Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
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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John Bromwich [AUS]Born: 14 November 1918
Died: 21 October 1999
Career: 1935-54
Played: Ambidextrous (right-handed serve, left-handed forehand, two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1938)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 56
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No one has ever played tennis the way that John Bromwich played tennis.
How many people have ever so clearly stood apart? There are only so many ways to serve, or hit groundstrokes, or manage the tactics of a match. And when a player with unusual technique starts to enjoy some success, others quickly follow.
Not with Bromwich. He was impossible to imitate. Anyway, no coach would have allowed it.
Bromwich (pronounced “brummage”) picked up an adult-size racket when he was too small to lift it with one hand. Like Chris Evert a few decades later, he compensated by using both hands. At the beginning, it wasn’t just a two-handed backhand: He hit with two hands on both sides, and he hit double-handed serves and overheads.
As the Australian got bigger and stronger, the second hand came off the racket. But the unorthodox style remained. While he was a natural lefty, his improvised two-handed serve had been a righty delivery. He continued to serve and hit overheads from that side. His service was never intimidating, and it would be misleading to call his overhead a “smash”–it was accurate but not hard-hit.
You would think that for a southpaw, hitting a right-handed serve and a two-handed backhand would be sufficiently unique. Not so.
Bromwich was a true artist with a tennis racket. Roy Emerson, a big fan, said, “[H]e could make the ball talk.” His equipment was optimized for his precision game, and it was nearly as unorthodox as his strokes. He played with a very light racket, less than 12 ounces, compared to the usual 14 ounces for a wooden racket. Some of the weight was saved by a grip almost as slim as that of a golf club. For added control, Bromwich used strings so loose that friends called his rackets “onion bags.”
Taken together, the unusual package of technique and equipment was deadly from the baseline. Jack Kramer, the great practitioner of high-percentage tennis, considered that serve-and-volley was almost always the smart move–unless one of a select handful of players were standing across the net. Bromwich was one of them.
He rarely approached the net in a singles match–and there was another paradox. He was one of the great doubles players of all time. With Adrian Quist, he held the Australian national title from 1938 to 1950, and he won Wimbledon doubles twice, with two different partners. Kramer chose Bromwich and Don Budge as his doubles team for a hypothetical all-time, all-Universe Davis Cup competition. “Anytime you had Bromwich in your forecourt, you should win.”
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The subtle, sophisticated Bromwich style sounds like the sort of game that would suit a veteran. He did indeed play well into his thirties, scoring shock upsets over the likes of Tony Trabert and Lew Hoad in 1954 after his first retirement failed to stick.
But John was a star from a young age. He was part of a doubles team that stretched Fred Perry and his British Davis Cup partner to five sets when he was only 16. At 18, he reached the finals in both singles and doubles at the Australian Championships. Aussie fans must have wondered what was happening with their sport. The man who beat Bromwich for the 1937 title was Viv McGrath, another early exponent of the two-handed backhand.
A few months later, Bromwich made his first trip abroad. He took a set from Budge in a Davis Cup Interzonal match, even as the Aussies were swept by their American hosts. The team from Down Under was odd enough to earn a mention in Time magazine:
When Australia’s Vivian McGrath appeared on the international tennis scene four years ago, experts could not have been more astonished had he been a kangaroo. For all backhand shots McGrath held his racket with both hands. … As a freak tennis player, Australia’s John Bromwich makes McGrath’s methods look banal. … Like 21-year-old McGrath, Bromwich is not only a freak but a prodigy.
The Australians would reach the Challenge Round in 1938. The 19-year-old Bromwich once again took a set from Budge, who was then in the middle of winning the Grand Slam. Bromwich and Quist had just lost the US national doubles title, but they bounced back to win their Davis Cup rubber against the same team–Budge and Gene Mako–thanks to what the New York Times called Bromwich’s “almost demoniacal fusillade.”
Budge was too strong for the Aussies, but by the 1939 Challenge Round, the champion had turned pro and was ineligible to compete. The visitors had a fighting chance. As Europe descended into war, Bromwich and Quist turned in a heroic performance to recover from two opening day losses. Quist played the match of his life to beat Bobby Riggs, and Bromwich won the deciding rubber in a clinical dismantling of Frank Parker, 6-0, 6-3, 6-1. While I’ve told the story of the tie at more length elsewhere, I can’t resist repeating Times columnist John Kieran’s quip about that final match:
At the end of the first set the crowd started to leave. At the end of the second set the policemen and ushers left. At the end of the third set the Davis Cup left.
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Few tennis greats lost a bigger chunk of their prime playing years to World War II. When he turned 21 in late 1939, Bromwich held his national singles and doubles titles, plus the Davis Cup and the championship at the Pacific Southwest in California.
A few months later, he was in New Guinea, where he would serve in the Australian Army for much of the war. He missed a half-decade of playing opportunities. When he returned, he was out of competitive shape, both overweight and weakened by repeated bouts of malaria. The Aussies were swept by Kramer and Ted Schroeder when Davis Cup competition finally resumed in 1946. Bromwich and Quist even lost the doubles rubber.
John steadily got himself back in playing shape, and his time away from competition made him more likeable on court. He was always a perfectionist, and as a youngster, he would berate himself for the slightest mistake. The outbursts gave him a reputation as a poor sportsman, though he was certainly not: He was so modest that he would never tell you the scores of a match he won. If you demanded the details, he still might change the subject.
