player – Tennisarchives.com

General First nameOtto
LastnameFroitzheim
GenderMale
CountryGermany
Date of birth1884-04-24
Place of birthStrasbourg, France
Date of death1962-10-29
Place of deathWiesbaden, Hessen, Germany

About

The following piece originally appeared in the book entitled ‘Tennis in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Zum 100-jährigen Bestehen des Deutschen Tennis Bundes.’/‘Tennis in Germany. From Its Beginnings to the Present Day. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the German Tennis Federation’. The book in question was first published in 2002.

Otto Froitzheim – The Original and the Best

By Heiner Gillmeister

[Translated from the German by Mark Ryan]

‘There is nothing about your physique that resembles a bulldog. […] With your pale, almost cadaverous face, your thin arms and small feet, one might think that one was contemplating a priest from the cathedral in your native city.’ It was with these words that, in a letter published in ‘Lawn Tennis and Badminton’ in 1908, a certain Mr ‘Sinnet’ (= Tennis) addressed himself to a particular German lawn tennis player. The cathedral in question was the famous building in Strasbourg partially constructed by the architect Erwin von Steinbach; the addressee of the letter was the German lawn tennis champion Otto Froitzheim.

Otto Froitzheim, the aforementioned person said not to have had the physique of a model athlete, first saw the light of day on 24 April 1884 in the Alsatian metropole of Strasbourg. His father was a senior teacher at the local secondary school; his mother was the daughter of a doctor from the Rhineland. In the 1860s, Otto Froitzheim’s father made a good impression in the Corps Teutonia student fraternity in Bonn, a telling connection which, half a century later, in 1904, the lawn tennis player would be able to thank for the dazzling debut he made at the first big international tournament in which he took part, in Wiesbaden, where he won a singles title at his first attempt.

While Otto Froitzheim had inherited a good eye and the fencer’s quick wrist from his father, from his mother he acquired a talent for movement and stamina while still in the cradle. (Much later in life Frau Froitzheim herself learned how to swim, cycle and ski.) At the age of ten Otto Froitzheim was good enough to win a relay race for schoolboys and was a keen participant in disciplines such as gymnastics, athletics, swimming, cycling and ice skating.

However, his favourite sport was football, which he regarded as the training ground for lawn tennis throughout his life. Otto Froitzheim first began to play lawn tennis at the age of 16. As a member of the Academic Sport Club in Strasbourg, he used the Lenôtre courts in the neighbourhood of the famous Orangerie Park, which was also the home of the Place Lenôtre Lawn Tennis Club founded by Baron Robert von Fichard.

After sitting his secondary school examination, at the age of just 17, Froitzheim began the study of law at the University of Strasbourg. One year later he won his first lawn tennis championship, that of Alsace-Lorraine, just before, having completed his fourth semester, volunteering in the autumn of 1902 for one year of service with Infantry Regiment No 138 in Strasbourg. From the winter semester of 1903 onwards, Froitzheim once again wore colours instead of the regiment’s field grey. The law student had also enrolled at the Royal Prussian University in Bonn and, like his father before him, joined the Corps Teutonia student fraternity.

Froitzheim had changed his place of study not just because of family tradition. Thanks to the initiative of the banker Oskar Simon and the interest shown in lawn tennis by the emperor’s sister, Princess Adolf von Schaumburg-Lippe, who lived in Bonn, and Prince Eitel Friedrich, the Bonn Ice Club had risen to become the lawn tennis stronghold of the Rhineland. By 1903, the students from the Hansea, Saxonia and Teutonia Corps had marked out their share of its 22(!) lawn tennis courts.

The archivists at the University of Bonn have meticulously preserved the documents relating to the time the Teuton Otto Froitzheim spent there as a student. These documents show that he had his student digs at No. 54, in the street named after the famous Bonn-based professor Ernst-Moritz Arndt – the house in question is still standing – and that Froitzheim took his fencing lessons from fencing master Erich in the duelling chamber located upstairs in the building of which the Koblenzer Tor [‘Koblenz Gate’] forms a part.

