilient than ours—which explained why it had to be hit so much harder to travel the same distance.

Several years later I had a second experience with Soviet tennis in the Caucasus oilfields. On my way to a petroleum laboratory surrounded by oil derricks, I had passed a tennis court and stopped to watch the play. The court was uneven and dusty, the net was torn, while balls and rackets evidenced long use. Players and the few spectators soon identified me as a foreigner and began plying me with questions about tennis in the U.S. They were particularly anxious to know how the quality of their tennis compared with that in my country.

This forced me to choose between truth and tact. I decided to be truthful but to emphasize the poor equipment as primarily responsible for their poor play. So I told them about our tightly strung rackets, our all-weather courts and the better bounce of our balls. I suggested that a judicious mixture of oil and soil might provide a better surface and that, while our tennis nets might be as old as theirs, we had found that they could be mended. They were also interested to learn how much an old racket could be improved by replacing one or two broken strings.

Then I went on to the laboratory building and after a brief inspection walked back past the tennis court. Play had stopped, but a large group at the side of the court was engaged in an eager discussion. A German-speaking player told me what had happened. The chairman of the local sports committee had been one of the players who had listened to my explanations. He had immediately called a meeting of the laboratory sports committee for a discussion: "How can we improve our tennis?" I stayed on for a few minutes and, with the help of my German-speaking interpreter, followed what was a very serious debate on how the most improvement could be secured with the smallest expenditure of money.

It was one more evidence that when Soviet citizens set out to do something in the field of sport they want to do it well and are willing to go to a lot of trouble to achieve their end. Yet it is also true that fewer committee meetings for theoretical discussion and more purposeful practice might be helpful.

We have flown around the world twice in recent years. Almost every summer we have traveled in Europe, Africa, the Near East or South America. Always we have taken our rackets. We have made many delightful friends through tennis—it is such an easy companionship and more relaxing than just sitting around.

Whenever we arrived in some foreign place the United Press—I always used United Press service for my news broadcasts—or the U.S. Information Agency sent some young men to meet us. "What can we do for you?" was the polite inquiry. They expected us to ask to meet the Premier or the ruling potentate. Instead our reply would be: "Can you arrange a game of tennis for us—we prefer mixed doubles—say at 5 o'clock tomorrow afternoon?"