The Day They Belabored the Point

The New York Times

September 23, 2009
The Day They Belabored the Point
By DAVE SEMINARA
As the 642nd shot of the rally floated high above her head, Vicki Nelson decided it was time to go for a winner.

“I thought I was going to go crazy,” Nelson told reporters after the match. “No matter what I did with the ball, she kept getting it back.”

She added: “It took me a long time to get up the nerve to come in, but she finally hit a short lob and I put it away — forever.”

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 24, 1984, Nelson and Jean Hepner, who were ranked No. 93 and No. 172 in the world, engaged in a 29-minute, 643-shot rally that remains the longest point played in a professional tennis match.

For comparison, during a match last month, Andy Murray and Julien Benneteau had a rally that lasted 53 shots, and it was the longest either of them could remember playing in competition.

The rally between Nelson and Hepner occurred in the first round of the $50,000 Virginia Slims-sponsored Ginny tournament at the Raintree Swim and Racquet Club in Richmond, Va., with Nelson finally prevailing, 6-4, 7-6 (11).

The 6-hour-31-minute marathon was itself the longest match in tennis history for nearly 20 years and remains the longest match completed on a single day. (In the 2004 French Open, Fabrice Santoro defeated Arnaud Clément in 6:33. That match, however, was suspended by darkness in the fifth set, so the final 1:55 was played the next day.)

Both Nelson and Hepner seem vaguely embarrassed that their names are in the record books.

“Even now, just thinking about it, my stomach is starting to hurt,” Hepner said. “I had a lot going on in my personal life at that time and I was trying to turn my career around and it was getting tougher to do. But I didn’t stay out there for six hours to get attention; I just wanted to win that match badly.”

Hepner, who was then 25, retired from the sport soon after and now lives in Redwood City, Calif. She is a teacher, property manager and competitive chess player, but only rarely plays tennis and no longer has any connections to the professional tennis world.

Nelson, who goes by Nelson-Dunbar after marrying, lives in Medina, Ohio, and remains involved in the sport. Her husband, Keith Dunbar, was a professional tennis coach and their 13-year-old son, Jacob, was the top-ranked player in the country in the 12-and-under division last year. Their son Ethan, 17, wants to play Division I tennis in college next year, and their 10-year-old daughter, Emily, has just begun playing.

The rally that put Nelson-Dunbar and Hepner in the record books came at set point for Hepner, who was ahead, 11-10, in the second-set tie breaker, which lasted 1:47 on its own.

“There was tons of lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said. “I would try to come in and she’d lob me again.”

After winning the point, Nelson-Dunbar collapsed with cramps in her legs. The chair umpire, who apparently maintained consciousness throughout the 643-stroke point, actually called a time-violation warning, but Nelson-Dunbar pulled it together and got back to the baseline to begin the next point.

How does a point go on for 29 minutes before one player or the other hits a winner or makes a mistake?

“We were both pretty much standing on the baseline lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said.

Hepner recalled, “I was just really concentrating and was very consistent.”

Two points later, Nelson-Dunbar closed out the match and apologized to the lines officials for its length.

“I felt so bad for them,” she said. “They were sitting out there so long, and they must have been falling asleep.”

Hepner said she had no idea the match had dragged on for more than six hours. “There’s time distortion when you are in the alpha state — like a hypnotic state,” she said. “I had no idea that six and a half hours had passed.”

John Packett, who covered the match for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, had the foresight to keep track of the strokes, explaining, “I started counting because the rallies were going so long, you had to figure, Who knows how long these points are going to last?”

Packett, who covered tennis and other sports for The Times-Dispatch for nearly 40 years, recalled the match as dull, yet strangely compelling.

“I’m not sure why I even watched it,” he said. “I’m glad I did, since it turned out to be a historic match, but it wasn’t one of the highlights of my journalistic career.”

