Vitas Gerulaitis

Vitas Gerulaitis is presented in these diary entries through the collision of tennis and nightlife: he is a competitor in a three-hour Wimbledon match, a subject of teasing about his routines, and the namesake of a New York party. The glimpses are social rather than biographical, but together they make his athletic identity part of the city’s circulating gossip and spectacle.

At Richard Weisman’s during Wimbledon

On August 22, 1977, the diary’s narrator went with Susan Johnson and Jed Johnson to Richard Weisman’s home, where everyone was already watching Gerulaitis play Björn Borg. The two players were not initially there: they had been having dinner together. The match lasted three hours; during it, Gerulaitis arrived with a girlfriend, while Borg had already gone home from dinner. The sequence places the athletic contest inside a social evening, with the players’ movements and company becoming part of the audience’s conversation.

The joke of discipline and nightlife

The gathering’s running joke contrasted the players’ supposed schedules: Borg was said to sleep for four hours and then play tennis for two, while Gerulaitis played for two hours and then went discothequing for four. The narrator adds that Gerulaitis had just discovered New York/New York, presenting nightlife as a fresh attraction. Yet the image of indulgence sits beside signs of discipline. There was plenty to drink at the gathering, but no cocaine; people teased Gerulaitis about the gold razorblade necklace he wore during the match, and he was described as being in training. He left early and had eaten only a plum. The entry thus holds the partygoer’s reputation and the athlete’s regimen in the same frame, without resolving one into the other.

A social presence beyond the court

On November 8, 1977, Richard Weisman held a party for Gerulaitis after returning from the Ken Norton fight. The diary records Margaret Trudeau and two Canadian friends among those present, but offers no further account of Gerulaitis’s actions or words at the event. Across these appearances, he is less a fully narrated personality than a recognizable presence around whom tennis, training, fashion, and parties gather. The entries’ brevity leaves his private character largely unknown while making visible how quickly a match and an athlete’s habits become social material.