Category: The Tennis 128

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Louise Brough [USA]
Born: 11 March 1923
Died: 3 February 2014
Career: 1940-57
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1955)
Peak Elo rating: 2,254 (1st place, 1949)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 57
 

* * *

In one article celebrating the Wimbledon centennial in 1977, the author admitted that he had forgotten about Louise Brough, a four-time singles champion between 1948 and 1955. It’s a recurring theme when you start talking about Brough, who also won nine doubles titles at the All-England Club. Everyone has seen her name on the honor roll; few modern-day fans have given her a second thought.

Ask a hundred spectators at this year’s US Open, and you won’t even find many who are sure how to pronounce her name. It’s “bruff.” As the New Yorker explained in 1942 after she scored a memorable win over Pauline Betz, it rhymes “with stuff, of which she has plenty, and with enough, which Miss Betz had more than.” Louise and her long-time doubles partner Margaret Osborne duPont were, uncreatively, “Broughie” and “Ozzie.”

Even during her heyday, Brough was often the forgotten woman. She couldn’t compete with the pizzazz and personality of Betz in the mid-1940s. In 1948, she won all three events at Wimbledon, and the New York Times reported on how well Doris Hart played in defeat. When Maureen Connolly came along in the early 1950s, Little Mo pushed Louise out of both the headlines and the winner’s circle. A half-decade later, when fans might have celebrated Brough’s remarkable staying power, they were instead drawn to the powerful, history-making Althea Gibson.

There was a generous stretch between the Betz and Connolly years when Louise should’ve held center stage. From 1947 to 1950, she won five major singles championships and another 16 in doubles. In one run of 111 grass-court matches, Brough won 102, losing only to Hart and Osborne duPont. She beat her doubles partner in eight of ten meetings in that span, but most tennis writers preferred to give the year-end number one ranking to Margaret.

The same newsmen were also thoroughly distracted by Gussie Moran, a far inferior player. Moran and Brough had competed as juniors in Southern California a decade earlier, but Gussie never developed into a star as an adult. Her fame came from a pair of lace panties designed by Ted Tinling to be worn at Wimbledon in 1949. The women’s game typically got the short shrift in news coverage anyway; now, Louise remembered, “[T]hey didn’t write up the tennis.” You could be sure to read about what “Gorgeous Gussie” was wearing under her skirt, though.

For the most part, though, Brough didn’t mind staying out of the spotlight. The pressure of big moments–especially at Forest Hills–had a tendency to get to her. More attention would’ve made it worse.

She also agreed with the pundits who thought that she could’ve played better. Decades after retirement, she could still say of her missed opportunities, “What a waste!” Any player who spends a decade and a half at the top of the game will lose some matches they should have won. Most players would agree, though, that 35 major titles hardly qualify as a waste.

* * *

The pressure that Brough felt came from high expectations. Her mother was a demanding tennis parent, at least by the more relaxed standards of the 1930s. “She was so supportive,” Louise said. “But she didn’t understand sports at all. She didn’t understand that you could lose.” Life was easier for the teenager if she won, and she usually did.

In 1942, the 19-year-old collected her first adult tournament trophies on the Eastern grass court circuit. She won five straight titles in July and August, beating both Osborne and Betz multiple times. She came within a set of the national title, losing the Forest Hills final to the more experienced Pauline.

After a season like that, it wasn’t just Louise and her mother. Now everyone had high expectations of the young star. She had come so close to the most prestigious title on offer during World War II, and many spectators thought she should’ve won it. Even her opponent recognized how close it was. Betz challenged the fearsome Brough smash, repeatedly lobbing into the sun. “I think her nerves finally got to her,” she said.

Brough, at her best, was untouchable. She built her game around a big American twist kick serve, the best of its kind in the women’s game since Alice Marble. Former champion Helen Jacobs observed just how devastating a weapon it could be. At the Longwood Bowl in 1942, the kicker sometimes pushed Osborne “twenty to thirty feet out of court, opening the way for severe drives to the opposite side.”

The effectiveness of Louise’s game lies in her driving power and the decisiveness of her net game. When she hits out, planning her strategy around the net attack, using her twisting service initially to open the court, there is little answer to her game and the opponent, to win, must wait for errors.

Alas, the wait often paid off. Jacobs thought that Brough played the 1942 Forest Hills final “without a vestige of confidence.” With the finish line in sight, Louise would give up her aggressive game in favor of baseline retrieving. Many women could compete with her on those terms. Against a fighter like Betz, a defensive strategy was suicidal.

Brough wouldn’t win at Forest Hills until her ninth attempt, in 1947. Even with that monkey off her back, she continued to struggle at her national championship. She held the women’s doubles title for a whopping nine consecutive years, twelve overall. She reached six singles finals in 19 tries, getting to championship point in three of them. But she took the singles trophy only once.

* * *

Louise came of age just as World War II put a halt to tennis in Europe. It feels wrong to say that she suffered too much from the conflict, since American women were able to play an almost-normal schedule in those years. Brough won 19 career singles titles before V-J day.

But as it turned out, the Californian would feel most at home on Centre Court at Wimbledon. She made her first trip to the hallowed grounds in 1946, getting a taste of the atmosphere at the All-England Club during the Wightman Cup. The Americans dominated the US-versus-Britain competition in those years, led by “Amazons” Louise and Margaret. In her debut Wightman Cup appearance, Brough made quick work of both her singles and doubles matches. They were the first two of 22 contests she’d win in the competition without suffering a single loss.

She was nearly as good at Wimbledon itself. She reached the singles final, defeating Osborne in a close semi-final before losing to Betz. She collected the best consolation prizes on offer, winning the doubles with Osborne and the mixed with fellow American Tom Brown.

The championship match against Pauline was one of only seven defeats Louise would ever concede at Wimbledon. In eleven appearances between 1946 and 1957, she amassed a record of 56-7, including four titles and another three finals. In 1948 and 1950, she won the triple crown, taking the singles, women’s doubles, and mixed.

She missed a triple-triple by only the narrowest of margins, losing a marathon mixed doubles final in 1949 with John Bromwich. We can forgive her that one. All three finals were played on the same day, and she began by winning the singles final by the all-time-great score of 10-8, 1-6, 10-8. By the time the 9-7, 11-9, 7-5 mixed doubles clash reached its conclusion, she had spent five and a half hours on court.

The secret to Brough’s success was, paradoxically, the peace she found on the sport’s biggest stage. Billie Jean King and Cynthia Starr wrote in their history of women’s tennis, We’ve Come a Long Way:

Enclosed by the dark green walls of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, despite the thousands looking down on her, Louise Brough was comforted by feelings of solitude and individuality that she found nowhere else on earth. She could not wait to go onto the Centre Court, she once said, so that she could be alone.

At Forest Hills, by contrast, the corridors were narrow and the paths between courts unprotected. The crush of the crowds and other indignities were half the challenge of winning a US national title. As a result, Louise enjoyed her greatest triumphs abroad.

* * *

From 1947 to 1950, Brough was probably the best player in the world. My Elo ratings give her the year-end number one ranking in 1948 and 1949. Pauline Betz had beaten her eleven times in a row, but Betz turned pro early in the 1947 season. That left only Doris Hart and Margaret Osborne duPont as serious rivals.

While Louise failed to defend her Forest Hills crown in 1948, it could’ve gone either way. She and Margaret fought it out to 15-13 in the deciding set, battling through rain delays and a noisy crowd that was impatient for the men’s final. The near-miss is more impressive in retrospect, as she wasn’t playing at full strength. A month later, she spent six weeks in bed after a cyst-removal operation.

Jacobs thought that she had the operation “to correct a condition that explains the tendency she had to tire in long matches.” That’s not my understanding of what a cyst removal is capable of, nor was it likely to have been a long-standing condition. But it is my policy never to question Helen Jacobs. In any case, the recovered Brough was nearly unbeatable in 1949. Her only losses came at Roland Garros, where the clay never suited her game, and twice on the Eastern grass to Hart.

Decades later, Louise would still call Doris Hart “that devil.” As Wightman Cup teammates and frequent opponents, they were “friendly enemies.” In 31 career meetings–more than Brough played against anyone save Osborne duPont–Hart got the better of her, 16 to 15. Count a semi-final at the National Girls’ Championship in 1940, and they finished their careers in a dead heat.

The two women traveled together to Australia in 1950. It was Brough’s only trip down under. In one of the least surprising developments in tennis history, the two women plowed through the local opposition at the Australian Championships, neither one dropping a set on the way to the final. Hart had won the year before, but this time, Louise came out on top in three sets. Without Osborne and Doris’s pal Shirley Fry, their usual partners, they joined forces in the doubles and won that too.

The doubles victory completed Brough’s career grand slam in doubles. Despite her ineffectiveness on clay, she and Margaret had won the French three of the previous four years.

* * *

It all went downhill from there. Sort of. The story of Louise’s last seven years on the circuit is one of the stranger narratives I’ve encountered in this tour through a century of tennis history.

She picked up a nasty case of tennis elbow around the time of her trip to Australia. It might have stemmed from an attempt to overcompensate for windy conditions at the tournaments Down Under. Or it may have come from lugging around a heavy suitcase. Whatever the cause, she played a shortened season in 1951, missing Forest Hills entirely.

Around the same time, she began struggling with her service toss. In Louise’s retelling, her ball-toss woes started on the Aussie sojourn, possibly another malady to blame on the wind. It couldn’t have been too bad that first season–after all, she went on to win the triple at Wimbledon six months later–but she occasionally had trouble executing the simplest things. A newsreel of an unnecessarily complicated 1950 Wightman Cup match shows her double faulting and missing an easy smash.

It’s tough to get a sense of just how much errant tosses affected Brough’s results. Between her age-29 campaign in 1952 and her last full season in 1957, she won another Wimbledon crown and reached the title match at four more majors. The toss was a factor in her 1955 Wimbledon final against Beverly Baker Fleitz, but she gutted that one out for a 7-5, 8-6 victory.

She had always been a nervy player, and she felt even more pressure as the years went by. On bad days, it was tough to watch. Shirley Fry told King and Starr that she “was saddened by the sight of Broughie tossing the ball up on her serve with a quivering hand and catching it, again and again.” Osborne duPont said that, on occasion, “she would be so tight or tense that she actually could not throw the ball in the air to serve. Her arm would become palsied.”

For her part, Louise said, “I just played too long.”

Doubles remained a refuge. Broughie and Ozzie won another three straight titles at Forest Hills from 1955 to 1957. The partnership was ideal, as Osborne duPont kept the stress off her partner. Fry thought that Louise was the “crew” to Margaret’s “captain.” It didn’t hurt that they had two of the biggest kick serves in the game. As long as Brough’s toss stayed on track, you could wait all day and never break them.

* * *

It’s odd to hear Brough say that she played too long, because the women with the best reasons to complain were the ones that had to face her.

From 1952 to 1957, Louise won 203 matches against only 38 losses. She added another 16 titles to her career haul. At the 1956 Wightman Cup, her last appearance in the competition, she pulled out three-set wins against two players a decade younger than herself, Angela Buxton and Angela Mortimer. Brough teamed with Fry for a routine doubles victory as well.

She was a refreshing interview after retirement, because her memories of her playing days never became rose-tinted. She told King and Starr:

I try to remember what it was like playing, and all I can think of is how does anyone go through this? The waiting and the weather and the noise and the crowds–I can remember how awful it was. We’d have to wait almost all day for the rain to clear up, and we’d be on pins and needles waiting for that match to happen. It just seems like it would be too much, just not worth it.

Yet in the same conversation, she’d quickly change the subject to her missed opportunities. She played too long, it wasn’t worth it… but if she’d just tried a little harder, she could’ve won even more!

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Pancho Segura [ECU]
Born: 20 June 1921
Died: 18 November 2017
Career: 1939-74
Played: Right-handed (two-handed forehand, one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1950, among pros)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 66
 

* * *

It is difficult to properly rate amateur-era players who spent most of their careers in the professional ranks. They often played long tours against a small number of opponents, never getting the chance to face the majority of their contemporaries. The conditions under which they worked, stopping in a different town every night and coping with the quirks of a portable canvas court, also make comparisons difficult.

Pancho Segura was not the greatest professional in the era between World War II and Open tennis. That honor goes to Jack Kramer or Richard “Pancho” González, two men who Segura faced at least 150 times apiece. But Segura–“Little Pancho,” standing eight inches shorter than González–is the one whose fame relies entirely on his pro exploits.

