The Tennis Player from Bermuda (3 page)

The next morning, Mrs Martin and I played at Coral Beach, and afterwards I asked, “Did you learn to play tennis here?”

“No. These courts weren’t laid down until after the war.” We were on one of the upper courts. “I learned on the lower courts, down by South Road.”

“Who taught you?”

“My parents.”

“But you must have had someone who showed you to play well.”

“Miss Hodgkin, you just lost our match 6-2, 6-1. Why are we discussing the ancient history of tennis in Bermuda? Why not think through why you lost?”

“I apologize.”

She snorted. “Don’t apologize. Win.”

“It’s just that I know you played at Wimbledon, and I wanted to know more about that. How it happened. How you learned. That’s all.”

I was ready to cry. I was still a child, really. She never meant to hurt me, but she could be mean.

She cocked her head to one side. She was thinking. “The only person who can tell you anything about playing tennis is yourself. All the fancy people who say they can teach you how to be a tennis champion are wrong, and most of the things they tell you are wrong. You’ll have to find out by yourself. There’s no other way.”

She walked away toward her bicycle.

“I know you had to play the final in the cold. And it was raining.” I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my tennis dress.

She turned and stared at me. “You’ve been talking to your father. It was cold and rainy on Centre Court that afternoon.” She left.

When I was 16, my parents and I were invited to a Christmas party at the Martins’ home, and there I saw an old book on a table:
Match Play and the Spin of the Ball,
by William T. Tilden
.
It would be an understatement to say that this book had been thoroughly read. It looked as though the dog had been after it. On the flyleaf was scrawled, “To Rachel, with admiration. Bill.” I started reading the book but quickly closed it, because I could see that almost every page carried Mrs Martin’s handwritten notes in the margins.

I found Tilden’s book in the Bermuda library, took it home and neglected my schoolwork for one evening to read it cover to cover.

The next day, before we played, I said to Mrs Martin, “I saw a book at your house by William Tilden. I checked it out of the library. He says that a baseline player with a good return of service will usually defeat a serve and volley player.”

She nodded. “Big Bill thought a strong return would more often than not pass a player at the net.”

“You knew him?”

She nodded again. “I met him at the Australian championships at Kooyong. Just before the war.”

After a moment, she said, “Big Bill went to Berlin, to the Rot-Weiss Club, to coach the German Davis Cup team. In 1937. Before I knew him. He regretted going to Berlin. At least, I hope so.”

“What’s the ‘Rot-Weiss Club’?”

She didn’t answer; she was in a reverie.

“Was he right about baseline players? That they defeat serve and volley players?”

She snapped back to the present. “Miss Hodgkin, are we going to devote the entire afternoon to chatting about Bill’s various theories?” She tossed her old wooden racket onto the court.

“Rough or smooth?” She meant that I should call whether the knots in the gut would land ‘rough’ – meaning that the side with the gut sticking out of the knots would point up – or ‘smooth.’

At a changeover, while she was drying her hands, I asked, “Should I switch and start staying on the baseline?”

“No.”

“You think I’m too small.”

“No. There are women baseline players with your stature who play effectively. You would have to play with intelligence from the baseline, but you do play intelligently.” This was one of Mrs Martin’s rare compliments.

“So why shouldn’t I think about switching to the baseline?”

She thought for a moment. “The baseline and the net each has advantages, but the principal advantage of playing from the baseline is time. Compared to the net, you have an additional half-second, maybe less, at the baseline to plan your shot.”

She seemed to regard an additional half-second as the tennis equivalent of a long weekend in the country. “Let’s resume play.”

For once I had to have an answer, and I put my hand on her arm. “Please tell me what you mean.”

“At the net, you can’t plan. There’s no time. You rely on instinct and confidence. A player at the net with good instincts and confidence may have been easy for Big Bill to pass, but not so easy for the rest of us. But confidence is essential at the net.”

I felt I was the least confident person on the planet. I was a small, awkward teenage girl. “Am I confident? Do you think I’m confident?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Your mother, and both your grandmothers, are medical doctors. I’m certain that during their medical training, and after, they were made to feel unwelcome because they are women in a male profession. They cared not the slightest. Each of them had confidence in herself.”

She paused. “You may have some of their confidence. Let’s resume play.”

I won the Bermuda girls’ singles championship in both 1958 and 1959, both times against older girls, and both times easily. But Mrs Martin did not come to watch my matches. That might have been misconstrued by some as coaching. Everyone knew she played tennis with me, but she wanted to make it appear that we merely played an occasional social game together, which was nonsense and everyone knew it.

