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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Pancho Segura [ECU]Born: 20 June 1921
Died: 18 November 2017
Career: 1939-74
Played: Right-handed (two-handed forehand, one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1950, among pros)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 66
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It is difficult to properly rate amateur-era players who spent most of their careers in the professional ranks. They often played long tours against a small number of opponents, never getting the chance to face the majority of their contemporaries. The conditions under which they worked, stopping in a different town every night and coping with the quirks of a portable canvas court, also make comparisons difficult.
Pancho Segura was not the greatest professional in the era between World War II and Open tennis. That honor goes to Jack Kramer or Richard “Pancho” González, two men who Segura faced at least 150 times apiece. But Segura–“Little Pancho,” standing eight inches shorter than González–is the one whose fame relies entirely on his pro exploits.
Kramer won Wimbledon. He and González combined to win Forest Hills every year from 1946 to 1949. Both men starred for Davis Cup-winning American teams. Segura, on the other hand, failed to reach the final at Forest Hills in seven tries. He was even less successful in his two appearances at Wimbledon.
By the traditional grand-slam accounting, Segura doesn’t merit a spot on a greatest-of-all-time list, let alone a place in the top 60.
Most players struggled when they made the transition from the relaxed atmosphere of amateur tennis tournaments to the exhausting pressure-cooker of the pro game. Segoo was one of very few who thrived in front of a new crowd every night, outsmarting opponents he’d face for weeks on end. As the conditions and the competition got tougher, he just kept improving.
Because of that unique career trajectory, Segura posted more than enough results to prove that he belonged among the very best. I’ll bombard you with numbers in a minute, but let’s start with an example. At the end of 1949, Frank Parker turned pro. He was the reigning Roland Garros champion, and in 1947, when Pancho was still an amateur, Parker won five of their seven meetings. For his first professional tour in the winter of 1949-50, he’d face Segura every night.
Segoo won the first eight matches they played. Parker hung in there, winning six of seven in one stretch. But after that, the five-foot-six-inch Pancho took over. One source says he won 59 matches in a row. The best reconstruction I can come up with gives him 41 out of the last 42. Either way: See ya later, Frankie.
By amateur standards, Parker finished 1949 as one of the best players in the world. By March of 1950, by my count, he had played Segura 75 times and lost 63 of them.
Little Pancho never won a major title, but he won an awful lot of tennis matches against the men who did.
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As early as 1943, when the 22-year-old Segura was learning English and playing tennis at the University of Miami, he said, “I like to play tough guys.” It’s a good thing, because he’d spend most of the next two decades doing just that.
I promised I’d give you some numbers. I can’t promise that you’ll believe them. Combining the tournament records at TennisArchives.com with the pro tour results listed in Chris Jordan’s book, The Professional Tennis Archive, I come up with a career record for Segura of 1,110 wins against 762 losses. That’s more match victories than any active player except for Roger Federer, and it’s more total matches played than anyone in the last half-century. It’s possible that only Bill Tilden has ever played so much competitive tennis.
That isn’t even the impressive part. Segura played the vast majority of his tennis against the best players of all time. He faced Kramer at least 180 times, González 150. He played more than 100 matches with each of Ken Rosewall, Frank Sedgman, and Tony Trabert. He played 87 against Parker and 59 against Lew Hoad. (Next time you hear commentators raving about Nadal-Djokovic LXII or whatever, come back and read this paragraph again.)
All told, Little Pancho played 954 matches against men in The Tennis 128 and another 456 against opponents who won major championships but didn’t make my list. That’s good for a total of 1,410 matches across the net from the toughest guys of all. He won 729, or 52%.
(Some context: The closest thing to a Segura-like ironman in the Open era is Jimmy Connors. Jimbo played about 1,560 tour-level matches, 254 of them against Tennis 128ers, plus another 94 against other slam winners. Segoo played three-quarters of his matches against the elite of the elite. The equivalent number for Connors is 22%.)
Eye-popping as Pancho’s totals are, even the win-loss record doesn’t fully communicate what he accomplished. When Segura turned pro at the end of 1947, he was 26 years old. My estimate is that he played his best tennis in 1949 and 1950. In those early years, he won 117 of 190 matches against 1947 Australian champ Dinny Pails, and he held his own against Kramer and González. Pails and Kramer were the same age as Segoo, and González was seven years younger.
