Ludvig Leif Sadi (Leif)
Rovsing
Male
Denmark
1887-07-27
Kopenhagen, Denmark
1977-06-17
Ordrup, Denmark
The following biographical sketch of Leif Rovsing was translated and adapted from the original Danish version, which can be viewed here: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Rovsing
Leif Rovsing
Childhood
Ludvig Leif Sadi Rovsing (born Qvist), known as Leif Rovsing, was born on 27 July 1887 in the Danish capital, Copenhagen. He was the illegitimate child of 31-year-old Marie Katrine Quist (1856-1931) who, ten days before Leif’s birth, moved in with Elif Harald Rovsing (1846-1910), a wholesale goods merchant. In 1889, Leif was adopted by Elif Rovsing and given his adoptive father’s surname. Elif Rovsing was probably Leif Rovsing’s actual biological father.
Elif Rovsing was the son of Professor Kristen Rovsing, who ran Borgerdydsskolen, the school the young Leif Rovsing would later attend and from which he graduated in 1905. Elif Rovsing died in 1910 and left a fortune to his 22-year-old adopted son, which Leif Rovsing invested in shares in several businesses including United Breweries, Burmeister & Wain, The Royal Porcelain Factory and Schous Soap House.
Tennis career
In 1900, at the age of just thirteen, Leif Rovsing became a member of the Kjøbehavns Boldklub (KB) sports club in Copenhagen. He later went on to win the men’s doubles title at the Danish Championships five times, in the period 1907-16. In 1907, 1908 and 1913, he won the outdoor title with Hans Wedege as partner, while in 1916 he won both the indoor title (with Erik Tegner) and the outdoor title (with Aage Madsen).
In July 1910, Leif Rovsing took part in the Wimbledon tournament for the first and only time. In the men’s singles event he lost in the first round to the Englishman Lawrence Milburn, 5-7, 4-6, 6-1, 6-1, 6-2. In the men’s doubles event he and his compatriot Poul Groes-Petersen lost in the first round, also in five sets, to the Indian brothers Athar-Ali Fyzee and Ali Hassan Fyzee.
In 1912, Leif Rovsing took part in the tennis events at the Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. In the outdoor men’s singles event his projected first opponent, the Hungarian Pal Segner, defaulted. Rovsing faced the Swede Charles Wennergren in his first match, which he lost by the score 4-6, 9-7, 6-8, 6-1, 6-1. In the men’s doubles event, he and his partner Victor Hansen were defeated in the first round by the Russians Aleksandr Alenitsyn and Mikhail Sumarokov-Elston, 2-6, 6-3, 7-5, 6-3.
In November 1913, Leif Rovsing entered the inaugural World Covered Court Championships tournament in Stockholm, but had little success. However, at the last edition of the tournament, held in Barcelona, Spain, in February 1923, he and Erik Tegner reached the men’s doubles final before losing to the French pair of Henri Cochet and Jean Couiteas, 6-1, 6-1, 7-5.
During his tennis career, Leif Rovsing also managed to win the men’s singles title at both the International Swedish Championships and the International Norwegian Championships.
Banned from Danish tennis due to homosexuality
In 1917, due to suspected homosexual activity, Leif Rovsing was banned from taking part in any tennis tournaments organised under the auspices of the Danish Boldspil-Union (DBU), the body governing football and other sports in Denmark. According to a report from the Boldklubben af 1893 (B.93), a sports club located in Copenhagen, an 18-year-old tennis player from the B.93 had visited Rovsing at the latter’s home some time in 1916.
Before being banned from taking part in any tennis tournaments, Rovsing was summoned to a meeting at the DBU, where he not only admitted to having had intimate contact with young men, but also argued in favour of homosexual love. “Homosexuality is beautiful and clean, hygienic and aesthetic,” he said, and concluded critically: “Certainly the DBU could remove me from the tennis world, but that would not remove homosexuality from the DBU.”
In 1918, in one of his many letters to the DBU, Rovsing wrote: “Life has no value for me without tennis.” In another letter he wrote: “I share the fate of Georg Brandes, Herman Bang, General Kuno Moltke, etc., who were all expelled from their homeland, but who quenched their thirst for ambition abroad. [...] There will surely come a day when the DBU will also learn that harmless conduct is not punishable.”
On 6 July 1921, the DBU announced that Leif Rovsing was no longer banned and that he could once again play in any club that wanted him as a member and that he could again participate in tournament matches. Rovsing was subsequently elected a member of the newly-founded Danish Lawn Tennis Association and took part in the aforementioned final edition of the World Covered Championships tournament in Barcelona in February 1923.
The B.93 club protested the decision of the DBU, stating: “Mr. Rovsing’s morality is of such a nature that it is in open conflict with the goals which it is the task of all healthy sports to strive for, namely physical and mental health.” The board of the Copenhagen Boldspil-Union (CBU) could not accept the DBU’s decision either, and at the CBU’s general meeting on 26 February 1923 a commission was appointed for ‘Renewed Investigation of the Rovsing Case’. The results of the commission’s work were presented on 16 November of the same year.
After these developments, Rovsing was banned again until the DBU could make another decision on his case at its board meeting on 17 May 1924. On 3 August 1925, the DBU extended the ban of 1924, which meant that Rovsing still could not participate in tournaments organized by the DBU or the Danish Lawn Tennis Association and sports clubs governed by the DBU. However, the DBU did not object to Rovsing playing against Danish tennis players in overseas tournaments, “so as long as the organisers allowed this.”
