In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Frank Parker [USA]Born: 31 January 1916
Died: 24 July 1997
Career: 1931-50
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1948)
Peak Elo rating: 2,103 (1st place, 1941 and 1945)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 73
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It’s possible to tell the story of men’s tennis in the 1930s and 1940s with only a passing mention of Frank Parker. When Bill Tilden went pro, he passed the baton to Ellsworth Vines, who gave way to Fred Perry and Jack Crawford. In the late 1930s, Don Budge emerged to dominate the circuit, followed by Bobby Riggs, a wartime hiatus, Jack Kramer, and Richard “Pancho” González.
Parker wasn’t a match for any of those men. He won the US National Championships in 1944 and 1945, the editions most affected by World War II. The 1944 field was only 32 players, only a handful of them serious contenders. Even the typically exuberant Allison Danzig wrote of that year’s title match, “It was not a brilliant match … but it was a worthy final for a wartime championship.”
Still, any retelling of the era is much richer with Parker in the story. During his two decades in amateur tennis, superstars came and went, winning a few majors before (understandably!) bolting for the professional ranks. The serve-and-volleying “Big Game,” exemplified by Kramer, steadily took over. Parker’s career is a reminder that there was an alternative path. Especially if, like the two-time Forest Hills champion, you had a world-beating backhand.
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Parker’s signature shot was often compared to the famous Budge backhand. Frequent competitor Gardnar Mulloy called it “uncanny” and “a thing of beauty.” Pancho Segura said simply that it was “the finest.” The backhand was a gift from God. Frank owed just about everything else to Mercer Beasley.
Beasley was a super-coach at a time when many players didn’t even have regular coaches. Though he stumbled into the profession at age 40, he made his mark right away, discovering a 14-year-old Ellsworth Vines in 1925. The coach’s reputation spread quickly, so when a wealthy member at the Milwaukee Town Club in Wisconsin thought he spotted promise in an 11-year-old ballboy, he arranged to hire Beasley as the club pro.
That ballboy, working for a nickel a set, was Franciszek Andrej Pajkowski. The Americanized “Frank Parker” was, in part, a sop to chair umpires who couldn’t handle the Polish mouthful. Under Beasley’s guidance, he quickly developed into a star. He won the national boys’ championship at age 15, and he added the national junior title a year later. In 1933, aged 17, Frankie added his first significant adult trophy at the US Clay Courts.
Parker posing
By then, Mercer and his wife Audrey had effectively adopted the young man. They even wanted to make the arrangement official. But while Frankie’s mother Anna recognized the advantages that the Beasleys could offer a talented boy from a poor family, she wasn’t willing to give up her son. Still, when Beasley chased coaching opportunities first to California and then to Tulane University in Louisiana, Frank followed. When Mercer couldn’t accompany him to tournaments, Audrey served as chaperone.
Parker became Beasley’s ideal player: a steady, conservative baseliner who rarely showed emotion on court. He took things one step further when he began wearing dark glasses on court, earning the nickname “Mr. Incognito” to go with the expression that reporters invariably called a poker face. Only when Frank finally won the US national title in 1944 did the New York Times claim to detect “a muffled cry of exultation barely breaking the bounds of his habitual restraint.”
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The only things Beasley couldn’t do for his charge were to make him taller–Frankie never grew beyond five feet, eight inches tall–and to fix his forehand. It was a challenging pair of handicaps for an elite player, and they prevented him from getting as far as the semi-finals at Forest Hills until 1936.
Beasley tweaked Parker’s forehand every offseason. When Frank described his own game in 1935, he said he used three different grips on that side, a hint that none of them worked that well. Oddly, the coach may have been responsible for wrecking a natural shot nearly as effective as the backhand. Jack Kramer wrote in The Game:
[A]s a boy he had this wonderful slightly overspin forehand drive. Clean and hard. Then for some reason, [Beasley] decided to change this stroke into a chop. It was obscene; it was like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
Both player and coach acknowledged that the forehand was a problem, but Kramer may have overstated his case. Parker made his first Davis Cup team in 1937, when the Americans traveled to Britain to win back the trophy. Playing second singles behind Don Budge, Parker lost to Bunny Austin in the first rubber, but bounced back to win in straight sets against Charles Hare and secure the Cup. The Milwaukee Journal reported, “Even his forehand, long a weak chink in his armor, was a thing of beauty. Shots made off that side had power and perfect length and accuracy.”
On the other hand, Kramer’s criticism had some relevance even five years later. Parker reached his first major final at Forest Hills in 1942, where he met Ted Schroeder. Schroeder attacked the backhand and eventually broke it down, but he didn’t mince words about Frankie’s weaker side:
Frank’s forehand was so bad. On a crucial shot, Frank did not know where he was going to hit it. It was a matter of execution. On Frank’s forehand, you did not know where it was going to go.
Fortunately, Parker’s court coverage–plus that backhand–were usually good enough to make up for everything else. When author Stan Hart tracked down the 68-year-old Frank in 1984, he wrote that the former champion still “covered his baseline like an ocelot.” Bobby Riggs paid him more conventional praise, writing, “His footwork is marvelous. You never see Frankie hitting the ball from an awkward position.”
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Beasley also–to put it crudely–gave Parker his wife. Audrey traveled with Frank for years, ensuring that the handsome young player kept his focus on tennis and away from off-court enticements. Parker seems to have found a distraction anyway. In 1938, Audrey and Mercer went to Reno for a quickie divorce, and shortly thereafter, Frank and Audrey got married. It was, in Parker’s words, “a love match,” and they remained together until Audrey’s death.
