At the height of his career, film studio RKO offered Perry a contract for two movies at US$50,000 each, but the Lawn Tennis Association, the amateur game’s governing body in England, talked him out of it.
Perry’s on-court prowess was second to none. “Perry’s forehand was merely the deadliest weapon in an armory full of menace,” Henderson notes. “He executed his backhand — distinguished by its short backswing — with the powerful efficiency of a butcher laying into a carcass.”
It was this ability that saw Perry, a teetotal pipe-smoker, win Wimbledon in 1934, 1935 and 1936, completing a sporting hat-trick that made him one of the world’s first truly international sportsmen.
In 1937, he turned professional, after becoming disillusioned with the LTA, upset that it had done little to offer him incentives to remain an amateur. He hired an American promoter and took US citizenship the following year.
Henderson believes that decision, compounded by his desire to stay in America when war broke out, cost Perry a knighthood. He was called up in 1942 and served in the US Air Force, spending most of the war in California as the military hierarchy tried, unsuccessfully, to find a propaganda role for him.
Perry’s failure to secure a knighthood was in some ways in keeping with his character. He had always felt like an outsider. His friend Dan Maskell, the veteran BBC tennis commentator, recalled: “He was not typically British; there was an aggressiveness and dedication about him that was out of step with the contemporary attitude towards sport.”
Indeed, Perry was even known to deviate from the very English sense of fair play. American champion Jack Kramer recalled how Perry would antagonize his opponents by saying “very clevah” whenever an opponent played a particularly good shot. “’Very clevah’ drove a lot of opponents crazy,” Kramer said.
When Perry turned professional, an official from the International Lawn Tennis Club of Great Britain wrote to inform him that he should never wear the club sweater again. “I made sure he wouldn’t have to worry about that,” Perry said. “I sent a sleeve to him as a present.”
Though a perennially disappointed nation desperately hopes that a successor will now emerge to emulate Perry’s success, aficionados of the sport doubt that England will see his like again.
At Perry’s funeral in 1995, a friend recalled how “simply fun to be around” Perry had been — friendly and a bit of a rascal. He told how one day Perry walked into a locker room and declared: “Thank God I’m not playing me today.”
In 1957, more than 20 years after winning his last grand slam title, Perry was approached by a Soviet delegation to help the USSR challenge the west’s hegemony at tennis. He made two visits to advise the Soviet bloc countries.
On his first, he pushed his hosts to make a grand political gesture, calling on them to allow a player to compete at Wimbledon. Anna Dmitrieva, 17, became that player, and reached the final in the junior tournament in 1958.
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