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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Frank Sedgman [AUS]Born: 29 October 1927
Career: 1945-78
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1950)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 49
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Rod Laver defines the “Golden Era” of Australian tennis as a 22-year span running from 1952 to 1973. Certainly the Aussies had a good run, winning the Davis Cup 14 times and the Wimbledon men’s singles title 13 times. They were even more dominant in doubles.
Yet Laver himself admits the fuzziness of the boundaries. He picked the starting point partly because of his fond memories of the 1953 Davis Cup Challenge Round, “although Frank Sedgman had been winning titles since 1949.”
Before Laver, Ken Rosewall, Lew Hoad, John Newcombe, and all the others, Australia had a superstar that brought the Davis Cup back to the Southern Hemisphere in 1950, gave his nation its first-ever men’s singles title at Forest Hills, and won every major doubles championship–men’s and mixed–twice. That was Frank Sedgman.
The economist Tyler Cowen coined a law: Most phenomena have origins earlier than you first think. Australian tennis dominance is no exception. Laver’s Golden Era would not have shined so brightly had Sedgman not gotten there first. We can trace the Aussie dynasty back even further, to Quist and Bromwich, to Jack Crawford, and even to 1914 Wimbledon champion Norman Brookes and his Kiwi teammate Anthony Wilding.
Sedgman didn’t create a national tennis culture from scratch the way that, say, Manolo Santana did in Spain. But after World War II, he was the man who gave Australian tennis a needed shot in the arm, adopting the techniques of the day’s top American players and setting a dizzying standard for the golden generation of Aussies to come.
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In 1938, when Frank was 11 years old, he saw Don Budge and Gottfried von Cramm play an exhibition match. He set out to emulate each man’s signature stroke, so throughout his formative years as a tennis player, he was always trying to perfect a Budge-like backhand drive or a kick serve as devastating as von Cramm’s.
Unlike all the other boys in attendance who dreamed big dreams that day, Sedgman nearly got there. Australian writer Paul Metzler considered his backhand one of the best of all time, and his service–which he could spin in either direction–was the foundation of a tireless serve-and-volley game.
All of that was a long way off in 1938. Young Frank was small and slight. His parents were avid players, but they struggled through the Depression, barely able to put food on the table. While he had to borrow a friend’s football boots, he always had a racket. He found his way to a clinic run by Harry Hopman, and the Davis Cup veteran liked the young man’s work ethic and never-say-die attitude.
Hopman eventually became an elder statesman of the sport. He captained the Australian Davis Cup team throughout its reign in the 1950s and 1960s, guided countless Aussie youngsters to major championships, and coached prospects including John McEnroe and Vitas Gerulaitis at his academy in the United States. But in the late 1930s, when he first encountered Sedgman, he was a 33-year-old jack-of-all-trades–veteran doubles specialist, journalist, coach–with little more than a regional reputation.
From one perspective, Hopman made Sedgman. He sent the wiry boy to the gym, where Frank began a weight-lifting regimen he would continue for 70 years. When Sedge didn’t make the cut for the 1948 Davis Cup team, Hopman found a private sponsor to fund a trip to Wimbledon, where the 20-year-old won the doubles title with John Bromwich. Sedgman might have reached an international standard with another mentor, but Hopman played an important role.
Still, Rod Laver makes the fascinating point that the influence worked the other way around: Sedgman validated Hopman’s coaching instincts and helped him establish a place at the top of the Australian tennis hierarchy. In other words, it was the player who made the coach.
At a time when few tennis players went to the gym, Frank turned it into an obsession. He packed on 18 pounds of muscle in less than two years. He developed the stamina to withstand Hopman’s most demonic drills. The coach watched as physical training transformed a raw talent into a Davis Cup star and five-time major champion. The lesson was obvious: Find prospects who are willing to work and send the rest home. Take the survivors, send them to the gym, and turn them into the fittest young men in tennis.
Ken Rosewall wasn’t called “Muscles” because he was naturally so strong. Hopman picked the nickname as motivation for a particularly scrawny kid. Decades after Sedgman played his last Davis Cup match, Aussies were still outrunning, outfighting, and outlasting the rest of the circuit. That was the Hopman way, and Hop believed in it because he had seen it work.
While Hopman didn’t call the Australian dynasty a “Golden Era,” he knew it was something special. He thought his readers would date it to Sedgman’s first major title, the 1949 Australian Championships. But for him, the Golden Era began when he first sent Frank to the gym.
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Another turning point came when Hopman sent his protégé to Los Angeles.
After World War II, the Americans quickly retook the Davis Cup. The team was led by Jack Kramer, a big-serving Californian brimming with confidence and tactical savvy. Any player worth their salt knew how to serve and volley, but Kramer–and his sidekick Ted Schroeder–took the strategy to its carefully calculated apex. He called it the Big Game.
No Australian had an answer. Quist and Bromwich were touch artists, and they were getting old. The Big Game required power and explosiveness, as well as an aggressive mindset on return that few Aussies possessed. Sedgman had the raw material for a Kramer-style attack, so after Frank’s first trip to Wimbledon in 1948, Hopman scraped together a little more money so that the youngster could go to California and learn the modern game directly from the source.
