My earliest memories of Wimbledon fortnight are of having to let myself silently into the house after school and then commando-crawl across the sitting room on my way to the kitchen for a snack, so that I didn’t obscure a potential match point for my mother and her viewing friends. They were tense times, made tenser by the fact that it was the Björn Borg-John McEnroe era. One half of the audience would be rooting for the silent Swede (including Mum, on the grounds that “he’d not get under your feet”) and the other for the hyperactive “You cannot be serious – the ball was in!” American. “Oh, be quiet,” Mum and I would snarl, in one of our rare moments of temperamental unity.
The BBC’s three-part documentary Gods of Tennis allows fans to relive those relatively halcyon days, with its first episode focusing on the slightly earlier era of Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe. To examine the impact the pair had on the game, contemporaneous footage is interspersed with interviews with King (Ashe died in 1993), sports journalists, other players and champions (including Sue Barker, Pam Shriver, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and, in later instalments, Borg and McEnroe themselves). And, for some reason, Miriam Margolyes.
In the fomentation of the early 70s we hear that King and Ashe helped drag the world of tennis kicking and screaming into a more egalitarian era. After King received prize money worth two-thirds of what her male counterpart Rod Laver was awarded when they each won their respective singles titles in 1968, she began the fight for pay parity with men (“Men just automatically think all the money is theirs”, she notes, drily). To counter arguments that there was less money in the women’s game because there was less public and therefore commercial interest, King set up a women-only tennis circuit and was soon pulling in huge audiences and buckets of sponsorship money. Less formally, she was – by her own presence and attitude on court – challenging the notion (even more prevalent then than now though it has far from disappeared) that female players should, above all, remain sweetly presentable, unaggressive and not too clearly out to win.
Evert – who shakes her head at several points at her youthful naivety and ignorance of what King was trying to do – was her greatest opponent on the court and the media’s darling. The efforts – always these efforts – to turn the two women against each other on a personal level, however, do not appear to have succeeded at the time. Both former players continue to regard each other with warmth and admiration even now.
Meanwhile, Ashe was fighting against the systemic racism in tennis. In 1973, he became the first Black player to compete in South Africa’s national championship and demanded a desegregated competition and audience. The South African author Mark Mathabane, who as a boy set off on a pilgrimage to see Ashe and became a friend thereafter for the rest of his life, says: “He made me realise that apartheid was based on a lie.”
With his every appearance on any court in an increasingly televised age, Ashe became an increasingly clear and public refutation of racist claims about what Black people could and couldn’t do. In 1975, using a brilliant and carefully worked out tactical game that required nerves of steel to cleave to, he beat the reigning champion Jimmy Connors in four sets to become the first Black winner of the men’s singles title at Wimbledon. (It is not mentioned in the programme, which concentrates on Wimbledon history after it turned professional in 1968, but in 1957 Althea Gibson became the first ever Black person to lift a singles trophy there.)
After the initial episode, featuring subjects who were undoubted pioneers and activists who made a genuine difference to the game, things get a bit looser. The focus shifts to the overall effect of changing times on tennis and its players rather than the other way around – the advent of serious sponsorship deals in the 80s, the increased tabloid attention and so on. Much more time is given over to footage of key matches between titans, and the heft of the opener is lost. Instead, it becomes more of a pleasant trot through the highlights of the past 30 years at the All England Lawn Tennis Club – nice though it is to relive some tremendously exciting points, especially before the power serve came to dominate the game. Nevertheless, you feel that there is a lack of consideration – bar a fleeting mention of the end of wooden rackets – of the changing nature of play itself.
There are still occasional moments of significance but they only highlight how much more priority should, for example, have been given to the outing of Navratilova and King (and the sly references and poisonous undercurrents that had pursued them from the start of their careers) or the obstacles overcome by players who had to abandon their homelands and families if they wanted to exercise their tremendous gifts. Some gods, it might have been worth noting, are more godlike than others.
• Gods of Tennis is on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
