A Tennis Hero: His Finest Shots Were Never on the Court

by james s. hirsch                        

Today's world-class diabetic athletes are rightfully extolled for their accomplishments, but the greatest individual in this realm is unknown to most people. His name was Bill Talbert, his game was tennis, and his story of courage, defiance, and grace - as well as his remarkable insights into the emotional contours of this disease - stands as a triumph of the ages.

Talbert was diagnosed in 1928, a mere six years after insulin was discovered.

Initially forbidden to exercise, he was a self-described invalid, but he defied his doctors and used tennis to win back his own freedom. Shame and pride pushed him to his limits physically but also to the pinnacle of his profession. Between 1941 and 1954, he was ranked 13 times among the U.S. top 10 players. Handsome and immaculately groomed, he was also a world traveler and bon vivant, with a taste for fine wine and late-night parties. Refuting all expectations, he won nine Grand Slam doubles titles, reached the men's doubles finals of the U.S. National Championship nine times, and won nine of 10 matches in the Davis Cup.

But his finest shots were never on the court.

Born on September 4, 1918, Bill grew up in Cincinnati in a household that prized manners, education, and sports. His father was a quiet, serious man who worked in a family cattle-buying business that went bust in the Great Depression. His mother was a devoted housewife who, in Bill's words, "did all the visible suffering for the family."

And Bill, as a boy, was a wiry but competitive athlete whose greatest passion was baseball; his goal was to play in the major leagues so he could get his parents tickets to every game.

But at age 10, Bill's mother noticed that he was losing weight, was tired, and was eating incessantly. She took him to the doctor - he wore a jacket and tie - who ran some tests and broke the news to the family.

"Bill has diabetes."

"How long will it be, doctor?" Mrs. Talbert asked.

In a way, Bill was lucky. In 1928, insulin had only been around for six years, making him one of America's insulin pioneers. At Cincinnati Children's Hospital, he learned that he could only eat foods like cauliflower, asparagus, and eggplant. He learned how to give injections by practicing on a rag doll. He learned how to test his urine, which involved boiling water to create a solution whose color indicated how much sugar, if any, was in the urine. "In my mind, sugar - that innocent tempting stuff that you used to swipe in cubes from the kitchen cupboard - began to take on the shape of the devil," Bill later said.

Three weeks after his diagnosis, he had gotten his sugar level down and was allowed to leave the hospital, but he had strict orders. Take your insulin, of course. Avoid carbohydrates, naturally. And do not exercise. At the time, the thinking was, exercise required energy, energy required sugar, and sugar was off limits for diabetics.

Bill could still attend school, but he became, in his words, an "invalid." He tried to raise his father's spirits. "Even though I can't play baseball anymore," Bill told him, "maybe some day I'll be able to write about it."

Bill later said: "That was the only time I can remember seeing my father cry."

Taking multiple injections a day, Bill was diligent about all aspects of care. "All through my schoolboy years, I knew kids who were afraid of failing tests in spelling, English, history, math; I lived in fear of flunking a urine test," he said.

One day when he was 14, he went to a Cincinnati Reds game, and after the game he was allowed on the field to get an autograph. Instead of approaching the players, he took off toward the diamond and - with his father watching in horror - ran around bases, touching each one with glee, sliding into home plate and feeling like a boy again.

His father realized Bill could no longer remain inactive, but baseball was too dangerous, so the following day, he brought home a tennis racket and one tennis ball. Bill's doctor reluctantly agreed to let him play, but he would have to figure out on his own how to balance his insulin and diet. Talbert was, it turned out, a natural in tennis, with elegant ground strokes and remarkable endurance, but his medical hurdles were seemingly insurmountable. For example, when he traveled to his first tournament, he had to ask the chairman's wife for some boiling water. Initially, she thought it was for tea, but then Bill explained that he had diabetes and needed to boil his hypodermic needle before each shot. (Disposable syringes were decades away.)

His biggest problem was that he never knew what his blood sugar was - home glucose monitoring was also far into the future - so Talbert knew he risked hypoglycemia every time he took the court. He once played nine sets in a single day. In later years, when he was playing in Argentina, he had the hotel staff write a note in Spanish for the chambermaid, saying he had diabetes, and if she found him unconscious on the bed, he needed sugar.

Close calls were inevitable. At a tournament in Tampa, Florida, a business acquaintance from Cleveland came to see him at his hotel. There was no answer in his room. The friend eventually demanded that the door be opened, and Talbert was found on his bed in a diabetic coma. He had fallen ill from a virus. A doctor later said if Talbert had been found three hours later, he would have died.

By the time Talbert was in his early 20's, he realized that his success as a tennis player was directly related to his success in managing his diabetes. He concluded he could no longer simply survive his diabetes. He had to master it.

