I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!
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Jack Kramer [USA]Born: 1 August 1921
Died: 12 September 2009
Career: 1937-54
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1946)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 35
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In his 1979 book, The Game, Jack Kramer reviewed the era from 1931 to 1967. He had personal experience of those years of the amateur-professional divide, as a fan, competitor, and promoter. He imagined an alternate world that put the amateurs and pros in direct competition, one where the best players–regardless of the source of their income–competed every year at Wimbledon and Forest Hills.
For each of those 37 seasons, he named “Kramer’s Open Champions” for the two major tournaments–including himself, where appropriate. In reality, Jack won three majors: the US Championships in 1946 and 1947, and Wimbledon in 1947. In the alternate history, he won ten.
That’s the first thing you need to know about Jack Kramer. He was unfailingly confident, whether playing for a championship, promoting a pro tournament at Madison Square Garden, or plotting the course of Open tennis. He grew up in Las Vegas and learned probability from dealers who boarded with his parents. His was the attitude of a gambler who always knew the odds. Friends called him Big Jake, after gambling slang for the jacks in the deck.
The second thing you need to know about Jack Kramer is that he was right.
There was no false bluster in claiming all those titles, placing himself between Don Budge and Richard “Pancho” González in the pantheon of the game’s greats. He dominated the amateur game for two years after World War II, then comfortably handled anyone a pro promoter could put in his way: González, Bobby Riggs, Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman. The one time he played Budge in a match that counted, at the 1948 US Pros, he won in five.
More than any other great player since the war, we don’t really know how good Kramer was. Frank Deford, his co-author for The Game, wrote:
[T]he one thing Jack was never given in tennis was the proper foil. He never had any unforgettable matches. He beat everybody to pieces. Kramer was such a superb match player that there is no telling to what heights he might have risen had he had someone to push him.
So, ten majors? Sure. Plus however many Australian titles he chose to contest. Maybe even a French or two. The reality–three majors and a handful of pro tours–is tough to rate, so it takes some imagination to understand where he falls on the all-time list.
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The third thing you need to know about Jack Kramer is that he was not Bill Pullman. Not exactly, anyway. Pullman-as-Kramer was the villain in 2017’s Battle of the Sexes, a male chauvinist who single-handedly drove Gladys Heldman and Billie Jean King to start their own tour.
One detail from the film is completely accurate: King disliked him so much that she refused to play the famous match against Riggs if Kramer was in the commentary booth.
“I have been tagged an ogre by the girls,” Kramer complains in his book, “and that is going to stick.” (Correct!) He offers his own side of the story, which isn’t so much an absolution as an illumination. “I’m not a crusader against women’s tennis,” he writes. “I’m just a businessman.” You can see where this is going:
The only prejudice practiced in tennis against women players is by the fans, who have shown repeatedly that they are prejudiced against having to watch women play tennis when they might be able to watch men play.
Kramer didn’t see the vicious circle of lower prize money, less promotion, and fewer talented youngsters attracted to the sport, nor would it have ever occurred to him to try to break the cycle. He had lost money from the Pauline Betz-Gussie Moran pro tour in 1951, seen some crowds head to the concession stands during women’s matches in the decades since, and that was that.
On the other hand, just-a-businessman Kramer suggested to Billie Jean as early as 1968 that there should be an independent women’s tour. He wasn’t the dictator of the Pacific Southwest, the tournament that so infuriated King and Rosie Casals that they walked away mid-match, double-defaulting the 1972 final. He claimed that, as just one member of the tournament’s board, he lobbied to increase women’s prize money, though only by a modest amount that would still leave the men with the majority of the pot.
Kramer and Pauline Betz in 1947
Public battles are always easier when you can fight them against a convenient villain, and Kramer fit the bill. Jack had been public enemy number one in the eyes of the amateur establishment back when he poached the best players for his pro circuit. He was a perfect target in 1973 as well. As executive director of the fledgling ATP, he led the 81-player Wimbledon boycott, losing his gig as a BBC commentator in the process.
Kramer was no more an ogre than any number of other 1970s country-club conservatives. He didn’t crusade against women’s tennis; he mostly ignored it. He held female champions in high regard. Even if the women’s tour would never count him an ally, his efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to put more money in the pockets of tennis players indirectly aided the cause.
