The Married Athlete

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21808, 13 June 1936, Page 14

The Married Athlete

The* first thing to be said about Perry, the British tennis champion, on marriage and the comments upon his explanation, is that the affair provides a pretty example of a common habit of proceeding easily from the particular to the general. Pfrry excused himself for his defeat by von Cramm, or perhaps one should say offered an explanation of that defeat, by saying that marriage had changed his attitude to the game. "Tennis used to be my whole life. Now I am "married I have other interests, and tennis is "only part of it. I have lost interest and enthusiasm and cannot concentrate." This is a perfectly understandable explanation. A young man who has kept himself keyed up for some years to a pitch of perfection in one of the most strenuous of games, marries and finds that tennis does not fill his whole world. He does not say that he will never recover his old zest. May he not be commended for his sense of proportion? There have been newly married men who have not ceased to concentrate on golf, which is perhaps not the best preparation for domestic happiness. But the. captain of an American tennis team now in England, spurred by Ferry's confession, leaps from the particular to the general, and declares that marriage stimulates alayers to greater efforts. He instances Allison, Crawford, and von Cramm. The American, indeed, seems to be quite annoyed, as if Perry had cast aspersions on the whole body of married players, whereas the Englishman referred only to himself. What is one man's poison may be another man's meat, and one great player corrupted by marriage does a wilderness of frustrated genius. On the broader question whether marriage helps or hinders a man on the road of achievement there has always been difference of opinion. In one of the most subtly vulgar of his stories Rudyard Kipling described how a dashing cavalry officer lost his nerve after marriage; when he led his squadron he would think of what would happen if his horse fell. White hands cling to the tightened rein., Slipping the spur from the booted heel. High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone. He travels the fastest who travels alone. Kitchener belonged to this school of thought. He liked his officers to be single, so that they would have but one mistress—the job on hand. That solitary genius, however, was not so good an example as he might seem to be, of the blessedness of the single state. He was intensely self-concentrated, given to doing much that he should have delegated to others, not by any means an ideal chief of staff, and, though a great man, not a great soldier. A wise wife might have worked a vital change in Kitchener; she might have made him less

angular, more communicative, more human. “High hopes faint on a warm .hearth-stone.” Do they? From Ulysses to Robert Falcon Scott and the hosts of obscure heads of families who answered the call in the Great War, thousands of men have left warm hearth-stones in search of adventure or as a matter of duty. It is true that Mr Bernard Shaw said that many of the men who went to the war did so to get away from their wives, but that Is only his little way. The best reply to Kipling’s story is contained in one of the songs in “ The Princess.” Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands; Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands; A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee. Possibly Tennyson’s lines are applicable to the tennis court as well as to the battle-field. And there are other lines that wilt not be denied when this subject is considered. I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more. Wolfe is said to have recited a passage from Gray’s “ Elegy ” as he approached the Heights of Abraham, and to have declared that he would rather have written them than take Quebec. Is the story apochryphal? What does it matter? The epigram about honour is so lovely jand so penetrating that even a tennis champion might be forgiven if he cried out that he would rather have written it than win the singles at Wimbledon.