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!

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Mary Pierce [FRA]
Born: 15 January 1975
Career: 1990-2006
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1995)
Peak Elo rating: 2,230 (4th place, 1995)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 18
 

* * *

Mary Pierce had a word to describe the fans at Roland Garros. “They’re fickle about me,” she said.

She both was and was not a hometown hero. Born in Canada to a French mother and an American father and raised in Florida, she could just as easily have ended up playing for the USA. The French Federation landed her allegiance instead, and she spent her career representing the tricolore.

Pierce entered the French Open for the first time as a wild card in 1990. She was only 15 years old, yet she already had more than a year of pro experience. Her first two Roland Garros campaigns ended early at the hands of veteran stars Mary Joe Fernández and Gabriela Sabatini. In 1992, she reached her first second week in Paris, falling to an even younger rival, Jennifer Capriati. Capriati stopped her at the same stage the following year as well.

No one doubted that Mary had the tools to go further. Her groundstrokes were as powerful as any on tour. At five-feet-eleven-inches, she was one of the “big babes” who defined the era for commentator Mary Carillo. One fellow player said of her baseline weapons, “When Mary Pierce hits the ball, it stays hit.”

The breakthrough finally came in front of the “home” fans in 1994. There was nothing in her record–except that tantalizing potential–to suggest it was coming. She bulldozed the French Open field, dropping only six games in five matches. She double-bageled Lori McNeil and dropped a 6-1, 6-1 defeat on Amanda Coetzer.

Pierce with Arantxa Sánchez Vicario
ahead of the 1994 Roland Garros final

She was even better against top seed Steffi Graf in the semi-final. Pierce simply blasted the German off the court. She won 6-2, 6-2, handing Graf her worst defeat at a major in three years. After the match, Steffi spoke for plenty of frustrated women on tour: “What tactic can you have when she puts away every point?”

The pressure finally caught up with the 19-year-old before the final. Arantxa Sánchez Vicario had the patience to withstand Pierce’s barrage, and she held off the challenge, 6-4, 6-4.

Mary won over the French crowd, but only temporarily. While she became a grand slam champion in Australia the following year, she won only ten matches in her next five appearances at Roland Garros. The Parisian crowds booed as often as they cheered.

No matter. Mary Pierce had faced worse. Even after a decade on tour, she had plenty of room to develop, physically, tactically, and mentally. In time, she would win over the French gallery for good.

* * *

The USTA had plenty of chances to regret letting Pierce out of their grasp. The French flag showed next to her name as she reached six major finals and ascended to third place in the WTA rankings. Even though she spoke French like a Floridian, she helped her mother’s country to Fed Cup titles in 1997 and 2003, defeating the Americans in the final of the latter campaign.

But this was no failure of talent evaluation. In the late 1980s, USTA scouts recognized the raw talent that would take Mary to the top of the game, even as they threw unprecedented financial and organizational support behind Capriati. Coaches such as Ron Woods and Stan Smith were wowed by what she had accomplished by her early teens, and they wanted to help her improve her match-play skills.

What the USTA couldn’t do was deal with Jim Pierce. Jim was “the original tennis dad from hell,” according to a 2000 profile in the Guardian. He was far from the first–Andrea Jaeger could tell you stories about her father Roland–but he brought the type to its apotheosis.

Mary recently told the New York Times, “From age 10 to 18, my life was basically hell on earth.” As soon as Jim saw the spark of her talent, he took full control of her development. Coaches and hitting partners would come and go, but he never let them get too close. They often chose to stay at arm’s length because Jim was outspoken at his best, physically threatening at his worst.

Jim Pierce, showing restraint

By the time Mary was 12, her father had crossed so many lines that the Florida Tennis Association banned him from tournaments for six months. He hit a fellow parent, and he berated Mary’s opponents in profanity-laced outbursts. Rumors swirled that he was physically abusive of his daughter. He described himself as a former beach bum, but in reality, he was a convicted felon who had served prison time in two states.

His behavior didn’t improve. The rest of the family–Mary, her mother Yannick, and younger brother David–split from him. He followed her on tour anyway. She filed restraining orders and hired a new bodyguard at each tour stop. The Women’s Tennis Council passed a rule in late 1992 making it possible to ban parents and coaches from tournaments. It was no secret why. The “Jim Pierce rule” was invoked against its namesake in a matter of months.