Most stars didn’t last more than a few years on the professional barnstorming circuit. So as each new recruit joined the tour, Pancho had younger and younger opponents to contend with. He won nearly half of his matches against Trabert, who was nine years younger. He came one match short of splitting his career series with Hoad, who was thirteen years younger. He won 42 of 49 matches against 1959 Wimbledon champ Alex Olmedo, who was fifteen years younger.
Rosewall was also thirteen years younger than Segura. He joined the pros for the 1957 season, right after reaching the Wimbledon final, winning Forest Hills and leading Australia to another Davis Cup title. The 23-year-old Rosewall faced off against the 36-year-old Segoo more than anyone else that year. The two undersized champions split their 50 meetings right down the middle.
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Despite the thousand-plus wins, no one remembers Segura for his victories. Bow-legged Pancho, a head shorter than the competition, sharp-shooting with his unorthodox two-handed forehand, was an instant fan favorite everywhere he went.
Pro tours depended on one or two headline names to sell tickets. Since Segoo had never won Wimbledon or played Davis Cup, he would never draw crowds on his own. With names like Kramer, González, and Bobby Riggs on the marquee, Segura was consigned to the “animal act”–a warm-up match before the big guns game out.
For patrons who showed up on time, the opener was often the highlight of the evening. Kramer wrote, “The fans would come out to see the new challenger face the old champion, but they would leave talking about the bandy-legged little sonovabitch who gave them such pleasure playing the first match and the doubles. The next time the tour came to town the fans would come back to see Segoo.”
Pancho reaching for a forehand at Wimbledon in 1946
Segura was the ultimate underdog, and not just because he was a five-foot-six mestizo amid a troupe of strapping blonde Americans and Australians. He was born to a poor family in Guayaquil, Ecuador. By the time he was a teen, he had suffered through a double hernia, rickets, and recurrent bouts of malaria.
Young Pancho had just one advantage. His father worked at a tennis club. The boy was too weak to play football with his peers, so he spent most of his time hanging around the club. Trying out a discarded racket, he could only manage it with both hands. He would eventually learn to hit a one-handed backhand, but the two-handed forehand would persist, ultimately becoming one of the greatest shots in the game’s history.
Combining some natural gifts with sheer persistence, Little Pancho became one of the best players at the club, even though he could only play in the evenings after the members went home. He graduated from ball boy to hitting partner, then became a ringer for the club against arch-rival Quito. Before long, he was competing–and winning–all over South America.
However, Ecuador remained a tennis backwater. The country wouldn’t sponsor a Davis Cup team until 1961. The only hope for a would-be champion was to go abroad. Plans were made to send Segura to France, but World War II put European tennis on ice. It was, he later said, the luckiest break of his career. The Ecuadorian Sports Ministry scraped together the money to send him to the United States in 1940, and he never looked back.
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The path from Ellis Island to professional stardom was hardly a straight line. Segura barely spoke a word of English when he arrived, and he lost his first match in the States. At least he had a good excuse for the defeat–it was the first time he had ever seen a grass court.
His results steadily improved, but his circumstances did not. The Sports Ministry had promised a $100 monthly stipend that rarely turned up. Pancho worked as a waiter and sometimes slept in clubhouses. Eventually, new patrons emerged. Arturo Cano, the Bolivian consul, funded his career for awhile. Then Gardnar Mulloy, one of the country’s best doubles players, arranged for Segura to come to the University of Miami, where he coached the tennis team.
By 1943, Segura was increasingly fluent in North American language and culture. He remained shy around Miami’s co-eds, but he won the first of three consecutive national intercollegiate championships. Many experts pegged him as the man to beat at Forest Hills.
The promise didn’t immediately pan out. At the 1943 US Championships, he lost to Kramer in the semi-finals. He would lose to Billy Talbert at the same stage in each of the next two years. Even without a title, he was already a distinctive, popular character on court. Alison Danzig wrote for the New York Times in 1943:
Segura stands as the most colorful figure to pull the crowd into the stadium. To watch Pancho in action is to get an eyeful of a human dynamo giving off sparks of nervous energy. He thirsts to hit. Every ounce of him is grimly concentrated on making the kill, and while crouching to receive service he waves his racquet like a tiger lashing his tail before springing on his victim.
More than a few fans–not to mention the entire population of Guayaquil–were disappointed each time he came up short. Only one group cheered against him: the old-fashioned coaches and administrators who were skeptical of his unorthodox strokes. One of them told Arthur Daley of the Times, “It would be bad for the sport if Pancho won the nationals, because then everyone would start copying his two-fisted forehand.”