In Frank’s later telling, the Beasleys had long since grown apart. But in the 1930s, the triangle was prime gossip-page fodder. It even drew comparisons with the scandal of the day, the affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. The player “stole” his coach’s wife, and the age difference invited constant jokes. Parker was only 22, and the middle-aged Beasleys had a 21-year-old daughter. Even a decade later, when Audrey tagged along on Frank’s first professional tour, Pancho Segura made a game at international borders of trying to get a glimpse of Audrey’s passport. He wanted to see just how old she really was.
Remarkably, the divorce and marriage changed very little, at least as far as Parker’s tennis was concerned. Reporters noticed that he loosened up a bit–but only a bit. Somehow he and Mercer remained friends, to the extent that when Frank won at Forest Hills in 1944, the New York Times story led with Beasley’s pride that his student finally became the national champion. And Audrey kept at her chaperoning. She accompanied the American Davis Cup team to Australia in 1946, and she carefully managed her husband’s training and rest schedule.
Apart from the unusual player-wife-coach triad, Parker’s life and career progressed steadily and predictably. He won multiple singles titles every season from 1932 to 1949, with the exception of the war years. He reached the fourth round at Forest Hills every year from 1934 to 1949, including during World War II. He took part in four Davis Cup campaigns, from the 1937 title effort against Great Britain to the 1948 defense against Australia.
Even the war didn’t really slow him down. He served in the Army, but his superiors saw his value as an entertainer. He spent much of the conflict based on Guam, touring with other stars in uniform like Bobby Riggs and Don Budge.
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In fact, World War II is responsible for many of Frank Parker’s mentions in the history books, both directly and indirectly.
His two national titles came in 1944 and 1945. The fields were not strong ones, and they were smaller than usual–Parker needed only five match wins to secure each championship. Not only was almost every entrant American, but many US standouts were missing. Ted Schroeder, who beat Parker in the 1942 final, didn’t return to Forest Hills until 1949. Joe Hunt, who won the 1943 title, missed the opportunity to defend in 1944 when his Navy flight training course was delayed by weather, and he died on a training mission the following year. Jack Kramer, who would beat Frank in the 1947 final, didn’t play the tournament in 1944 or 1945.
Instead, Parker played two finals against Billy Talbert. Both years, he had the advantage of all that time on the road with Riggs, Budge, and others. On the other hand, Forest Hills was nearly the only proper tournament he was able to play. Maybe that kept the pressure off. His always-troublesome forehand served him well in the 1944 final, working even better than his backhand despite Talbert’s attack in that direction.
Frank’s 1945 title deserves an even bigger asterisk. Talbert was a particularly dangerous challenger this year, as he had won ten straight tournaments before the national event. But he pulled a tendon in his left knee during his semi-final against Pancho Segura and visibly limped through the final. Still, Talbert fought Parker to 12-all in the first set, once coming within two points of victory. But once the 66-minute opening frame was decided in Parker’s favor, there was no coming back.
The two national championships raised Parker’s stature, and his resulting ranking at the top of the 1945 American list upped it even more. He never had the time or money to play the European circuit, but in 1948, the USLTA sponsored him to enter the French Championships and Wimbledon. The 32-year-old took the title at Roland Garros, beating Jaroslav Drobný, and he made it a twofer the following year, overcoming young American Budge Patty. He teamed with Richard González in 1949 to win the doubles titles at both European majors.
In the late 1930s, there were always Americans ahead of Parker in line, so when he was at his physical peak, international opportunities just weren’t there. But the two French titles raise some interesting questions. If the man who had won the US Clay Court championship five times had made a habit of traveling to Roland Garros, just how many majors could he have won?
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Parker’s record of four major singles titles and two more finals–all that wartime context aside–is an outstanding one. Oddly enough, they don’t have much to do with his ranking on this list.
In 1944 and 1945, he entered only a handful of events, and most of his matches were against middling competition. He probably was competing at a high level, but the evidence we have just doesn’t tell us much either way. Aside from the fact that he lifted a famous trophy in early September, Parker didn’t add much to his resume as a would-be all-time great during the war.
In 1949, he turned pro after Forest Hills, and promptly started losing to Pancho Segura. He had always beaten Segura outdoors; on the indoor courts that constituted most of the professional circuit, Pancho got the better of him. By tacking a bunch of losses onto an otherwise sterling campaign, Parker lessened the value of his 1949 season, at least in the eyes of algorithms like mine.
Still, my ratings show that Parker was a world top-tenner at the end of 1936, 1937, 1939-41, and 1945-49, with peaks in ’41 and ’48. His performance in 1941 was particularly steady. He tallied eight titles, one of them at the prestigious Pacific Southwest, where he beat Bobby Riggs and Frank Kovacs in the last two rounds.
In 1946, Jack Kramer made the case that his pal Ted Schroeder–not Frank–should play second singles in the Davis Cup final against Australia. Schroeder was rusty, but Kramer argued, “Frankie doesn’t ever upset anybody. He doesn’t get upset himself either, he just plays the same level every match. Here, that’s not good enough.” Maybe so–although weekends like that Riggs-Kovacs double in 1941 suggest otherwise.
More importantly, what matters in Davis Cup selection is not what matters to the broader question of a player’s legacy. Frank Parker won the matches he was supposed to win–more than 600 of them–for two decades. Eddie Moylan, who faced him several times after the war, said, “There were no easy points with him. When you won a point from Frank, you deserved it.” Few men on the circuit were up to the task.