* * *

Woods, the USTA coach, delivered the understatement of the year to Sports Illustrated in 1993: “It’s surprising that she could play with that kind of baggage.” When she turned 18 that January, she was ranked 12th in the world, with four tour-level titles to her name.

With Jim out of the way, Mary returned to Nick Bollettieri’s academy, where she had briefly trained before Jim alienated yet another group of peers. Bollettieri set her two goals. She would need to get in better shape (he wrote to her, “you are fat!”), and she would have to learn to fend for herself on court, rather than relying so much on support from courtside.

Results came quickly. Pierce claimed her first top-ten scalps, beating both Sabatini and Martina Navratilova at the 1993 year-end championships. She reached the Roland Garros final the following year. After a particularly hard off-season training regimen with her full-time coach, Sven Groeneveld, she won the 1995 Australian Open. She never lost more than four games in a set, and she finished the tournament with wins over the top two seeds, Sánchez Vicario and Conchita Martínez.

Most importantly, from Bollettieri’s perspective, she did it without him. He had to leave Australia before the semi-final, but he saw on television that she turned to her coach’s box only when it was time to celebrate the victory.

Ironically, her new coach was a bit like her old one. When they split in 1996, Pierce compared the two:

My dad was very outspoken, like Nick is. My dad would talk to anyone about anything, kind of like Nick. And my dad would talk about everything openly and sometimes exaggerate it or blow it up, kind of like Nick.

Jim could be menacing and short-sighted, but as he would point out to anyone who would listen, he took his daughter to 14th in the world rankings by himself. While Mary distanced herself from her father, she–like Andrea Jaeger with Roland–gave him a great deal of credit for her success and insisted he acted with the best of intentions. Her teen years may have been “hell on earth,” but she believed she would never have become a champion otherwise.

* * *

Pierce couldn’t sustain the level that took her to two grand slam finals in the space of eight months. 1996 was a particular struggle. After the break from Bollettieri, she reached only one final and lost to 82nd-ranked Barbara Rittner at Roland Garros. She dropped out of the WTA top 20 for the first time in nearly five years.

Steadily, she regained control of her health, her weight, and the family situation that all too often made sports columns sound like the gossip page. She reconciled with Jim and occasionally even trained with him, though in limited doses and only on her own terms. She made it back to the Australian Open final in 1997, won four titles in 1998, and returned to the top five by the end of 1999.

In early 2000, she hired a a familiar face as her new coach. Brother David was no Jim, but he did work her hard. Around the same time, a conversation with a fellow player, Linda Wild, persuaded her to become a born-again Christian. The shift in her mindset was significant enough that some of her peers assumed she was seeing a sports psychologist.

The new outlook–or perhaps the new coaching arrangement–showed up in her results immediately. At Hilton Head in April, she won the title with the loss only twelve games in five matches. After beating Monica Seles, 6-1, 6-1, she destroyed Sánchez Vicario in the final. Her 6-1, 6-0 victory required only 83 points, 27 of which were winners off the Pierce racket.

Despite the bludgeoning beatdowns she handed out in South Carolina, Mary’s game had become more well-rounded. Perhaps sharing a court with master tactician Martina Hingis helped: The two women paired up that year at the Australian Open, where they reached the final together. They would win the doubles title in Paris.

Pierce’s newfound courtcraft allowed her to clear the final hurdle at Roland Garros. She beat Seles in a quarter-final slugfest, then narrowly defeated Hingis in the semis after squandering match points and losing the second set. The final against Conchita Martínez was comparatively simple. Pierce hit 33 winners to her opponent’s 16, and she won 26 of 36 points at net. She seized her second grand slam title, 6-2, 7-5.

For a day, at least, the French had nothing to be fickle about.

* * *

Mary had no opportunity to build on her triumph. Back and shoulder injuries limited her to only 10 events in the next 18 months, and she wouldn’t be fully healthy for longer yet. She helped the French to a Fed Cup championship in 2003, but she wouldn’t reach her another final on her own until the following year, when Kim Clijsters beat her at the Paris Indoors.

Having won majors at age 20 and age 25, Pierce couldn’t reasonably hope for the pattern to continue with another grand slam title after her 30th birthday. Yet she nearly pulled it off.

