born
Jon Henderson recalls the birth of the tie-break, reviled by many as vandalism but the flashpoint for an epic battle
MANY of us saw it as a nasty American innovation, others regarded it simply as gratuitous tinkering with an exquisite scoring system, while few, as I recall, spoke up for it. Twenty-five years ago Wimbledon introduced the tie-break.
It seemed particularly bad timing because only two years before Pancho Gonzales and Charlie Pasarell had staged one of Wimbledon’s most remarkable matches.
The pair needed 112 games to settle their first- round meeting, Gonzales winning 22-24 1-6 16-14 6-3 11-9 after five hours and 12 minutes. With the tie- break cutting sets off in their prime, we would never see its like again.
Jimmy van Alen, an American millionaire, was responsible. For some time he had been promoting his ideas to modernise scoring so that it was easier to understand and the length of matches became more predictable.
Basically, tennis was to borrow from ping-pong with sets being won by the first player to reach 21 or 31 points with no deuces along the way, but with a `sudden death’ nine-point tie-break (ie the first to five points was the winner) at 20-20 or 30-30. Points scoring would be 0, 1, 2, 3 etc instead of love, 15, 30, 40. Five-point sequences known as “hands” would supersede service games.
Well, it was mostly vandalism — or Van-Alenism, if you prefer — but the tie-break, which survived, confounded our fears that the game was selling out just to satisfy the gnat-like attention span of the average Yank. The 1970 US Open was the first major tournament to adopt the tie-break with a red flag being hoisted on the umpire’s chair whenever a set reached 6-6, a signal which became as effective as a Japanese tourist guide’s umbrella for rallying a throng.
Wimbledon, inevitably, was more cautious, introducing the tie-break at 8-8 to start with (it switched to 6-6 in 1979) and rather than opt for Van Alen’s preferred “sudden death” nine-point version, which could simultaneously give match point to one side and set point to the other, went instead for the best of 12 with the winner having to be two points ahead.
Van Alen disliked this latter system, describing it as “lingering death” because, in theory, it could go on indefinitely. In practice, though, it produced one of the greatest passages of play in Wimbledon history.
The tie-break that sent the 1980 men’s final between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe into a fifth set was the stuff of legends, up there with phases of the 1970 World Cup football final, exchanges in the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fights and Ian Botham’s Headingley heroics of 1981. Borg, winner of the previous four championships, led by two sets to one and was just a tie-break away from his fifth successive title.
Under Van Alen’s nine-point shoot-out, the Swede would indeed have won it there and then. With McEnroe serving at 4-4, my notes record that the American missed a forehand volley at the net. But we were to get a further 25 points of extraordinarily exciting tennis whose quality withstood the pressure better than some of us who looked on. “Lennart [Bergelin, Borg’s coach] was white in the face, almost like a dead man,” said Marianna Simionescu, Borg’s girlfriend who was in the VIP box on Centre Court. Simionescu was also drained: `I didn’t have any more strength to watch.’
At 17-16 to McEnroe, 22 points after Borg had held match point at 6-5, the Swede served to save the set and his forehand volley in answer to McEnroe’s well- struck return spilled into the net. At the time we thought it was a tired volley but there were 14 more games to come, Borg winning the deciding set 8-6.
But ask anyone who watched that final for their abiding memory and the chances are it will not be the moment of Borg’s fifth successive title, but that tie-break.
Thanks, Jimmy.