Kramer won Wimbledon. He and González combined to win Forest Hills every year from 1946 to 1949. Both men starred for Davis Cup-winning American teams. Segura, on the other hand, failed to reach the final at Forest Hills in seven tries. He was even less successful in his two appearances at Wimbledon.

By the traditional grand-slam accounting, Segura doesn’t merit a spot on a greatest-of-all-time list, let alone a place in the top 60.

Most players struggled when they made the transition from the relaxed atmosphere of amateur tennis tournaments to the exhausting pressure-cooker of the pro game. Segoo was one of very few who thrived in front of a new crowd every night, outsmarting opponents he’d face for weeks on end. As the conditions and the competition got tougher, he just kept improving.

Because of that unique career trajectory, Segura posted more than enough results to prove that he belonged among the very best. I’ll bombard you with numbers in a minute, but let’s start with an example. At the end of 1949, Frank Parker turned pro. He was the reigning Roland Garros champion, and in 1947, when Pancho was still an amateur, Parker won five of their seven meetings. For his first professional tour in the winter of 1949-50, he’d face Segura every night.

Segoo won the first eight matches they played. Parker hung in there, winning six of seven in one stretch. But after that, the five-foot-six-inch Pancho took over. One source says he won 59 matches in a row. The best reconstruction I can come up with gives him 41 out of the last 42. Either way: See ya later, Frankie.

By amateur standards, Parker finished 1949 as one of the best players in the world. By March of 1950, by my count, he had played Segura 75 times and lost 63 of them.

Little Pancho never won a major title, but he won an awful lot of tennis matches against the men who did.

* * *

As early as 1943, when the 22-year-old Segura was learning English and playing tennis at the University of Miami, he said, “I like to play tough guys.” It’s a good thing, because he’d spend most of the next two decades doing just that.

I promised I’d give you some numbers. I can’t promise that you’ll believe them. Combining the tournament records at TennisArchives.com with the pro tour results listed in Chris Jordan’s book, The Professional Tennis Archive, I come up with a career record for Segura of 1,110 wins against 762 losses. That’s more match victories than any active player except for Roger Federer, and it’s more total matches played than anyone in the last half-century. It’s possible that only Bill Tilden has ever played so much competitive tennis.

That isn’t even the impressive part. Segura played the vast majority of his tennis against the best players of all time. He faced Kramer at least 180 times, González 150. He played more than 100 matches with each of Ken Rosewall, Frank Sedgman, and Tony Trabert. He played 87 against Parker and 59 against Lew Hoad. (Next time you hear commentators raving about Nadal-Djokovic LXII or whatever, come back and read this paragraph again.)

All told, Little Pancho played 954 matches against men in The Tennis 128 and another 456 against opponents who won major championships but didn’t make my list. That’s good for a total of 1,410 matches across the net from the toughest guys of all. He won 729, or 52%.

(Some context: The closest thing to a Segura-like ironman in the Open era is Jimmy Connors. Jimbo played about 1,560 tour-level matches, 254 of them against Tennis 128ers, plus another 94 against other slam winners. Segoo played three-quarters of his matches against the elite of the elite. The equivalent number for Connors is 22%.)

Eye-popping as Pancho’s totals are, even the win-loss record doesn’t fully communicate what he accomplished. When Segura turned pro at the end of 1947, he was 26 years old. My estimate is that he played his best tennis in 1949 and 1950. In those early years, he won 117 of 190 matches against 1947 Australian champ Dinny Pails, and he held his own against Kramer and González. Pails and Kramer were the same age as Segoo, and González was seven years younger.

Most stars didn’t last more than a few years on the professional barnstorming circuit. So as each new recruit joined the tour, Pancho had younger and younger opponents to contend with. He won nearly half of his matches against Trabert, who was nine years younger. He came one match short of splitting his career series with Hoad, who was thirteen years younger. He won 42 of 49 matches against 1959 Wimbledon champ Alex Olmedo, who was fifteen years younger.

Rosewall was also thirteen years younger than Segura. He joined the pros for the 1957 season, right after reaching the Wimbledon final, winning Forest Hills and leading Australia to another Davis Cup title. The 23-year-old Rosewall faced off against the 36-year-old Segoo more than anyone else that year. The two undersized champions split their 50 meetings right down the middle.

* * *

Despite the thousand-plus wins, no one remembers Segura for his victories. Bow-legged Pancho, a head shorter than the competition, sharp-shooting with his unorthodox two-handed forehand, was an instant fan favorite everywhere he went.

Pro tours depended on one or two headline names to sell tickets. Since Segoo had never won Wimbledon or played Davis Cup, he would never draw crowds on his own. With names like Kramer, González, and Bobby Riggs on the marquee, Segura was consigned to the “animal act”–a warm-up match before the big guns game out.

For patrons who showed up on time, the opener was often the highlight of the evening. Kramer wrote, “The fans would come out to see the new challenger face the old champion, but they would leave talking about the bandy-legged little sonovabitch who gave them such pleasure playing the first match and the doubles. The next time the tour came to town the fans would come back to see Segoo.”

Pancho reaching for a forehand at Wimbledon in 1946

Segura was the ultimate underdog, and not just because he was a five-foot-six mestizo amid a troupe of strapping blonde Americans and Australians. He was born to a poor family in Guayaquil, Ecuador. By the time he was a teen, he had suffered through a double hernia, rickets, and recurrent bouts of malaria.

Young Pancho had just one advantage. His father worked at a tennis club. The boy was too weak to play football with his peers, so he spent most of his time hanging around the club. Trying out a discarded racket, he could only manage it with both hands. He would eventually learn to hit a one-handed backhand, but the two-handed forehand would persist, ultimately becoming one of the greatest shots in the game’s history.

Combining some natural gifts with sheer persistence, Little Pancho became one of the best players at the club, even though he could only play in the evenings after the members went home. He graduated from ball boy to hitting partner, then became a ringer for the club against arch-rival Quito. Before long, he was competing–and winning–all over South America.

However, Ecuador remained a tennis backwater. The country wouldn’t sponsor a Davis Cup team until 1961. The only hope for a would-be champion was to go abroad. Plans were made to send Segura to France, but World War II put European tennis on ice. It was, he later said, the luckiest break of his career. The Ecuadorian Sports Ministry scraped together the money to send him to the United States in 1940, and he never looked back.

* * *

The path from Ellis Island to professional stardom was hardly a straight line. Segura barely spoke a word of English when he arrived, and he lost his first match in the States. At least he had a good excuse for the defeat–it was the first time he had ever seen a grass court.

His results steadily improved, but his circumstances did not. The Sports Ministry had promised a $100 monthly stipend that rarely turned up. Pancho worked as a waiter and sometimes slept in clubhouses. Eventually, new patrons emerged. Arturo Cano, the Bolivian consul, funded his career for awhile. Then Gardnar Mulloy, one of the country’s best doubles players, arranged for Segura to come to the University of Miami, where he coached the tennis team.

By 1943, Segura was increasingly fluent in North American language and culture. He remained shy around Miami’s co-eds, but he won the first of three consecutive national intercollegiate championships. Many experts pegged him as the man to beat at Forest Hills.

The promise didn’t immediately pan out. At the 1943 US Championships, he lost to Kramer in the semi-finals. He would lose to Billy Talbert at the same stage in each of the next two years. Even without a title, he was already a distinctive, popular character on court. Alison Danzig wrote for the New York Times in 1943:

Segura stands as the most colorful figure to pull the crowd into the stadium. To watch Pancho in action is to get an eyeful of a human dynamo giving off sparks of nervous energy. He thirsts to hit. Every ounce of him is grimly concentrated on making the kill, and while crouching to receive service he waves his racquet like a tiger lashing his tail before springing on his victim.

More than a few fans–not to mention the entire population of Guayaquil–were disappointed each time he came up short. Only one group cheered against him: the old-fashioned coaches and administrators who were skeptical of his unorthodox strokes. One of them told Arthur Daley of the Times, “It would be bad for the sport if Pancho won the nationals, because then everyone would start copying his two-fisted forehand.”

* * *

The coaches had little to worry about. Everything about Segura’s game was unique, and though he would one day become one of the sport’s most effective coaches, nothing he did could really be copied.

Pancho’s legs–deformed by rickets–eventually became something to joke about. Harry Hopman called him the “most pigeon-toed tennis champion.” A chiropodist who examined him in the early 1940s concluded, “It would be a physical impossibility for anyone with feet like that to play tennis.” Yet he ran more than anyone, often in order to create another opportunity to hit a two-handed forehand.

The forehand was so deadly that it was worth the extra work. Not only did Segura wear himself out running around his weaker backhand, he had to slide his right hand up and down the racket when switching grips.

No matter. 1932 Wimbledon champion Ellsworth Vines called the forehand the “most outstanding stroke in game’s history; unbeatable unless [an] opponent could avoid it.” Kramer considered Don Budge’s backhand to be the best “pure stroke,” but “Segura’s forehand was better, because he could disguise it so well, and hit so many more angles.”

People said that Pancho’s forehand was so accurate, he could knock down a nail anywhere on the other side of the court. It was such a dominant weapon that opponents had no choice but to alter their game plan. Hopman wrote:

The professionals who play against Segura for percentages rarely hit to his two-hander. They take the risk of giving him a sitting shot from his backhand rather than take a chance of hitting the ball out of his reach on that two-hander. … [W]hen they volley for an opening on his two-handed side they don’t relax until the ball has bounced for the second time or Segura stops running for the ball.

Make the mistake of hitting to the forehand, and in Alex Olmedo’s memorable phrase, Segoo would “turn you into a windshield wiper on the baseline.” The rest of Pancho’s game was solid enough, but that one shot is what continued to win matches for him well into his forties.

* * *

Behind the forehand was one of the greatest tennis minds in the game’s history. Segura hated to lose, and every defeat was an opportunity to find a weakness he could exploit in the next match.

As early as the 1950s, Kramer relied on Pancho as a kind of finishing school for new professionals. Trabert, Hoad, and others learned finesse and tactics from the Ecuadorian that they had never needed to win Wimbledon against the amateurs. Even players he didn’t work with directly ended up using him as a model. Rod Laver said, “When I was in a match, I always used to remind myself how Pancho did it.”

Supportive as he was of his fellow professionals, Segoo wasn’t above a bit of gamesmanship. For years, he led his tour-mates to believe that he couldn’t drive. Someone had to get the troupe from one city to the next, but he preferred to rest. When they finally discovered that he was capable of piloting a vehicle, Pancho proved to be the world’s worst navigator. One night, Frank Sedgman put him behind the wheel for the trip from Tallahassee to Tampa. Sedgman promptly fell asleep, and when he woke up, they were still in Tallahassee. Segura hadn’t found his way out of the city. That’s what he said, anyway.

Segura retired from the tour in the mid-1960s and became a full time coach, first at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, and later at the La Costa Resort in Carlsbad. He worked with some of the greatest players of the 1970s. One of his charges, Stan Smith, considered him “maybe the best tactician that I’ve ever met.” Billie Jean King called him the “Ph.D. of tennis.”

Of course, Pancho wasn’t training his students in the ways of the two-fisted forehand. He could teach technique just fine, but his genius worked at a higher level. Gamblers loved to eavesdrop, because he could quickly identify who was likely to win a match. Kramer, no dolt himself, said, “If you sit next to Segoo watching a quality match, he’s analyzing for you why one guy’s winning and the other guy’s losing in a brilliant running commentary. He’s uncanny that way.”

Segura’s greatest student was Jimmy Connors. Connors had learned the game from his mother, Gloria, who realized that Pancho–another smaller-than-average guy who won points from the baseline–was the voice her son needed to hear. Under Segura’s eye, Jimbo won all three majors he played in 1974. In 1975, his shock loss to Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon came–perhaps not coincidentally–after Gloria took back the coaching reins.

Pancho kept playing as long as his body would allow it. At the first Open Wimbledon in 1968, he and Olmedo faced the South Africans Abe Segal and Gordon Forbes, taking one set by the record-setting score of 32-30. When Billie Jean King won the Battle of the Sexes in 1973, Segura wanted a crack at her–he was sure he was a better player than Bobby Riggs.

Segura’s enthusiasm for the game was unflagging, and for more than six decades, it was infectious. In 2006, Pancho’s biographer, Caroline Seebohm, interviewed his former college coach, Gardnar Mulloy. The 92-year-old Mulloy could only say of the joyous player he once sponsored, “I want to be like him when I grow up.”

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Evonne Goolagong [AUS]
Born: 31 July 1951
Career: 1968-83
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1971)
Peak Elo rating: 2,259 (2nd place, 1976)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 92
 

* * *

When Evonne Goolagong won Wimbledon the first time, in 1971, she did so ahead of schedule. She was only 19 years old, making her second appearance at The Championships after a second-round exit the year before. Her mentor, Vic Edwards, had long predicted that everything would come together for her three years later, in 1974.

