I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.
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Don Budge [USA]Born: 13 June 1915
Died: 26 January 2000
Career: 1932-53
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1937)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 43
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I’ll just come out and say it: Don Budge is overrated.
Before you fire off the hate mail, let me be clear. Budge was a great player–the 22nd best of all time!–a prince of a guy, and possessor of a backhand that rates among the most intimidating strokes in the game’s history.
It may help to modify my claim. Don Budge’s career is overrated. It wasn’t his fault–blame Hitler and an overzealous Army drill sergeant–but he didn’t play for that long, and his peak was rather short. Looking strictly at the results, even his peak is easy to overrate. He won the Grand Slam, but most of the men standing in his way that season were barely fit to hold his racket.
There are other rating algorithms by which Budge does better. Imagine we could poll every man he ever faced. What percentage of them would consider him to be the best player they ever shared the court with? There are plenty of flaws with this approach (for one thing, Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal would cannibalize each other’s ratings), but Budge would almost certainly land in the all-time top ten.
“He was so powerful,” said Bobby Riggs, “that everybody was afraid of him.”
Other peers from his playing days, notably Jack Kramer, spent decades telling anyone who would listen that Budge was the best of them all.
Asked to pick the strongest “on-a-given-day” player, men of Kramer’s generation would invariably name Ellsworth Vines. Yet their comments–both during their playing days and after–reveal that they gave the nod to Vines as a kind of consolation prize. Budge at his best was untouchable. He didn’t seem like an any-given-day player because his breathtaking form could last for weeks.
In a 1939 professional tournament at Wembley, Budge made quick work of Bill Tilden, 6-2, 6-2. While Big Bill was 46 years old, he remained competitive, even scoring a few upsets in 1941 when Don was off his game. But that night in Britain, the older man was reduced to a three-word review of his conqueror: “He is perfect.”
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Some opponents counted themselves out before the first ball was struck. “He looked like Mr. Tennis,” said one. “He made you feel like you might be his ball boy.”
Budge sported long white trousers–“creams”–long after the rest of the circuit switched to shorts. No one wore them better. “Don is many wonderful things none of which is handsome,” wrote Kramer, “but in tennis whites he looked like a matinee idol.”
Discussions of Don’s game tend to start and end with his backhand, but there was so much more to it than that. By 1937, he simply didn’t have any weaknesses. He stood six-feet, one-inch tall, and he was fit enough to compete as hard in the fifth set as he did in the first. His racket, the “Ghost,” was the heaviest on the circuit.
His serve was no cannonball, but it was enough to keep returners at the baseline. Thanks to the “Paul Bunyan” racket, his groundstrokes were deceptively heavy. Venturing to the net was a low-percentage move at any stage of the rally. If Budge tried to pass you, one rival said, “you’d swear you were volleying a piano.”
That’s what you’d think, anyway, if you got a racket on the ball. Contemporary Julius Heldman wrote that he “could hit a placement from any spot on the court to any other spot on the court.” Sportswriter Al Laney marveled at his “almost inhuman accuracy.”
Budge generated such weight of shot that he often didn’t bother with the angles. He could hit sharp cross-court groundstrokes, especially with the backhand. But he often sent smashes straight up the middle of the court. It took a gifted defender to get one of those back in play; only the best of the best could return the shot and remain standing.
And, of course, there was the backhand. Don’s first love was baseball, which he played as a left-handed hitter. The Budge backhand was essentially a baseball swing, with the left hand leaving the racket just before impact. (He was mildly ambidextrous, in fact. On the basketball court, he shot right-handed but made most of his rebounds with the left.)
Writing in 1960, Heldman credited the backhand with “that extra flair, that great freedom of motion, which made it the envy of every player who ever lived.”
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Opponents were awed, and rightly so. Budge was nicknamed the “Fire Dragon.” No player wanted to show up to a tournament and discover he would be an early-round sacrifice to the ruthless redhead.
Oddly enough, Don denied that he had any particular killer instinct. He told an interviewer in the 1980s:
If beating someone as badly and as quickly as I could is having a killer instinct, then, okay, you can call it that. But it takes discipline.
Discpline became a byword for the man from Oakland. In 1934, he walked away from his studies at the University of California to serve as a backup for the Davis Cup squad. Yet after a so-so performance at the US Open that year, the 19-year-old went back to the UC Berkeley tennis coach, Tom Stow, to rebuild his game.