She may not have admitted even to herself that we had a complicated, intense, private, and competitive relationship with one another. I don’t mean to suggest that it was in any way inappropriate by today’s standards; it wasn’t, but I depended on her, and in some way I’m sure she wouldn’t admit, and may not have even realized, she depended on me.

But I wasn’t sure, and now decades later I’m still not sure, whether at that time she liked me.

I owe her so much and today, while she is quite elderly, and I am in my late 60s, we are close friends. I shop for her groceries, and we walk together slowly on quiet lanes in Paget and chat about our families. But when I was a girl it was as though she felt obligated to show me the way I might become a champion – even though she was plainly reluctant to do so. For what possible reason, I couldn’t imagine.

We never talked about it.

She rarely talked about anything.

But we both knew we were watching sand flowing down through an hourglass.

For years, she won 6-0, 6-0, every time. Then it was often 6-2, 6-2. Later it was 6-4, 6-4, and a few times 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.

It was only a matter of time. But I had never defeated her.

J
UNE
1960
F
IRST
R
OUND
L
ADIES’
S
INGLES
T
OURNAMENT
T
ENNIS
S
TADIUM
M
ONTPELIER
R
OAD
B
ERMUDA

There were no rules about entering either the Bermuda girls’ tournament or the main tournament. Most young ladies played in the girls’ tournament until they went away for university to England or the States, and then they either stopped playing altogether or moved to the main tournament. There was no set age limit. You entered the tournament in which you wanted to play. In June 1960, I entered myself in the main tournament. Only after I had entered did I learn that the youngest, unseeded player was always paired in the first round with the top seeded player, who in 1960 was the defending champion, Mrs Martin. That meant I would play her in the first round.

At the time, this seemed a horrible mistake. Looking back, though, I’m not sure it was a mistake. It may have given me the career in tennis I had.

Mother’s response was simple: “You must withdraw from the tournament.” I said no. Father, the diplomat, asked for a word with me alone.

He began by calling me ‘sweetheart,’ which was his softening up move. It usually worked. But it didn’t this time. I said I was staying in the tournament.

“Fiona, Rachel is a tennis player with an international reputation. She is extremely competitive. I’ve known her all her life. She cares for you, a great deal, but you must understand if you challenge her in public competition she will crush you. And she’ll be entirely justified. No one will criticize her in the slightest.”

“I will play her and win.”

“Fiona, Rachel is undoubtedly the best tennis player to ever live on this island. You must be realistic.”

“I will win.”

“I’m sure you will win over her, some day, and maybe some day soon. But not this year. Wait until you’re 18, next year. Play her then.”

“I’m playing her next week.” And that was that.

After my brief first round match, the Hodgkin family and Mrs Martin met in the ladies’ dressing room in the tennis stadium near Hamilton. It was highly unusual for Father to be in the ladies’ dressing room, but the lady players, under the circumstances, all decided to be somewhere else until this particular meeting of parents, child, and defending champion had ended.

I was not merely crying; it would be more accurate to call it uncontrolled wailing.

Mrs Martin, after she won the match, 6-1, 6-0, had been furious and brutal. She called me a coward in front of my parents – who had not come to my defense. It is possible that, contrary to her bedrock principles, Mrs Martin had given me the only game I won in order to encourage me. If so, it hadn’t worked.

In the dressing room, Mrs Martin was still angry and even more specific in her accounting of my shortcomings.

“You capitulated in the second set. You failed to even try. Why bother walking out onto the court?”

“I couldn’t win,” I said through my tears.

“How the devil do you know?” she snapped. “The match isn’t over until the last point is played. You gave up.”

“I just want you to play tennis with me, still. I have to play with you.”

“I can’t play with a coward.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“You have the skill. You’re intelligent on the court. But you don’t have the character to win. You’re weak.”

And then her
coup de grâce
: “You’ll never be a champion.”

I wailed.

Mother interrupted. “I think we should talk about whether Fiona should continue playing tennis at all. Perhaps another sport would be better for her.”

Mrs Martin was a little calmer now. She had never called me by my Christian name, at least not since I was a baby. But now she turned to me and said, “I think that is something only Fiona can decide.”

She said good day to my parents and walked out.

I didn’t play tennis for a month. I worked for Mother and Grandfather filing their patients’ charts. I talked to no one. I was humiliated, and everyone on Bermuda knew it. I was miserable. In the late afternoons, I would cycle to some deserted beach and sit on the sand watching the Atlantic. I thought about leaving Bermuda; we had plenty of relatives in both the States and England with whom I could live.

Finally, one Saturday afternoon, I put on a tennis dress, took my racket, and cycled to the Martins’ home, but they were not there. I went to Coral Beach and found the Martins playing mixed doubles with another couple. I waited until they came off the court, and then approached Mrs Martin and asked if I might have a word.