Some of his adjustments - we now know - were probably not beneficial. For example, instead of taking two or three daily injections of short-acting insulin, he began taking one daily injection of the new, long-lasting protamine zinc insulin. He believed that gave him "coverage" for the entire day. It didn't, but Talbert's intense exercise clearly helped him smooth out hyperglycemic peaks.

Talbert was also experimenting with food in ways that did show more foresight. He recognized the glycemic effects of carbohydrates, so for breakfast, he would eat protein (lean meats, eggs, milk), then for lunch, he'd have more protein (meats or fish), vegetables, and some carbs (potatoes, bread, ice cream) to start building "sugar reserves" for his tennis match. After the game, he would automatically drink juice to avert any lows, and he would have a sandwich or crackers before bed to offset the long-lasting insulin.

That may not be how a nutritionist plans today, but with few exceptions, it kept Talbert out of the hospital with severe highs or lows. Talbert also changed his tennis game to accommodate his diabetes. He decided he could not play a power game because "that style is too energetic," and he had to conserve his strength. He had to outmaneuver his opponent, use a variety of strokes, and attack "based on careful preparation and control of my strokes."

He concluded that the sweeping backhand was "biologically wrong for me" - he shortened the stroke, with less of a backswing. Pursing a minimalist style, he also cut the backswing out of his serve, "producing a stroke that made the purists wince." But it worked well enough.

At age 23, he was ranked as one of America's ten best players, an emotional triumph for a young man who now felt whole.

He said: "Whatever scars diabetes may once have cut into my spirit felt healed over by now. Whatever sense of inadequacy I may have felt as a kid was gone. That old feeling of isolation, of being left out of things, was well behind me. Success in tennis had filled the empty places that trouble had left. I was a whole man."

Yet his diabetic journey had barely begun. He had mastered the disease, but he hadn't accepted it. He played tennis to escape diabetes, to pretend that he wasn't like the others whose lives had been stymied by the condition.

"As a general fact of life, it was open to discussion, but as a personal problem, it was something private, not to be shared . . . Every day of activity seemed to crowd the diabetes into a smaller corner of my life, to make it less of an obstacle. I couldn't resist any opportunity to see just how far I could push it - and how much more I could enlarge the scope of my freedom."

When World War II broke out, he resented that the military had rejected him. "I couldn't help feeling that I'd been brushed off as part of a category instead of being considered as an individual, and that was something that always grated me . . . My membership among the "normal people" wasn't so secure after all. When I went back on to the courts, I played like a man with something to prove."

And so he pushed himself, with a staggering schedule of matches, with cross-country travel, and with a freewheeling social life that stretched from Manhattan's cafe society to Hollywood's glamorous inner circle. As he later said:

"It was a program of carelessness, but a deliberate carelessness - my own peculiar form of independence, no longer an objective but a compulsion. At first it had been a means to an end; now it had become an end in itself. I had started, years before, by looking for some relief from the confinement of diabetes; now I was in a headlong flight from it. Where the diabetic, traditionally, was supposed to stay inert, I had to be continuously on the go. Where the diabetic was taught moderation, I had to indulge myself. Diabetics were supposed to be cautious, and I liked nothing better than to take off in the direction of any impulse that stirred me. An extra few sets of tennis after a tournament match, a midnight swim at a beach half an evening's drive away - that was the kind of action I doted on. A tournament-week party the night before the finals or a cafe evening right after - I liked the pretty girls. I was always ready to go. Faster and faster. Any place, any time. Anything to keep myself from having time to think about where I was going, or why, or how to stop."

This effort to escape from his diabetes began to end when Talbert was in his 30's. He found himself in Australia as the captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team, and local reporters, after inquiring why he didn't serve in the military, wrote glowing stories on Talbert as an inspirational figure. The stories generated a huge response from Australian diabetes organizations and individual patients. In the past, Talbert had turned down requests to speak to groups or individuals about the subject, but now he felt obliged because he was representing America. The experience, connecting him with other diabetics, touched him deeply, so he continued his outreach in the U.S. He got involved with the ADA and, later, the JDRF, and he spoke to countless children about their fears, their guilt, and their search for normalcy.

"It had taken me all these years - and perhaps a touch of that universal fear - to understand what I was. I had been running from an image of myself that I had created. The diabetic and the "normal" person - it was a distinction I had made. There was nothing wrong, no shame, in being "one of them," if you realized that they were all people."

In 1958, Talbert wrote a book, "Playing for Life," which recounted his experiences as a young man, but his own life was just getting started. He married and had two sons; wrote several tennis books; was the Tournament Director of the U.S. Open; and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. He died in 1999, at age 81, a truly remarkable life.

So let's give Bill Talbert the final word. In describing his vast tennis experiences, he said: "In all that time, I had never been farther from diabetes than from my own skin. The hypodermic needle was just as vital as ever . . . But what counted was the excitement of the game, the lure of the gamble . . . the crowd, the band, the tennis officials and government dignitaries in their canopied pavilion . . . the freshly chalked lawn . . . the Davis Cup . . . what counted was the living."