This story appears in the May 30, 2019, issue of Sports Illustrated. For more great storytelling and in-depth analysis, subscribe to the magazine—and get up to 94% off the cover price. Click here for more.
“He probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance.”
—Ernest Hemingway, describing Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises
Players arrived by steamship, not private jet. They bashed tennis balls with wooden billy clubs, not rackets made of space-age fibers and carbon tubes. They competed not for $3.