No tennis match could have been so dramatic, so civilized and so musically rhythmic as the Budge-Cramm encounter on noble Wimbledon court on July 20, 1937. Marshall Jon Fisher, who has written for Harper’ and The Atlantic, tells the story of this historic last match of the Davis Cup semifinal between Don Budge, an American ranked No. 1 in the world, and Baron Gottfried von Cramm, a German ranked No. 2, in his book A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, A World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played (321pp, Crown, $25).
“On this still-peaceful English summer day, the swastka is flying high over Center Court, along with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes,” writes Fisher. “Nazi officials are sipping tea with the queen in the Royal Box.The occasion was the Davis Cup Interzone Final between Budge, 22, a lanky redheaded son of a truck driver from Oakland, California, with a terrific serve and a lethal backhand, and Cramm, 28, “the very embodiment of style, grace, and sportsmanship,” with a beautifulame reminiscent of chamber music. Cramm took the first two sets, Budge snatched the next two, and as the two played on into the London twilight, the capacity crowd of 14,000 on the bleachers came to see that something extraordinary was happening. The two figures in white began to set a rhythm of something more befitting a ballet than a game where you hit a ball. People stopped asking other people to sit down. The umpire gave up stopping the game to beg for silence during rallies.