In 1904, after the summer semester and at the age of 20, Froitzheim passed his initial law exams. At the age of 25, having rushed through the remaining exams at the speed of his forehand and backhand drives, he became one of the youngest assessors in Germany. Froitzheim climbed the career ladder at the same speed. First, he entered the service of the Customs Office in Strasbourg. As a consequence of this, and in accordance with the motto ‘Service is service’, a champion taken from the night shift at the main customs office in Basel was only just able to reach a lawn tennis final, such as the one in Bad Homburg.

After being taken on as a ‘non-essential’ employee in the Department of the Interior of the Ministry of the Reichland – as Alsace was then called – Froitzheim was subsequently transferred to the police headquarters in Berlin, probably at the instigation of Prince Adalbert, his patron in the Kaiser’s family.

Froitzheim survived World War One as a prisoner of war in England. In 1918 he was exchanged for a prisoner in the Netherlands and, shortly before the end of the war, for one in Germany. In the meantime, he had been promoted to the position of senior government official [‘Oberregierungsrat’] and took up his duties again at his old place of work in Strasbourg. But the French then sacked the high-ranking official. However, despite the changed political circumstances, Froitzheim still had his advocates in Berlin.

In 1921, according to one of the sports magazines, which still used the official style of the time: “Oberregierungsrat Otto Froitzheim has been appointed head of the usury department at the police headquarters in Berlin. This choice can only be described as a happy one, since the new head of department will certainly not judge its affairs from the point of view of a bureaucrat.” The anti-bureaucrat praised in that manner soon rose further up the career ladder. In 1923, he became deputy head at the police headquarters in Cologne. However, two years later, on 1 November 1925, he was brought back to Berlin, where he had been made a senior government official in the local police headquarters.

However, Froitzheim’s stay in the capital of the Weimar Republic did not last long. In the autumn of 1926, he was appointed to the police headquarters in Wiesbaden. He remained in this post for seven years and would probably have reached pensionable age in it if, this time, the Nazis, and not the French, had not fired him from it. Froitzheim, the highest-ranking police official, had refused to become a member of the SA or the SS!

However, once again he found a friend in the highest of places. None other than Hermann Göring ensured that Froitzheim was promoted to the office of regional vice-president in Aachen on the Rhine. In this role Froitzheim could afford not to appear in uniform on relevant occasions. The only compromise he had to make was to join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazi Party.

Göring, a former commander of the Richthofen squadron and himself a lover of ‘fantasy’ uniforms, had interceded on behalf of the Alsatian because Froitzheim had done enough for the Third Reich by once defeating the English lawn tennis champion Major Ritchie. However, Froitzheim’s coolness towards the Nazis did not prevent the Allies from placing him in an internment camp after the war.

Otto Froitzheim the lawn tennis player preferred the baseline game. Gifted with great anticipatory skill and, in addition, with great movement, he appeared to reach his opponent’s shots effortlessly and got to them, always in an almost ideal posture, when their trajectory had dropped slightly after bouncing. Hitting the ball not hard, but in a sprightly manner and with the middle of the racket, he was able, especially with his exemplary backhand, to send the ball to an excellent length which, in its consistency, wore down his opponent. If his opponent had enough stamina, the ball might pass over the net 40 or 50 times; in one match it was even said to have done so 117 times.

Froitzheim rarely used slice or topspin. In 1929, probably in a critical tone of voice, he promised his conqueror Roderich Menzel, a top-class top-spinner, that he would be better adapted to his game the next time they played each other. It is possible that Froitzheim did not want to admit that a new era had begun in his beloved sport.

With his safe style of lawn tennis, which paralyzed his opponents – the word double fault was also not a part of his vocabulary – Otto Froitzheim had innumerable successes throughout a career lasting almost three decades: International Champion of Germany in 1907, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1921, 1922 and 1925; world hard court champion in Paris in 1912; defeated only by the Australian Norman Brookes in five sets in the all-comers’ final at Wimbledon in 1914; four times victorious in sixteen matches against the four-time Wimbledon singles champion Anthony Wilding; and as late as 1927 victorious against Frank Hunter, the world number six, in a series of matches pitting the USA against Germany.