Not only did Goolagong beat expectations, she did so in particularly convincing style. She lost only one set in seven rounds. Most impressive of all, she beat Billie Jean King and Margaret Court, back-to-back, in the semi-finals and final. The two women had won six of the last eight Wimbledon titles, and King would bounce back to win three of the next four.

One way to put Evonne’s achievement in context is in the form of a trivia question. How many players ever defeated both King and Court in the same tournament?

Answer: 3. Darlene Hard did it twice in 1963, before Billie Jean was the dominant force she’d become. Ann Jones upset both to win Wimbledon in 1969. Goolagong was the third.

Now, here’s the truly impressive thing. Once Court and King had faded, women’s tennis had another equally dominant duo in Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Between 1974 and 1989, only seven players beat that pair in the same event.

Rosie Casals did it in 1974, when Martina was still a chubby teenager. Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger each managed it as they moonballed their way to superstardom. Hana Mandlíková defeated the pair at events in both 1981 and 1985. Steffi Graf and Helena Sukova each accomplished the feat at the tail end of the Chrissie-and-Martina era.

The seventh woman to beat both Evert and Navratilova at the same tournament was–you guessed it–Evonne Goolagong. She ran the gauntlet to win the 1976 Virginia Slims Championships. Two years later, she once again stared down the most difficult of draws at the 1978 Slims of Boston.

All four of these all-time greats–Court, King, Evert, and Navratilova–won the majority of their meetings with Goolagong, most of them by a wide margin. But on a good day, Evonne could beat anybody. Throughout the 1970s, she had a lot of good days.

* * *

Goolagong reached 18 major singles finals, including 16 in one 20-event span. Yet tennis writers at the time tended to focus on Goolagong’s lapses. She once let it slip that she and Edwards referred to her off-moments as “walkabouts,” and from that moment on, no story about her was complete without the w-word.

Evonne’s path to stardom was an unusual one. An Aboriginal Australian raised in the tiny country town of Barellan, she was encouraged by a local man named Bill Kurtzman from the age of nine. Edwards, an accomplished coach with his own tennis school in Sydney, heard about the young talent and whisked her off to the city. Edwards’s eye was not flawless–he passed on a young Margaret Smith–but it would have been tough to miss Goolagong’s potential.

Even as a twelve-year-old, Goolagong’s backhands–both the volley and the slice groundstroke–were essentially the same weapons that would bedevil a generation of tour players. Edwards needed only to build a game around that.

The young woman’s game still looked like a natural gift after years of training at the Edwards academy. Fellow player Julie Heldman told the journalist Grace Liechtenstein in 1973, “She doesn’t seem conscious of her body at all, it just works for her.” Dress designer Teddy Tinling dubbed her “Nature’s child.”

Chris Evert said, “Evonne plays tennis the way black people dance.” While that one–like most comments about her athleticism and natural gifts–was intended as a compliment, there was often a tinge of racism. Goolagong didn’t face nearly as much bigotry away from Australia as she had at home–apartheid South Africa made her an honorary white so she could play tournaments there–but she was frequently reminded that she was a little different.

Other observers found more creative ways to describe Evonne’s talents. A male player told Liechtenstein, “She’s the only one of the girls who wears a jock”–that is, the Australian played an athletic brand of tennis that would have been more at home in the men’s game.

Billie Jean King said after a loss to Goolagong in 1974, “She was like a panther compared to me. She had more mobility and she played beautifully. I started watching her, and then I’d remember all of a sudden that I had to hit the ball.”

* * *

What made Evonne’s gifts that much more vexing to her opponents was that she hardly appeared to be trying. She rarely got frustrated; a mistake was more likely to trigger a grin than a show of frustration.

Goolagong was an adept net-rusher, though rush isn’t quite the word for it. Navratilova said in 2005, “She didn’t serve-and-volley; she would sort of saunter-and-volley.”

Most players raced to the net to avoid needing to hit a first volley from deep behind the service line in no-man’s land. Goolagong didn’t appear to care. In the 1971 Wimbledon final, she serve-and-volleyed 35 times, winning 25. Even with her lack of urgency, she put away nine of her first volleys for clean winners, and Court passed her only twice.

As celebrated as her backhand volley was, Evonne could win from the baseline as well. Her career winning percentage on clay, 83%, was identical to her mark on grass. She took the Roland Garros title on her first appearance there. She may well have won it again, but after the French Open banned World Team Tennis players in 1974, Goolagong skipped the event until 1983.

The Australian could beat most of the women on the circuit without much effort at all. In 1973, she hesitated to join the fledgling Virginia Slims circuit, playing federation-approved events instead. Against the divided competition that season, she won 106 matches, including 13 titles. She beat nearly everyone except for Evert, Court, and Virginia Wade.

The only way to get Goolagong fully engaged on court was to play well enough to challenge her. She wrote that “the most fun is catching up with and hitting a ball that looks impossible to reach.” Like the balletic Maria Bueno, to whom she was often compared, her “greatest high was to hit a ball well, to try to do it perfectly.”

* * *

Evonne’s easygoing quest for excellence allowed her to rack up victories and titles, but it left her peers wondering if she could ever become a truly dominant player in the mold of King and Court.

Some fellow players questioned whether Goolagong had the necessary killer instinct. (“Uh, you know, I won Wimbledon without the killer instinct,” Evonne replied.) Billie Jean thought that she hadn’t fully committed herself, and she wouldn’t be a “real champ” until she did.

These were strange things to say in 1973 about a player who had reached the final of seven of the previous nine majors. (And she skipped one of the other two!) Yet from 1972 on, Goolagong was never ranked number one by the journalists who published their year-end top-ten lists. She only briefly held the top position on the WTA computer, in 1976. My historical Elo ratings are even harsher still, setting her peak ranking at number two. By the Elo formula, her most common year-end status was fourth place.

Coach Edwards told Grace Liechtenstein that Evonne’s “mind hasn’t matured. When it does, she could be on top for years … except that I reckon one of these days she’ll meet some handsome guy, run off and get married.” Edwards didn’t have a lot of faith in the doggedness of his charge, figuring that she couldn’t manage both tennis and a family.

He got that wrong. Goolagong married Roger Cawley, a former British junior player, in 1975, and she quickly ditched Edwards’s coaching and all-encompassing management in favor of her husband. In 1976, her first full season with Cawley, she lost only six matches, five of them to Evert. She reeled off one winning streak of 26 matches, including two victories apiece over Evert and Martina Navratilova.

Joe Jares of Sports Illustrated reported the consensus view of why Evonne was suddenly winning so much. “[T]hese days Goolagong … is actually paying attention.”

* * *

In 1977, Goolagong and Cawley had their first child, a daughter, Kelly. Evonne missed a year, but continuing to defy Edwards’s forecast, she had her eye on a comeback from the day she discovered she was pregnant. She trained throughout the pregnancy, and she came back five pounds lighter than she left.

She struggled with injuries throughout the early days of her comeback and again a couple of years later, but when she made it on court, she usually won. She reeled off 20 straight victories on the Australian circuit at the end of 1977, culminating in a title at the Australian Open. It was her fourth championship there and her sixth major overall. She added three titles in North America in early 1978, including her second tournament win with victories over both Evert and Navratilova.

In her absence, though, Chrissie and Martina had tightened their stranglehold on the game. In 1978, Navratilova stopped Evonne in the Wimbledon semi-finals. The next year, Evert straight-setted her at both Wimbledon and the US Open.

Goolagong later said, “Everyone had written me off and I was determined to prove a point. I had to show myself and everybody else that I was still competitive.” Winning a few titles on the Slims circuit was one thing, and she did pile up 17 tournament victories in the three years after Kelly was born. But majors were another story. While Margaret Court won three slams the year after her first child was born, no mother had been crowned Wimbledon champion since 1914.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0P-AsmiDrw

The first half of 1980, when Evonne was 28, didn’t offer much hope. She struggled with illness and injury, and even worse, she couldn’t solve the riddle of Navratilova, who beat her four times in a span of three months. At the Wimbledon warm-up in Chichester, she lost to Evert for the fourth straight time.

Fans tend to remember the 1980 Wimbledon championships for its Borg-McEnroe men’s final, but Goolagong’s feats at the tournament were nearly as impressive. She overcame one-set deficits against former finalist Betty Stöve and youngster Hana Mandlíková in the third and fourth rounds, then made quick work of sixth seed Wendy Turnbull in the quarters. Against 17-year-old Tracy Austin in the semi-finals, she endured a bona fide Goolagong walkabout, dropping the second set 6-0, but bounced back to reach the final.

Nine years after her first triumph at the All-England Club, Evonne did it again. Facing Evert just three weeks after the loss in Chichester, the veteran won in straight sets, 6-1, 7-6. She took 30 of 52 net points against the best baseline player of her generation, allowing Evert only four passing-shot winners. Killer instinct or no, she repeatedly slammed the door whenever Chrissie got close, saving 9 of 13 break points.

Goolagong proved her point. She is the only Wimbledon champion to beat four top-ten seeded players en route to the title. She remains only the second mother to claim the title. She will surely always be the only woman from Barellan, New South Wales to win the most coveted trophy in tennis.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

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
 

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.”

* * *

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.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Ilie Năstase [ROU]
Born: 19 July 1946
Career: 1962-85
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1973)
Peak Elo rating: 2,256 (1st place, 1973)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 98
 

* * *

Here’s a mystery you probably haven’t mulled over for a few decades: Did Ilie Năstase throw his fourth-round match at Wimbledon in 1973?

1973 was the boycott year, when 81 men skipped Wimbledon to protest the International Lawn Tennis Federation’s suspension of Yugoslav player Niki Pilić for missing a Davis Cup tie. The recently-formed Association of Tennis Professionals–the ATP–objected. Functioning more as a player’s union than it does today, it wanted to have a say in disciplinary matters. The ILTF didn’t budge.

Năstase was one of only a handful of ATP members to defy the boycott and play. He was a half-hearted participant in the union: he signed up but generally did whatever he wanted. When the organization fined him after the tournament, he explained that the Romanian Army–of which he was technically a captain–ordered him to play.

He was, by far, the best player left in the field. He had lost a thrilling five-set final to Stan Smith the year before, and he had won seven of his last eight tournaments, including the French Open, the Italian Championships, and Queen’s Club. He should’ve coasted to the title. His competition consisted of a few fellow Eastern Europeans, some prospects (including Björn Borg and Ilie’s doubles partner Jimmy Connors), and an armada of last-minute replacements.

The overwhelming favorite barely made it to the second week. Năstase lost his fourth-round match in four sets. His vanquisher was a 21-year-old American college star named Sandy Mayer, who had an injured thumb and was sneezing with hay fever. Mayer had plenty of promise, but he was nearly a decade away from reaching his career-best ranking. The day wasn’t covered in glory for anybody.

Speculation started immediately. Maybe the Romanian couldn’t have lost his opening match on purpose: That would be too obvious. Mayer was the first opponent he faced who could plausibly beat him. Năstase secretly supported the boycott–so the theory went–and lost at the first opportunity.

Ilie in uniform, at Wimbledon in 2015

There’s just as much evidence on the other side of the ledger. Ilie was hardly impregnable against second-tier opponents. In a single four-week span at the start of the season, he lost to journeymen Ove Nils Bengtson, Karl Meiler, and Paul Gerken. He managed to drop a set to unheralded Colombian Iván Molina in the second round. And he was hardly in a rush to get away from the scene of the controversy. Năstase and Connors combined to win the doubles title over the boycott-decimated field.

For his part, Năstase has never said anything publicly to support the tanking hypothesis. He wrote in his 2004 autobiography that his back seized up during the Queen’s Club final and continued to give him problems. Against Mayer, he “was not in good shape mentally or physically,” and he didn’t like playing on the upset-friendly Court No. 2.

As conspiracy theories go, it’s pretty weak sauce. Upsets happen, and while Năstase was probably the best player in the world at the time, he was never untouchable. But the question persists.

The historical mysteries that linger are always about something bigger, and this one is no exception. The 1973 Wimbledon fourth round itself is a historical footnote. But Năstase is one of the most compelling characters in the game’s history. Was he a hero or a villain? Did he defy an authoritarian government to silently support his colleagues, or was he little more than a scab acting at odds with his own union?

As for that day on Court No. 2, only Ilie knows for sure. To the broader question, the answer is both. Or neither. The Romanian was a magician, a buffoon, and occasionally, a champion of unsurpassed brilliance.