Back again with her brother, Mary rounded into form just in time for the French Open. Her ranking remained outside the top 20, so a difficult draw awaited her. Just to reach the semi-finals, she needed to beat three top-ten seeds: Vera Zvonareva, Patty Schnyder, and top-ranked Lindsay Davenport. After breezing past Elena Likhotseva in the semi-finals, she was finally stopped by Justine Henin, who beat her, 6-1, 6-1. It was her fifth major final, a full half-decade after her fourth.

She wouldn’t need to wait as long for number six. She reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, then won ten straight sets to take a title in San Diego. At the US Open, she got her revenge against Henin in the fourth round, then beat top-tenners Amelie Mauresmo and Elena Dementieva for a second major final of the season. This time it was Clijsters who left her as the runner-up.

Two months and one Moscow title later, Pierce was–again–back in the top five. She finished her campaign at the year-end championships with the best week of her career. She beat Davenport, Clijsters, Mauresmo, and Dementieva before losing a marathon three-setter to Mauresmo in the final. Measured by consistency, this comeback was even better than the one that had earned her a Roland Garros title five years earlier.

Alas, it didn’t last. A new set of injuries kept her out of action from February to July. Then at Linz in October, she tore a ligament in her left knee, collapsing on court only a few points from a second-round victory. Her career was over, even if it would take a few years before she made it official.

Pierce’s legacy–and her treatment by the French crowd–has become less complicated in the years since. Her biography is no longer dominated by her father’s misbehavior, no matter how much it explains her rocky rise to the top. Her bad losses are largely forgotten, no more than footnotes next to the triumphant wins. Her devastating groundstrokes–the hardest hit by any of the “big babes” of the 1990s and the core of her success on tour–are more than enough to ensure her a place in tennis history.

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

* * *

Manolo Santana [ESP]
Born: 10 May 1938
Died: 11 December 2021
Career: 1956-80
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1965)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 69
 

* * *

I don’t know exactly when Manolo Santana said, “Grass is just for cows.” Most sources claim only that he said it before winning Wimbledon in 1966. It’s one of the most famous quips in tennis history, often repeated by frustrated clay-court warriors in the half-century since.

Obviously he said it before his Wimbledon title. Only a first-class jerk would say it after winning the sport’s most prestigious championship–and Santana would never have been so rude. But “before” is vague. Are we talking about 1958, when the 20-year-old lost his first match at the All-England Club in straight sets? Or was it in an interview right before the 1966 event, which he entered as the 4th seed with a Forest Hills title under his belt?

There’s no doubt Manolo preferred the dirt. He was the greatest clay-court player of his generation, twice ousting Nicola Pietrangeli in the final at Roland Garros. He rarely entered more than three grass-court events in a season. In 1965, his title-winning run at the US National Championships was his only appearance on turf apart from Davis Cup.

For all his reluctance to spoil a good pasture, he began sorting out the secrets to grass-court success long before 1966. In 1962, he reached the Wimbledon quarter-finals, beating a young Cliff Drysdale and American Davis Cupper Frank Froehling before taking a set from Rod Laver in the round of eight. The next year, he went one round further.

All it took for Santana to turn in a good result on grass, apparently, was a bit of preparation. In his second attempt at Forest Hills, in 1964, he crashed out in the second round. Roger Taylor beat him in a five-setter, and Manolo pointed to his late arrival in the States, two days before the tournament began. The following year, he got two weeks of practice time on turf. The result: Seven wins, and his first major title on grass.

He told the journalist Herbert Warren Wind that even two weeks wasn’t enough. Six weeks would be ideal. And if he had to play on grass, he preferred the harder surface of the All-England Club.

In 1966, he skipped the French to give himself five weeks of proper Wimbledon prep. He needed every minute of it. It took a lucky break and two narrow escapes, but Santana ultimately proved that the grass wasn’t just for cows. It was prime grazing land for Spanish dirtballers, too.

* * *

Santana’s list of firsts is seemingly endless. He was the first Spanish Wimbledon champion, and the first from Continental Europe since Yvon Petra in 1946. (1954 titlist Jaroslav Drobný was Czech, but he had defected and then represented Egypt.) When he won Forest Hills, he was the first champion from the Continent since Henri Cochet in 1928.