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The coaches had little to worry about. Everything about Segura’s game was unique, and though he would one day become one of the sport’s most effective coaches, nothing he did could really be copied.
Pancho’s legs–deformed by rickets–eventually became something to joke about. Harry Hopman called him the “most pigeon-toed tennis champion.” A chiropodist who examined him in the early 1940s concluded, “It would be a physical impossibility for anyone with feet like that to play tennis.” Yet he ran more than anyone, often in order to create another opportunity to hit a two-handed forehand.
The forehand was so deadly that it was worth the extra work. Not only did Segura wear himself out running around his weaker backhand, he had to slide his right hand up and down the racket when switching grips.
No matter. 1932 Wimbledon champion Ellsworth Vines called the forehand the “most outstanding stroke in game’s history; unbeatable unless [an] opponent could avoid it.” Kramer considered Don Budge’s backhand to be the best “pure stroke,” but “Segura’s forehand was better, because he could disguise it so well, and hit so many more angles.”
People said that Pancho’s forehand was so accurate, he could knock down a nail anywhere on the other side of the court. It was such a dominant weapon that opponents had no choice but to alter their game plan. Hopman wrote:
The professionals who play against Segura for percentages rarely hit to his two-hander. They take the risk of giving him a sitting shot from his backhand rather than take a chance of hitting the ball out of his reach on that two-hander. … [W]hen they volley for an opening on his two-handed side they don’t relax until the ball has bounced for the second time or Segura stops running for the ball.
Make the mistake of hitting to the forehand, and in Alex Olmedo’s memorable phrase, Segoo would “turn you into a windshield wiper on the baseline.” The rest of Pancho’s game was solid enough, but that one shot is what continued to win matches for him well into his forties.
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Behind the forehand was one of the greatest tennis minds in the game’s history. Segura hated to lose, and every defeat was an opportunity to find a weakness he could exploit in the next match.
As early as the 1950s, Kramer relied on Pancho as a kind of finishing school for new professionals. Trabert, Hoad, and others learned finesse and tactics from the Ecuadorian that they had never needed to win Wimbledon against the amateurs. Even players he didn’t work with directly ended up using him as a model. Rod Laver said, “When I was in a match, I always used to remind myself how Pancho did it.”
Supportive as he was of his fellow professionals, Segoo wasn’t above a bit of gamesmanship. For years, he led his tour-mates to believe that he couldn’t drive. Someone had to get the troupe from one city to the next, but he preferred to rest. When they finally discovered that he was capable of piloting a vehicle, Pancho proved to be the world’s worst navigator. One night, Frank Sedgman put him behind the wheel for the trip from Tallahassee to Tampa. Sedgman promptly fell asleep, and when he woke up, they were still in Tallahassee. Segura hadn’t found his way out of the city. That’s what he said, anyway.
Segura retired from the tour in the mid-1960s and became a full time coach, first at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, and later at the La Costa Resort in Carlsbad. He worked with some of the greatest players of the 1970s. One of his charges, Stan Smith, considered him “maybe the best tactician that I’ve ever met.” Billie Jean King called him the “Ph.D. of tennis.”
Of course, Pancho wasn’t training his students in the ways of the two-fisted forehand. He could teach technique just fine, but his genius worked at a higher level. Gamblers loved to eavesdrop, because he could quickly identify who was likely to win a match. Kramer, no dolt himself, said, “If you sit next to Segoo watching a quality match, he’s analyzing for you why one guy’s winning and the other guy’s losing in a brilliant running commentary. He’s uncanny that way.”
Segura’s greatest student was Jimmy Connors. Connors had learned the game from his mother, Gloria, who realized that Pancho–another smaller-than-average guy who won points from the baseline–was the voice her son needed to hear. Under Segura’s eye, Jimbo won all three majors he played in 1974. In 1975, his shock loss to Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon came–perhaps not coincidentally–after Gloria took back the coaching reins.
Pancho kept playing as long as his body would allow it. At the first Open Wimbledon in 1968, he and Olmedo faced the South Africans Abe Segal and Gordon Forbes, taking one set by the record-setting score of 32-30. When Billie Jean King won the Battle of the Sexes in 1973, Segura wanted a crack at her–he was sure he was a better player than Bobby Riggs.
Segura’s enthusiasm for the game was unflagging, and for more than six decades, it was infectious. In 2006, Pancho’s biographer, Caroline Seebohm, interviewed his former college coach, Gardnar Mulloy. The 92-year-old Mulloy could only say of the joyous player he once sponsored, “I want to be like him when I grow up.”