Stow was one of the most influential coaches of his era, guiding the likes of Sarah Palfrey Cooke (and her husband Elwood), Frank Kovacs, and Margaret Osborne. Budge appreciated his blend of intensity and humor. It wasn’t just that Stow could identify a flaw in an instant, Budge said. “He had the gift of exaggerating in a comical way whatever particular thing you were doing wrong.”
Between 1934 and 1937, Budge and Stow systematically built the game of a champion. While Stow left the miraculous backhand as it was, he replaced Don’s Western-grip forehand with an extreme Eastern grip that would serve him better on grass.* They worked on tactics, making it second nature for Budge to move in behind any short ball.
* It’s not a coincidence that Alice Marble underwent the same transformation. Both players swung a baseball bat before a tennis racket, and the cement courts of Northern California didn’t expose the weakness of a Western grip the way that grass did.
A bit later in the partnership, the young man decided he was too vulnerable at the end of long matches. He added a morning run to his routine, and he swore off both fried food and his beloved chocolate milkshakes.
Ahead of the 1937 season, Stow told his student, “I am convinced that you are the best player in the world. Now you go out and prove that I’m right.”
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Budge did as requested. He ascended to the top of the rankings in 1937, beating Gottfried von Cramm for the Wimbledon and Forest Hills titles. On the back of another memorable battle with the German, he helped the American Davis Cup squad regain the Davis Cup after the trophy’s eleven-year sojourn in France and Great Britain.
He was just warming up. It’s tough to accomplish much more on a tennis court than the Fire Dragon did in his Grand Slam season of 1938. In addition to the four major singles titles, Budge led the United States to a second-straight Davis Cup title. And with Gene Mako and Alice Marble, he won both the men’s doubles and mixed doubles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills.
(How good was the Budge/Marble team? Half a century later, a journalist asked if Don remembered any particular matches from their partnership. Nope–with Alice at his side, “we would waltz through those people, 6-1, 6-3.” Indeed, the Wimbledon final that year ended 6-1, 6-4. They secured the Forest Hills title, 6-1, 6-2.)
Budge sometimes gets credit for “inventing” the idea of the four-major grand slam. That’s not quite right: Journalists started talking about it when Jack Crawford came close in 1933, and even then, the concept was borrowed from Bobby Jones’s multi-major exploits in golf. Fred Perry made the long trip to Australia in 1934 and 1935, and while he fell just short of completing the set in a single year, he became the first man to win all four titles in his career.
The American probably did invent the notion of trying to achieve the feat.
By 1938, the Grand Slam was the only thing he hadn’t accomplished. With no Davis Cup commitments until the title defense in September, Budge could spare the travel time that the quest required. Sailing to and from Australia took six weeks all by itself. He convinced Mako, his friend and doubles partner, to tag along for company and a crack at the doubles Grand Slam.
Compared to the logistics, tennis was the easy part. In 25 singles matches at the majors, Budge lost just four sets. Stomach problems accounted for three of them, in the third and fourth rounds at Roland Garros. Even there, on the unfamiliar Parisian clay, he recovered with aplomb. No less a figure than Suzanne Lenglen warned him that on such a slow surface, he couldn’t be so aggressive on the return of serve. He ignored her advice and dispatched the big-serving, six-foot, three-inch Roderich Menzel in the final, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4.
Lenglen congratulated him and admitted, “I had to see it to believe it.”
In Australia, his final-round nemesis was the 19-year-old John Bromwich. At Wimbledon, it was Bunny Austin. At Forest Hills, it was Mako, in his sole career major final. Mako snuck off with a set, and Bromwich won a measly seven games. Austin managed only four.
As Budge and Austin shook hands at the conclusion of the Wimbledon final, Don asked, “What was wrong with your game? You were way off your form.” The Englishman disagreed:
I had been playing my best. But my best had not been good enough. Nor, I believe, on that day, would the best of anyone, past, present or to come, have been good enough…. [If] it was a poor match, as a match, the crowd were privileged to watch one of the greatest exhibitions of lawn tennis skill ever seen.
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This is where we need to press pause on the lovefest. Everyone agreed that Budge was playing astonishing tennis. The problem, from the historian’s perspective, is the definition of “everyone.”
The amateur field in 1938–apart from the imposing redhead–had a distinct minor-league character. Von Cramm beat Budge in an exhibition Down Under, but he missed the rest of the season after the Nazis imprisoned him on a morals charge. The top five players in the world consisted of those two, Vines, Perry, and Hans Nüsslein. The last three were professionals, forbidden to compete at the majors.
