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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Jaroslav Drobný [CZE/EGY/GBR]Born: 21 October 1921
Died: 13 September 2001
Career: 1938-65
Played: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1954)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 158
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Jaroslav Drobný was, in a way, the John Isner of his day. His serve was nearly unbreakable, and with a backhand that often abandoned him under pressure, he struggled to make headway against his opponents’ service games as well.
One difference: Drobný was a lefty. He took full advantage of his left-handedness in an era with even fewer standout southpaws than there are today.
He owned what Harry Hopman called a “big fast service,” which he often used to pile up ace after ace. He possessed every other serve in the book, too. Lefty slice? Check. Nasty kicker? Got that too.
Lew Hoad beat him only once in seven tries. He wrote that the Czech had “more serves than a magician has rabbits in a hat.” Hoad compared the challenge of facing Drobný’s serve to that of a cricket batsman trying to guess what delivery will come next.
One result of the Czech’s service prowess was an Isnerian predilection for very long matches.
In the 1948 Davis Cup Inter-Zonal final against Australia, the lefty dropped his first rubber to Bill Sidwell, 6-3, 6-2, 9-11, 14-12. Drobný and Vladimir Černík kept the Czechs in the tie with a win in the doubles, starting with a 10-8 opening set. To continue the comeback, Drobný faced down Adrian Quist in the longest Davis Cup match of the amateur era. He saved five match points–five points that would’ve given the tie to Australia–before pulling out a victory, 6-8, 3-6, 18-16, 6-3, 7-5.
In addition to the serve, Drobný had one of the best smashes in the game
Long before the tiebreak was invented, Drobný was no stranger to marathon sets. At Wimbledon in 1953, he and Budge Patty delivered the match of the tournament in the third round. The Czech won, 8-6, 16-18, 3-6, 8-6, 12-10. At 10-all in the decider, the referee indicated that the match would be suspended for darkness after two more games. The 31-year-old Drobný knew he would barely be able to move the next day, so he made a final, desparate push to finish the match.
The veterans met again two years later for a wood-court title in Lyon. After three hours and 45 minutes, the score stood at 21-19, 8-10, 21-21. At that point, as the New Yorker put it, “the contestants arrived at one of the most sensible decisions in the annals of tennis.” They called it a draw.
I forgot to mention one thing. Jaroslav Drobný–the left-handed ace machine, the master of a half-dozen deliveries, the man who could hold serve 20 times in a set–stood five feet, seven inches tall.
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Drobný didn’t look like a tennis player, and it’s only by an accident of family history that he became one. His parents tried for years to find an apartment for their growing family. When an opportunity finally arose, the new home came attached to a job. Father Josef would be the live-in head groundsman at the First Czech Lawn Tennis Club.
By the time young Jaroslav–“Jarda” to his friends–moved to the family’s roomier new digs, he was an avid footballer and a prodigy on ice skates. Tennis was the national sport for the elites. Jarda, a working-class boy, was on his way to mastering the favorite games of the Czech masses.
Drobný was offered a pro football contract as a teen. By then, though, he was developing into one of the strongest tennis players in the country. In the winter of 1936-37, aged 15, he was the youngest player ever chosen for the national ice hockey team. He would forgo football and balance the other two pursuits for more than a decade, wielding a racket in the summer, a hockey stick in the winter.
Strangely, for a man who would struggle with his backhand for much of his career, he was more or less ambidextrous. He played hockey and golf right-handed. As a ball boy at his father’s club, he saw plenty of top international stars up close, and for a time, he emulated the two-handed backhand of Australians Viv McGrath and Geoff Brown. He might have had a smoother path to the top had he defied convention and stuck with a double-hander.
Jarda looked more suited to ice hockey than tennis. He was not only short, he was stocky. Hopman described him as “thickset to chunkiness.” Time magazine simply called him “squat.” His appearance became even more unusual when, during a hockey game, an opponent’s skate blade scraped his eye. He needed glasses for the rest of his life.
The silver-medal winning 1948 Czechoslovakian Olympic team. Drobný stands furthest to the left in the back row.
His appearance raised doubts, but his racket silenced them. In 1937, Drobný defeated the ethnically German Czech veteran, Roderich Menzel, the only time Menzel was ever beaten in his home country. The following year, Jarda made his first trip to Wimbledon, where he lost in the first round. He watched Don Budge win the title, the third leg of the American’s Grand Slam. Budge followed the Czech delegation home to play the International tournament in Prague, where he won again–but only after Drobný pushed him to five sets.
