player – Tennisarchives.com

General First namePaul Camille Marie Joseph Ghislain
Lastnamede Borman
GenderMale
CountryBelgium
Date of birth1879-12-01
Place of birthSint-Joost-ten-Noode, Belgium
Date of death1948-04-21
Place of deathOostende, Belgium

About

The following biographical piece about Paul de Borman was translated from the original Dutch article, which can be accessed here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348185676_Borman_Paul_de

By Bram Constandt

Paul de Borman, sportsman, Belgian tennis champion, promoter of tennis, chairman of the Belgian and international tennis federations, was born on 1 December 1879 in Saint-Joost-ten-Noode as the second son in the noble family of Ernest de Borman and Mathilde Misson. On 29 June 1927, Paul de Borman married fellow tennis player Anne Christine de Selliers de Moranville (1881-1962). They had three children together: Geneviève (b. 1908), Léopold (b. 1909) and Myriam (b. 1915).

Circa 1895, the young Paul de Borman began his sporting career as a footballer at the Léopold Club in Brussels. With this team he played against the most important Belgian football clubs of the time, for example, on October 4, 1896, against DC Liégeois, and on March 28, 1902, against Antwerp FC. As part of this Brussels-based football team, he quickly took the first steps towards developing an impressive network of friends and acquaintances.

The president of the Léopold Club was Baron Édouard de Laveleye (1854-1938), who was also the very first president of the Belgian Football Association and a member of the Belgian Olympic Committee. Paul de Borman’s nephew, Victor Robyns de Schneidauer (1876-1919), was also a member of the management board at the Léopold Club, with which de Borman would continue to maintain lasting sporting contacts.

Paul de Borman was not only a gifted football player, but also made a career as a football referee. The first mention of his role as a football referee dates from 1899. He refereed many football matches, such as the one between Racing Club de Bruxelles and Antwerp FC that took place in Leuven in 1900. He also refereed the Coupe Van den Abeele, an international match in which Belgium narrowly beat the Netherlands in 1902.

In 1903, together with Edouard de Laveleye, amongst others, de Borman was also co-founder of the Belgian Referees’ Association. In this way he contributed to promoting the importance of refereeing within the football world. In 1906, he probably stopped all his activities in the football world to focus entirely on lawn tennis. Symbolic of this commitment was the publication that year of his book about lawn tennis, simply called Lawn Tennis. Paul de Borman was bitten by the lawn tennis bug quite early on and would always retain his passion for the sport.

De Borman’s earliest lawn tennis activities date from 1898. That year he was co-founder of the tennis section within the Léopold Club. Like so many sports clubs of that period, the Léopold Club was a place where various sports could be played. That same year, 1898, de Borman also won the men’s singles title at the Belgian National Championships for the first time. His career as a lawn tennis player subsequently really took off.

In 1899, de Borman not only won the men’s singles title at the Belgian National Championships again, but also won the same title at the Coupe de Spa. That victory marked the start of a long series of victories in lawn tennis tournaments at home and abroad.

In 1904, de Borman experienced his first peak as a tennis player when he reached the semi-finals in the men’s singles event at Wimbledon before losing to Major Ritchie. That same year, Belgium reached the challenge round of the Davis Cup with de Borman as an integral member of the team. They were beaten by five rubbers to love by the defending champions, the British Isles.

In 1904, de Borman also won the men’s singles title at the Belgian National Championships, for the sixth time. He would won that title a total of nine times: from 1898 to 1900, 1902 to 1905, and in 1911 and 1912.

In the meantime, lawn tennis had also broken through on the Belgian coast. It was introduced by tourists from Brussels, who wanted to practice their favorite sport by the sea during their holidays. Shortly after the founding of the lawn tennis club in Ostend in 1900, Paul de Borman became a member. He would also achieve some notable successes there.

In 1902, de Borman defeated the American player Clarence Hobart and in 1907 and 1908 he won the men’s doubles event in Ostend together with William Lemaire de Warzée (1878-1966). His wife, Anne, also made a name for herself in Ostend.

The sport of lawn tennis was introduced to Westende by Victor Robyns de Schneidauer, who was able to count on the cooperation of his cousin Paul de Borman. This is why de Borman gradually shifted his focus from Ostend to Westende. By 1908, de Borman was already a member of the committee at the annual Championships of Westende tournament, which he helped to organise.

Under de Borman’s impetus, many big names from tennis visited the Belgian coast. They included the great Frenchwoman Suzanne Lenglen. De Borman liked Westende so much that he had the Villa Butterfly built there in 1909. The villa had a view of the lawn tennis courts at the nearby club. The name of the villa refers to the wings of the butterfly, which for de Borman also symbolised two crossed tennis rackets.

During the same period, de Borman became increasingly involved in the promotion and improvement of lawn tennis in Belgium, albeit with a pronounced international ambition. In this respect, together with the Dutch lawn tennis player and diplomat Carel van Rappard (1874-1939), he organised the first Belgium versus Netherlands international matches in 1909.