In March 1924, Rovsing had for the first time threatened to take his own life, stating: “Should I be banned again, I will take my life! Death is far preferable to being considered a moral criminal again, someone no one dares to show up in company with. I do not want to relive years like the ones in which I was banned [...] But if I have to live again, for months and years, as I have lived until today, with one thought swirling around in my mind, that of my powerlessness in the face of the injustice being done to me, as I see it, then I will go mad, and then death will be preferable.”
In 1927 Rovsing, together with the Kløvermarkens Tennis Club in Copenhagen, organised and financed a tennis tournament. Most of the prominent tennis players of the time agreed to take part, but the Danish Lawn Tennis Association banned Rovsing from participating. As a result, the club sued the DBU. Kløvermarkens Tennis Club wanted Rovsing as a member because he had not done anything illegal on the tennis court, and homosexuality was not in violation of Danish law. The DBU’s defence was based on logic: “People with Rovsing’s views and behaviour should not have access to the players’ changing rooms and bathrooms.” On 12 October 1928, the Eastern High Court ruled in the case: “For the protection of the young members” in the clubs, the ban was upheld.
Thoughts of suicide kept swirling around in Leif Rovsing’s head, and he wrote pleading appeals to the CBU, DBU, DLTF and KB in shocking, incoherent handwriting. In his despair and in order to get back to the sport he loved, Rovsing even completely wrote off his homosexuality in a letter to the DBU: “In future I will say that homosexuality is a criminal offence and a terrible disease.”
The Danish Tennis Club
Leif Rovsing was not allowed to play tennis in clubs in Copenhagen for several years, so in 1919 he established his own tennis tournament and, in 1921, financed and had his own tennis indoor tennis club built. This facility was officially named the Dansk Tennis Club (Danish Tennis Club) and was, and still is, located on Rygårds Allé 75 in Studiebyen in the district of Hellerup, in the suburbs of Copenhagen. Rovsing decorated his club with Egyptian and Balinese ornaments.
Throughout his adult life, Leif Rovsing travelled in the Far East and lived for a long period in the Indonesian province of Bali. Rovsing also lived in the house that was built next to his indoor tennis club in Hellerup. Both the indoor tennis courts and the Danish Tennis Club building still exist today and are owned and operated by the Danish Tennis Foundation. The club’s architect was Henry Madsen. The official inauguration of the Danish Tennis Club took place on 8 October 1922, on the occasion of an exhibition tennis match between Henning Larsen and Leif Rovsing. In 1925, Rovsing estimated that his tennis facility had cost him approximately 350,000 Danish krone.
Life after tennis
The Eastern High Court’s aforementioned ruling of 1928 put a definitive end to Leif Rovsing’s tennis career. He began an intense life of travel. Before World War II, he went on no less than eight long trips to the tropics, where Bali in particular aroused his enthusiasm. In the early 1930s, he bought an 8-hectare plot in Asserbo near Tisvilde Hegn, in the northern part of the Danish island of North Zealand, partly because he was concerned with nature conservation and wanted to preserve the area, but also in order to recreate the tropical idyll he had experienced following the construction of a village during one of his trips to Bali.
Leif Rovsing responded to the DBU through lectures, articles, books, travelogues and, not least, a lifelong struggle to get homosexuality accepted in the sports world. In the 1950s, he was a prolific contributor to the gay magazine Vennen, which he financially supported. He also established the Leif Rovsing Scholarship in order to promote research into the subject of sexuality, including “Deviations from normal sexual relations”.
In 1955, as part of a case involving pornography, Leif Rovsing’s home was searched by the police and he was arrested and remanded in custody for fifteen days, charged with having sex with a prostitute under eighteen years of age. He pleaded not guilty and saw the accusation as revenge for his writings. However, he received a suspended sentence of thirty days in prison for obscenity.
In the 1970s, Leif Rovsing moved to a nursing home in Ordrup in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen, where he died on 17 June 1977, one month before what would have been his ninetieth birthday. He had bequeathed all of his fortune to the Danish Tennis Foundation, for the maintenance of the indoor tennis facility on Rygaards Allé and the Danish Tennis Club, and for various business-related and non-profit purposes. Since 2007, the Danish Tennis Foundation has also owned and run a scholarship for performing artists, writers and composers in a building in the town of Gudhjem on the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm.
1908 - 1923
0
16
5
Round 1
Leif Rovsing 1 *
A. Riera
6-1
6-1
6-0
Round 2
Donald Greig 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-3
8-6
4-6
7-9
6-2
Quarterfinals
Leif Rovsing 1 *
H. Rosenberg
w.o.
Semifinals
Otto Froitzheim 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-2
7-5
Round 1
Étienne Micard 1 *
Leif Rovsing
w.o.
Round 1
Leif Rovsing 1 *
Fritz Axel Albert Lindqvist
6-3
6-4
Round 2
Torsten Gronfors 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-4
6-4
Round 1
Heinrich Kleinschroth 1 *
Leif Rovsing
w.o.
Round 3
Charles Wennergren 1 *
Leif Rovsing
4-6
9-7
6-8
6-1
6-1
Round 1
Louis Maria Heyden (Grandy) 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-1
6-3
Round 2
Lawrence Edward Milburn 1 *
Leif Rovsing
5-7
4-6
6-1
6-1
6-2
Round 2
Leif Rovsing 1 *
Cecil Stewart Hartley
5-7
6-3
6-3
Quarterfinals
Athar Ali Fyzee 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-3
6-1
Round 1
Val Miley 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-4
6-4
Round 1
Leif Rovsing 1 *
I. Grönfors
3-6
6-3
6-2
Round 2
Hans Carling 1 *
Leif Rovsing
6-2
6-1