* * *

Whatever else he was, it’s important to remember that at the peak of his powers, Ilie Năstase was a huge international celebrity. In the early 1970s, he got more global attention than any other sports star save Muhammad Ali. He was the first athlete endorser signed by Nike. While his playing record never quite accounted for his worldwide fame, his undeniable charisma made up the difference.

Fans who showed up, or tuned in, for a Năstase match could expect both shotmaking and showmanship. He might chase down a lob with a behind-the-back flick of the wrist, a shot that Bud Collins dubbed the “Bucharest Backfire.” If the linesman dared call it out, he might unleash a stream of profanity, commiserate with the crowd, or stage a sit-down strike until he got his way.

A Bucharest Backfire in 1969 Davis Cup competition

Ilie symbolized one possible path for fully professional, Open tennis. Everybody respected the Australians, modest champions like Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and John Newcombe. Yet the new big-money atmosphere of the sport made room for more colorful, controversial characters, and Năstase was the first superstar to fill the gap.

Amateur-era tennis had its bad boys, but as Sports Illustrated put it in a 1972 profile of Ilie, “Bad in tennis was always only semibad.” While rebels like Bobby Riggs and Frank Kovacs bent the rules, they rarely stepped across the unwritten boundaries. When a real problem child appeared, national federations were so powerful that they could simply get rid of the offender. At Forest Hills in 1951, an American top-tenner named Earl Cochell berated the tournament referee behind closed doors. He was banned for life.

More than a few people wished that tennis would do the same thing to Năstase. Laver said, “I don’t want my kid seeing Năstase play. The demeanor you show on the court is important to tennis…. Maybe we were too stereotyped. But we were told to behave or they’d take our racket away.”

No one ever seriously thought about taking Ilie’s racket away. He was too good for the box office. John McEnroe, another man whose entertainment value consisted of more than just courtcraft, said, “[H]e’s done more for the game than any single player who has ever lived…. You wouldn’t believe how many people come to see him.”

In the first decade of the Open era, tennis was even more fractured than it is today. Every one of the competing camps–majors, national federations, rival tournament circuits, promoters staging lucrative one-offs–needed to figure out how to make money in the sport’s new environment, and no one was ready to kill a golden goose. At one tournament, Năstase and his mentor Ion Țiriac were defaulted from their doubles match. The next day, they pulled out of the singles, saying that if they couldn’t play doubles, they wouldn’t play at all. Presto–the default was reversed, and they were back in the doubles.

* * *

It wasn’t until 2017, decades after his retirement as a player, that Năstase finally went far enough that a governing body severely sanctioned him. During a Fed Cup tie, he (among other things!) swore at the chair umpire and got himself kicked out of the stadium. The ITF banned him for four years. Even then, he turned up at the on-site restaurant the next day, and he made an appearance at the Madrid Open a few months later.

Hard to believe that when Ilie first came on the scene, the word Țiriac would use to describe him was “timid.”

Țiriac was nowhere near the level that Năstase would reach, but he was the top of the heap in Romanian tennis when Ilie learned the game. A former international rugby and ice hockey player nicknamed the Brașov Bulldozer, he realized that a tennis career would last longer, and that his legs–combined with tactical smarts, gamesmanship, and an unparalleled will to win–would keep him competitive against all but the very best players in the international game.

Năstase and Țiriac in 1987

He held the Romanian national title for nearly a decade before Ilie took it from him. Even then, in the late 1960s, Năstase looked up to the older man, and the pair traveled the European circuit together. Țiriac would tell his protégé that he needed to open up, until one day, Năstase suddenly had a personality. The veteran may have had second thoughts about that advice.

“I feel like dog trainer who teach dog manners and graces,” Țiriac said in 1972. “And just when you think dog knows how should act with nice qualities, dog make big puddle and all is wasted.”

To some degree, Năstase’s antics were a natural part of his personality. Țiriac thought so, and he cautioned against trying to change him. You could have all of Ilie or none of him.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the behavior was out of his control. Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers said in 1976, “Năstase likes attention and because tennis has been considered a gentleman’s game, he keeps his opponents so shook up they can’t concentrate.”

He so riled up Clark Graebner that once, mid-match, Graebner motioned him to come to the net, where he smacked him. In a big-money match against Jimmy Connors, the players exchanged the usual trash talk. Finally Năstase thought his opponent had gone too far. He knew where to hurt Jimmy, saying that Connors couldn’t do anything without his mother. The momentum shift was immediate; it was all Ilie from that point on.

* * *

None of this would’ve mattered if Năstase hadn’t accumulated the results of a champion. He came close to winning his first major title against Stan Smith at Wimbledon in 1972, then took the final step at the US Open. He defeated the home favorite, Arthur Ashe, in five sets.

By 1972, no one could call Ilie timid, either on or off the court. After winning his first titles as the most dogged of clay-courters, even willing to moonball if necessary, he learned to serve and volley. He never developed the serve of a Smith or an Ashe, but he learned the tactics necessary to succeed on all surfaces.

Ashe said, “Năstase is so good that I actually can get inspired watching him play.” Fred Stolle explained, “He’s quicker than anybody. And it’s not scrambling. The guy never scrambles. It’s not much anticipation, either. It’s just all zoom. He doesn’t seem to be trying. He doesn’t do much on the volley, either. Then all of a sudden he’s there. He’s always there.”

Despite the indifferent serve, Năstase’s zoom was enough to beat tough competition on fast indoor carpet. His most impressive feat was his run of five straight finals at the season-ending Masters event between 1971 and 1975.

The first three of those, all of which he won, were played on carpet. The fields weren’t quite comparable to those at the present-day World Tour Finals because many top stars were committed to the rival WCT circuit, but they were hardly cakewalks. In 1971, he swept a round robin against the likes of Smith, Graebner, and Cliff Richey. In 1972, he went undefeated again, beating Connors and Smith in the knockout rounds. In 1973, he finally dropped a match, but made up for it with straight-set victories over Connors, John Newcombe, and Tom Okker. At the 1975 edition of the event, he obliterated Björn Borg, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1.

When the ATP debuted its computer ranking system in August of 1973, Ilie was number one, and deservedly so. He held on to the top spot for 40 weeks, until Newcombe overtook him the following year.

According to my historical Elo ratings, his legacy would look even better if the ATP had switched on the computer sooner. He earned the top spot starting in August of 1972, lost it for part of 1973, and took it back–as the official formula agrees–in the summer of that year. All told, my system gives him nearly 100 weeks at number one, an achievement that only nine players have matched since.

* * *

So, hero or villain?

If you polled the tennis world in the summer of 1972, you’d have gotten “hero” by a landslide, albeit with some famous names standing up for the opposition. After Ilie beat Ashe for the Forest Hills title, two things happened to shift the narrative.

First, Romania hosted the United States in the final round of the Davis Cup that year. Năstase and Țiriac felt that they had always been at a disadvantage when they played in the States, so they did everything they could to stack the deck in their own favor. The Romanians opted for a glacially slow clay surface, they smothered the visitors with a security detail, and they hired line judges with strong partisan preferences. Gamesmanship aside, it was Romania’s–and Ilie’s–chance to shine at the apex of men’s tennis.

The home team flopped. In the opening rubber against Stan Smith, Năstase got into an argument near the end of the first set, then appeared to lose interest entirely. He fell in straight sets. The Romanians were even more punchless in the doubles, going down 6-2, 6-0, 6-3. Năstase came out of the biggest weekend of his career looking like a clown, one who didn’t have what it took to win when it counted. It wasn’t entirely fair–Ilie played a whopping 52 Davis Cup ties in his career and won 109 matches in the competition–but the reputation was tough to shake.

The other thing that happened was the rise of Jimmy Connors. For half a decade or more, all the complaints about bad boys in tennis–and they were incessant–were about Connors and Năstase, Năstase and Connors.

Năstase and Connors as doubles partners at Wimbledon in 1974

Ilie’s nickname, inevitably, was “Nasty,” but the term was a better match for Connors. Thrilling as Jimbo was to watch, he had little of the personal charisma that allowed Năstase to get away with anything. In 1972, Sports Illustrated celebrated the potential value that a proper “bad boy” could bring to tennis. A few years later, Connors attracted even more fans, but he ensured that people were a lot more ambivalent about the value of bad behavior in the traditionally elite game.

But even in the Connors era, advocates of old-fashioned, prim-and-proper tennis couldn’t help but recognize greatness. Margaret Court, who briefly played alongside Ilie for the World Team Tennis Hawaii Leis in 1976, spoke for many of them. “Ilie Năstase is a difficult man to like. But he’s just too good.”

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Amélie Mauresmo [FRA]
Born: 5 July 1979
Career: 1995-2009
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2004)
Peak Elo rating: 2,307 (1st place, 2005)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 25
 

* * *

As the new tournament director at the French Open this year, Amélie Mauresmo found herself the inadvertent center of attention. The event staged one-match night sessions for the first time in its history, and almost every evening of the fortnight, Mauresmo gave that spotlight to men, not women.

She said, “In this era we are in right now–and as a woman, a former woman’s player, I don’t feel bad or unfair saying this–you have more attraction and appeal, in general, for the men’s matches.” Most days, the women’s field didn’t offer a “confrontation or star” that would fit the schedule.

There were also practical concerns. A one-match session could easily turn out to be a dud, especially if a best-of-three contest ended quickly. While plenty of best-of-five men’s matches are boring, too, at least they last a couple of hours. Mauresmo said that the tournament might address the timing issue by adding a doubles match to the session next year. It might work, but broadcasters rarely salivate at the prospect of early-round doubles in prime-time.

The responses to Mauresmo’s comments, of course, were immediate and emotional. Everyone from Iga Swiatek to Billie Jean King chimed in. It’s a matter of respect; balanced programming is key to growing the sport; and there are plenty of great women’s matches, like the Alizé Cornet-Jelena Ostapenko clash that did merit the night session.

All true, as far as it goes. However, few people took issue with Mauresmo’s central argument. For fans and television schedulers, a handful of famous, veteran names rule the sport. With figures like Ashleigh Barty and Serena Williams missing from the women’s side, men such as Novak Djoković and Rafael Nadal were obvious choices for top billing.

BBC commentator Annabel Croft defended the schedule. “There have been periods when the women’s game has been more interesting than the men’s but I have to say the women’s game has had a bit of a dip lately.”

That historical context helps explain why Mauresmo was willing to give center stage to one gender over the other. When the roles were reversed, she was one of the women appearing on the front page of the newspaper in the morning and playing on center court at night. She knows there will be years when women justifiably monopolize the Roland Garros night sessions. This just wasn’t one of them.

* * *

Mauresmo reached her first major final at the 1999 Australian Open, when she was 19 years old. The women’s draw in Melbourne had everything. Martina Hingis was the defending champion, but she hadn’t won much in the twelve months since. The field was full of stars past and future, from Steffi Graf to Monica Seles to Venus Williams.

By comparison, the men’s draw was “the rough equivalent of the jayvee game,” as Harvey Araton put it in the New York Times. Sports Illustrated called the eventual finalists, Thomas Enqvist and Yevgeny Kafelnikov, “duller than oatmeal.”

There was nothing dull about women’s tennis at the turn of the century. At the 1999 Australian, it was the unseeded, 29th-ranked Mauresmo who caused things to get even spicier than usual.

Amélie wasn’t on the radar of most fans, who thought of her as a name for the future if they thought of her at all. She saved match points in the first round, then opened up the draw with a three-set upset win over 8th seed Patty Schnyder in the second. She cruised to the semifinals with three easy wins, including a quarter-final defeat of Mary Pierce.

By the time she faced top seed Lindsay Davenport in the semi-final, Mauresmo was on everyone’s radar, and not because of her first-week victories. Early in the event, she came out as gay to French media. The Aussie tabloids jumped on the story.

The coverage of the 19-year-old’s sexuality ramped up further after she narrowly got past Davenport. She won 103 points to the American’s 102 in a 4-6, 7-5, 7-5 victory. Davenport said more than she meant to in a post-match interview: “A couple of times, I mean, I thought I was playing a guy out there, the girl was hitting it so hard, so strong, and I would look over there and she’s so strong in the shoulders, those shoulders.”

There’s a long history of commentators and opponents talking about women–usually the best of them–playing like men. Often, such remarks were intended as compliments, even if they sound increasingly cringey to a modern ear. Davenport was, to all appearances, just explaining how she was overpowered. A week after Mauresmo came out, though, it sounded like something else.

