it only to the fourth round, but Tinling’s panties transformed her into a sex symbol. From that day on, the press nicknamed her “Gorgeous Gussy,” and she coasted on that fame for years. The panties cast Tinling as a troublemaker, and he was banned from the Wimbledon clubhouse for nearly two decades as a result of the incident. It’s tempting to paint him as a subversive—upending authority, deliberately pushing Wimbledon’s stuffy, old-fashioned buttons. But in fact it was the tedium of tradition that Tinling felt truly allergic to. He called the all-white rule of Wimbledon “kitchen-sink tennis,” a reference to the color of porcelain, which he thought boring to look at. To him, fashion was a form of expression, and how could you express yourself without any color? Tinling himself cut a natty figure in the world of tennis. A favorite nickname for him was the “Leaning Tower of Pizzazz.” Pictures show him to be completely bald, lanky, and very tall (he was anywhere from 6’5” to 6’8”, depending on who you asked and what kind of shoes he was wearing). He was fond of jewelry, bell-bottoms, and bright shirts that unbuttoned down to the navel. “Tinling was 59 years old on June 23,” read read the aforementioned 1969 SI profile, “but he dresses like a mod pop singer 40 years younger.” He was quick-witted and diplomatic, skilled in handling the egos of sports divas and stars, deft at parrying the complaints of his critics. And he had lived and breathed tennis for most of his life. Born in 1910 in Eastbourne, England, Tinling’s childhood asthma prompted his family to move to the south of France, where he wound up a ball boy for one of the greats of women’s tennis: the balletic Suzanne Lenglen. 1 He aspired to a career as a couturier,
was defined by a unisex look. For female players, this meant lots of unflattering long skirts and shorts made of uncomfortable fabrics such as gabardine and wool. “They look like they’re made by grandmothers or sisters of grandmothers,” Tinling complained. Never one to decline a challenge, he sewed a dainty white dress for Moran made of a soft-knit rayon that clung gently to her figure, with a shimmery satin trim. Moran loved it at the fitting, but had only ever worn shorts; days before the tournament, she asked Tinling to make a pair of matching panties to wear underneath. Aware that Moran had a “walk that had so much bounce she appeared to be treading on a succession of rubber balls,” and that her skirt would flutter prettily when she swung her racquet, he made her a set of underwear with a two- inch lace trim around the bottom. All he wanted, he later said, was to show off her mahogany-tanned legs. How best to describe the uproar Moran’s lace panties caused? It was like the media reaction to Janet Jackson’s nipple slip at the Super Bowl, only infused with a sense of postwar puritanism. Every time Moran served, her skirt would fly up, and as she leaned forward, the white lace of the panties would proudly offset the tops of her bronzed thighs. Tinling wrote in his 1979 memoir Love and Faults that the moment was tantamount “to a star of today suddenly appearing topless on Wimbledon’s center court.” Every photographer was on his stomach on the grass, lens angled up, calling out to Moran to serve one more time. “Gussy was a very sexy girl who always played in very tight shorts,” Tinling told Sports Illustrated in 1969. “She was, like Lana Turner, a real sweater girl. The fellows used to crawl up the wall with delight when they saw her.” Moran made
1 Tennis was a much different game in the 1920s. Lenglen, often clad in a long pleated skirt and sporting a wide headband, was famous for taking serves. Tinling recalled her bloodied bone corsets hanging in the locker room after a game. He worshipped her as a player. nips of brandy between
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