Hugh Waters, a former tennis coach and the owner of the Raintree club, remembered: “I had a lot of people coming up to me at the tournament saying the match was ridiculous, but I always jumped on them. It takes guts to do what they did.

“People don’t understand the mental aspect of the game: this was a battle of wills and real tennis fans like me could appreciate it.”

Nelson-Dunbar turned 22 minutes after the match ended, but she went to bed without celebrating because she had to play again that afternoon.

Before calling it a night, she called Keith Dunbar, who was then her boyfriend.

“She told me it was the worst day of her life,” he recalled. “I asked her if she lost, and she said no, she won, but she had just gotten off the court. I told her to imagine how Jean felt.”

In her next match, Nelson-Dunbar was ushered out of the tournament by Michaela Washington, 5-7, 7-5, 6-0. “I was really bad — I could barely move that day,” Nelson-Dunbar remembered.

She earned $775 in prize money for the week, and Hepner, who stayed with a local family during the tournament to reduce travel costs, took home $475 for her efforts, or about $73 an hour on court.

Among the astonishing elements to the match was this: If Hepner had won the epic rally, she would have forced a third set, and who knows how long the match might have lasted.

To This Day, Chair Umpire Still Has no Answer for McEnroe

The New York Times

November 5, 2009
To This Day, Chair Umpire Has No Answer for McEnroe
By DAVE SEMINARA

“Answer the question. The question, jerk!

“No mistakes so far in this match, right?”

Twenty-five years ago, John McEnroe stared up at Dr. Leif Ake Nilsson, a Swedish chair umpire, and angrily demanded a response. He never received one. Nilsson, now 66 and living in Malmo, Sweden, still has no answer for McEnroe. “He wanted an answer to his question,” Nilsson recalled, “but I couldn’t find any answers.”

The incident came during McEnroe’s semifinal encounter with Anders Jarryd, then the sixth-ranked tennis player in the world, at the Swedish Open, on Nov. 4, 1984. McEnroe served, ahead by 4-2 in the second set, after losing the first set, 6-1. When a linesman called the first serve long, McEnroe approached Nilsson and glared at him with his trademark scowl.

“He asked me if all Swedish umpires were as good as me,” Nilsson said. “I couldn’t find an answer to that question, either.”

McEnroe then unleashed a sarcastic attack on Nilsson, who sat frozen in his chair.

“No mistakes so far in this match, right?” McEnroe bellowed, as he continued to step ominously closer to the umpire’s chair. “You haven’t overruled anything. No mistakes whatsoever!”

Was Nilsson, a dentist, fantasizing at that moment about giving McEnroe a particularly painful root canal? “No, no, no, never,” he said. “You never think that way.”

Nilsson ignored McEnroe’s barb, and officiously chirped, “Second serve, please.”

The overly polite request incensed McEnroe, who screamed, “Answer my question!” He then summoned even more ferocity, shouting, “The question, jerk!”

“He totally lost his head,” Jarryd recalled. “He was ready to lose the match.”

Nilsson had issued McEnroe a warning in the second game of the match for firing a ball in anger at a spectator, so this second outburst cost him a point penalty. He lost his service game moments later; then steamed over to the sideline and smashed several glasses of ice water with a slice backhand that might have otherwise been a penetrating approach shot. He then sat down for a second before springing back up and taking a forehand swipe at the cups, sort of like a bowler attempting to salvage a spare.

“They were real glasses, not paper cups,” Nilsson said.

Jarryd sat in stunned silence. “I was a bit in shock, but I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Mac was a big star. I couldn’t very well go up to the umpire and ask him to disqualify John.”

Nilsson assessed McEnroe a game penalty, leveling the score at 4-4 in the second set. “He grabbed his bags and was about to walk off the court,” Jarryd said. “He probably thought he was going to be disqualified, but nothing happened,” and the match eventually resumed.

Despite the row, or perhaps because of it, McEnroe won the match, 1-6, 7-6, 6-2.