Davenport was quick to apologize, personally and sincerely. The same was not true of Hingis, who would face Mauresmo in the final. The Swiss Miss said her opponent was “half a man,” and she griped about the Frenchwoman’s public displays of affection. Hingis’s apology was as perfunctory as Davenport’s was genuine.

Alas, this was not a Hollywood movie. The unheralded teen who overcame one obstacle after another, revealing her true self along the way, did not win the tournament. The villain ended up on top. Hingis claimed her third straight Australian Open, 6-2, 6-3.

* * *

Amélie’s Australian adventure prepared her for the media attention she’d receive up to the present day. But the storybook ending was a long time coming.

Two years after her Melbourne final, she was barely hanging on to a spot in the WTA top 20. It wasn’t until the US Open in 2001 that she reached another grand slam quarter-final. She lost that match to Jennifer Capriati, and she lost her next five encounters with top-tenners as well.

In fairness, it was not an easy time to climb the women’s tennis ladder. Consider some of the top women born between 1975 and 1983:

Birth  Player               
1975   Mary Pierce          
1976   Jennifer Capriati    
1976   Lindsay Davenport    
1979   Amélie Mauresmo      
1980   Martina Hingis       
1980   Venus Williams       
1981   Elena Dementieva     
1982   Serena Williams      
1982   Justine Henin        
1983   Kim Clijsters

If great players were evenly distributed throughout the last century, my Tennis 128 list would contain five women from that time span. Instead, there are ten, some of them very close to the top of the all-time rankings. (Spoiler alert: Both Williams sisters are on the list.)

Eventually, Mauresmo would hold her own against most of her peers. She won only 2 of 12 against Serena Williams, but she managed 3 of 8 against Venus Williams. She split 14 meetings with Hingis, and almost broke even against Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters. She won her career series against Capriati, Pierce, and Elena Dementieva.

Those wins helped her climb the rankings, but in the early 2000s, Amélie could only watch while the Williams sisters dominated all the tournaments that mattered. In 2002, she lost a quarter-final in Australia to Capriati, a semi at Wimbledon to Serena, and a nail-biter of a US Open semi-final to Venus. While she cracked the WTA top five for the first time, a major title still seemed a long way off.

* * *

Journalists found it easy to construct a narrative around Mauresmo’s struggles. She never regretted coming out, but the added attention–much of it negative–both distracted her and added to the pressure she faced. Plus, she gained a reputation as a choker, a talented player who didn’t have what it took to win the big matches.

Like many players whose mental strength is questioned, Amélie has accepted the judgment, at least as an explanation for part of her career. She’ll talk about how she was afraid to win, until she finally realized–around 2004–that it ought to have been her name on the trophy instead.

Maybe so. Certainly she improved, and her results took a leap forward that season. She won 63 of 75 matches, claiming four titles and reaching number one on the WTA computer–albeit briefly–ahead of the likes of Davenport, Henin, and Serena.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other reasons why Mauresmo took longer than her peers to put things together. She told the Guardian in 2006 that she wasn’t “a tennis machine.” Despite winning two junior slams, she was never a can’t-miss prospect. According to French journalist Alain Deflassieux, she wasn’t even the best youngster among the strong crop of Frenchwomen born in 1979.

Mauresmo was a fascinating player to watch, even apart from the inconsistency that drove the “choker” narrative. She boasted a flashy one-handed backhand somewhere between those of Henin and Richard Gasquet, and she was never afraid to move forward. She rarely went out of her way to play grass-court events, but her game was suited to the surface. In the 2006 Wimbledon final, she serve-and-volleyed 33 times.

The variety was a blessing and a curse. Amélie told the Guardian:

It didn’t help me for a long time. When you have a choice you have to make the right one. When you don’t have a choice you do what you know how to do best and that’s about it. When you have a repertoire–for this ball a chip down the line? Or a top spin short across the court?–there’s a chance that you’ll make the wrong decision.

A chosen few, like Martina Hingis, seem to come out of the womb knowing how to make those choices. For the rest of us, including some of the greatest players in the game’s history, it takes time.

* * *

After her triumphant 2004 campaign, it seemed that Mauresmo might finally win a major. Instead, the 2005 season played out just like the one before. She won just four games against Serena in Australia. She crashed out early to a young Ana Ivanović in Paris. Davenport beat her in a marathon, narrative-reinforcing three-setter at Wimbledon. Then Amélie limped out of the US Open after a 6-4, 6-1 defeat at the hands of Pierce.

Pierce beat her again to kick off the round robin stage of the year-end championships in Los Angeles, but then the tides turned. Mauresmo beat Clijsters and Dementieva in straight sets to advance to the knockout stage, then defeated Maria Sharapova in the semi-final and Pierce in a rematch for the title. While it wasn’t a major, it was the next best thing.

And it was a major confidence boost. Mauresmo would end up winning eleven matches in a row against top-ten opponents, including finals against Henin, Pierce, and Clijsters to kick off 2006.

The Henin match was an unsatisfying victory by retirement, but Amélie could only complain so much: It was her first grand slam title. Her path to the 2006 Australian Open championship was bizarre: She beat Michaëlla Krajicek, Clijsters, and Henin by retirement, and Henin’s ailment was a stomach bug she probably could’ve played through.

Retirements or not, the wins counted. Mauresmo would reclaim the number one position in the rankings in March.

She would justify her position–and her asterisked win in Melbourne–with another big performance at Wimbledon. This time, all seven matches finished when Amélie converted match point. She cast aside any remaining doubts about her mental fortitude, bouncing back from lost second sets against Anastasia Myskina in the quarters and Sharapova in the semis. Then she recovered after losing the first set to Henin in the final. Faced with the pressure of serving for the most storied trophy in tennis, she opened her final game with two aces, executed a textbook serve-and-volley point at 30-all, and coaxed an unforced error from the Belgian to finish the job.

* * *

Mauresmo’s fall from the top was even quicker than her belated rise. She reached the final at the 2006 year-end championships, where she lost to Henin. She beat Clijsters for the 2007 Antwerp title, but the tournament represented 4 of only 27 wins that season. She didn’t reach the quarter-finals in either of her grand slam title defenses.

After two more indifferent seasons, she retired, a few months after her 30th birthday.

Her post-retirement career, however, has been almost as impressive as her decade-plus on court. She helped Marion Bartoli to the 2013 Wimbledon title, and she coached Andy Murray from 2014 to 2016, helping him to his first tournament wins on clay. She was in Lucas Pouille’s box for the young Frenchman’s surprise run to the 2018 Australian Open semi-final.

Now, she runs the French Open, one of the four biggest events on the tennis calendar. Time will tell whether she excels at the helm of a major championship, and whether she even finds it interesting enough to stick around for long. In a good year, the tournament director will spend more of her time behind the scenes. But when the pressure and media attention does arrive, it won’t faze her at all.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Ora Washington [USA]
Born: 1898 or 1899
Died: 21 December 1971
Career: 1924-47
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (ATA national ranking)
Major singles titles: 0 (in 0 attempts)
Total singles titles: At least 36
 

* * *

For a century or more, the tennis world has been remarkably interconnected. The preeminence of Wimbledon, Forest Hills, and the Davis Cup meant that the strongest competitors of the amateur era regularly faced off against each other. The amateur-professional divide split the field for a few decades, but even then, players earned their spots on a pro tour mainly by winning championships on the amateur circuit.

We measure the all-time greats by their performances against each other, on the sport’s biggest stages. So how do we rate a superstar who wasn’t allowed to compete against the best players of her era, or even to set foot in the most famous venues?

Before 1950, tennis in the United States was racially segregated. Black players were not welcome at the clubs where the most important tournaments were held, and they were explicitly barred from competing in most sanctioned events. Apart from a handful of exhibition matches, there was no meaningful interracial competition in tennis until Althea Gibson made her first appearance at the US National Championships.

Tennis isn’t alone in its shameful, racist past. Major League Baseball, for example, was desegregated only three years earlier. But as other sports have celebrated the exploits of their pre-integration Black stars, tennis has largely ignored its own. The Baseball Hall of Fame has inducted dozens of Negro League players. By contrast, the honor roll at the International Tennis Hall of Fame suggests that the Black game began with Althea and her mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson.

Black tennis thrived before Gibson. There were Black champions even before Althea was born. When Arthur Ashe finished the magisterial volumes of A Hard Road to Glory, he concluded that one of those early greats “may have been the best female athlete ever.”

That was Ora Washington.

* * *

Washington is best remembered today as a basketball player. She toiled in segregated obscurity in that sport as well, but basketball–like baseball–has taken strides to recognize its Black pioneers. Ora was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018. The Women’s Basketball Hall had already honored her in 2009.

She led the champion Philadelphia Tribune team throughout the 1930s. Despite standing a modest five-feet-seven-inches tall, Ora played center. She often led her squad in scoring, and she always intimidated her counterparts. One opponent remembered, “I never saw her when she hit me, but she did it so quick it would knock the breath out of me.”

Her page at the Basketball Hall of Fame website doesn’t mention her tennis exploits. The Women’s Hall page allows that she was “[a]lso a star tennis player.”

This is true. Just like a contributing editor at the Hollywood Reporter, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, also played a bit of basketball.

Tennis was Ora’s first serious competitive pursuit, even if it was hardly her start in sports. She was born in Virginia to a large family, one in which outdoor games such as croquet were a constant feature. When the Washington clan hit hard times, an aunt moved to Philadelphia. Ora, also in search of work, followed. On her days off from cleaning houses, she hung out at the Germantown YWCA, one of the few gathering places for Black women that maintained tennis courts.

She picked up a racket in 1924, and she won her first titles in Wilmington, Delaware later that summer. Just a year later, she put the Black tennis world on notice. She upset Chicagoan Isadore Channels, the 1924 national champion, and she won the doubles title at the American Tennis Association (ATA) national tournament. In 1929, she would claim her first of eight ATA singles championships. There was no higher accolade available to Black tennis players at the time, and before Althea Gibson came along, no one achieved it as often as she did. No one came close.

Ashe didn’t exaggerate: Washington was in a class by herself. Whether you considered her a hoopster who dabbled in tennis or a racket wielder who filled her spare time with basketball, she was royalty. The papers called her “Queen Ora.”

* * *

We’re still at work on a full accounting of Washington’s on-court exploits. Tennis Abstract credits her with 35 singles titles, spanning 104 match wins against only 11 losses. I found a 36th title last week in the course of researching this essay, and when we consider doubles victories, she probably retired with well over 100 championships to her name.

The match-by-match victory tally is woefully incomplete. While some tournaments had small draws, requiring only two or three singles wins for a title, ATA national events often went through six rounds. Most Black newspapers were weeklies, so they would report a few notable results from the first day’s play, then follow up with a recap of the finals. White publications generally ignored the events entirely. For many of Washington’s triumphs, we don’t know the identity of more than one or two of her opponents or the scores by which she cast them aside.

Just as the 104 known wins understate her dominance, her 11 defeats overstate her vulnerability. Seven of those rare losses came at the hands of Lula Ballard, a fellow Philadelphian and frequent doubles partner who picked up a national championship before the reign of Queen Ora began. Ballard also doubled as a basketball star, and she swung a racket more gracefully than Washington did. Ora maintained a slim edge in their career encounters, winning 10 of 17, many of which went to three sets.

Washington devoted more time to tennis than her rival did, and no one could touch her in her steady battering of the rest of the field. Against everyone else, Ora won 94 of 98 known matches. The New York Age compared her to the boxer Joe Louis, another Black star who won with “deadening regularity.” Beginning in 1928, Washington went undefeated for nearly eight years.

The uncertainty about Ora’s stats extends to just about every aspect of her life. Her home county in Virginia didn’t keep records, so we don’t have her exact birthdate. All we can say is that she was probably born in 1898 or 1899. We know roughly when she started playing tennis, but we can’t be confident of the oft-repeated story that she picked up the sport to get over the death of a sister.

Washington frequently appeared in the headlines during her sporting career, but she drew little attention in retirement. New stars grabbed the spotlight, and integration shifted the focus away from organizations like the ATA. Ora did little to spread her own story. Her obscurity was so complete that when the Black Athletes Hall of Fame inducted her in 1976, no one knew why she didn’t show up. She had died five years earlier.

The resuscitation of her basketball record has given us a bit of a 21st-century Washington revival. Deserved as it is, our knowledge of her life and career hasn’t kept pace. Stories about her have turned into a game of historical telephone. The Basketball Hall of Fame initially honored her as “Ora Mae Washington.” Just one problem: That wasn’t her name. No one knows exactly where the “Mae” came from, but it didn’t come from Ora. Her middle name was Belle.

