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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Shirley Fry [USA]Born: 30 June 1927
Died: 13 July 2021
Career: 1941-57
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1956)
Peak Elo rating: 2,258 (2nd place, 1956)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 63
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At the end of the 1955 season, Shirley Fry’s long-time doubles partner, Doris Hart, turned professional. A few months past her 30th birthday, Hart had plenty to be proud of: six major singles titles, including the career grand slam; a place in the top ten dating back to 1946; and a whopping 33 major doubles titles. She would play a few professional events in the late 1950s, but she was effectively retiring from competition, trading the amateur game for a new life as a teaching pro.
Eleven of those doubles titles were shared with Fry. Shirley was just a couple of years younger, born in 1927 to Doris’s 1925, and they’d been playing singles against each other and doubles together since 1941. For a stretch in the early 1950s, the team was unstoppable: They won the French, Wimbledon, and the US Nationals in 1951, 1952, and 1953. Neither one traveled to Australia in that span, so they were unbeaten at majors for more than three years.
When Hart left the tour, Fry kept at it. Allison Danzig said of Shirley in the New York Times, “it was her fate to play second or third fiddle,” and her friend’s retirement opened up new possibilities. Fry had played her entire career in the shadow of some American “amazons”–Hart, Louise Brough, and Margaret Osborne duPont. She was not only several inches shorter than her most successful peers, but she had losing records against each. At the same time that Hart turned pro, Brough was slowing down, and Osborne duPont was predominantly a threat on the doubles court.
There were other contenders on the horizon, but 1956 was shaping up to be a good year for Shirley Fry.
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One of Doris Hart’s first orders of business after stashing away her luggage was to publish an autobiography. She called it Tennis with Hart. It was a breezy recap of her career, primarily a tool to convert her newfound surfeit of leisure time into some cash.
“Tennis with Hart” is also a handy three-word summary of Shirley Fry’s first decade and a half on the circuit. Between 1941 and 1955, Fry entered 169 singles events, not counting exhibitions and team competitions such as the Wightman Cup. Of those 169 tournaments, she shared the draw with Doris 120 times. Modern-day pros typically all follow the same global tour, so it might not sound odd for a pair of players to turn up so often in the same field. Seven decades ago, it was a different story. When Shirley was in the draw, Hart was present almost twice as often as any other woman. The next most common foe at Fry’s tournaments was Louise Brough, who played 61 of the same events as Fry. Only nine other players showed up in as many as 40.
Hart and Fry frequently chose to travel together, often as the top two seeds at tournaments in the Caribbean and the American South. When they did, woe betide the third and fourth seeds. At the 120 events that they both entered, they combined for 69 singles titles. They also accounted for 63 of the runner-up showings, and they faced off in the final 46 times.
Fry (right) and Hart
with the 1952 Wimbledon doubles trophy
Unfortunately for Shirley, she was clearly the junior partner of the dominant duo. She won only 12 of the 46 finals and a mere 17 of their total 64 meetings.* They met three times in major finals, splitting their two title matches at Roland Garros, while Hart clobbered her friend, 6-1, 6-0, at Wimbledon in 1951. The pair would often talk strategy, even when they were about to play each other. Later, Hart would tell author Bruce Schoenfeld, “I didn’t consider her a threat.”
* Fry’s record against Hart is 17-47 in adult circuit events. Tennis Abstract has a few other results, including junior and college matches, bringing the (probably still incomplete) career total to 18-50.
Doris was only part of Shirley’s problem in a strong era for American tennis stars. Fry reached the quarter-finals or better in every major she played in the 1950s. But the draw rarely opened up for her. In her career at slams, she lost to Hart five times, Maureen Connolly another five times, and Brough three times. To win her one singles major in the Doris Hart era, at Roland Garros in 1951, Fry needed every bit of her speed and resourcefulness to get past Osborne duPont, 6-2, 9-7 in the semi-finals, and Hart, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 in the championship match.
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By 1956, a new crop of stars were taking over. Beverly Baker Fleitz, Wimbledon finalist in 1955, was playing as well as ever. Angela Mortimer continued her dominance of fellow Brits, and snuck off with the 1955 French championship. The tall, hard-hitting Althea Gibson kept improving and looked every bit as imposing as the Amazons of the previous generation.
Shirley Fry almost didn’t last long enough to test herself against the fresh batch of rivals. A bad case of tennis elbow finally caught up with her in 1954, and after a rough season, she announced her retirement. She took a job with the Tampa Bay Times, and–in an oft-told story that is too good to omit–one of her first tasks was to send the story of her own retirement down to the composing room.
