Tennis

Roscoe Tanner: ‘At 15-40 I hit it three inches wide … Borg didn’t beat me by much’ | Simon Cambers


Moments before the biggest match of his life was due to begin, Roscoe Tanner locked himself in the bathroom of the changing room at the All England Club. Playing Björn Borg at Wimbledon could do that to a man. This was 1979 and the ice-cold Borg was a big favourite to win the title for a fourth consecutive year while Tanner, a blond left-hander with a hammer for a serve, was in the final for the first time.

Tanner wasn’t afraid, though – not even of Borg, who had made Wimbledon a fortress. This wasn’t fear. The champion on grass at the Australian Open a couple of years earlier, Tanner had a game made for grass, his lefty serve – once recorded at 153mph – a vicious weapon. And yet, as officials waited for him to come out at the scheduled time, he just sat, stalling.

The American broadcaster NBC, which was showing Wimbledon live for the first time that year, had asked for the start time to be delayed by a few minutes, to allow their commentators to set up the final. The request was denied but Donald Dell, Tanner’s agent and also an NBC commentator, asked Tanner if he could take matters into his own hands. At first, Tanner refused.

“I said: ‘I’ve been fighting my whole life to get to this match, and to delay it – I might get point penalties or all kinds of problems that could develop from me not being ready when they call me,’” he says now. “So I said: ‘No, I won’t do it,’ and he said: ‘OK,’ and he left. Then I was sitting there and I thought: ‘There is one way I can.’”

When Leo Turner, the locker‑room attendant, approached Tanner to take him to the court, the American said his stomach was acting up and that he needed to go to the bathroom. “So I went into one of the stalls and locked the door and I just sat on the toilet, Tanner recalls. “He kept knocking, saying: ‘Mr Tanner, Mr Tanner, we’ve got to go,’ and I said: ‘Leo, I can’t yet.’ I was just sitting there looking at my watch. I saw it was about eight minutes and I said: ‘OK, let’s go,’ and went out on the court.”

Roscoe Tanner powers his way to the net in the 1979 Wimbledon Men’s Final against Bjorn Borg



Tanner powers his way to the net in the 1979 Wimbledon final against Borg. ‘Overall I feel like he raised his game and beat me, so that’s OK,’ says Tanner. Photograph: Colorsport/Rex/Shutterstock

In the 40 years since then, Tanner has been no stranger to controversy – of a more serious kind. He has been jailed four times, once in Germany and three times in the US, for charges relating to writing dodgy cheques and failing to pay child support. He has spent much of the past three decades in financial difficulty and for a long time was estranged from his five daughters.

In 1979, though, he was in his pomp. Tanner had reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 1975 and 1976, losing against Jimmy Connors and Borg respectively, and three years on he dropped just two sets on his way to his first final.

“Really I thought I had a great chance against Björn, because I’d beaten him earlier that year in Philadelphia,” he says. “I knew that if I played the way I could, especially on grass, I had a good chance. If I played him on clay I’d have had a different feeling.”

And he had his chances, winning the first and third sets as it went to a decider. In the final set he held two break points at 4-3, 15-40 – only to blink. “I hit a very good return, he was coming to net, which is where you would like Björn to be, and he hit a volley and popped it up about three‑quarter court, easy to my forehand,” Tanner says. “I’m thinking, cool, I’m looking to hit it down the line but I want to make him think I’m going to hit it cross‑court, so I wanted to hold it for a beat. He covered cross-court and I hit it about three inches wide. So that was a chance to have a break in the fifth set.”

Roscoe Tanner practising in Orlando in June 2019

Roscoe Tanner practising in Orlando in June 2019. Photograph: Roscoe Tanner

Four decades on the disappointment is still there, but overall the feeling is one of pride after he was ultimately beaten 6-7, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4. “There’s always a slight nagging feeling but I’d say overall it’s an exceptionally good feeling,” he says. “It was the finals of Wimbledon, which to me is the event. Sure I would love to have won, that’s the nagging feeling. But I was in the final and it was a good final. I’d have a different feeling if I’d lost like 2, 2 and 2. But it was a good final, I trained hard for it and I played well. Couple of shots that I missed that I wouldn’t like to have missed, but overall I feel like he raised his game and beat me, so that’s OK. He didn’t beat me by much. Then later in the year, in the quarter-finals at the US Open, I beat him. That was a tiny bit of revenge. I can be honest and say that, it was on my mind. I would have traded my quarter-final for his final, but I did it.”

Tanner won 15 singles events, including one grand slam title and total prize money of £1.67m. Considering that the singles winners at this year’s Wimbledon will pick up £2.35m each, does he think he was unlucky to have played when he did? “If I was born in the wrong time, think about [Rod] Laver,” he says. “We were pretty fortunate, we were getting paid to play a game and as far as we were concerned it was big money then, way bigger than the guys before us. But Borg won five Wimbledons in a row. If you take all those cheques and add them together, it’s [only just over half] what [Stefan] Edberg won [when he secured the title in 1988]. It went crazy. And I think part of it was tennis going live back to the United States. That helped.”

Tanner says it is around 20 years since he last attended Wimbledon but he hopes to return for this year’s championships. In recent years, he has worked hard to make amends with friends and family and he is working with underprivileged children through the Learn to Serve Foundation in Orlando.

“I made some very bad decisions and I paid the price for it,” he says. “My kids are all on a way better footing now, so I don’t have any of those issues any more. I regret all those things, but in a sense it’s taught me a lot. In Orlando, we’re developing a tennis programme for kids who don’t have anything. The idea is not so much to make them pros but maybe help them get college scholarships. Education is what’s going to get children out of their situation. I think maybe some of the stuff I went through did hit me in the head and made me realise this is what I’m meant to do. They can’t say to me I don’t understand because I’ve been there. So it gives me a platform to talk to them.”



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