Tennis: Game, set but no match for the Wimbledon losers.

Originally published in
The Times, Tuesday July 08, 1986.

 As at Rome’s Colosseum, Wimbledon’s centre court salutes only those
of its gladiators who survive and conquer in their final encounters.
A few All-England finalists return, hardened by past battles, and
emerge triumphant. Most, though, receive an imperial thumbs-down and
are doomed to oblivion in the history of tennis.
 
Ivan Lendl is so good a player that it is hard to imagine that he
will not hold up that golden trophy one day, as Boris Becker has done
twice. Yet if he never does, Lendl may at least take some cold
comfort in the list of tennis thoroughbreds who have also stumbled at
the final hurdle, sometimes more than once.
 
Ken Rosewall lost four finals spanning 20 years; Baron von Cramm lost
three in succession, as did Fred Stolle. All losers in Wimbledon’s
last round bear the mental scars; none can banish the memory of their
loneliness as they towelled down, waiting to receive the words of
commiseration from the royal party, like extras obliged to play a
role they would have spurned just hours before.
 
‘Photographers just rushed past me, they shoved me aside and trampled
all over my bags and rackets,’ Dennis Ralston says. He was beaten
6-4, 11-9, 6-4 in 1966 by Manuel Santana. ‘I was furious but
impotent; it was the lowest moment in my life. ‘ In retrospect, he
bitterly regrets his self-satisfaction at reaching the final and his lack
of real determination to win it at all costs.

For Ralston, as for so many others, a reversal of that one match
result would have changed his standing in the game. Now Chris Lloyd’s
coach, a television commentator and a college tennis instructor, he
is unrecognised by Wimbledon’s hierarchy to this day. He has never
been inside the members’ enclosure at Wimbledon (though he could have
gone to last Thursday’s reception with the newly formed Last Eight
Club). Yet the winners have all been accepted, honourarily, into the Club’s holy of holies.
 
Ken Rosewall, in 1971, became a unique exception. Kurt Nielsen has
followed. The Dane reached two finals, in 1953 and 1955, but, like
Lendl, did not come close to winning. A Wimbledon title then, might
have produced a Danish tennis explosion on a Borg-like Swedish scale.
 
Who knows? Nielsen strikes me as a rather sad figure these days,
having retired two years ago as a Grand Prix supervisor, probably
because he was just too nice to tame the likes of John McEnroe. Like
many near champions, he would have been more successful, according to
Rosewall, had he bothered to become fitter, Australian style.
 
Some players kept on trying in vain. Rosewall came so close in 1954
and 1956, had a tough five-setter against John Newcombe in the 1970
final, and at the age of 39 ‘amazed’ himself by getting through
again, only to be devastated by Connors.

Another Australian, Fred Stolle, was nurturing his prodigy, Mary-Jo
Fernandez, aged 14, at Wimbledon this year. Stolle lost his first
final in 1963 to Chuck McKinley (now ill with a brain tumour and
inducted this week into the Tennis Hall of Fame). Stolle beat
McKinley the following year, but in the final ran into his nemesis,
Roy Emerson (6-4, 12-10, 6-3), as he did again in the 1965 final.
 
Of course there have been tales of dashed hopes for women stars,
Christine Truman being one, though her injury in the final against
Angela Mortimer has, her detractors suggest, become worse and worse
with the passage of the years.
 
One who might well have been champion, but for injury, was Vera
Sukova, who died in 1984. She tripped down the stairs of her hotel just before her final, badly damaging an ankle. Her foot and leg
heavily strapped, she was no match for the American, Karen Susman,
losing 6-4, 6-4. The charming Czech had earlier defeated Angela
Mortimer, herself the victim of a torn hamstring which would have led
her to scratch were she not defending champion.
 
For the Sukova family, all is not lost. Vera’s daughter, Helena, who
played so marvellously in this year’s quarter-final against Mrs
Lloyd, may restore its honour. Another loser with a tale of woe was
Baron von Cramm, who in his 1936 final against the great Fred Perry,
pulled a thigh muscle after the first game, which went to deuce 10
times. He lost 6-1, 6-1, 6-0.
 
The man who came closest to winning the title without actually doing
so was an Australian, John Bromwich.  Serving at 5-3, 40-15 in the
final set against Bob Falkenberg, the hard-hitting American, Bromwich
was beaten three times by desperate full-blooded returns of service.
Bromwich did not win another game.
 
For every disappointed finalist there have, of course, been two
defeated semi-finalists. For Ramanathan Krishnan, simply getting that
far twice (losing to Fraser in 1960, and Laver in 1961), made him a
national hero in India. Perhaps, for the sake of his family’s serenity, it is just as well he went no further.
 
Still, his success bred Vijay Amritraj, the Wimbledon junior
champion, whose family were inspired to build a court in Madras, one
mile away from the Krishnan’s. Ramanathan’s son Ramesh reached the
quarter-finals this year.
 
Some finalists fade into obscurity fast. Chris Lewis, of New Zealand,
found reaching the 1983 final to be something of a curse, though a
cherished memory. Unable to live up to the vastly increased
expectations, his tennis has slipped to a point where he declined
this year to compete at Wimbledon, where he would have had to play in
the qualifying event.

Some finalists fade into obscurity fast. Chris Lewis, of New Zealand,
found reaching the 1983 final to be something of a curse, though a
cherished memory. Unable to live up to the vastly increased
expectations, his tennis has slipped to a point where he declined
this year to compete at Wimbledon, where he would have had to play in
the qualifying event.
 
Lewis had to be prised off a beach in Australia earlier this year for
a Davis Cup match, in which he performed disastrously. He then
relinquished the world circuit for the comforts of club tennis in West Germany.
 
Kevin Curren, the 1985 finalist, is struggling to find the motivation for
another onslaught on his favourite surface, grass, here next year.
 
Still, despite the degree of indifference with which losing finalists
are treated here, all remain adamant that the Wimbledon traditions
must not be sacrificed. The old hands complain that many players
think they are, in Ralston’s words, bigger than the game, and show
scant respect for Wimbledon’s glorious past.

Clearly for these great Wimbledon finalists, the game on what might have been their day of glory turned out bigger than they could cope with.