The article Shirley handled reveals that her retirement was always intended–or, at the very least, hoped–to be temporary. She compared herself both to Maureen Connolly–who she said worked as a copygirl before becoming the national champion–and Sarah Palfrey Cooke, who took most of three years off before winning at Forest Hills in 1945.
It doesn’t take a very clever reader to deduce that Shirley still had her eye on a US national title.
In the 1950s, the only cure for tennis elbow was rest. That, apparently, wasn’t Fry’s strong suit. Less than three months after her retirement announcement, she entered the Dixie Championships in Tampa. Four matches and eight sets later, she won the title.* Glamour girl Karol Fageros gave her a test in the final, and Shirley came through, 9-7, 8-6. Fry and Fageros teamed up to win the doubles.
* The level of competition was mixed at regional events like the Dixie. Fry’s first opponent was 11-year-old Sandy Warshaw. Warshaw was the under-13 state champion, but she’s better known for becoming the first female mayor of Tampa, 31 years later.
Her elbow handled the strain just fine. The next week, she played the Florida West Coast Championships in St. Petersburg, where she beat Fageros again and advanced to the final. Waiting there was old friend Doris Hart. Shirley lost, but not before making Hart fight to a 7-9, 6-4, 7-5 decision. It almost goes without saying that they put the band back together: Hart and Fry won the doubles, losing only two games in three matches.
Shirley took it easy for the rest of the 1955 season, playing two events in Florida in February, one in Havana in April, plus one warm-up ahead of the US Nationals. Before falling in the quarter-finals at Forest Hills to Dorothy Knode, she reached four finals. Twice she beat Hart, and twice Doris beat her.
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Fry’s performance as a part-timer in 1955 was good enough to earn her an invitation to join the US Wightman Cup team the following year. The international competition between the US and Britain was prestigious enough on its own, but it meant more than that for Shirley: It was a free trip across the Atlantic at just the right time to enter Wimbledon.
After another off-season at the Tampa Bay Times copy desk, Shirley’s elbow was as good as new. She entered ten tournaments in the first four months of the year, and she won nine of them. Dorothy Knode was the only woman who managed to beat her, and even she rarely gave Fry much to worry about. In that four-month span, Shirley won four of their five meetings.
Shirley at Wimbledon in 1956
The first stop for the Wightman Cup team that summer was in Manchester for the Northern Championships. The visitors were the class of the field, as Fry, Knode, Louise Brough, and Althea Gibson brushed aside the local challengers and made it an all-American final four. Fry drew Gibson, setting up their first meeting since Queen’s Club in 1951.
Five years on, Gibson was a completely different player. She was in the midst of a tour that took her around the world, through India and Egypt in addition to the traditional tennis stops in France, Italy, and England. The Manchester semi-final against Fry was her 63rd match of the season (it was still June!), and she had lost only three times, all to Angela Mortimer. The win streak included triumphs at the Italian Championships in Rome and her first major singles title at Roland Garros.
The two women would face off 13 times in a span of eight months. Fry enjoyed playing Gibson–more specifically, she liked to beat her. She told a reporter in 2013, “I think I had Althea’s number. She didn’t like to play against me. Off the court, she was a very nice person. But she’s somebody you want to beat when she was on the court.” It was clear that Fry didn’t have half the natural talent that Gibson did. Shirley knew it, and Shirley knew that Althea knew it–which made her victories all the sweeter.
But in Manchester, Gibson held sway. It was a sloppy match, with Gibson evidently fatigued from her long half-season of tennis. Fry couldn’t quite pull it out, losing a 6-3, 6-8, 7-5 decision. Later, Shirley said, “I beat her when I should have,” and it’s true, the Northern meeting wasn’t one of the big ones. Those would come soon enough.
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Two weeks later, Fry split her two Wightman Cup singles matches, saving a match point to beat Angela Buxton and losing to Mortimer. She partnered Louise Brough to tack on a doubles win that finished off a 5-2 victory for the Americans. The outcome was not particularly noteworthy–the Brits hadn’t won since 1930.
In retrospect, what sticks out about the 1956 Wightman Cup is the fact that Shirley Fry lost a singles match. She wouldn’t do that again for a long time.
Shirley cruised through the first four rounds at Wimbledon. It was her eighth trip to the Championships, and the opponents who had bedeviled her in the past–Doris Hart in the 1951 final and Maureen Connolly in the 1952 and 1953 semi-finals–were out of the picture. The draw didn’t do her any favors this year, though. She would face Gibson in the quarters, and defending champion Louise Brough potentially awaited in the semis.