Judging from assessments like Austin’s, it’s plausible that Budge would’ve beaten anyone. But in pro tours the following year, the results were less clear. Budge made easy work of a sometimes apathetic Perry, but Vines won 17 of their 39 meetings. At Wembley–the same tournament where Tilden declared that Don was “perfect”–Nüsslein pushed him to the brink in a 13-11, 2-6, 6-4 decision.
In retirement, Budge would occasionally hear from skeptics who argued that other men could’ve achieved a Grand Slam, had schedules permitted or the trip to Australia been more rewarding. His answer was usually the same: Yeah, but I did. His 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood had a custom license plate: G SLAM.
Both sides have a point.
I was stunned to discover just how few men played all four majors in the amateur era. Between 1925–when the French Championships opened up to foreigners–and the beginning of the Open Era 43 years later, only 70 different men ever entered all four in the same season. (Many of them, mostly Australians, did it multiple times. Roy Emerson completed ten full circuits before 1968.)
Only eleven played a complete Grand Slam season before World War II. Three of those–Crawford, Perry, and Budge–won all four or came close.
Of course, Don had a point. Many players didn’t try for a Slam because they didn’t stand a chance. The three-week sailings between Australia and North America may have been relaxing, but they were hardly good training for championship tennis. Vines went to Australia in 1933 and got dragged into one provincial tournament after another. By the time the national championships came around, he had his land legs but little else. The defending Wimbledon champion lost in the quarter-finals to a 16-year-old.
What 1938 proved–and what doesn’t come up often enough in lists of the man’s assets–was Budge’s ability to play his best when it mattered. He paced himself deliberately, avoiding Vines’s mistake of working too hard in the warm-ups. He lost six matches that year, falling short at all three tournaments he played back home in California. He saved himself for the 25 matches that earned him the Slam. He didn’t care about the rest, and he knew that posterity wouldn’t, either.
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According to Jack Kramer’s imagination, Budge could’ve remained world champion until 1950. The only problem was that the wrong man picked up the 1940 Forest Hills title. Had Bobby Riggs won the national championship that year, he would’ve turned pro. Riggs would’ve challenged Budge on a pro tour in 1941, and the Fire Dragon would’ve won easily. Post-war pros–notably Kramer himself–would’ve been recruited at earlier ages. With less experience, they would’ve been mere cannon-fodder for Budge.
Instead, Riggs lost to Don McNeill. There was no credible pro challenger in 1941, so promoter Jack Harris put together a Budge-Tilden tour. While the result was never in doubt, both men could draw a crowd. Riggs turned pro after the season, but with the disruption of World War II, a proper Riggs-Budge tour had to wait.
More important than the 1939 Forest Hills final, Budge sustained an injury in the Army Air Corps that never fully healed. In 1943, he was sent through an obstacle course and, out of shape, he tore his right shoulder.
A healthy Budge probably would’ve handled Riggs in 1946. Instead, the challenger had a weakness to exploit. This being Bobby Riggs, he was unforgiving–some would say downright annoying–as he lobbed on point after point until Don’s overhead game finally gave way. Even with the physical edge, Riggs barely eked out the tour, winning 24 matches to Budge’s 22.
From that point on, the redhead’s appearances on court became less frequent, his peaks even rarer. But when he did give it his all, spectators could see glimpses of the man who won the Grand Slam.
At the 1948 US Pro, he drew Kramer in the semi-finals. Jack was at the top of his game, and Budge matched him blow for blow. Kramer’s “Big Game” tactics involved serve-and-volleying to the backhand. Against Budge, he served in the prescribed direction, but he quickly discovered that netrushing was a fool’s errand. The veteran exposed the weakness in Kramer’s own backhand and took a two sets to one lead, opening up a one-break advantage in the fourth.
But at age 33, this was no longer the Budge who could play all day without losing the crease in his trousers. He was struck by leg cramps and didn’t win a single game the rest of the way. Many onlookers, including umpire Levan Richards, believed that without the cramps, Don would’ve completed his victory.
The most famous of Budge’s single-day performances had come back in 1937, when he outlasted von Cramm to secure the Davis Cup Inter-Zone tie for the United States. After the match, US captain Walter Pate proclaimed, “No man, living or dead, could have beaten either man that day.”
Later stars–Laver, McEnroe, Federer, you know the list–lasted longer and enjoyed more of those special days. But for a couple of decades, if you asked any tour player who they would nominate for a single match to decide the fate of the planet, they’d all pick Budge.
They might have been right.