His Roland Garros titles were the first majors ever won by a Spaniard. In 1965, he led his national team to the Davis Cup Inter-Zonal round for the first time, advancing all the way to a date with the Australian side in the Challenge Round.

Even in 2006, with a new Spanish star undeniably on the rise, Manolo relayed to a journalist what his countrymen still said: “Santana is tennis and tennis is Santana.”

His preeminence obscured the utter implausibility of his rise to stardom. Society in Generalissimo Franco’s Spain was as stratified as any in Europe. Tennis was an upper-class sport. Santana was the son of an electrician, a working-class kid with few prospects.

Santana, in 1965, expressing his opinion of grass court tennis

It wasn’t that there were few public tennis courts in Madrid–there were no playing opportunities outside of the city’s exclusive clubs. The youngster dropped out of school at age 10 and worked as a ballboy for tips at the Club Tenis de Velasquez. His first racket was one that he carved himself at age 12. The next year, he won the club’s tournament for ball boys, which earned him a membership.

Even then, Manolo’s chances of an international athletic career were effectively nil. It took a tragedy to open the door. When he was 16, his father died, and a family from the club–the Romero Giróns–took him under their wing. Gloria Girón not only paid for his tennis training, she also provided a tutor to make up for the schooling he had missed. Gloria couldn’t give him a proper society pedigree, but she could ensure that he represent his country well. He wasn’t allowed to travel abroad on his own until she thought his social skills were up to the job.

Santana’s took his first trip to the States in 1959, when he was 21 years old. He made friends easily, as he always would, and he impressed Frank Froehling by picking up a $25 check at a dinner with players who were presumably earning more expense money than he was. On the other hand, his game still needed work. Froehling’s first impression was that the youngster was “really bad.”

* * *

Froehling witnessed one of the Spaniard’s first stabs at grass court play. On the familiar clay, Santana showed much more promise. He won his first tournament abroad in 1959, when he beat Luis Ayala for the International Championships of Argentina. The next year, he reached his first major quarter-final, overcoming 4th-seeded Rod Laver in the third round, 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 5-7, 6-3.

He would beat Laver in another five-setter the following year, defeating the Australian in the semi-finals before beating Pietrangeli for his first major. Laver narrowly got the better of Manolo in those days, winning 7 of 13 meetings between 1960 and 1962. But on clay, Santana was the superior player, taking 6 of 9. He certainly made an impression on Rocket Rod:

He was a magician on clay. Manolo could hit the most incredible angles, drive you crazy with topspin lobs or drop shots. And he improved his volleying so that he was dangerous on grass, too. He toyed with me a couple of times in Europe, letting me know I had a lot to learn about clay.

Laver figured out how to play on the crushed brick, of course–he won Roland Garros in 1962 and 1969. But even in 1970, with the Australian remaining at the top of the game and Santana on his way toward retirement, Manolo could work his magic. One of his last titles came at Barcelona that year, straight-setting Laver in the final.

Bud Collins dubbed Santana the “Godfather of the Groundstrokes.” His forehand was a topspin weapon ahead of its time, one that made his well-disguised dropshots even more deadly. His contemporary, the American player and journalist Gene Scott, credited him as having “literally invented” the backhand topspin lob.

As if that wasn’t enough, another commentator said, “[H]e sees the ball a yard faster than most others.” Scott considered him a genius. Manolo was so confident in his return of serve that he never worried about a strong server. “I’m more scared myself,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1967, “when I see that a player is returning serve well, rather than just serving well.”

* * *

Manolo’s record at majors is rather sparse. Between his first Wimbledon in 1958 and his last appearance at Forest Hills in 1977, he played only 25 slams. He never entered the Australian Championships, and only once–in 1964–did he play all three of the others in the same season.

The Wimbledon title solidified his status as a sporting legend in Spain, but he would’ve been a megastar without it. Perhaps more than any other player of his era, Santana made his reputation with exploits in the Davis Cup.

When he first traveled to the United States, the Davis Cup had spent more than two decades shuttling between only two homes, America and Australia. Every year between 1938 and 1959–with a break for World War II–those two nations contested the Challenge Round for possession of the Cup.

