March 24, 1973: Plimpton Falls Short

George Plimpton in 1977

We’re lucky that it was a bit of a slow news day for tennis on March 24, 1973. A few newspapers had room for this:

PHILADELPHIA–The local team of James L. Van Alen 2d and Jimmy Dunn won the United States amateur-professional handicap court tennis doubles championship today by defeating George Plimpton and Eddie Noll of New York, 6-5, 6-5, 3-6, 6-4, at the Racquet Club.

Yes, that Jimmy Van Alen. And yes–oh yes!–that George Plimpton.

Van Alen was, depending on your perspective, somewhere between a gadfly and a visionary. He invented the tiebreak and spent more than a decade badgering the rest of the US tennis establishment. Even when his brainchild became standard, he wasn’t satisfied. His ideal was a nine-point breaker: first to five, sudden death. As the first-to-seven, win-by-two variation gained popularity, he got steadily crankier about it.

Details aside, the man loved tiebreaks. He proposed that once a set reached 6-all, a special red flag would be flown above the stadium to indicate that a tiebreak was underway. He convinced the officials at the US Open to go for it, and when he attended other events, he brought along a spare flag of his own.

A Van Alen “Sudden Death” flag flying above Forest Hills in 1971

In 1973, Van Alen was 70 years old. He was far past his prime as a lawn tennis player, and he had never been a particularly great one. (He did win a match at the 1931 US National Championships.) His pastime of choice was court tennis, the ancient sport on which lawn tennis was based. Court tennis is a more strategic game that relies less on power. Van Alen won national singles and doubles titles in his niche pursuit.

Van Alen’s prestige gave him another advantage. This was an “amateur-professional” doubles championship–that is, one of each. Van Alen the amateur chose to team up with Jimmy Dunn, the head pro at the Philadelphia host club. It always helps to choose the right partner: It was Dunn’s tenth title at this event.

* * *

Van Alen was not, however, the most interesting man on the court that day. Few characters could compete with George Plimpton in that category.

Plimpton was a journalist and occasional actor. By 1973, he was 46 years old and a minor celebrity. Despite a patrician background that could be traced back to the Mayflower, Plimpton got closer to the action than any sportswriter before him. He pitched to major-league all-stars, traded punches with Sugar Ray Robinson, and manned the net for hockey’s Boston Bruins.

He achieved his fame through dalliances in football and golf, yet when he wasn’t on assignment, tennis was his sport of choice. The writer was known as an excellent lawn tennis player, and he occasionally turned up in pro-am exhibitions. When he got married in 1968, the New York Times went with the standard line for a racket-wielder: “Plimpton Drops Singles for Doubles.” A decade later, he played alongside Vitas Gerulaitis as a headliner at a Rockefeller Center benefit match–on ice.

A 1971 New Yorker cartoon

Among his many stunts, he once faced off against Richard González at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Gorgo wasn’t one to show mercy on an amateur, and the fact Plimpton was a journalist probably didn’t help either. González destroyed him.

Like Van Alen, Plimpton found a home in the small world of court tennis. He had competed at national events since at least 1961. He merged his profession and his passion in 1971 when he edited Pierre’s Book, the instructional guide written by French court tennis great Pierre Etchebaster.

Despite an advantage of more than two decades, Plimpton doesn’t seem to have been Van Alen’s equal at the royal game. In that 1973 championship match, his pro partner, Eddie Noll, had to handle three-quarters of his team’s shots.

Unfortunately for us, Plimpton never wrote much about the sport he pursued so avidly. He covered lawn tennis just once for Sports Illustrated, the publication that backed him on some of his wilder adventures. For that 1967 story, he was drawn to a series of unusual matches at Southampton and Newport–early-round tilts that refused to end, extending to 32-30, 48-46, and 49-47. Naturally, he checked in with the tournament director at the Newport Casino, Jimmy Van Alen.

“That’s nonsense out there,” said the inventor of the tiebreak. “Just nonsense.”

* * *

This is the second installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

Podcast Episode 107: Book Club: Sudden Death, by Alvaro Enrigue

Episode 107 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, with Carl Bialik of the Thirty Love podcast, is our fourth book club episode, a discussion of Alvaro Enrigue’s novel, Sudden Death.

The book is set around the year 1600, and a central feature is a real tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. Enrigue is fascinated by the various ways tennis pops up in the documentary record of the era, a mix of high and low culture, cutting across continents and national borders.

The novel is digressive, so we follow suit and stray far afield from the contents of the book itself. Carl and I get into the advantages and difficulties of writing blow-by-blow descriptions of points, how many numbers is too many numbers, the various ways theatrical productions depict tennis, and why tennis fans seem so insecure.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this episode is about 52 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

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Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba

Bernoulli and Court Tennis

Italian translation at settesei.it

As if you needed more proof that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Most of us are fairly new to the mathematical study of tennis.  It turns out that probabilistic analysis of tennis goes back almost as far as probability theory itself, to Jacob Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician best known for the Law of Large Numbers.

In the late 17th century, Bernoulli wrote a Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis.  I haven’t given it a thorough reading yet, but for now, I have to share a line that ought to be the epigram to just about every work of statistical analysis in sport:

You cannot conceive, as you say, that one could measure the strengths of players with numbers, much less that one could draw from these numbers all the conclusions I have drawn.

Bernoulli was born, taught, and died in Basel, which must be why tennis is still so popular there today.