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Before Kramer became the face of pro tennis and the man who Bud Collins called “the most important figure in the history of the game,” he was an amateur champion who rose to the top with tactics that no one had ever seen before.
He called it the “Big Game” or the “Power Game.” A later commentator suggested that “Pressure Game” would be a more fitting label. Players such as Bill Tilden, Ellsworth Vines, and Budge had hit hard, serve-and-volleyed, and forced their opponents into mistakes, but Kramer took aggressive tennis to a new level.
Big Jake always credited Cliff Roche, a retired engineer and weekend hacker, with the underpinnings of the Big Game. Roche taught him “percentage tennis”–positioning and strokes designed to cut off the other man’s angles and pressure him into mistakes. That meant coming in behind every first serve and most second serves. Kramer saw the second serve return as an opportunity as well.
“If you don’t come in on your second serve,” he said, “your opponent will.”
Before Kramer and Roche, points were to be constructed. Earlier champions could and did serve-and-volley, but they were more likely to wait for a weak shot–often the return of serve–before they attacked and set about ending the rally. Kramer recognized that the longer his service points stretched out, the more his advantage ebbed away. His goal was to finish every exchange with his first volley.
“I win fast,” he liked to say, “or I lose fast.”
The other prong of Roche’s strategy was energy management. Big Game proponents rarely lost their serve, so they took it easy on return. Jack wrote:
[E]arly in a set I let a guy have his serve unless he got behind love-30 or love-40 off his own mistakes. I would just try and keep him honest–go for winners off his serve, try something different–whatever I could do with the least loss of energy. Then when it got to 4-all, I played every point all out.
Tiebreaks were far in the future. When two big servers got together, the resulting scorelines could be eye-popping. At a tour stop in Seattle, Kramer and González once traded blows for 56 games until Jack finally broke to take the set, 30-28.
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There were no secrets at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, where Roche taught Kramer the Big Game. The first wave of champion serve-and-volleyers all came from Southern California: Ted Schroeder, Joe Hunt, Bob Falkenburg, and González.
When Kramer and Schroeder went to Australia to reclaim the Davis Cup in 1946, their tactics revitalized tennis Down Under. 19-year-old Frank Sedgman was one up-and-comer who took notice, and he soon became the first of a long line of Aussie serve-and-volleying champions. Kramer believed that the visit sent a different message to Australian coach Harry Hopman: the value of stamina. Hopman eventually became the leading proponent of fitness training for tennis players.
Jack was the best player in the world when he made that trip, but his Big Game had taken years to develop. In 1941, the year he turned 20, he failed to win a tournament in 17 tries, dropping repeated decisions to Riggs, Frank Kovacs, Frank Parker and Don McNeill. When Riggs and Kovacs went pro at the end of the season, Jack’s results improved, but a bout of appendicitis kept him out of the 1942 Nationals at Forest Hills, the only major not halted by the war.
1943, too, could have been his year. He reached the finals at Forest Hills only to fall ill with food poisoning and lose to Joe Hunt in four sets. He spent 1944 and 1945 aboard a Coast Guard vessel in the Pacific. His earlier bad luck was compounded: Had he won a national title, he probably would have spent his time in uniform playing exhibitions. Instead, he saw combat and rarely touched a racket at all.
Misfortune trailed him into the first post-war season. Kramer was the second seed and betting favorite at Wimbledon, selections that he justified by losing only five games in the first three rounds. But he developed such painful blisters on his right hand that he had to wear a glove for his fourth-round clash with Jaroslav Drobný. Drobný won, 2-6, 17-15, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.
Back home, though, his talent finally paid off in the victory column. He was nearly undefeated Stateside in 1946, picking up titles at Seabright, Forest Hills, the Pacific Southwest, and the Pacific Coast Championships. He was just as good in 1947, picking up the Wimbledon crown with the loss of only one set, then defending his United States title as well.
Cruising the Pacific during the war, Kramer had had plenty of time to think. He decided then that he would cut out distractions and redouble his efforts to get the most he could out of tennis. He was always straightforward about his intent to turn pro; he might have done so at the end of 1946 had he won Wimbledon on the first attempt. It took only one year longer. After Forest Hills in 1947, he took a $50,000 guarantee, and by December, he was on court at Madison Square Garden against the reigning pro champ, Bobby Riggs.