Australia continued to churn out an endless stream of stars–Laver, Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle, and more–while the Americans failed to keep pace. Other nations, especially in Europe, became more competitive. Italy reached the Challenge Round in 1960 and 1961, and Mexico was the runner-up in 1962. Pro champion Richard “Pancho” González sometimes coached the US team, and he recognized how the field had changed since he played Davis Cup in 1949. “It is a much bigger thing now. For the first time many of these small countries have a chance, and they work hard at it.”

The plural “they” is a bit deceptive. A Spanish Davis Cup campaign in those years meant that one man almost single-handedly took on the rest of Europe.

Before the 1965 Challenge Round.
L to R: Juan Gisbert, Santana, Emerson, and Stolle

Spain’s effort in 1963 gives you some idea of what Manolo was up against. Playing in the European zone, the Spaniards opened against the West Germans in Cologne, the first weekend in May. Santana won his two singles matches in straight sets, and since he skipped the doubles, his side only barely squeaked through. Four weeks later–just after Roland Garros–Spain hosted Italy in Barcelona. Manolo lost the opening singles to Pietrangeli, but he won the doubles and his second singles rubber to secure the victory.

Two more weeks, and the French came to Barcelona. Santana played and won three rubbers. After Wimbledon, the Europe zone semi-final pitted Spain against Great Britain, and this time they had to play on grass. Manolo’s teammate Lis Arilla failed to win a set in either of his singles matches. Santana managed to get past Bobby Wilson in five, but he and Arilla dropped a tight doubles rubber. His final singles match, against Mike Sangster, was a dead rubber, but you wouldn’t have known by the way they played. The Spaniard drew even through four sets before falling, 7-5 in the fifth.

* * *

Santana gave four weeks of his season, won 8 of 11 matches he played, and his side didn’t come anywhere near the vaunted Challenge Round. Great Britain went on to lose to the United States, who lost to Australia.

There were plenty of years like that. Manolo played a whopping 46 ties in his career, winning 92 matches–69 singles and 23 doubles. Only Pietrangeli and Ilie Năstase won more.

The breakthrough finally came in 1965. Spain defeated Greece, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa to win the European zone. Santana won 11 of 11 matches, dropping only two sets, both in doubles. The reward was an Inter-Zonal match with the Americans, to be played at home in Barcelona. On red clay.

The home team got off to a stunning start when the 23-year-old Juan Gisbert upset the top American, Dennis Ralston. Then Manolo took over. He straight-setted Frank Froehling to give Spain a commanding 2-0 lead. The next day, he and Arilla outlasted Ralston and Clark Graebner, 9-7 in the fifth, to secure the tie.

The crowd was enthusiastic but not knowledgeable. In Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford joked that Spanish fans “assumed that Spain had as much chance of beating the U.S. in tennis as in nuclear warfare.” The reaction after the clinching doubles rubber was bedlam:

But if the crowds seemed noisy at first, it became obvious later on that they had been behaving with considerable restraint. The scene that transpired when the verdict was clinched with a victory in the doubles for a 3-0 lead was something straight out of your neighborhood bullring. Santana and his partner, Lis Arilla, were hoisted on willing shoulders and carried about like matadors. Cushions, flung high and long, glided to rest on the court in a gay litter. Ball boys scooped them together and rolled on them, tumbling in an aimless ecstasy. Then Jimmy Bartroli, the Spanish captain, got out the ball bags and started flinging tennis balls to the happy spectators. There may have been past receptions in Barcelona equal to this one–Columbus came back there after discovering America–but it is difficult to conceive of one surpassing it.

In November, the Spaniards beat India–nine sets played, nine sets won for Santana–to advance to the Challenge Round.

After six ties and 16 straight match victories for Santana, the Challenge Round was a bit of a victory tour. No one, probably including the challengers themselves, thought that they had a chance against the Australians, in Australia, on grass. The Spanish team spent several weeks practicing Down Under, but they didn’t enter any tournaments, and the local press hinted that they weren’t giving it their all.

The accusation was probably meritless–some locals were just miffed because their tournaments would’ve made more money with Spanish headliners. In any case, the conventional wisdom was proven right. Santana narrowly lost the opening rubber to Stolle, 10-12, 3-6, 6-1, 6-4, 7-5. Gisbert was helpless against Emerson, the reigning Wimbledon champion. Manolo and Arilla were bested by the youngsters Tony Roche and John Newcombe in four sets.