“When something like this happened, most of the time he’d start to play better, and in this match I got a little nervous,” Jarryd said. “Other players would fall apart. But not him. Never him. He became more dangerous.”

McEnroe was fined $2,100 and ultimately suspended for 21 days for exceeding the $7,500 annual fine cap, a rule instituted expressly for him. After the match, he claimed that he lost his temper because he was “mentally tired,” and Jarryd told reporters that it was “difficult to play someone who behaves like McEnroe.”

In an interview in February with Tennis Week, McEnroe described the incident as his most embarrassing tennis memory.

“There was a line call that didn’t look so great,” he said in the interview. “I went ballistic. Called the umpire a jerk. Whacked a ball into the stands. Then smacked a soda can with my racket, and got soda all over the King of Sweden, who was sitting in the front row.”

Nilsson and Jarryd contended that the King of Sweden was not at the match.

McEnroe went on to beat Mats Wilander in the final of what proved to be the last tournament of his finest season: he was 84-3 that year, and won Wimbledon and the United States Open.

Wilander and the Swedes got a measure of revenge on McEnroe weeks later, however, as Sweden beat the United States, 5-0, in the Davis Cup final in Gothenburg. Nilsson was a linesman at the match, but avoided further confrontation with McEnroe, who never won another Grand Slam after his magical season.

Nilsson bumped into McEnroe in a hotel at a seniors event years ago, but reported that there was no tearful reunion. “We stayed in the same hotel, our sons even played together, but he never even looked at me when we saw each other,” Nilsson said.

The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet recently asked McEnroe if he remembered Nilsson, and he replied, “I don’t remember any particular chair umpire; they were all equally bad.”

Nilsson was asked what he would do differently if he had the opportunity to relive the incident.

“If I could have found an answer to his question, I should have done it, but even today I don’t know what to answer,” he said. “If I had given him a proper answer, maybe he would have accepted it. I just didn’t know what to say. That’s why I said, ‘Second serve, please.’ ”

Jarryd and McEnroe remained friends and doubles partners; they’ve won the 45-and-over doubles title at the French Open three years running.

After 25 years, McEnroe’s moment lives on, registering hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, placing in dozens of best sports tantrum lists, and even serving as the inspiration for the name of a Swedish tennis Web site, answermyquestionjerk.se In the pantheon of McEnroe eruptions, the match ranks alongside his “You cannot be serious” tirade, in which he called the chair umpire Ted James “the pits of the world.”

But who had the call right, Nilsson or McEnroe? Jarryd did not remember if the ball was in or out.

“The linesman saw it correct, and I saw it correct,” Nilsson said. “We were concentrating on the line, and he’s on the baseline on the other side of the net. Who had the ability to see it best, us or him? It doesn’t matter if it was in or out, it’s the umpire’s opinion that counts.”

The Year the Davis Cup Felt Empty

The Year the Davis Cup Felt Empty, 11/28/09


November 29, 2009
The Year the Davis Cup Felt Empty
By DAVE SEMINARA
Four men who dreamed of sipping Champagne from the Davis Cup finally had their hands on it, but there would be no celebration.

“We were told to put our tennis clothes on and come down to accept our trophies,” recalled Raymond Moore, a member of the only South African team to win the Davis Cup.

Bob Hewitt, who played singles and doubles for that South African team and was later inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, remembered, “We were proud to see our names on the Davis Cup, but the way we got it left a sour taste in our mouths.”

Tuesday is the 35th anniversary of the most important tennis matches never to be played. In 1974, South Africa and India advanced to the final of the Davis Cup, which had been won by either the United States or Australia every year since 1936. But the Indian government boycotted the final in protest of South Africa’s system of apartheid.

The players who would have contested the final have had decades to debate the merits of the decision, but there still is no consensus.

The South African players opposed apartheid but took different approaches to representing what had become a pariah state.