* * *

The most frequently repeated–and gradually twisted–story about Ora concerns her desire to take on the greatest player of her era, Helen Wills Moody.

Ora knew she was the best player around, and she surely wondered how she would stack up against even stronger competition. In the early 1930s, Helen Wills Moody was the strongest of all. She won 14 majors–six of them at Wimbledon–between 1927 and 1933.

By the end of Washington’s life, reporters would write that her dream had been to test herself against Wills Moody. No match ever happened–or was even seriously discussed. The non-match has somehow developed a mythology. Wikipedia makes a poorly-sourced claim that “Moody refused to schedule a match,” and many journalists have repeated it, sometimes insinuating that Helen wouldn’t play because she was either too racist, too insecure, or both.

I don’t doubt that Ora wanted the challenge. It would’ve been a huge opportunity for her, and it could’ve accelerated the path to integrated tennis. In the 1940s, Don Budge and Alice Marble played exhibitions with Black players and Marble–along with Sarah Palfrey Cooke and others–pressured the establishment to open its doors to Althea Gibson.

But there’s no evidence that any kind of overture to Wills Moody was made at the time. When a reporter asked her about the non-match in 1976, Helen didn’t remember anything about it, or about Ora. Wills Moody played a very limited schedule, and even a prospective title defense at Forest Hills or Wimbledon didn’t always convince her to leave her home in California. The whole idea of a Wills-Washington showdown was always far-fetched, even if we assume the best of intentions on Wills Moody’s part.

* * *

From our vantage point nearly 100 years later, it’s impossible to know how Ora would’ve fared against the toughest competition of her day. We have mixed reports of her serve, rave reviews of her overhead, and awed tales of her footspeed. She choked up on the racket, and her groundstrokes–particularly a backhand slice–were old-fashioned. Her only chance against Wills Moody probably would’ve been to chop her into submission, the strategy that worked for Elizabeth Ryan.

Ora’s success relied in part on the same intimidating reputation that preceded her on the basketball court. The Chicago Defender wrote in 1931, “[H]er superiority is so evident that her competitors are frequently beaten before the first ball crosses the net.” It’s unlikely that a top-ranked white star would’ve succumbed so quickly.

Baseball researchers are able to approximate the level of play in the pre-integration Negro Leagues. Even with the official color line in place, there was a fair amount of interracial competition. All-star teams of Negro League and Major League players barnstormed against each other in the offseason. We can also look at the records of players such as Jackie Robinson, who spent one year on one side of the divide before shifting to the other.

Tennis has almost nothing of the sort. Black players occasionally entered local public parks tournaments, with some success. Frances Gittens*, a New York-based ATA star who lost her 15 matches against Ora, won at least one parks tournament in Brooklyn against predominantly white competition. Flora Lomax, a national champion in the years following Washington’s retirement from singles competition, played several interracial tournaments in Detroit, often beating the field. A Californian named Juliette Harris held her own in Los Angeles public parks competition, once taking Gracyn Wheeler–a future Forest Hills quarter-finalist–to a third set.**

* Before Frances married fellow player Mr. Gittens, she was, believe it or not, Frances Forehand.

** In 1930, Harris found herself across the net from Dr. Esther Bartosh, around the time that Bartosh began coaching the young Bobby Riggs.

Those three examples aren’t the full extent of interracial women’s competition in the pre-Althea years, but they are frustratingly close. Each one implies that there was plenty of talent blocked by the sport’s color barrier, but the sum of the evidence is not nearly enough to draw stronger conclusions.

* * *

For Black journalists in the 1950s, the most compelling hypothetical was historical, not racial. Who was better: Ora Washington or Althea Gibson? In 1953, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American imagined a clash between the two women at their peaks, composing a blow-by-blow report for the fictional match. Lacy gave Althea a slight edge, with a final score of 3-6, 6-3, 8-6.

Philadelphia Tribune reporter Malcolm Poindexter offered a more measured comparison in 1956, the year Gibson won her first major title. He made it clear that Ora had her supporters, and that “Miss Washington [could] have given Helen Jacobs or the other great women of her day a real tussle.” But one local connoisseur, Al Bishop, sided with Althea:

[Ora’s] court game was old style…. She had the tactics, and was dynamic to watch. But she didn’t have the stroke. Her overhead game was terrific, but even that wouldn’t have helped too much…. Ora played a different style game entirely.

That brings us back to where we started. We can’t compare Washington to Jacobs or Wills Moody because they never faced off, and they had no opponents in common. We can’t really compare Ora to Althea–even though they did sometimes share a doubles court–because they belong to different eras. Washington was never part of the globally interconnected tennis world. For all that an analytical approach can tell us, Ora might as well have been the champion of Lapland.

The truth of the matter is, Washington probably wasn’t as strong as the all-time greats people want to stack her up against.

The most damaging aspect of segregation wasn’t the exclusion of Black players from top-level competition, it was the complete lack of opportunities for talented youngsters to develop into future champions. Ora probably never saw a tennis court until she was in her early twenties. She never had a coach. She had so little financial support that she continued cleaning houses even while she was a two-sport superstar.

She overcame all that, and she still beat all comers–many of them upper-middle-class young women who would never work a menial job in their lives. She overcame all that, and she still played such impressive tennis that old-timers would put her on par with the Wimbledon-winning Althea Gibson. No better player could possibly have emerged from the milieu of 1920s Black Philadelphia.

It was just as unlikely that a woman with Ora’s background would become one of the great basketball players of all time. Yet 100 years later, she has a plaque at that sport’s Hall of Fame.

It’s well past time that she receives the same recognition for her tennis.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Bobby Riggs [USA]
Born: 25 February 1918
Died: 25 October 1995
Career: 1933-50
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1939)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 103
 

* * *

In 2013, a Florida man approached ESPN with a story about an overheard conversation. Forty years earlier, he had heard two mobsters discussing what sounded like a plot to fix Bobby Riggs’s match with Billie Jean King. He was far from the first person to question whether the Battle of the Sexes was on the up-and-up.

Riggs was known as–among other things–the “happy hustler,” a showman whose sense of ethics lagged far behind his flair for publicity. He would bet on anything. If you weren’t interested in a wager, he’d badger you until you changed your mind.

He usually won, and he was a rarely in a situation where throwing a match would benefit him. Tanking a set or two, though? He’d been doing that since he was a teenager racking up both trophies and illicit cash on Los Angeles courts in the 1930s. He had a hard time getting motivated without money on the line, so in a lopsided early-round match, he’d often play indifferently. After losing a few games or couple of sets, a buddy in the stands might signal that he’d finally found someone to take the other side of a bet.

Even before the first Battle of the Sexes–the “Mother’s Day Massacre” of Margaret Court that convinced Billie Jean King to take on Riggs a few months later–some people wondered which side Bobby would back. His bluster was convincing, but he was a 55-year-old pusher taking on the best woman player in the world.

His triumph against Court couldn’t have been greater. He destroyed her in 57 minutes, dropping only three games. What’s more, the event captured the world’s imagination, attracting record television audiences and guaranteeing him a steady stream of sponsorship and appearance income. If anyone threw that match, it was Margaret. But it’s far more likely she just wasn’t prepared for either the spectacle or the craft of the greatest dinkballer of all time.

Everything was different against Billie Jean. Riggs was out of shape. Before the match, he was the one who looked morose, overwhelmed by the occasion and the 30,000-strong crowd at the Houston Astrodome. His play was ineffectual from the outset. He double-faulted, made careless errors, and watched as King smashed away one lob after another.

That’s what really got people talking about a fix. Bobby was a control artist. Even with tennis elbow and 15 extra pounds, those aren’t skills that just disappear. He had dominated seniors competition–not to mention won Wimbledon 34 years earlier–by anticipating every one of his opponents’ moves and putting each of his shots exactly where he wanted it. In his prime, he claimed, he once went six months without double faulting.

And then there was the lob. While Riggs had a well-rounded game, his lob was the pièce de résistance, the shot that gave him a chance against some of the greatest players of all time. Some of his friends, like former US National doubles champion Gene Mako, were convinced that he wasn’t just tanking, he was playing badly in such a way that savvy fans would realize it. It’s an odd way to salvage one’s dignity, but it can’t be ruled out.

Bobby insisted to his dying day that he played his best. King is also adamant that there was no funny business. Riggs could’ve laid an egg that day for all sorts of other reasons, most of them stemming from the overconfidence he gained four months earlier. We’ll probably never know for sure. With every year that passes, the truth gets that much murkier.

But there’s a reason the debate interests me so much. Bobby Riggs was so good at age 55 that he obliterated Margaret Court. Experts were convinced he should have had nearly as easy a time with Billie Jean. Just how good was this guy?

* * *

It’s almost as difficult to get a handle on Riggs’s greatness as it is to determine what really happened at the Astrodome in September 1973. Bobby never looked like a champion, and his game was easy to underestimate. As Rosie Casals liked to point out, he walked like a duck. (“And besides, he was an idiot.”) His career was split between the amateurs and the pros, with a generous bite taken out of the middle by World War II.

Bobby was a wiry five-feet-seven-inches tall. While his height wasn’t quite the disadvantage it would be now, it sure didn’t help. His main adversaries were six-footers; his rival Frank Kovacs was six-foot-four. The size difference counted against him both on and off court. As a junior, he was denied some playing opportunities because–among other reasons–he didn’t look like a future star.

His finesse game didn’t help matters. Riggs eventually developed a strong first serve, but as a teen, he just spun it in. He handled himself adequately at net, but he didn’t worry much about getting there. He anticipated well, he was breathtakingly fast, and he almost never missed. He was the GPOAT: Greatest Pusher of All Time.

Yet even that description doesn’t do him justice. He was more than just an exemplary exponent of a playing style designed to wear down and aggravate opponents. Surrounded by serve-and-volleyers like Jack Kramer and power hitters like Don Budge who also sought to take the net early, Riggs deployed a defensive game so deadly it might as well have been offense.

Bobby had consistently lost to Budge before the war, but in a series of Army-Navy exhibitions for the troops, he began to edge ahead. The two men faced off at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles in January 1946, a rematch after an earlier contest that was largely decided by an arm injury to Budge.

The Pan-Pacific had a huge clock that hung from the ceiling above the court. Bobby’s lobs not only had to clear the reach of the six-foot-one Budge, they also had to stay under the clock. Riggs recalled:

Every time I lobbed I could hear the crowd holding its breath to see where the ball would go. Most of them fell within six inches of the baseline. Only three of them actually hit the clock. I must have lobbed him about seventy times during that match.

Riggs won, and he solidified his status as the world’s best professional. He’d lose that distinction a couple of years later when he toured against Kramer, but even then, Bobby’s crafty tactics held up against the leading proponent of the hyper-aggressive Big Game. Riggs took the opening match of the series at Madison Square Garden, and he held his own for several weeks before Kramer improved and pulled ahead.

* * *

It takes a bit of discipline to work out Riggs’s place on the timeline of tennis history. He was a rising star in the late 1930s, when Budge’s Grand Slam overshadowed everything else in American tennis. He won three majors between 1939 and 1941, then turned pro just as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After a couple of post-war years at the top of the pro game, he stepped aside for Kramer.

The chronology doesn’t lie, but Bobby seems to exist in a kind of parallel tennis universe. Thanks to his size, his penchant for gambling, and his wrong-side-of-the-tracks origins, he was never embraced by Perry Jones, the grand poobah of Southern California tennis. Instead, his mentor throughout his teen years was Esther Bartosh, a physician who only took up tennis in her late twenties because she was frequently on call. She needed a sport she could play while still within reach of a phone.

Most promising youngsters traveled the country with financial aid from their regional associations. Bobby had to scare up his own boosters. Bartosh contributed some money and transportation, and Riggs later hooked up with a gadfly named Jack Del Valle. Del Valle drove him to tournaments around the country, funding their travels with bets on Riggs’s matches.

Other stars played for pride–or at least they pretended to. With Bobby, money was always front and center, whether he was negotiating outsized “expenses” from tournament directors or risking his take in an all-night poker game the night before the final.

Eventually Bobby moved to Chicago, where the local establishment was more accepting of his quirks. It helped that he won almost every tournament he entered. Jones’s influence kept him off the Davis Cup team until 1938, and the USLTA didn’t send him to Wimbledon until 1939. By then, still only 21 years old, he was clearly the best amateur player in the country. He was more than ready: He won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles on his first try.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djOHphNx1fw

Only then did Riggs fall in step with the usual status and schedule of an amateur champion. But the war in Europe tore up the calendar. Wimbledon wouldn’t resume until 1946. After Bobby suffered the most painful loss of his career to Adrian Quist in the Davis Cup Challenge Round that September, he had no chance to redeem himself. The international team competition was suspended for the duration as well.