Froitzheim would probably have had even more success if his great talent had been complemented by a more ascetic lifestyle, more diligent training and the resultant athleticism of Anthony Wilding. Froitzheim’s career ended where it began. In 1929, he lost to a certain Gottfried von Cramm in the final in Wiesbaden. Looking back at his career in 1955, Froitzheim said that that was when he realized a new era had finally dawned.

What sort of a person was Otto Froitzheim? Roderich Menzel, who at the Rot-Weiss tournament in Berlin in 1929, as a young and aspiring player, played against and beat him, described Froitzheim as follows: He was “of medium height, slim but not gaunt, had a prominent head”, a “warm, rich voice and a soft, mischievous laugh”.

Without wanting to belittle von Cramm’s importance, Menzel, who was from Reichenberg in the Sudetenland, considered the man from Alsace to be the greater personality, because he not only impressed those around him as a lawn tennis player, but also by the way he advanced in his professional career, his dry sense of humor, his quick wit and, last but not least, by successes of which “a Casanova would have been proud”.

Menzel, who travelled to several countries with Froitzheim after World War Two in order to find advertisers for the lawn tennis encyclopaedia he was writing, did not provide further details with regard to Froitzheim’s love life. ‘Froitzheim and Women’ – this was also a short chapter in the biography of the lawn tennis player written by F.W. Esser. The latter’s printer only allowed him to write a 130-page biography and, in the end, something had to be said about the role of lawn tennis in the champion’s life! This was an extremely elegant way of avoiding the subject.

On May 25, 1921, the glamorous Berlin Ice Skating Club inaugurated its new clubhouse, which had been built at a cost of over one million marks, and organized a lawn tennis tournament to celebrate the occasion. That day, Leni Riefenstahl, a young, hopeful dancer who was taking lawn tennis lessons at the club, was about to enjoy the amenities of the new women’s dressing-room when a man opened the door and surveyed her with his grey, slightly hazy eyes.

A short time later Riefenstahl saw the same man again and was amazed. She encountered him outside, on the crowded tournament court, when he was about to inflict a one-sided defeat on Oscar Kreuzer, the second-best German lawn tennis player. The man from the ladies’ dressing-room was Otto Froitzheim, Germany’s top lawn tennis player. Froitzheim’s veiled gaze, which his friend Menzel also mentioned, had hypnotized and at the same time fascinated the young woman. Ignoring all warnings about the man notorious for his numerous affairs, she arranged a rendezvous with him two years later.

Froitzheim, who had meanwhile been transferred to Cologne, maintained, as insiders knew, a kind of love arbour in Berlin’s Tiergarten, to which he used to repair every fortnight. He and Leni Riefenstahl were now meeting each other regularly, especially when the international tournament organised by the Rot-Weiss Lawn Tennis Tournament Club at Whitsun lured Otto the Great to Berlin. It was on one of those occasions that the dancer received a severe blow to the head. She had just taken a seat in the stands to enjoy Froitzheim’s lawn tennis skills when a lady sitting behind her was obviously displeased that the man with the grey eyes kept looking up at Riefenstahl. So she hit Riefenstahl hard on the head with her parasol.

The lady’s real name was Barbara Apolonia Chalupiec, but the Polish native was better known to her contemporaries by her stage name. The parasol’s owner was Pola Negri, the silent film star of the 1920s and Froitzheim’s secret lover. In the end, Leni Riefenstahl broke off her engagement to the Don Juan from Alsace. She heard that Froitzheim had been flirting with a tennis player during a tournament held in Merano. The eternal bachelor Froitzheim is said to have had a happy marriage in the end, one which produced a son and a daughter. However, in her memoirs Leni Riefenstahl paints the exceptional lawn tennis player, who also became an honorary member of the German Tennis Federation, in a less than favourable light.

Froitzheim spent his final years in Wiesbaden, where he died on 27 October 1962 at the age of 78 after a short, serious illness.
------------------------------------------------------

Otto Froitzheim sometimes used the pseudonym ‘O. Roland’ when taking part in lawn tennis tournaments.

Media

Leave a Reply Cancel reply