Bigger than life: a biography of Francis X. Shields, the last great amadeur.

Bigger than Life: A Biography of Francis X. Shields, The Last Great Amateur

Bigger than Life: A Biography of Francis X. Shields, The Last Great Amateur, by William X. Shields (Freundlich/Scribner's, 288 pp., $17.95)

IT WOULD be a shame if this magical book were semi-ignored as just another sports biography, for it is more than that, a poignant evocation of an era that had a distinctive identity worth remembering, and of a great athlete whose career touched the heights of comedy and the depths of tragedy. It is the era of Vines and Allison, Budge and Doeg, and the last days of the great grass tournaments and the glittering world of Newport, Longwood, Spring Lake, Southampton, and Forest Hills, where the Depression was an unpleasant rumor, the music would always play, the booze and the money would always flow. The British designer Teddy Tinling recalls the Newport parties of the 1930s as "complete Gatsby era,' with three or four orchestras in the garden of each of the great mansions. "Everybody was wild. The only thing that mattered was to get smashed and laugh.'

Frank Shields, grandfather of Brooke Shields, was middle-class, but he was also of the stamp of Bevil Rudd, the legendary Oxford undergraduate of the Nineties who, strolling by the university track one afternoon, put down his derby and his cigar, broke the world quarter-mile record, returned his cigar and derby to their former locations, and never ran again.

Shields was a similarly endowed natural athlete, astonishingly quick and strong at six-six, and drop-dead handsome, a dark Apollo. Yale wanted him for an end, but he was academically impossible, and even tutoring was futile. By the time he was 17, in the late 1920s, he was being hailed as another Bill Tilden. In 1933 he was ranked number one in the United States and probably was the best tennis player in the world, with a serve that was virtually unreturnable and a forehand much like Boris Becker's current top-spin bludgeon.

Like Bevil Rudd, however, he did not take athletics with total seriousness. Parties, women, booze, and high jinks were just as important to him as Forest Hills or Wimbledon, and he was the heavyweight champion of the nightclub brawl: "SHIELDS SERVES BLACK EYE.' He had the constitution of a horse and could play a five-set match after an all-nighter. He usually changed from his tennis clothes straight into his tuxedo.

In 1931 Shields became the only player in history to fail to show up for a Wimbledon final, against his crony Sidney B. Wood. This was a murky episode, in which legend has it that Shields was busy investigating the attributes of a matched pair of French countesses; the truth is probably that he had a badly twisted leg from his previous match with Borotra--though the explanations are not mutually exclusive. In June 1933, after unexpectedly losing in the quarter-finals of the French championships, and scheduled to play in Germany, Shields disappeared. "SHIELDS DISAPPEARS. TENNIS PLAYER DROPS OUT OF SIGHT IN PARIS.' He had accompanied some friends on the boat train to Le Havre, a party all the way, and woke up at sea on the Warren Harding with no money, only his tuxedo. But for all that, this great tennis dilettante was right up there with Vines, Budge, and the other leading players of the day.

When he played in Los Angeles, the screams of admiring schoolgirls attracted the movie moguls, and he got a lucrative contract. He failed as a screen sex symbol, but had a ball in Hollywood with natural allies like Errol Flynn, Johnny Weissmuller, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1947, his last appearance at Forest Hills in the men's singles, he forced the rising star Fred Kovaleski to five sets, to the hosannas of the sports writers. He always preserved the older grand style, playing in long white trousers and never succumbing to shorts. Then he was court-tennis champion at the exclusive Racquets Club, from which he was once suspended for throwing peanuts at a member, the problem being that their heavy glass bowl accompanied the peanuts in their flight.

His later years were not funny. When drunk, which he frequently was, he became coldly destructive and bullying with his strength. During his third marriage, "a local doctor who was a good friend gave Mum a bottle of chloral hydrate and said she should put it in Pop's drink whenever the tribal drums began to call him. The idea was to knock him out. Well, it had no effect in his first drink, nor in the second. Finally, when he was halfway through the third, which should have worked on an elephant, he said, "This drink tastes awful.' With that, he left the house to find someone who could make him a decent drink.'

Local police protected him and got him to bed from Southampton to Palm Beach despite his brawls and car crashes. All three of his wives loved him, but could not stand him. "Children and Frank had a natural affinity,' writes number three in a fond preface, "and much the same point of view.'

After two heart attacks and a stroke, Frank Shields died at 65, of a third heart attack, in a Manhattan taxi. Not long before he died, he phoned his son Frank with the message, "The kid is gone.' What? "The kid is gone.' Frank met his father, who took him to a Catholic church. Someone had stolen the Christ Child from a Nativity scene. The kid was gone. "Come on,' said Shields, "let's go have a drink.'

This memoir is told artlessly and with love by Shields's son William, who saw beyond the multiple outrages to the core of innocence within the great athlete they often called the Jolly Schoolboy.