Observers looking for reasons to discount his accomplishments didn’t have to work very hard. For one thing, the Wimbledon and Forest Hills titles became much more accessible after Budge had turned pro. Even Bobby wouldn’t have backed himself against Budge at that stage. For another, the impending hostilities limited the field. Gottfried von Cramm destroyed Riggs at Queen’s Club in 1939, beating him 6-0, 6-1 in under 20 minutes. Von Cramm would’ve been the favorite at Wimbledon, but the All-England Club forbade him from competing because of a politically-motivated morals conviction in Germany.

* * *

With so many gaps and asterisks on the Riggs record, we’re left to rely on the assessments of his peers. Four-time national doubles titlist Bill Talbert called him “the percentage player par excellence.”

[Riggs had] no real weakness—and no real strengths, either, except the all-important one: he got the ball into the court. He returned everything. His own shots were delivered—like the pitches of such baseball ‘junk artists’ as Preacher Roe of the Dodgers and Eddie Lopat of the Yankees—with a baffling variety of speeds.

Jack Kramer never stopped insisting Bobby was even better than that. He claimed that Riggs was “by far the most underrated of all the top players.”

He had such quickness and ball control, he could adapt to any surface, and he was a super match player…. [H]e could find ways to control the bigger, more powerful opponent. He could pin you back by hitting long, down the lines, and then he’d run you ragged with chips and drop shots. He was outstanding with a volley from either side, and he could lob as well as any man…. He could disguise it, and he could hit winning overheads. They weren’t powerful, but they were always on target.

In the five-plus years between the summer of 1936 and the end of 1941, Bobby won a whopping 68 amateur singles titles. TennisArchives.com credits him with a career tally–including pro tournaments–of 534 match wins against only 93 losses. Many early-round matches are not accounted for, so the actual victory count and corresponding winning percentage are quite a bit higher.

After Kramer dethroned him, Riggs stepped away from serious competition. He returned to serious tennis only in the late 1960s, after a couple of decades promoting pro tours, half-heartedly pursuing a business career, and hustling every rich golfer in America. For Sports Illustrated, it was like Bobby–“The Great Retriever”–never left. “How could anyone really forget Bobby Riggs?”

* * *

Few men could’ve mustered a second act that would outstrip such a sterling first. Only a one-of-a-kind character could play two matches for the history books at 55 years of age.

Journalist Curry Kirkpatrick wrote, “probably his entire life cycle has been one long rehearsal for Ramona”–the Mother’s Day match against Court. Riggs had often played the villain, the cocky dark-haired runt against All-American boys like Kramer. He didn’t mind, especially when it helped him get better odds.

The Battle of the Sexes spectacle could never have reached the same level of notoriety with anyone else. Bobby’s flair for promotion was a good start. But his deceptive game style was what made the whole thing work. He was the weekend pusher against Court’s heavy hitting and King’s netrushing, the unassuming physical specimen against a five-foot-nine Australian nicknamed “The Arm.” Kramer, for one, had far better male chauvinist credentials–Riggs almost certainly exaggerated his own sexism–but he never could’ve played the underdog.

King and Riggs in 1973

One of the best arguments that Bobby didn’t throw the match against Billie Jean is that he believed a small fortune in future income was at stake. He estimated that he made $1.5 million from the match at the Astrodome, and he envisioned an annual challenge match in which he’d take on the best player on the women’s circuit until someone finally beat him. His celebrity persisted–and paid off–nonetheless. But he didn’t know that until afterwards.

Whatever ultimately caused Billie Jean’s 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 victory, Riggs came to terms with it:

The operation was a great success, a beautiful promotion. The only thing is, me, the patient, got killed. But, hey, a happy ending. I cried all the way to the bank.

Bobby learned in his time hustling golf that playing well was only half the battle. Skillfully negotiating the terms of the bet–handicaps, ground rules, and the like–was every bit as important. He applied the same logic to his everyday tennis hustles, quibbling over what advantages he would give a challenger in order to create the appearance of an even match while still keeping a bit of an edge for himself.

Still, no matter what the terms, he still had to win. Across five decades of competitive tennis, he almost always did just that. In the match with Billie Jean, Bobby finally found something even better. He could win even by losing.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

René Lacoste [FRA]
Born: 2 July 1904
Died: 12 October 1996
Career: 1921-32
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1926)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 24
 

* * *

Even before he sold millions of polo shirts embroidered with his personal insignia, René Lacoste had one of the best nicknames in tennis history. He was “The Crocodile.”

Or, maybe, the alligator. The debate is almost a century old. Lacoste’s game doesn’t offer an answer. Alligators are the more timid of the two, and Lacoste rarely ventured to the net. On the other hand, crocodiles are deadlier, and on the tennis court, he was certainly that.

Like any good nickname, it’s not entirely clear how it got started. The canonical story was told by a Boston sportswriter named George Carens. In 1923, Lacoste was in Boston for a Davis Cup tie against Australia. Carens sought out up-and-coming stars, so he tagged along one day when the French team went for a stroll around the city.

Lacoste spotted a crocodile-skin valise in a shop window. He loved it, and he made a deal with team captain Allan Muhr that if he won the opening rubber against Australia’s James Anderson, Muhr would buy him the bag. Alas, he lost to the veteran in straight sets, and the French team failed to advance. Still, Carens wrote about it, and the “crocodile” tag stuck. It seemed to fit René’s game. Carens said, “He was relentless, and chewed up his opponents slowly.”

That’s the story, anyway. It’s unclear where Carens worked at the time–his first job was at the Boston Herald, but someone else covered tennis for the Herald that summer. I can’t find any references to Lacoste as the Crocodile (or the Alligator) in the American press until 1925. In September of that year, John J. Hallahan of the Boston Globe wrote that the Frenchman “is now being termed ‘Crocodile.'”

In any event, the moniker stuck. The first time it popped up in the New York Times, it was in the mouth of Lacoste’s teammate Jean Borotra. Ahead of the 1927 US Nationals, Lacoste told American reporters it would be his last full season. Borotra didn’t commit to any particular species, but he thought it was just another reptilian ploy:

Ah, that crocodile, the poor alligator. He will be lucky to win his first match in the [US national] championship. He will never play again, poor fellow. Now I will tell one.

* * *

Borotra, in his sarcasm, was half right. The 23-year-old Lacoste was at the top of his game.

A week after that comment appeared in the Times, the French team finally toppled Bill Tilden and the Americans for possession of the Davis Cup. The “Four Musketeers”–Lacoste, Borotra, Henri Cochet, and Toto Brugnon–pooled their efforts to wear out the great Tilden. Borotra and Brugnon lost the doubles, but they kept Tilden and Frank Hunter on court for five sets. Lacoste took advantage of the 34-year-old’s fatigue to beat him in singles the next day, and Cochet sealed the 1927 Cup victory with a four-set win over Bill Johnston.

The US Championships at Forest Hills the following week were little more than a victory lap for the Crocodile. Cochet lost early and Borotra fell to Tilden in the quarters, but Lacoste wouldn’t budge. He won four-set matches over Manuel Alonso and Johnston to reach the final, then bested Tilden once again, 11-9, 6-3, 11-9 in the final.

Big Bill, who had held the national title from 1920 to 1925, recognized that he had met his match. Tilden’s pen was as prolific as his racket, and he would often have reason to praise Lacoste in print. “In the perfection of his stroking, he is a machine,” he once wrote. “He was the genius–shrewd, analytical, superb in technique.”

Lacoste faced Tilden eight times between the 1925 Davis Cup Challenge Round and the 1929 Roland Garros semi-final. The stakes were always high. Every one of their encounters was either for a Davis Cup championship, or in the semi-finals or final of a grand slam. The Frenchman won six, and he pushed the American to five sets in the other two.

* * *

Borotra was also half wrong. It was unthinkable that a sportsman as single-minded and accomplished as Lacoste would simply walk away. Yet soon, he would do just that.

1927 was his last trip to Forest Hills. 1928 was his final Wimbledon and his last Davis Cup. Apart from a one-off comeback in 1932, his farewell major came at the French Championships in 1929, one month before his 25th birthday.

In that final outing, Lacoste beat Tilden and Borotra to win his seventh major title. He entered only 17 in his entire career. Few men have ever packed so many tennis exploits into so little time.

Everything about his career was astonishingly compressed. He only discovered the game when he was 15. It soon developed into an obsession, one that did not fit into the life his father had planned for him. Jean-Jules was a director of the Hispano-Suiza car company, and it was assumed that René, too, would pursue a career in business. The boy was particularly gifted in mathematics and would train as an engineer.

But nothing could shake tennis’s grip on the young Lacoste. Father and son came to an agreement. John Tunis explained in the New Yorker:

At last, however, he agreed to give his son two years to see what he could do. If at the end of those two years he was the fifth ranking player in all tennis, he was to have five years more. If not, he was to go into the factory and become an honest fellow…. That was in 1922. Never a boy applied himself as René Lacoste applied himself to tennis.

Lacoste quickly started winning, but not everyone was convinced he had the makings of a champion.

He beat Marcel Dupont, a national doubles titlist, in 1921. Dupont described him as “a mere schoolboy who can do nothing but poke the ball into the court.” Another potential rival, Paul Féret, concurred: “He is useless, this young Lacoste, he can do nothing but push the ball back and back.”

Dupont and Féret would both learn what Tilden was forced to discover just a few years later. René wasn’t just getting the ball back; he was edging opponents further and further away from their comfort zones. The Times captured the probing game style with a proverb: “It is the sort of genius that is defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains.”

The year that Lacoste made the deal with his father, he lost at Wimbledon in the first round. The following season, he reached the fourth round. In 1924, he made it to the final, where he lost a five-setter to Borotra.

At the end of the season, the experts made their evaluations, and Lacoste was ranked fifth in the world.

* * *

The Crocodile never lost his sense of urgency. He knew that his opportunities to win the sport’s greatest honors were limited, and he prepared accordingly.

From his earliest days in competition, he jotted down the tactics of potential opponents. Racing to meet his father’s deadline, Tunis wrote, “He learned the science of ballistics, of dynamics, the laws of speed, of spin, of the flight of the ball. In note books he worked out angles of a tennis court by trigonometry.” Then he applied the theory to match play, treating every foe like an algebra problem.

While other players grouched about equipment, officials, and weather conditions, Lacoste refused to be distracted. He always kept eight to ten rackets in rotation, so he wouldn’t become too dependent on any of them.

A journalist asked if he blamed his defeat at Forest Hills in 1924 to the blistering heat. His response? “Ah, ça m’est égal [it doesn’t matter]. Changes of ball, changes of climate, changes of diet, all that does not affect me. Give me three days with a new ball in a strange country and I am as good as ever.”

He was equally impervious to surface. His first major title came at the French Championships in 1925. In the final, he straight-setted Borotra, the electric serve-and-volleyer. The slow clay was tailored to his patient game, but it hardly mattered. The two men met again for the Wimbledon championship a month later, and it took Lacoste just one more set to repeat his victory.

René’s persistence even worked on the fastest of amateur-era surfaces, indoor wood. In early 1926, he tagged along with Borotra to the US National Indoor Championships in New York City. Lacoste was as unflappable as ever. Allison Danzig, writing for the New Yorker, said of the semi-final, “Vincent Richards, for all of his knocking the cover off the ball, might as well have tried to hammer down a stone wall.”

Borotra may have been the best wood-court player of all time, but when the two Frenchmen met in the final, Lacoste broke his opponent’s resolve with a 15-13 first set. The Crocodile won in four. While Borotra didn’t mind facing Tilden, there was a limit to his appetite for a struggle. “Excuse me, please,” he said, “from Mr. Lacoste.”

* * *

Lacoste’s preparation may have paid its greatest dividends in, of all things, a dead Davis Cup rubber.

Throughout the 1920s, the French made steady progress as they tried to become the first non-English speaking country to win the Davis Cup. The United States won the Cup back from Australia in 1920, and with Tilden at the top of his game, they had little trouble holding on.

Lacoste made his Cup debut in 1923, the year that he admired that crocodile-skin valise in Boston. For the first time, France came just one step short of the Challenge Round. They lost to Australia, who would stop them at the same stage in 1924. In 1925, they would finally get past the Aussies, but the Americans proved too strong in the championship round. Lacoste lost to both Tilden and Johnston, and he and Borotra lost the doubles in straight sets.