She started off poorly against Althea. Her serve was never an asset (“I had the worst serve in tennis,” she once said), and it frequently found the net as Gibson took the first set, 6-4. In the second, Fry attacked the Gibson forehand, and inexplicably, Althea abandoned her usual aggressive game. Fry was an outstanding retriever–among the greatest of the era, according to Connolly–and Gibson wasn’t fit enough to beat her at her own game. Shirley came back to win the last two sets, 6-3, 6-4, and the only highlight left for Gibson was a deadpan joke at the post-match press-conference: “It was easier to beat small fry elsewhere than big Fry at Wimbledon.”
In the semi-finals, it was Brough who struggled with her serve. The 1955 champ was flummoxed by the wind, and Fry, even more dogged than usual, pulled out a 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 upset. The final, against 20-year-old Brit Angela Buxton, was a mere formality. Buxton had nearly beaten Fry in Wightman Cup, but the championship match was all Shirley. She pummelled the Buxton backhand until it fell apart, and she secured her long-awaited Wimbledon title, 6-3, 6-1.
Fry wouldn’t lose again until November. She wouldn’t drop another set in her next 14 matches. Her first event back home was the US Clay Courts in Chicago, where she lost only ten games in her first five matches, before she straight-setted Gibson in the final. After that, it was the traditional Forest Hills warm-up in Manchester. In the title match there against Brough, she finally dropped a set, but she came out on top and headed to the US Nationals on a 22-match win streak.
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The only player capable of stopping the streaking Shirley Fry was Althea Gibson. But according to Althea, “When Shirley beat me at Wimbledon I think I cultivated a complex. Every time I played her I felt that she had me.” That, right there, is your two-sentence summary of the 1956 US National Championships.
Fry had little problem reaching the final, stumbling only in a three-set victory over Margaret Osborne duPont. Gibson was even better, straight-setting her way to the championship match. With the title on the line, Althea showed flashes of the brilliance that would win her the 1957 and 1958 titles, but she couldn’t sustain her form against Shirley’s steady baseline game. Unlike the Wimbledon quarter-final, this one wasn’t even close: 6-3, 6-4 to Fry.
Fry’s success came in her 16th entry at Forest Hills. No woman had ever waited so long before finally winning this title. When Doris Hart turned pro, Shirley moved up to the top spot in the national rankings, and that, in a roundabout way, gave her some motivation: “Some people thought I hadn’t earned it, so I decided to go out and win this year. That’s what I’m doing.” How confident was the Wimbledon champ? She said that before the final against Gibson.
A New York Times profile the day after her victory teased the new titlist about her break from the game two years earlier: “She has been as unsuccessful as can be in her pursuit of retirement.” What the writer didn’t know–and perhaps Shirley didn’t, either–is that Fry was only a few months away from another attempt to say goodbye. This time, she would make it stick.
Fry and Gibson headed to Australia in November, the first trip down under for both women. Once again, Shirley had a traveling partner with whom she could dominate tournaments in both singles and doubles. The two Americans would play five tournaments, and they met in the final each time. Gibson won three of the five, plus another three exhibition matches. Althea was clearly gaining the upper hand. Even one of Fry’s victories, at the Victorian Championships in Melbourne, was marred by controversy, as Gibson was called for 21 foot faults.
You might recall what Fry said of the rivalry: “I beat her when I should have.” Shirley’s only other win on the tour was at the event that counts in the history books, the Australian Championships. In their match for the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest title, Gibson struggled again with foot faults, and the prominent stage may have brought back her mental block about beating Fry. Shirley matched the score from Forest Hills, winning 6-3, 6-4.
The Australian title secured the career grand slam for Fry, and by teaming with Gibson to win the doubles championship, she completed her set of majors in that discipline, as well. As if that weren’t enough for one trip, Shirley reunited with an American, Karl Irvin, now living in Australia, who moonlighted as an umpire. They married in February. When Shirley lost in the first round of a tournament in Sydney in March, she had an excellent excuse: She was pregnant.
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Shirley Fry was one of the humblest of former champions. After all, she had plenty of practice. After her victory at Wimbledon, she went up to the BBC booth for an interview. First question: “How many Wimbledons have you played in, Doris?”
Althea Gibson liked to say that it was hard to get cocky when you weren’t even the best player in the front seat of your rental car. Fry spent a decade of her life sharing rides with Doris Hart, and if Doris wasn’t sitting next to her, another all-time great probably was.
Fortunately for Shirley Fry, her legacy rests in the hands of others. Billie Jean King, for one, considered her an idol. Ever self-deprecating, Shirley was ready with a response. “That flatters me, because I really wasn’t that good of a player.” Even Doris Hart wouldn’t have let her get away with that one.