Cliff Drysdale, who was the top-ranked South African player in 1974 and is now a tennis commentator for ESPN, publicly opposed apartheid, left the team and renounced his South African citizenship after playing one Davis Cup match in 1974.

Drysdale said that he grew tired of representing a country whose government had become “increasingly unacceptable to the whole world.” (In a notable example, South Africa was barred from the Olympics from 1964 until 1992.) Drysdale said he had begun to feel like an “unwelcomed guest” at tournaments around the globe. “I just had had enough of it,” he said.

Moore was a vocal critic of the apartheid regime, while Hewitt and his doubles partner, Frew McMillan, did not comment publicly on the issue.

“I could understand the nature of governments opposing the politics of South Africa, which I opposed myself, but I was not a political animal, I was a sporting beast,” McMillan said.

While the rising tide of condemnation for South Africa’s minority-rule government complicated the team’s surprising run to the Davis Cup final, India’s path there included more on-court drama. After upsetting the defending champion, Australia, in an epic confrontation that set a record for games played, 327, India still had the Soviet Union standing in the way of a trip to the final.

The team was led by Vijay and Anand Amritraj, who were brothers and rivals.

“I was always better than Vijay growing up,” said Anand Amritraj, who was two years older. “Then in ’73, he had a breakout year, and I was left in the dust.”

With India leading the Soviet Union after the doubles, 2-1, Anand Amritraj clinched a berth in the final with a rousing five-set win over Teimuraz Kakulia.

“It was two brothers taking their country to the final, which had never happened, and this was for a billion people,” Vijay Amritraj said. “It was past the goose-bump feeling.”

India’s celebration proved short-lived. South Africa defeated Italy to reach the final, and after weeks of speculation that a compromise might be reached to play at a neutral site, the Indian government decided to boycott the final. The decision, which most believe came from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, ceded the Cup to South Africa and came as a crushing disappointment for the players on both teams.

The boycott did spare the South African officials that ran Ellis Park in Johannesburg, which was scheduled to host the matches, from having to accommodate Indian fans.

“The crowd at Ellis Park would have been segregated with just a very small section near the top reserved for nonwhites,” said Sy Lerman, who covered the Davis Cup in 1974 for The Daily Mail in Johannesburg.

Would South African officials have allowed Indian fans to sit among whites, or might they have relegated friends of the Indian team to the nonwhite section? “That would have been a ludicrous chance for us to take,” Vijay Amritraj said.

The passage of time has not produced a consensus on whether the boycott was justified.

“At the end of the day, the Indian government was right,” Moore said. “If more countries had boycotted South Africa, maybe apartheid would have crashed down sooner.”

McMillan, who lives in England, maintained that sports should be separated from politics. “If we had played, they might have seen that we weren’t as bad as some people thought,” he said. “I would like to think that they took the worst course of action.”

The Indian team is no less divided.

“I think it was a bad call,” Anand Amritraj said. “The only time we had an excellent chance of winning the Davis Cup, we gave it away.”

But Vijay Amritraj contended that the Indian government made the right move. “As a sportsman I was disappointed, but as an individual I took pride in the fact that my government made the right call,” he said.

Each side remains convinced that it would have won.

“I felt then and I feel now that we would absolutely have beaten them,” said Moore, who lives in California and is a director of the Indian Wells tennis tournament. Anand Amritraj, who owns a tennis club in Bayshore, N.Y., disagreed, saying: “I think they’re definitely delusional. We would have won, 4-1.”

During a Davis Cup tie with India in 1967, Hewitt broke his leg late in the final set of a doubles match with McMillan but finished and won the match in South Africa’s 5-0 victory.

In September, India and South Africa met in Davis Cup play in Johannesburg — India won their World Group playoff tie, 4-1 — but the lost Davis Cup meeting is viewed as a missed opportunity by the men who would have played. South Africa never made it to another final, and India still has not won the Cup.