1926 wasn’t much better. France reached the Challenge Round again, but they lost the first four rubbers to the Americans. Lacoste fell to Johnston and Borotra lost to Tilden. Brugnon and Cochet failed to win a set in the doubles. The singles matches of the final day didn’t matter, but René wasn’t about to give up a chance to learn more about Tilden, the man who probably occupied more pages in his notebook than anyone else.

Tilden had needed five sets to beat Lacoste the year before, and the new, improved Crocodile was finally too much for the veteran to handle. Big Bill took the first set, and René came back to grab the second and third. Tilden grew as frustrated with his opponent’s imperturbability as his backhand:

The monotonous regularity with which that unsmiling, drab, almost dull man returned the best I could hit, seemingly without any effect upon him physically or mentally, piled almost irresistible pressure on my nervous system. I used to wish to God he would just once show some form of human reaction. I was often filled with a wild desire to throw my racket at him or hit him over the head.

Allison Danzig was pithier, writing that Tilden was “outguessed, outgeneraled, and outstroked.” Late in the third set, the American aggravated an old knee injury, and he probably should’ve retired. He played on, holding his own as Lacoste failed to work out how to put away an injured opponent. But the result was never really in doubt. While the Americans held on to the Cup, the French won a moral victory. Not only did they avoid a second straight shutout at the hands of the defenders, they finally beat Tilden.

The difference between 5-0 and 4-1 sounds merely academic. But René’s long-awaited victory helped the Frenchmen overcome the last mental block standing between them and international tennis dominance.

The floodgates opened. The next week at the US National Championships, all four of the quarter-finals pitted an American against a Frenchman, and only Vinnie Richards came through for the home team. Tilden lost a five-setter to Cochet. Lacoste beat Borotra in the final, dropping only eight games.

In 1927, as we’ve seen, the French finally triumphed. Big Bill had 50 weeks to plan yet another Davis Cup title defense, but with an aging body, a weak supporting cast, and ever-strengthening competition, there was only so much he could do. The next time the Musketeers got a crack at the American team, they pulled out a narrow victory. France would retain the Davis Cup until Fred Perry’s British team took it from them in 1933.

* * *

Lacoste had barely reached the top of the tennis world when his own body began to let him down. At the start of 1928, he struggled through a tough five-setter on the Riviera against Henry Mayes, an opponent he should’ve beaten easily. Diagnosed with neuritis, he had to take a month off. A year later, he was coping with respiratory disease and stopping competing entirely.

His physical deterioration may have made a tough decision easier. 1929 was the end of the five-year term that his father had granted him to pursue the game. It wasn’t long before Lacoste was selling his signature short-sleeved, crocodile-emblazoned shirts. It turned out that René and his father had had little to argue about: He became a tennis champion and a success in industry, surpassing even Jean-Jules.

When Lacoste retired from competitive play, the rest of the circuit could finally breathe a sigh of relief. They had spent the last half-decade comparing the Frenchman to a machine, one that mere flesh and blood couldn’t hope to compete with. The New Yorker summed it up in 1926: “Mr. Tilden, after all, is human and will make an error. M. Lacoste is simply unreasonable.”

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Vic Seixas [USA]
Born: 30 August 1923
Career: 1940-74
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1954)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 56
 

* * *

25 years before Vitas Gerulaitis and Jimmy Connors, tennis had Vic Seixas and Ken Rosewall.

Seixas did not have a lot of reason for optimism when he took the court for the second rubber of the 1954 Davis Cup Challenge Round. The Americans had lost to the Australians four years running, and worse, Rosewall owned a six-match winning streak against Seixas. The last victory was just one month old.

Years later, Vic said that Rosewall might not have been the best player he ever encountered, but he was “the toughest opponent I’ve ever faced.” Everything about the matchup tilted in the young Australian’s favor. Seixas was an expert at the net, but with an inconsistent serve and spotty groundstrokes, he didn’t always have a clear path to get there. Rosewall, 11 years the American’s junior, simply hit one passing shot after another.

Their third meeting came in the final of the French Championships in 1953. According to Rosewall’s biographer, Peter Rowley, the very first game of that match “broke Seixas’ heart.” Three of the four points were return winners for the Aussie. The fourth was a perfect drop shot. Vic made a final push in the third set, but the title went to Rosewall in four.

Still, Seixas was optimistic. Before the 1954 Davis Cup showdown, as he remembered it, he said, “Watch out, Ken, because nobody has ever beaten me nine times in a row.” It really would’ve been seven–and nine of ten–but you get the idea.

* * *

Spoiler alert: Seixas won the match. Just as nobody could beat Gerulaitis 17 times in a row (except Björn Borg), Vic was unbeatable when facing an opponent who had owned him for so long.

Before Seixas upset Rosewall, Tony Trabert had eked out a victory over Lew Hoad. The next day, the Americans came back out for the doubles. Vic had never been so confident. On the changeover after the Aussies forced a fifth set, Seixas told captain Bill Talbert, “Don’t worry, Cap, they’re just delaying the inevitable.”

Neither Talbert, nor anyone else in the tennis world, was accustomed to seeing such a calm, confident Vic. His last name is pronounced “SAY-shus,” giving rise to a convenient nickname of “Vexatious.” Journalist Herbert Warren Wind was kinder, punning on the name for “efficeixas” and “audeixas,” but Seixas’s querelousness was what stuck in the mind. While he was a perfect gentleman off the court, he never let a close line call go unchallenged. He was qualified as an umpire, and he never doubted that he had the best eyes of anyone on duty.

Talbert was convinced that, for Seixas, the key to beating Rosewall was mental. He described his player as “a moody veteran given to periods of deep depression and flashes of brilliance.” Once he had a game plan he felt could cope with the sharpshooting Australian, Vic was “in a happy, positive frame of mind.” Unlike in the 1953 Challenge Round, when Seixas challenged one line call far past the point of 1950s-era decorum, he remained focused throughout the four sets it took to finish off Rosewall.

The Americans triumphed, but it turned to be a mere blip in Vic’s futility against the young Aussie. They met for the last time at Wimbledon in 1956, when Rosewall won in the semi-finals, 7-5 in the fifth set. Seixas threw his racket, covered his ears to block out the cheers for his opponent, and shrugged off Rosewall’s arm after they shook hands at net.

Even though the Australians cultivated on-court diffidence to the point of apparent apathy, they respected their volatile rival. The Aussie Prime Minister R. G. Menzies, whose passion for tennis occasionally slowed the legislative gears, was prepared to forgive him anything. Vic’s behavior, Menzies wrote, “must be overlooked when you realize it is a chip of the rugged and admirable character of Seixas the Fighter on court.”

* * *

Only a few years earlier, no one would’ve thought it possible that a 30-something Vic Seixas could become both Wimbledon champion and Davis Cup hero.

He started early, picking up the sport in his hometown of Philadelphia at age 5 or 6. He could beat his father–“a mediocre club player”–within two weeks. He earned a tennis scholarship to Penn Charter high school, and he came within one point of beating Budge Patty for the national junior title.

Then World War II intervened. He spent most of the conflict in the South Pacific, testing and ferrying airplanes for the Army Air Corps. Returning to civilian life, he went to school at the University of North Carolina, where he won 63 of 66 interscholastic tennis matches and played guard on the basketball team. A multi-sport star who also excelled at squash, he always considered himself an athlete who happened to play tennis. Had tennis not worked out, he said, he would’ve given his all to baseball instead.

By the time Vic graduated, a future as a “frustrated baseball player” seemed a lot more likely than an international tennis career. Sports Illustrated explained in 1957:

By every reasonable law of athletics, he should have had no international career at all. If a tennis player is going to develop into a star, he invariably gives definite indications of this when he is in his early 20s. By 27 he is on the way down. Seixas began when he was 27.

He was a mere “regional lion” at the start of 1950. But sent on a tour abroad that year with Art Larsen, Doris Hart, and Shirley Fry, he reached the quarters at the French and the semis at Wimbledon. The busy schedule of a touring player suited him. In eight attempts at Forest Hills as a junior or a part-timer, he had never surpassed the fourth round.

* * *

Seixas played the kind of tennis you’d expect from a late bloomer. Nothing about his game was sensational, except perhaps his volleys. His kick serve was fluid and reliable, but he couldn’t always control his more powerful first delivery. His groundstrokes were compact; neither the loopy forehand nor the sliced backhand functioned as much of a weapon.

These were hardly the strokes of a champion. Australian Davis Cup captain Harry Hopman considered him the most unorthodox of the top ten. A friend told Seixas, “After many years you’ve gained control of basically unsound shots.”

What set Vic apart was sheer tenacity. Like David Ferrer a half-century later, Seixas fought for every point. While that level of persistence has become standard for a certain type of 21st-century competitor, it was extremely rare in the amateur era. The “Big Game” style played by Jack Kramer, Ted Schroeder, and Trabert coupled aggressive serve-and-volleying with periods of rest. Few players were ashamed to tank the third set after winning the first two.

Seixas took full advantage of the conventional wisdom. When an opponent let down his guard, he pounced. Even on his best day, he would have had no chance against an in-form Lew Hoad. But Hoad could rarely sustain the all-time-great shotmaking that his peers still rave about. Lew straight-setted Seixas three times, but Vic led their career head-to-head, six matches to five.

Going hard on every point required a level of conditioning that most of Vic’s peers didn’t even attempt. The Hopman-trained Australians did, and that was part of what kept them on top. Seixas was one of the few men who still stood a chance if he found himself in a fifth set against a Hopmanite.

The combination of superior fitness and persistent fight also earned him laurels that his raw talent didn’t obviously deserve. At Wimbledon in 1953, Seixas fought off Hoad in the quarter-finals, winning a 9-7 fifth set. In the semis, he lost the second and third sets to Australian left-hander Mervyn Rose, 12-10 and 11-9. Vic had more left in the tank, and he came back from the two-sets-to-one deficit to win. Rosewall had lost early, so all that was left for Seixas was a routine straight-set victory in the final over the unseeded Dane, Kurt Nielsen.

Seixas realized that the draw broke his way. Rosewall probably would’ve gotten the better of him. But he always said he didn’t want to “belittle” his own accomplishment, and rightfully so.

Vic reached the quarter-finals of a major 20 times in his career, including 10 semi-finals and 5 finals. If you give yourself that many chances at the ultimate prize, you’ll eventually find fortune on your side.

He took advantage of another set of favorable developments at Forest Hills in 1954. He had been entering the US National Championships almost every year since 1940, when he won a match as a 17-year-old and nearly ousted Frank Kovacs. He had reached two finals, losing to Frank Sedgman in 1951 and Trabert in 1953.

In 1954, none of Vic’s nemeses got in the way. Sedgman had turned pro. Hoad lost a marathon quarter-final to the underachieving American Ham Richardson. Both Trabert and Rosewall lost to Rex Hartwig, an Australian whose extreme highs and lows made Hoad look like an accountant. Seixas probably wasn’t the best player in the draw–though Hopman would put him at the top of his year-end list–but he was far too steady for Hartwig in a four-set final.

* * *

Seixas tends to be remembered as a second-class great, behind Trabert and all those Australians. Sportswriter Al Laney showered him in backhanded praise, describing Vic as one of a few players “who went very far in the game, and gave us some of our most pleasurable moments, not so much because they really belonged on the highest rung of the ladder but because they were such indomitable fighters.”

Jack Kramer was more direct. He never offered Seixas a pro contract because he “was simply not good enough.” He wrote, “Seixas [and a few others] were smart enough to realize that the only reason they won in the amateurs was because the best players had turned pro.”

Maybe. Seixas, Trabert, Rosewall, and Hoad all would’ve had a harder time if Kramer and Richard “Pancho” González had been contesting Wimbledon and Forest Hills every year. Kramer was only two years older than Vic, and González was several years younger, but they crossed paths only at the beginning of Seixas’s time as a star. Whether he was “good enough” or not, Vic held his own against the best amateurs of the 1950s in the year or two before Kramer deemed them worthy of professional deals.

Beyond the major titles and the 1954 Davis Cup, Seixas’s legacy rests in his astonishing longevity. He ultimately played Forest Hills 28 times, and he lost in the first round only twice. In 1966, he had long been a part-time player again, working as a stockbroker in Philadelphia for Goldman Sachs. Yet at the National Championships, he outlasted a cramping Stan Smith, 23 years his junior. Earlier that summer, he won a three-and-a-half-hour match against 22-year-old Australian Davis Cupper Bill Bowrey.

Now, a month away from his 99th birthday, Seixas is the oldest living Hall of Famer. (“I’d rather be the youngest,” he likes to say.) Even amid such a sterling crowd, Vic continues to outlast the competition.