Breeding The Will to Win
Gardnar Mulloy
How did I arrive at Wimbledon as doubles champion (Click Here) at the age of 43? Here is how that journey began.
When I was eleven in the year 1925 my father, Robin Mulloy, built a tennis court in the garden of our home. 'Why?' I asked him curiously. 'It's the only sport you can play all your life, son', he replied.
Of course I was much too young to be convinced by such a sweeping pronouncement and could not imagine why I would not be able to play football all my life. Tennis seemed such a trifling game--a soft, not too strenuous pastime for the rich.
That was largely true then, and to some extent still is in the United States. And although the great Bill Tilden was electrifying his way round the tournaments, bringing a new technique and a new glory to the game, the public mind was quite firmly made up.
Tennis was for the well-to-do. It was to be played in exclusive and expensive country clubs or in the private luxury that goes with Long Island mansions.
Having expressed my indifference towards tennis, I showed no more interest in our court, particularly since at the time I was living a Huckleberry Finn existence with my best friend Eddie Hodsdon. .
Our family lived in a suburban district of Miami called Spring Garden, where my father had built our large brick house. The district was wooded, with a river on one side and a canal on the other. There were very few other houses in the neighborhood.
The Seminole Indians, the only tribe never to surrender to the U.S. Government, used to set up camps close by.
Land was booming then. The railroad had opened the State of Florida and created a new frontier. People made fortunes overnight. New properties were going up and my father, who was in the lumber business, was doing very nicely.
I met Eddie Hodsdon in junior high school. Together we explored the river, discovering fish and bootleggers. The fish had• always been there. The bootleggers had arrived with Prohibition and set up their headquarters in the house next to ours.
They were using speedboats to run liquor past the coast guard cutters, and bringing their craft up to our part of the river for repairs. Eddie and I helped out with their boats whenever possible, for which we usually received a dollar. Our parents never found out.
Then one night we thought we would take a look at the girls we had seen coming and going from the bootlegger gang house. With great stealth we crept to a window and were quickly spotted. Then, to our astonishment, we were invited in. I cannot recall the specifics of what happened next, but I retain the memory of having been treated very well.
Despite this show of neighborly good will, the bootlegger presence created constant danger. Fights and orgies were commonplace; blood was found on the sidewalks; murder was committed.
Good-time girls and gangsters sometimes called at our house because of its similar structure to the hangout next door. One night when Mother and Father had gone out for the evening there was a knock at the front door.
My sister opened it and a party of drunken, rowdy gangsters and girls pushed in. I heard her scream in terror, rushed to the head of the stairs and bawled at them to get out--they were in the wrong house! They roared with laughter and then left.
Periodically Dad would call the police and raids would be carried out, but the bootleggers carried thick wads of bills for such contingencies.
About this time my father and I began to grow close. He was a kind, generous and understanding man with an unshakeable disbelief in corporal punishment.
That was Mother's job. She used to give us some good clips round the ear or, what was worse, put us to bed.
Dad's punishment made a greater and more lasting impression on me. When I was bad he would come into my room, sit down on my bed, and lecture me at great length, presenting all sides of the argument before telling me what he would now do under the circumstances.
In 1929 I entered high school, and Wall Street crashed. The depression followed and my father took a beating, as people who owed him money suddenly could not pay. But Dad quickly replaced the now profitless lumber business with a new source of income. He obtained the agency for Franklin Autos.
Tennis still stood very low on the list of things I cared about, I even used to get up early to go to Church to avoid playing in the matches Dad organized with some of his friends on Sunday mornings. However, he had driven and badgered me enough that by 1930 I was a reasonably good player for my age.
Then, one Sunday, he took me over to Henderson Park to see the finals of the High School Singles Championship. At the conclusion of the match he turned to me and said: 'What do you think, son?'
'Well, heck Dad! I could beat 'em both', I replied confidently. 'That's what I've been telling you', he stated with finality. Next day I went to school and got onto the tennis team and in a week I became the top player.
Despite my success and increasing interest in the game I still fancied myself a football player, and between the years 1930-32 controlled and directed the activities of a team which I murderously called 'The Mulloy Bonecrushers'.
With other local boys' teams we formed a league of our own, likely one of the most colorful in history as far as names were concerned with the Allapata Rockcrushers, the Fort Dallas Fairies, and the Miramar Goops.
But I was too thin and fragile to be a great football player. Before my playing career ended I had broken my collarbone, smashed a wrist and had been carried off the field with a severe concussion.
I had also begun to win tennis tournaments. The first big one was the Great Barrington Championship, in Massachusetts, when I was eighteen.
We were vegetarians at the time and a man where I was staying said I could not possibly find the strength to win if I did not eat meat. I confounded him by winning the tournament.
The preceding year I had won my first men's title at Lake Chatauqua, New York. These and other lesser tournament triumphs were now beginning to shape my future.
This was aided by my father who was always behind me urging, coaxing, encouraging me at the game. Of course, I was beaten frequently too, but Dad never sympathized.
'I don't want to know how you lost', he would say, 'Neither do I want to hear excuses. You only lose if your opponent is better than you are!' .
Thus he showed his disappointment and, because I hated to disappoint him, he bred in me the will to win.