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In 1939, the 17-year-old Czech reached the third round at Wimbledon and was well on the way to stardom. However, German aggression halted international competition in Europe. Drobný had it better than most. The German occupiers in Prague generally left him alone. He was drafted to work at a factory, but he could still play ice hockey, and when scarce balls and racket string were available, he could practice his tennis, as well.
As the European circuit resumed in 1946, Drobný was better prepared than most of his Continental competition. He reached the semi-final at Wimbledon on the back of a shock fourth-round upset of the second seed, Jack Kramer. It was the first of many dramatic matches he’d play on the No. 1 court, and it foreshadowed the marathon duels in his future at the Championships. He beat Kramer 2-6, 17-15, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.
The Czech did even better at the French, which was held later that summer. In Paris, he made it to the final and won the first two sets of an all-lefty battle with Marcel Bernard before falling in five.
The runner-up finish at Roland Garros offered an outline of Drobný’s fate for the rest of the decade. He became known for an occasional lack of concentration, as well as the flimsy backhand that collapsed under pressure.
At Forest Hills the following year, he took a one-set lead over Kramer in the semi-finals. But he lost focus when tournament officials asked the players to switch courts. He was also distracted when his opponent changed into spiked shoes, which he’d never seen before. He won only four games in the final three sets. At the 1948 US National Championships, a similar story played out in a semi-final against Richard “Pancho” González. After splitting two hard-fought sets, 10-8 and 9-11, Drobný managed just three games the rest of the way.
Jarda was runner-up in Paris again in 1948 (to Frank Parker), second place at Wimbledon to Ted Schroeder in 1949, and bridesmaid to Budge Patty at the French in 1950. Parker was the only man who put him away in four sets; his other three final-round losses up to that point required five.
“[Drobný] is always the most feared opponent in any tournament,” Patty wrote in 1951, “because he is capable of beating anyone in the world.” He just had a hard time finishing the job in a major final.
Patty recognized that some of his rival’s struggles were psychological. If those could be overcome, watch out. “Once he is champion he will be a king difficult to dethrone.”
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The war was over, international tennis was back to normal, and–for a little while–Czechoslovakia was no different. Drobný and his teammate, Vladimir Černík, made up a dangerous Davis Cup side. They won the European Zone, falling one step short of the Challenge Round, in both 1947 and 1948.
But as the Russians tightened their grip on Czechoslovakia, no aspect of life in Prague went untouched. Party officials could withhold exit visas, and they increasingly controlled Drobný’s schedule. They even became stingy with equipment. Sokol, the national gymnastics body, took over all of sport, and the upper-class associations of lawn tennis caused the racket sport and its exponents to fall under suspicion.
When the Davis Cup team went to North America in 1948 for the Inter-Zonal final, they were accompanied by a new captain, former great Karel Koželuh. Koželuh, however, didn’t do much coaching. He was well-connected at home, and he was more concerned with keeping his name clean. More than anything else, that meant making sure Drobný didn’t defect.
It was a justifiable fear. The United States accepted several defectors from Eastern Bloc countries at the 1948 London Olympics. A number of less prominent Czechs went into voluntary exile. In 1950, the entire national ice hockey team hatched a plan to defect as a group. When they were caught, most of the players were barred from organized competition and sent to work in Sudetenland’s uranium mines.
Drobný, as a two-sport star, was safe for the moment. The government recognized the power of sport as propaganda, and he could help deliver that. But it was less clear what would happen when he stopped winning. When the Davis Cup team advanced, the press hailed them as heroes of the proletariat. When they lost, they were lazy, capitalist flunkies.
The breaking point came in July of 1949, at a tournament in Gstaad. Party minders ordered Drobný and Černík to withdraw and return home. The event was off-limits, they said, because of the presence of competitors from “fascist” Germany and Spain. The players refused. Drobný reached the final, and the duo won the doubles. They announced they would seek exile.
Drobný and Černík were an interational sensation, front page news in the New York Times. Leaving their families behind, they said they would apply for asylum in the United States.
Sokol immediately issued a statement. The traitorous pair had gone over “to the pay of capitalist entrepreneurs.”
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The only entrepreneur involved in the decision was Jaroslav Drobný. Exile wasn’t easy. Britain ignored an asylum request*, and he attempted to settle in Australia before making connections in Egypt that got him citizenship there. Until he settled in London a few years later with his wife, fellow player Rita Anderson Jarvis, he essentially lived on the circuit, out of a suitcase.
