By Bill Simons

The late, great gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson had some distant tennis connections.

For starters, there was his link to the courts at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. No, he didn’t concoct some wild column detailing how free-form clans of roving hippies gleefully pranced across the courts in commedia dell’arte pre-dawn romps. But Thompson, then a struggling freelancer desperate for work, did bunk down for long stretches on hilly Parnassus Street, which overlooks San Francisco’s public tennis mecca.

Thompson, too, had a link with George Plimpton, the curator of the game’s most inventive site for memorabilia: Tennis Week’s Hall of Whimsey, which is famous for “housing” such iconic items as the table beneath which all the “under-the-table” payments were made to amateurs in the ‘50s and ‘60s and a brandy-laced sugar cube from the stash that diva Suzanne Lenglen drew from during changeovers at her classic French Riviera showdown against Helen Wills. Thompson and Plimpton may never have had a best-two-out-of-three faceoff on a Saturday morning, but Thompson insisted that Plimpton was “the best thing to come out of Harvard since LSD.”

Sure, you’d need “shot-spot” to detect any real connection between Thompson and tennis. (John McEnroe, the game’s answer to gonzo journalism, told us it would have been cool if Thompson had been on his now-defunct talk show.) Still, Thompson was America’s most provocative author-turned-sports-observer since Hemingway, who, like Thompson, settled down in the Rockies before blowing his brains out. But while Hemingway focused primarily on fishing, hunting, and bullfighting, Thompson’s love of sport was as voracious as his appetite for gin, guns ‘n gambling. Yes, the guy crafted a career based on outrageous excess. Still he confided that “when that Swine Christian Laetner [from Duke] hit that impossible last-second shot against Kentucky...it was and remains the Worst Shock I’ve experienced in my Life.”

A “fool for football,” Thompson recalled sitting “through hailstorms on the wet planks of Kezar Stadium when John Brodie was getting sacked and stomped like a bird every Sunday,” and claimed he “might have become a shepherd, or Night Manager of the famous O’Farrell [x-rated] Theatre, if not for Joe Montana & Bill Walsh.”

In fact, “Mr. Fear and Loathing” himself — the only sportswriter we know who got kicked out of the Washington Redskins press box because he “forgot” to take off his hat for the national anthem — dubbed himself “The Man Who Loved Sports Too Much.”

But why was this master of mayhem, America’s rebel in residence, such a sports nut?

“Because,” claimed writer John Walsh, “sports brought out his giddiness...the whimsical smile, and the worship of mischief that conveniently attach themselves to sports...Because Hunter’s ultimate goal was to be named the Prime Minister of Fun, and sports was his Proud Highway...Because Hunter loved anarchy, domination, power, wealth, dynasty, revenge and failure. Mood swings are a staple of the gonzo lifestyle...Because Hunter is genetically predisposed toward uncertainty, adventure, and risk...Because sports is full of rebels and rascals, Hunter’s closest friends.”

Not surprisingly, there was virtually nothing in sports that wasn’t grist for Thompson’s relentless, unsparing mill. He all but gave college basketball a pass by mildly dismissing the NCAA Championships as “routine neo-annual clashes between high-profile, big budget programs, like Ford vs. General Motors. They are embarrassing.”

His assessment of pro hoops was less meek. In an opus entitled “Can the Three Stooges Save The NBA?” he proclaimed, “The only thing wrong with the NBA — or any other pro sport, for that matter — is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overseeing Greed. There is no Mystery about it.”

And there was no mystery about his take on the most hallowed event in his native state, Kentucky. He conceded, “I have had more truly heinous experiences linked to Churchill Downs than any other venue...Derby week is a white-knuckle orgy of Booze & Sex & Violence that...swamps anybody who goes near it in a hurricane of Fear, Pain, & Stupefying Disasters that will haunt them for the rest of their lives...I still have recurring nightmares about it that cause me to wake up sweating & screaming like some kind of pig being eaten alive by meat bats. The best thing about the Kentucky Derby is that it is only two minutes long.”

Even as benign a happening as the Honolulu Marathon withered under Thompson’s gaze. He viewed the runners as a “tightly packed mob of naked strangers who are all whacked on Ephedrine...There are 30,000 of them ...[But] why do they run? What kind of sick instinct, stoked by countless hours of brutal training, would cause intelligent people to get up at four in the morning and stagger through the streets of Honolulu for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have any chance of winning? ...They do not enter to win. They enter to survive, and go home with a T-shirt.”

Invariably, Thompson sounded his harshest notes when bashing the NFL. “There is something wrong with the game,” he complained. “Something vital is missing...[the games] seem vaguely meaningless, like watered-down wine or weak whiskey.” To Thompson, “watching the Baltimore Ravens play is like...being stuck for six hours in an elevator with Dick Cheney on speed.” Ouch!

Worse yet, he noted that “Adolf Hitler was a sports fan. He would have been right at home at the Big Game in New Orleans. It was his kind of a Show — Beautiful athletes, savage gladiators, and a monumental display of Military Firepower.” And Thompson didn’t overlook Oakland’s Raider Nation whom he called the “sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and wackos ever assembled in such numbers...in the English-speaking world.”

True, Thompson wasn’t totally negative. He observed that the America’s Cup had “moments of staggering beauty and wild adventure” and that “a [foot] Racer in full stride is an elegant thing to see.”

Beyond this, Thompson celebrated certain sports (think naked bowling) and invented new ones, like a more-than-bizarre combination of golf and riflery. Plus, he was a champion of major league reform. He asserted that baseball “pitchers are as useless as tits on a boar hog & should all be put to sleep. Baseball’s only hope for survival is the elimination of the ‘pitcher’ position completely.”

Ultimately, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson made tennis harshest critics — say, T.J. Simers or Sally (“Is Tennis Dying”) Jenkins — seem like tame, “peace-in-the-valley” PR flaks for the Girl Scouts. And one can only shudder to imagine the catastrophic freefall if Thompson had set his fearsome gaze on some of the more gnarly foibles of our game — intractable turf wars, near-obscene guarantees, Gordian knot conflicts of interest, unrestrained vanities and the dizzying dysfunction and (“can’t anyone put an end to this madness?”) anarchy that all but define tennis.

So maybe it’s just as well that our sport was gonzo-free; that the most brutal eye in the press box looked the other way.

Then again, maybe not.

© 2005 INSIDE TENNIS All rights reserved.
All photographs, text and graphics, appearing on the Inside Tennis web site are protected by copyright.
Any republication, retransmission or reproduction or other use is prohibited without express written permission of Inside Tennis.