The Cup would stay in Australia, but there was a consolation prize. On the third day of play, Santana upset Emerson, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4, 15-13. Sure, the tie was over, but it was a clash between the two great amateur champions, and the Spaniard had come out on top. The Spanish crowd was smaller than the one in Barcelona, but it was every bit as vociferous. It may be the only time in Davis Cup Challenge Round history that a player was carried off on the shoulders of his fans after winning a dead rubber.

* * *

In Santana’s era, players often used majors to prepare for the Davis Cup. By 1965, Manolo was more modern in his outlook. He saw the Challenge Round–and its many weeks of pre-competition training on grass courts–as a perfect way to ready himself for Wimbledon the following year.

By the time he took the court against Isao Watanabe in the first round of the 1966 Championships, he was, probably for the first time, ready for Wimbledon. He held the US National crown. He had beaten two-time defending champion Emerson in Australia. He had skipped the French Championships in favor of more time to prepare on turf.

All the work was nearly wasted when Santana faced the Australian Ken Fletcher in the quarter-finals. Fletcher was best known as a doubles player; he never passed the quarters of a major outside of his home country. Yet after a long, see-saw battle, he served for the match against Manolo. One game from defeat, the Spaniard needed his entire arsenal of backhand lobs and drop shots to escape, winning in the fifth set, 6-2, 3-6, 8-6, 4-6, 7-5.

The draw lined him up for a semi-final meeting with Emerson. But fate intervened. Against another Australian doubles maven, Owen Davidson, the defending champ took off after a short ball, slipped on the grass, and crashed into the umpire’s chair. He limped to a four-set defeat in the quarters. Santana, seeded fourth, was now the favorite, at least on paper. Roche and Stolle, the second and third seeds, also failed to reach the final four.

Davidson should’ve been easy pickings for the Spaniard, but he played what he later called “the best competitive tennis of my life.” Santana led 5-1 in the fifth, and the Aussie broke him. When Santana reached triple match point at 5-4, Davidson won five points in a row. But that was the underdog’s last gasp. Manolo advanced to the final by a whisker, 6-2, 4-6, 9-7, 3-6, 7-5.

His opponent for the title was the American Dennis Ralston, who had so disappointed his Davis Cup side in Barcelona the previous year. Once the great hope of American tennis, the 23-year-old had to settle for near-greatness and a constant struggle for confidence in big matches. He didn’t have Santana’s track record at majors, but his game was better suited to the surface, and he had beaten the Spaniard at Queen’s Club a few weeks earlier.

With another Wimbledon fortnight and two tight matches under his belt, Santana was simply too good. He played the net like a born serve-and-volleyer, winning more than two-thirds of his 128 net approaches. While Ralston double-faulted nine times, Manolo made only three unforced errors from the baseline. It was over in straights, 6-4, 11-9, 6-4.

Princess Margaret congratulated the victor after the match. She said, “Muy bueno.”

* * *

Santana hurt his ankle, and he failed to defend his Forest Hills title, losing to John Newcombe in the semi-finals. He underwent ankle surgery in the offseason, and the step he lost was evident when he crashed out of Wimbledon in the first round the following year.

Still, he managed to bring his best when Spanish pride was on the line. As they had in 1965, Santana and company fought through six Davis Cup ties to reach the 1967 Challenge Round. The Americans weren’t a factor this time, as they had lost a shocker in the early going to Ecuador. Manolo got a glimpse of the future in his own early rounds, facing Romania. He beat both Ilie Năstase and Ion Țiriac in the singles, but not before losing a bagel set to Năstase and dropping the doubles against them.

In the 1967 Challenge Round, Emerson was ready for him. Santana managed only six games. Once again, the Spanish team was finished at the end of the second day, and their hero had to settle for a victory in a dead rubber, this time against Newcombe.

Manolo would continue to enter tournaments until the late 1970s, but he gradually stepped away from the game. Even in 1967, it was clear to journalist Frank Deford that he wanted to make time for other pursuits: a growing family and a job at Philip Morris. The former ballboy realized he had talents that went beyond the tennis court, and he wanted to prove it.