The trip paid off immediately. Sedgman returned home and won his national title, beating Bromwich 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 in the final of the Australian Championships. He reached the quarter-finals at both Wimbledon and Forest Hills, losing a pair of five-setters to Schroeder. He won eight consecutive Davis Cup matches against Canada, Mexico, and Italy to put his side in the Challenge Round. In the final, he lost straight-setters to both Richard “Pancho” González and–again–Schroeder, but he was clearly a man on the rise.
His serve–especially the second delivery–wasn’t quite up to the Kramer standard, but his net game was astonishing. As a kid, he practiced deep volleys against a brick wall until arm ached. Now, he could put away first volleys for winners that lesser players would struggle to even keep in play. Kramer considered him the quickest player he’d ever seen, and Laver compares his anticipation to that of Roger Federer.
Sedgman’s dazzling net play would soon translate into results on the singles court. But it was even better suited to doubles, and he enjoyed his first international success in the tandem game. As we’ve seen, Sedge won a Wimbledon title with Bromwich on his first attempt. Hopman later paired him with Ken McGregor, a South Australian who idolized Sedgman even though he was just 18 months younger. The pair won seven majors in a row, including the 1951 Grand Slam. Frank swept the mixed doubles field as well, pairing Doris Hart to win the French, Wimbledon, and Forest Hills in both 1951 and 1952.
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The end goal of Sedgman’s development, especially in Hopman’s eyes, was to bring back the Davis Cup. After the 1949 season, González went pro, leaving the Americans with a mediocre team anchored by the aging part-timer Schroeder.
With one year more experience and a less imposing defender, Australia retook the trophy. Sedgman played every possible match, winning 11 of 12 rubbers in ties against Canada, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States. He straight-setted the American Tom Brown to kick off the Challenge Round, then partnered Bromwich to win the doubles and secure the victory.
The victory set the stage for the 1951 Davis Cup tie that would launch an era. Australia hadn’t hosted the Challenge Round since 1946, when the American visitors blew them away. This time around, they had Sedgman, the hero of 1950 and the reigning champion at Forest Hills. By the time the tie was played in December, Frank had established himself as the best singles player in the world, and Sedgman and McGregor had won the first four of their seven straight major doubles titles.
What the Aussies didn’t have was a second world-class singles player. Lefty Merv Rose would eventually win two majors, but at age 21, he represented only the lack of depth on the Australian side. In front of a packed grandstand at White City Stadium in Sydney, he lost both of his singles rubbers, to Schroeder and Vic Seixas.
That left Sedgman to play the hero. He beat Schroeder in four sets on the first day to even the tie, then teamed with McGregor to make quick work of the doubles. He came back out for the deciding rubber against Seixas and denied the American any chance at drama. He dropped only eight games, sealing the Davis Cup defense, 6-4, 6-2, 6-2.
Rod Laver would remember the 1953 Challenge Round, but the 1951 victory inspired a generation. Roy Emerson said, “[T]here couldn’t be a better guy to emulate than Sedge.” Ashley Cooper: “For me it all started with Sedge.” John Newcombe: “Sedge was the trailblazer.”
1960 Wimbledon champion Neale Fraser: “Sedge was my hero, and I wanted to be just like him.”
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After the triumphant 1951 campaign, Frank was the obvious man to turn professional and challenge the king, Jack Kramer. But Sedgman wanted one more crack at Wimbledon, and Aussie tennis boosters wanted to keep the Davis Cup. They raised $5,000 and bought a gas station in Frank’s wife’s name. He would remain “amateur” for one more season.
While Sedge somehow lost the Australian title to McGregor, everything else went according to plan. He won Wimbledon, so relentlessly attacking his opponent’s backhand in the final that in one reporter’s telling, he “reduced [Jaroslav] Drobný to a forlorn, bowed figure who had given up hope.” He was even deadlier at Forest Hills, defending his title without the loss of a single set. In the final, Gardnar Mulloy lasted only 47 minutes.
Just as the gas station sponsors hoped, Sedgman capped his amateur career with another sterling Davis Cup performance. This time in front of a roaring crowd in Adelaide, he and McGregor won the first four rubbers against Seixas and Tony Trabert. Hopman’s contributions were mostly limited to suggesting that his players drink more or less water, but with three straight Cup championships, his reputation as a mastermind in the captain’s chair was assured.
At the end of 1952, Sedgman’s value to the pro tour would never be higher, and with youngsters Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall coming along, Frank was no longer quite so essential for a Davis Cup defense. He finally signed on to play Kramer, and he nearly got the better of the reigning pro champion. In a grueling 95-stop tour, he let an early lead slip away, losing 54 matches to 41. Both men fought through illness and injury, including the arthritis that would soon end Kramer’s career.
Sedgman would remain a key part of the pro circuit for another half-decade. He held his own against González and the steady stream of young challengers–Trabert, Rosewall, Hoad, and more–who Kramer brought on board to keep things interesting. He ranked second among the pros as late as 1960.
Everything the Australians did that made the Golden Era so special, Sedge did first. Even after he retired for the first time in the mid-1960s, his acolytes–direct and indirect–were everywhere, and they were usually winning. Fred Stolle called him “the perfect role model for a generation of starry-eyed kids.” A whole lot of those kids–along with Sedgman himself–are now in the International Tennis Hall of Fame.