player – Tennisarchives.com

General First nameBela
LastnameVon Kehrling
GenderMale
CountryHungary
Date of birth1891-01-25
Place of birthSpišská Sobota, Slovakia
Date of death1937-04-26
Place of deathBudapest, Hungary

About

The following piece was translated from the original article in Hungarian, which can be accessed at:
https://www.nemzetisport.hu/tenisz/2021/01/a-csodagyerek-130-eve-szuletett-minden-idok-talan-legnagyobb-magyar-teniszezoje

[Published online on 21 January 2021]

By István L. Pap

A child prodigy, who became perhaps the greatest Hungarian tennis player of all time, was born 130 years ago this month.

He was extremely popular throughout Europe, and abroad he was called Bela von Kehrling, but Bela de Kehrling appears in the news reports of the time, just as Baron de Kehrling, i.e. Baron Kehrling, appeared in the entries for the Table Tennis World Cup in 1926. But this was probably due to the abbreviation B. Kehrling and an uninformed reporter.

Béla Kehrling’s father owned a fabric dyeing and dry-cleaning business in Óbuda. Béla acquired his nickname, Puci, after the “puceráj”. Not only was he known as one of the best tennis players of his time, but he was also at the top in table tennis and, what’s more, before the turn of the century there was hardly any sport that he had not tried.

His was a real talent and he was serious at every sport he tried. In athletics and gymnastics, he perfected his movement and coordination; he tried bobsleighing in the Tatra Mountains during the quiet winter months; and, as a footballer, he played for the Hungarian national team four times (“Csüdör was the better of the two full-backs, Kehrling’s slowness created many dangerous situations,” said a report in the magazine “Sporthírlap” about the latter’s first match, against the Austrians, on 4 October 1914.)

Kehrling played football for several seasons in the Hungarian first division, as a right-back and central defender for FC ‘33, which was then part of the Magyar Atlétikai Club (MAC). In the first ever photograph of the Hungarian ice hockey team, taken in 1926, Kehrling can be seen stretching during the Budapest Skating Association’s tour to Vienna. The first domestic championship was organized only in 1937, the year of Kehrling’s death.

According to an article published in “Nemzeti Sport” in the summer of 1911: “Kehrling is actually a prodigy. At the beginning of spring, he was still happily playing football as part of the FC ‘33 team, then he started gymnastics with the Óbuda team and went to Turin and won the javelin competition with a throw of 41 metres, before going out on court without any practice and asking for a racket and beating Pista Csáki, who is playing well this year, in the handicap event. Does all of this not make you a bit dizzy?”

Where his phenomenal sporting career is concerned, we should not forget to record that World War One broke out when Kehrling was 23 years old and lasted until he was 27 years old. However, Hungary was also an undesirable element in world sports for another two years which, if you will, were Kehrling’s best years. The available rubber was absorbed by the military industry, so the supply of tennis balls also dried up.

In order to help calm the political situation, Kehrling made a significant contribution. The sports authorities in Hungary asked him to try and make some friends for Hungarian sport. So he travelled to the newly-established Czechoslovakia, where he won the men’s singles event at the international tennis championship and made new friendships and revived old ones. He did everything he could to reduce our isolation.

Kehrling took part in the outdoor tennis events at the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912 and in the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924, but finished out of the medals both times. In Paris, he lost to the American Richard Norris Williams, one of the survivors of the 1912 Titanic disaster, in the round of 16 of the men’s singles event.

In the interim, like all Hungarian athletes, he had been barred from taking part in the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920. However, in 1923 Kehrling was successful at the Gothenburg Games, held in that Swedish city in May 1923. This competition included athletes from powers that were on the losing side at the end of World War One.

In 1925, Kehrling reached the semi-finals of the men’s doubles event at Wimbledon with the Italian Umberto de Morpurgo; they were beaten in four sets, 11-9, 7-9, 6-1, 6-1, by the eventual champions Jean Borotra and René Lacoste. In the same year Kehrling won the Wimbledon Plate, a consolation event for players who had lost in the early round of the men’s singles event. In 1926, Kehrling teamed up with the Dutch player Christiaan van Lennep at Wimbledon, but with less success.

Kehrling was only able to compete at Wimbledon, for example, for the time in 1925, when he was already 34, though even then he was still among the best in the world and would remain so for a good seven years. He was greatly respected and competed against all the best players: Jean Borotra, René Lacoste (whose nickname was “The Crocodile”; hence the logo of the sporting goods company he later founded), Henri Cochet and the American Bill Tilden, winner of ten major singles titles. Kehrling managed to beat most of them, was a permanent fixture in the top ten in Europe and even featured in the top half of that list.