Santana with Nadal in 2009

Yet his influence remained. Every Spanish player of the last half-century, from Manuel Orantes to Arantxa Sánchez Vicario to Rafael Nadal, has acknowledged that Spanish tennis would not have developed the way it did if it weren’t for Manolo.

When Santana died last year, Nadal credited him “for opening the way for others.” He wasn’t able to deliver the Davis Cup to Spain, but his progeny finally won it in 2000. They’ve done it five more times since. His major titles in the 1960s created a tennis boom that eventually led to grand slam wins for eight more of his countrymen.

Spaniards still mostly prefer clay. But today they grow up knowing that grass-court heroics are also within their grasp. The nation waited 89 years for their first Wimbledon champion, and it took 42 more before Nadal became their second man to hoist the trophy. Thanks in part to the long shadow of Manolo Santana, the wait for the country’s next hero at Wimbledon will be shorter still.

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

* * *

Nancy Richey [USA]
Born: 24 August 1942
Career: 1959-78
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1969)
Peak Elo rating: 2,345 (2nd place, 1965)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 72
 

At the end of 1965, the leaders of the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) voted to finalize their annual rankings. The responsible committee had already generated a list. Usually, all that was left was a rubber stamp.

The ranking committee gave the top women’s place for the 1965 season to the 22-year-old, recently-married Billie Jean King. She had a good case: six titles, including a sweep of the summer grass-court circuit leading up to Forest Hills. She had reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon and the final at the US National Championships, where she lost to Margaret Smith (now Margaret Court).

The representative from Texas wasn’t so sure. He stood up to propose dropping King to number two, behind the Lone Star State’s own Nancy Richey. Richey, 15 months older than King at 23 years of age, also had the makings of a sterling national number one. Her 1965 haul included seven titles on four different surfaces. Three of them required final-round victories over Smith. Richey and King hadn’t played each other in 1965, but in four encounters the year before, Nancy won three.

No one seconded the proposal to move Richey to number one. But a compromise was struck: Billie Jean and Nancy would be co-ranked number one.

If there hadn’t been a rivalry between the two women before, there certainly was now.

* * *

Richey was the perfect foil for Billie Jean and her aggressive serve-and-volley game. King excelled on grass, untroubled by bad bounces because her high-energy style rarely allowed the ball to touch the ground.

Nancy was a clay-courter through-and-through. Dirt was the most common court surface back home in Texas, and she developed the game to match. While she wasn’t particularly fast, she was a grinder of the first order. In 1960, the New York Times pegged the 17-year-old as “a girl who will run after a ball even into the next court.”

She ran, but she rarely ran forward. While her volleys were serviceable, her mobility at net was subpar. Usually it didn’t matter. In 1964, World Tennis described her forehand and backhand as “the hardest groundstrokes in the game.” She was dubbed the “Two-Shot Texan” and drew comparisons with another great baseliner, Maureen Connolly.

Richey’s persistence wasn’t limited to those times when an opponent stood across the net. She quickly developed a reputation for a practice regimen–and single-mindedness–that would kill most of her peers. The first time she played Julie Heldman, in Puerto Rico in 1962, she won 6-0, 6-0. Then she headed back out to the courts for several hours of practice.

She came by her doggedness honestly. Her father, George Richey, showed promise as a baseball pitcher before injuring his throwing elbow at age 14. Tennis was the only one-armed sport he knew of, so that’s what he picked up. He didn’t have the freedom to pursue the amateur game, but as a teaching pro, he was good enough to crack the top ten in the world professional rankings. Not bad for a righty playing left-handed. He even scored a couple of wins against another coach with good tennis genes, a Floridian named Jimmy Evert.

George didn’t force his kids to play tennis. But when they showed interest, he demanded that they give it their all. That suited Nancy fine. Her brother Cliff, four years younger, became even more single-minded. In an era when most events were joint tournaments for men and women, the Richey family spent much of the year traveling together. They lived and breathed tennis.

And they practiced.

* * *

For years, the King-Richey rivalry sat on the backburner. Billie Jean played in California and on the Eastern grass-court circuit. Nancy dominated the National Clay Court Championships in the Midwest, and she spent more time in Europe.

They might have met at the 1966 U.S. Indoors in Boston, where Richey would have been the defending champion. But on a tour of Australia, she tore the cartilage in her left knee. It forced her to default her first major singles final, at the Australian Championships to Smith, and it knocked her out of action until April. King won the indoor event easily.