In 1910, de Borman became secretary of the Belgian Lawn Tennis Federation, which he had co-founded in 1902. In that capacity he wrote a report on the need to increase the quality of Belgian lawn tennis players and to attract more foreign players to Belgium in order to raise the level of the sport there.

He achieved the goal of attracing foreign lawn tennis players for the series of exhibtion matches held at the Léopold Club in Brussels in May 1910. The participants included the New Zealander Anthony Wilding and Max Decugis from France. The exhibition became the start of a friendship between these three international players. With Anthony Wilding, de Borman also won the men’s doubles event at the Belgian International Championships and the Dutch International Championships in 1910.

Although de Borman had been a co-founder of the Belgian Lawn Tennis Federation in 1902, his ambition extended much further. For example, in 1913, he was co-founder of the Fédération Internationale de Lawn Tennis/International Lawn Tennis Federation, whose headquarters are in Paris.

On the eve of the First World War, Paul de Borman reached his absolute peak as a player. He practiced alternately on the lawn tennis courts in Brussels and Westende, and won several tournaments both at home and abroad. However, the First World War would curtail his sporting career because international competition came to an end and there was a lack of both lawn tennis equipment and the necessary infrastructure.

It is not clear where exactly Paul de Borman spent the war. According to one story, Anne de Borman fled to the Netherlands in 1917, perhaps to join her husband there. Other sources mention that Paul de Borman was in Great Britain at the time, but that might have been his brother, Pierre.

After the armistice, the de Bormans wanted to resume playing lawn tennis as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the seaside resort of Westende was completely in ruins. Both the Villa Butterfly and the lawn tennis courts had been destroyed. Out of necessity, the family initially chose the Belgian seaside resort of Le Zoute as their summer holiday home. Lawn tennis courts were also available there.

The de Bormans spent the winter season of 1920 on the French Riviera, at that time the epicentre for the beau monde of the international lawn tennis circuit. De Borman also resumed his activites in Brussels, and circa 1920 even became chairman of the Léopold Club.

Although Paul de Borman remained active as a lawn tennis player, he became more and more active as a manager and promoter of the sport. Gradually, however, he stopped taking part in tournaments. In 1919, he was elected chairman of the International Tennis Federation for the first time at the annual general meeting.

In 1920, Paul de Borman was chairman of the committee that was responsible for organising the lawn tennis matches at the Olympic Games, which were held in Antwerp that year. He also acted as an umpire during the Olympiad. A nice detail: his wife Anne de Borman took part in the women’s singles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles events in Antwerp. The Olympic Games of 1920 were also organised by the Belgian Olympic Committee, headed by Édouard de Laveleye. This makes Paul de Borman’s involvement easy to explain.

In 1924, de Borman became chairman of the Belgian Lawn Tennis Federation; he remained in this post until his death. The reconstruction of the de Borman family’s villa in Westende was completed in 1924 and the family returned there in the summer. The Westende Lawn Tennis Club was also rebuilt. However, the pre-war pacesetter Victor Robyns de Schneidauer had died, and in 1925 Maurice Sigart became the new chairman.

However, de Borman was co-founder, main shareholder and manager of the Westende Lawn Tennis Club, and for years the Sigart-de Borman duo formed a strong team whose aim was to further develop the sport of lawn tennis. Because of their efforts, Westende became a renowned national and international centre of the sport.

The Westende Lawn Tennis Club attracted not only the established names, it also became a breeding ground for upcoming talent. The children of the two trendsetters, Josane Sigart (1909-99) and Léopold de Borman, as well as his Léopold’s two sisters, discovered and developed their lawn tennis talents there.

In 1935, there were internal struggles at the Westende Lawn Tennis Club and Maurice Sigart and Paul de Borman disappeared from the board of directors. However, Paul de Borman returned in 1937 and became the club’s chairman, a position he held until 1942. In the latter year he also resigned as manager of Westende’s promotional company. He had become a permanent resident of Westende and helped manage the seaside resort for three years.

De Borman built up a real network within the international tennis world, both as chairman of the Belgian Lawn Tennis Federation and as head of the International Tennis Federation. He therefore enjoyed a lot of respect, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the Belgian King, Leopold III. When the Swedish king, Gustaf V, came to Belgium on a state visit in 1937, de Borman was invited to take part in a doubles match alongside Paul Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister.

In 1937, de Borman also accompanied the Belgian king when he attended a series of international lawn tennis matches between players from Sweden and Belgium. De Borman subsequently maintained good relations with the Belgian royal family because, in 1948, King Leopold III posthumously awarded him a decoration in the Order of King Leopold II.

Paul de Borman died on 21 April 1948 in Ostend. He was buried in the cemetery in Westende. His wife, Anne, who died in 1962, was also buried there. The Beker de Borman, the annual, official championship for young Belgian lawn tennis players, still bears the de Borman name, as does the stadium at the Royal Léopold Club in Brussels. Paul de Borman was also mentioned as a tennis coach in the book Lolita, first published in 1955, by the Russian-born, American writer Vladimir Nabokov.

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