Between 1912 and 1933, Kehrling also won a total of 34 Hungarian championship titles, and was virtually invincible on domestic clay.

Nothing is more characteristic of Kehrling’s popularity than the fact that his constant training partner and good friend was King Gustav Adolf V of Sweden, known on the tennis court simply as “Mr G”. In 1906, he won the men’s doubles event at the Swedish Championships when he was heir to the throne. He ascended the throne in 1907, but also remained a regular participant in the tournaments held on the French Riveria. Kehrling's domestic Davis Cup matches were regularly attended by members of the Hungarian elite and, of course, by Governor Miklós Horthy.

At the same time, Kehrling also represented the MAC as a table tennis player between 1911 and 1934. At the 1926 World Championship, he won a team gold medal and a silver medal in men’s doubles with Zoltán Mechlovits. In the final of the team competition against Austria, he stepped in to replace individual world champion Jacobi Roland, who was traveling home due to the death of his father, and won the decisive battle against the undefeated Munio Pillinger with a score of 4:4. One of his grandchildren, Beatrix Kisházi, also became a multiple Top 12 champion in Europe, a bronze medallist at the World Cup and European champion in table tennis.

Of course, tennis remained Kehrling’s number one sport though he only played for buttons compared to the astronomical prize money earned by today’s stars. As his son wrote in his memoirs: “From the world of today’s awards worth thousands and thousands of dollars, it is worth looking back at the prizes of the champions of the twenties: writing folders, women’s reticules, vases, antiques, clocks, sweaters, plaques, bat sculptures, leather wallets, silver goblets, gold pins, photos of Horthy, crystal, glass, mocca sets, suitcases, recorder stands...”

In 1915, during the war, Kehrling married Magdolna Schlauch, who played tennis herself and regularly wrote about the successes of her travelling husband in various newspapers. In 1924, he became the Hungarian representative of Mass, a French company that manufactured tennis rackets, while in 1926 he also began to represent the world-famous English Dunlop company. These positions provided a decent living for the family of Béla Kehrling who, officially, was an amateur tennis player. At the end of his career, he became vice-president of the Hungarian Tennis Association, and from 1929 he edited the bi-monthly Hungarian magazine “Tennisz és Golf”/“Tennis and Golf”.

Kehrling played a lot and was not deterred by the fact that in 1926 he had had an unexpected heart attack at a tournament in Berlin. “From then on, no matter how many times I was there for his matches, I didn’t push for Puci to win, but for him to come off the court alive,” his wife wrote. He was unable to stop and defended himself by saying: “The country needs me”.

In the spring of 1932, after winning a tournament on the Italian Riviera, Kehrling suffered another heart attack and was banned from playing by doctors. In October, he still beat Tilden in Budapest, and anyway he arbitrarily interpreted the warning as only applying to singles play. (“Well, I’ll take a good rest in the winter, but in the spring, whatever they say, I’ll be back again. I want to play doubles with the Davis Cup team,” Kehrling said.)

At his last tournament, in Balatonalmádi in 1936, he won the men’s doubles title with Ottó Szigeti and then retired. “On Sunday, Béla Kehrling told a staff member at the magazine ‘A. Reggel’ that he will compete in a tennis championship for the last time. If his health permits, he will take part in the tennis tournament in Lillafüred next week and then retire. He is hanging up his tennis racket.”

After that, Kehrling didn’t play anymore. He was already seriously in the autumn of 1936 in the fall of the year he was already seriously ill and he died on 26 April 1937. That was all his heart could take. At Farkasrét Cemetery in Budapest, he was given an ornamental grave for his burial. At the start of the funeral ceremony, a moment’s silence was held at all the tennis clubs in Hungary.

“Kehrling played special, individual tennis. His infallible instinct, his excellent positioning when reaching the most difficult balls, and his inimitable, smooth movement best characterized his game. His hitting was exemplary and with his deep backhand volley he mesmerized audiences from Hamburg to Budapest, from Paris to London, from Oslo to Barcelona.” Thus did the German publication “Der Tennissport” describe the great Hungarian champion in 1940, three years after his death.

No Hungarian tennis player of comparable skill has probably been born since then and certainly none has been more popular and influential than Béla Kehrling.

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