New York City vista
NEW YORK — Can it be 40 years since Rod Laver borrowed a dime from me? Afraid so. It wasn’t a “Brother, can you spare a dime?” plea, however. After all, Laver had moments before won a tennis tournament called the US Open, and was handed a check for $ 16,000. (The same event that will shortly endow a man and a woman with $ 1,600,000 a piece. Yes, you can get rich playing this fuzzy ball game, but you have to practice an awful lot.) continue reading »
September 11 2009 | US Open | 2 Comments »
Sculpture on a terrace of the Metropolitan Opera House
Call me Bud C. That’s Bud the Curmudgeon.
You can also call me grouchy, grumpy and cantankerous, too. That’s OK because it’s the way I feel when running up against the confusing, careless corruption of tennis language.
What I have in mind is the game’s most precious and rarest accomplishment: the Grand Slam. It’s the quintessential quadrilateral, a gem so luminous and virtually out of reach that it has been achieved merely six times since the origin 71 years ago. But it hurts, and I shed curmudgeonly tears at the way the Slam is treated by most print and TV journalists, as well as numerous players and officials who ought to know better. continue reading »
August 29 2009 | Misc. Articles | 1 Comment »
“Laver’s lost the first two sets!”
The cry ran through the Wimbledon press room like wildfire. But it was chilling to me.
Wimbledon ’69 had barely begun, and the defending champion, “Rocket” Laver, was under siege, losing badly to an anonymous Indian in the second round on Court 4, a patch of grass hardly fit for the emperor.
To the other reporters, it was the possibility of a juicy upset story. Not for me. I was helping Laver write his memoir (“The Education of a Tennis Player”) – but the New York publisher had made it clear: No Grand Slam, no book. So I was not exactly objective on the subject of Rodney George Laver at the halfway mark of his second Slam. continue reading »
January 31 2009 | Australian Open | 1 Comment »