* Years after marrying a British national, Jarda would finally become a citizen. In 1960, he played his final Wimbledon as a representative of the host country.
Somehow, the loneliness of solo travel didn’t stop him from playing some of the best tennis the Continent had ever seen.
Here is a summary of Drobný’s record from 1950 to 1954, based on the results listed at TennisArchives.com:
Year Matches Wins Events Finals Titles 1950 100 88 27 21 15 1951 97 85 31 22 19 1952 104 97 31 29 23 1953 75 67 21 15 13 1954 88 78 26 19 16 Total 464 415 136 106 86
As usual when we’re dealing with amateur-era results, these totals are probably not quite complete. All events are likely accounted for (except for exhibitions), and for a player of Drobný’s stature, we probably know about all of his losses. These numbers may miss some early-round victories.
The sum of his performances are truly remarkable. He won 89% of his matches in this five-year span. He reached the final in four out of every five tournaments he entered. He took the title at nearly two in three.
Some of the events were minor. After all, there weren’t 30-plus major tournaments on offer every year, especially for a player who didn’t like the bustle of Forest Hills and preferred to stick to European clay. But Drobný hardly avoided competition. He finally won the French in 1951, then mounted a successful defense a year later. He reached a second Wimbledon final in 1952, where he lost to Frank Sedgman.
With the backing of Egypt’s King Farouk and a reputation as the best player on the Continent, the exile’s bet on himself paid off. Not only was he free of suffocating political control, he could also make a handsome living. While no amateur tennis players got rich on the circuit, the best of them collected ample expense money at nearly every stop. Drobný made a lot of stops.
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In 1954, Jarda was 32 years old. He could no longer serve as hard as he used to, at least not all the time. For years, he had heard people say that his game couldn’t keep up with the speed of grass courts. With two final-round losses in ten attempts at Wimbledon, he could never quite prove them wrong.
We saw a moment ago that he was still a dominant player in 1954. But he lost in the fourth round at Roland Garros–his worst result at the French to that point–to eventual finalist Art Larsen. The Wimbledon committee considered that upset, combined it with Drobný’s fatigued semi-final defeat to the unseeded Kurt Nielsen the year before, and saddled him with the 11th seed.
The exile loved Wimbledon, and the crowds loved him back. But he was so insulted that he was tempted to withdraw from the tournament. His wife talked sense into him, and he compromised by entering only the singles draw. On his days off, he went fishing.
A year after his record-setting marathon against Patty, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. He didn’t lose a set in his first five matches. Larsen, the seeded player he was drawn to face in the fourth round, didn’t make it that far. Drobný’s quarter-final opponent, second-seed Lew Hoad, couldn’t make inroads against the veteran’s service savvy and went out in straights.
No British players made it past the fourth round, so the home fans had an easy decision. Everyone was for Drobný, the warrior, the underdog, the adopted Londoner with his home in Tooting.
(Not everyone recognized him–after all, he never did look like a tennis player. When he arrived at the All-England Club one day, a scalper tried to sell him a ticket. “Sorry,” Drobný said, “I shall have to stand during the match.”)
In the semi-final, the left-hander came up against–who else?–Budge Patty. The two men had played 13 times since the war, five of those going to a fifth set. Two months earlier, Patty had won a marathon four-setter in the semi-finals of the Italian, every set reaching 5-all. This time, Drobný wrote, “my resolve was calm, my temperament equable.” He beat Patty in four.
Waiting in the final was the 19-year-old Ken Rosewall, an Australian already recognized as possessing the best backhand in tennis. Rosewall followed the old game plan, using his own baseline weapons to attack Drobný’s weaker wing. On this day, the Czech’s backhand held up.
They split the first two sets: the first to Drobný, 13-11, the second to Rosewall, 6-4. The veteran had played a cagey game up to that point, sticking to the backcourt. The Australian, with his middling serve, did the same. In the third, Drobný went on the attack, coming in behind his serves and grabbing the edge, 6-2.
Jarda served for the match at 5-4 in the fourth, but Rosewall still wasn’t done. With a lucky net cord and a stinging backhand down the line, he fought back to 5-all. The Australian was visibly tiring, but he held on through 14 games. Finally Drobný broke to take the lead. With two big serves, he sealed the victory, 9-7 in the fourth.
Champion in his eleventh Wimbledon, the 32-year-old said after the match, “That’s it–and that’s all. From here in it will be fun.”