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He may not have known it before he signed his first pro contract, but Jack Kramer was built for professional tennis. He was able to keep his competitive juices flowing night after night, and he remained effective even while nursing minor injuries. Even more, crowds recognized that he was there for them. A couple generations earlier, Bill Tilden had given the impression that he was doing his fans a favor by showing up. Confident as he was, Kramer was never a prima donna.
Above all, he wanted to win. Pancho Segura recalled in 1986:
Kramer was the toughest competitor I ever played, mentally. He was ruthless. He’d beat you love, love and love if he could. His concentration and determination were as tough as anybody’s.
Riggs learned the hard way. The Kramer-Riggs tour started on even terms: Bobby won the MSG opener, and after 28 stops, Jack led the series 15-13. But while the veteran exhausted his bag of tricks, Kramer continued to polish his game, solidifying groundstrokes and adding bite to his second serve.
Kramer won 54 of the last 61 matches between the two. Before an appearance in Fort Worth, Riggs pleaded: “Look, you gotta give me a break. Carry me a bit. Make it look it competitive. Your winning streak is killing interest in the tour, not to mention costing us a lot of money.”
Kramer beat him that night, 6-0, 6-0.
Big Jake didn’t have the biggest serve, but he served hard, with dazzling variety. He wasn’t the fastest player around the court, but he was more than quick enough to execute his tactics. “Kramer did his killing smoothly and quietly,” according to Harry Hopman. The pressure was relentless, and players who couldn’t handle it were simply steamrolled.
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The knock on Kramer was that he made it look too easy. Generations of boys watched him (and successors like Sedgman, and Tony Trabert, and Lew Hoad) and concluded that with a booming serve and a willingness to rush the net, they too could reach the top of the game.
Big Jake knew what made him so effective, and it wasn’t what his acolytes thought it was. His serves–first and second–were both precise and varied. He could hit every serve in the book, and the money-maker was a deuce-court delivery that sliced wide. Film circulated of Kramer on the practice court, knocking down ball boxes with his accuracy and sending serves through small hoops placed above the net.
The difference between the amateur game and the pros, according to Kramer and innumerable other stars, was the second serve. You could win Wimbledon without a good one. But on a 100-stop barnstorming tour against Kramer or González, a powder-puff second ball was an insurmountable weakness.
Jack’s other distinctive asset was his forehand approach shot. Plenty of players could control points from the baseline with their forehands, much as they do today. Everyone knew how to approach with a backhand slice. But from the backcourt, it isn’t as natural to move up behind a forehand. Kramer could. He considered it his secret weapon, the shot that “busted up all the usual percentages.”
It all came back to pressure. There was nowhere to hide. Kramer didn’t give you a break with his second serve. You couldn’t pin him to the baseline by feeding him forehands. You could only take your chances trying to pass him–and that was exactly what he wanted you to do.
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By 1949, Big Jake was already coping with injuries. Cortisone shots kept him in the game until 1954, when he wrapped up a successful tour against Sedgman and arthritis forced him to move to the business side of the pro game.
My historical Elo ratings confirm that he was every bit as good as he thought he was. He was the year-end number one by that formula every year from 1946 to 1951. Only one man–Frank Parker in his career year of 1946–even came close.
He was the face of professional tennis for another decade. Kramer swooped in to seize one standout after another from the amateur game, a circuit he unabashedly called his “farm system.” He was the most persistent voice in favor of open tennis, a development he believed could’ve come about in the 1930s, if only “some dumb sonuvabitch like me” had been around to force the issue.
Critics often painted him as a self-aggrandizing money-grubber. But in the early 1960s, he recognized that his own prominence–and his unpopularity among amateur officialdom–made open tennis less likely to come about. He handed off the tour to Tony Trabert and stepped away.
Herbert Warren Wind wrote in 1962:
[T]he very people who came to deplore his freewheeling business operations have always been quick to acknowledge that there is no one they would rather watch a match with, talk tennis with, or, for that matter, spend their time with.
By the 1970s, it was easy to castigate Kramer for his role in the Wimbledon boycott or because he failed to do more for the women’s game. But tennis of the 1970s–even women’s tennis–was the world he made. He essentially invented the concept of a pro tournament circuit; a points-based ranking system was his idea as well. The dominant strategy on the men’s tour was still his own Big Game.
“Believe me,” he said, “John McEnroe plays exactly the way I used to play.”
He might have been a dinosaur. But among the dinosaurs, he was a Tyrannosaurus rex.