1950s star Ken McGregor loved to tell a story of the impossibly high standards Bromwich set for himself. As related by fellow player and Australian Davis Cup coach Harry Hopman:
Bromwich was playing a South Australian, Schwartz, in a championship match on an outside court in Adelaide and leading 6-0, 6-0, 5-0 and holding 15-40 on Schwartz’s service. Schwartz served and volleyed the return at an angle which forced Brom well off court. Brom reached it and with a wonderful recovery sent up a two-handed lob, crosscourt, to bring up backline chalk but just wide of the sideline. At the call of ‘out’, Brom stopped in his tracks, began scratching his chest through his tennis shirt–as was his nervous habit–and exclaimed in an almost heart-rending tone: “I’ll never win this if I keep making mistakes like that.”
(This story being too good to check, of course I’m compelled to ruin it. “Schwartz” was the Aussie Davis Cupper Leonard Schwartz, and the tournament in question was the 1938 South Australian Championships. Bromwich did indeed win, and he may have missed a lob or two. But the final score was actually 9-7, 6-4, 6-1.)
Post-war, Bromwich remained a perfectionist. But he had matured, and he wasn’t quite so demonstrative on court. Fans grew to like him more as he aged, especially when he scored his memorable upsets in the 1950s.
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He was not the underdog at the 1948 Wimbledon Championships. Now 29 years old, he was the second seed–behind Frank Parker–in a wide-open field. Defending champion Jack Kramer had turned pro. Parker had a steady but unspectacular game, and the conventional wisdom was that it was Bromwich’s year.
Sure enough, Parker lost in the fourth round, and the ambidextrous Australian reached the final. He was the heavy favorite against a six-foot-three-inch, big-serving American, Bob Falkenburg. Falkenburg had few assets apart from the service, and Bromwich was considered to be one of the best returners in the game.
Bromwich should’ve won the first set, when he reached 5-4, 40-15 on his own serve. Falkenburg snatched it away, and it was a see-saw battle from there. The American was broken early in the second, and he tanked the rest of the set. Falkenburg came back in the third, then let the fourth go to save energy. Bromwich broke early in the fifth, taking leads of 3-0, 4-1, and 5-2. He reached double match point when he served at 5-3.
That’s where the story gets a bit murky. What we know for sure is that Falkenburg saved both match points, and when Bromwich earned a third in the same game, the big man saved that too. The American ran out the set and the match, winning by a final score of 7-5, 0-6, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5. Less clear is how those crucial points unfolded.
One version of the pivotal game strongly implies that Bromwich choked, overcome with the pressure of winning the sport’s biggest individual prize. Kramer wasn’t there–he was touring in South America–but he had money on the Australian to win. Here’s how he recounts it:
The first [match point] was the point that did Bromwich in. He moved up to hit a volley, which he had a real chance to put away, but instead he decided to let the ball go, figuring it was hit long. It dropped in well ahead of the baseline, however, and Falkenburg–reprieved–served his way out of the next match point, held, broke, and went on to win four straight games and the title, 7-5.
If you’ve ever read anything about Bromwich, you’ve probably read some version of this. Kramer’s version has been widely copied. It’s the rendition of the Wimbledon final that you’ll read on John’s Wikipedia page. Bromwich’s profile on the Tennis Hall of Fame website is similar, though it makes his misjudgement sound more reasonable, saying that Falkenburg’s floater hit the line.
Problem is, it’s far from clear that Bromwich’s ill-advised “take” really happened. Kramer told the story in his book, The Game, which was published in 1979, thirty years after the fact. Summaries written closer to the event–including those by people who were present–give more of the credit to Falkenburg.
Here’s Hopman, writing in 1957:
[Falkenburg] saved three match points in the fifth set with two very brave (for Bob) passing shots from his suspect backhand, and one with a magnificent undershied volley[.]
And the London correspondent for the New York Times, the day after the match:
Falkenburg turned invincible. He saved one of those match points by dropping the ball over the net where Bromwich couldn’t touch it and another by putting a fast one to the Australian’s left hand that was too difficult to get back. … Falkenburg passed him in the corner with a beautiful placement [on the third match point]. There was no holding the stringy, frail-looking American after that. He couldn’t do anything wrong.
There might be a way to reconcile the Times description of the first point with Kramer’s, but it would be a stretch.
75 years on, we may never know with certainty what happened at match point in a Wimbledon final. But I belabor the point because Kramer used it as a sort of psychological explanation that just doesn’t fit. Are we to believe that the best amateur doubles player in the world–a genius at net–simply let an easy ball float past? It may have been the man’s first Wimbledon final, but this is a player with two major singles titles to his name, one who secured the Davis Cup for his country before heading home to five years of war.
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Kramer put an awful lot of emphasis on that one point. Here’s his pop-psych evaluation:
To me it never seemed that he was the same player after that. He doubted himself. He was a precision player to start with … and I suppose after he misjudged that one shot, the most important in his life, he never possessed the confidence he needed.
Except… Bromwich came back to win two doubles titles the next day. He drew Falkenburg in the Wimbledon quarters the following year, and in another five-setter, he got his revenge. He remained untouchable in doubles, winning two majors in 1949 and three–including Wimbledon–in 1950. When Australia reclaimed the Davis Cup in 1950, it was Bromwich and Frank Sedgman who secured the third point for the challengers.
We’ll never know what Bromwich would’ve accomplished on the singles court had he finished off Falkenburg and won Wimbledon. But it seems lazy–if not outright illogical–to assume that an unorthodox finesse player nearing his 30th birthday would’ve gone on even greater heights. Keeping in mind the years he lost to the war, Bromwich’s career was already a great one. There’s no need to invent a narrative to explain why he didn’t succeed at majors that he wasn’t going to win anyway.
The ambidextrous Australian was truly one of a kind, from his doubles exploits to his funky, Aga Radwanska-style backhand. No one else played like him because no one else possibly could.
Hopman once claimed, “[T]here is no one style which could be laid down as the ‘correct’ way to play.” When he said that, he must have been thinking of John Bromwich.