Nancy made a trip into King territory, to the National Hard Court Championships in La Jolla. But she lost in the quarters, two rounds before she would’ve met her rival. Both women played Wimbledon, where King won her maiden major singles title. Richey won the doubles with Maria Bueno, but lost in the singles quarter-final. At Forest Hills, Nancy made the final–her third runner-up finish at a major that year–while Billie Jean lost early.

Deprived of an on-court outlet, the ladies were reduced to a war of words. King accused Richey of skipping the Forest Hills warmups on grass in order to avoid playing her. Nancy said the same about Billie Jean’s decision not to enter the U.S. Clay Courts. Clark Graebner neatly summed up the state of play in 1966:

Women’s tennis is awful. I can’t stand it. But if those two play each other at Forest Hills, I’d walk from my house in Cleveland to New York to watch that match. They’ll be going at each other with sledgehammers.

* * *

The rivalry would have to wait until March of 1968 for any kind of resolution. Both women continued in stellar form. Richey went back to Australia in 1967, where she picked up her first major singles title. King defended her Wimbledon title, untroubled by Nancy, a fourth-round loser. Richey won her fifth straight title at the U.S. Clay Courts. Billie Jean showed up but failed to force a meeting when she suffered an uncharacteristic loss to Rosie Casals.

King and Richey were teammates for Wightman Cup in August. Both women swept their singles matches, but Richey wrenched her back in a tough three-setter with Virginia Wade. She would miss the rest of the season, forced to watch as Billie Jean added the Forest Hills crown to her ever-lengthening list of laurels.

Nancy’s injury couldn’t have come at a worse time. Promoter George MacCall was putting together a group of four women who would compete alongside his troupe of professional male players. His first choices were Billie Jean, Margaret Court, Bueno, and Richey. But he didn’t want to take his chances with the Texan’s back. Court and Bueno weren’t ready to take the plunge, so the opportunity went instead to King, Casals, Ann Jones, and Françoise Dürr.

As it turned out, Richey would’ve been fine. The pro circuit didn’t get underway until April of 1968, and Nancy returned to action at the beginning of March, winning her first tournament back.

Three weeks later, fans were finally treated to the long-awaited clash between the top American women. At the Garden Challenge in New York City, both women won their first two matches in straights. That set up a semi-final match, their first meeting in nearly four years.

Just about everything favored Billie Jean. She was on a tear, having won five consecutive titles, including the Australian Championships and the U.S. Indoors. The indoor wood surface worked to her advantage as well. Still, the woman who had just beaten Margaret Court twice in front of the Australian’s home crowds knew how much was at stake. “I was unbelievably tense,” King said. “I wanted to beat her so badly I could taste it.”

She almost did. King won the first set, 6-4, and she built a 5-1 lead in the second. Richey broke her and fought back to 5-3. In the ninth game, Billie Jean reached match point, and Nancy floated a weak lob to her backhand. It was a shot King had put away hundreds of times, but she took too long deciding to hit a smash, and she missed by a foot and a half. Her confidence shaken, she was broken again. Richey never let go, winning three more games for the second and another six for the third.

From match point down, Nancy won 12 games in a row. “I still wake up from nightmares thinking about that match,” Billie Jean said later that year. “It was my all time worst match.”

They met again two months later, at Roland Garros. In the semi-final, Richey won again, coming back from a one-set deficit to do so. She had now won six of seven career matches against her top countrywoman, and she came back in the final to beat another difficult rival, Ann Jones. Jones had defeated her easily in the 1966 final, but now, America’s top clay court player had taken the world’s preeminent clay court championship.

* * *

1968 was a confusing–if exciting–time to be a tennis player. The sport’s governing bodies had finally agreed to allow professionals to compete alongside amateurs. Players were required to identify as one or the other; some tournaments still didn’t admit pros. Certain competitors, like the MacCall quartet, were “contract” pros, and others–who would play for prize money and remain tied to their national federations–were known as “registered” professionals.

The compromise was serviceable, except for one thing. The USLTA didn’t initially permit its players to become “registered.” Anyone not signed as a contract pro, including stars such as Richey and Arthur Ashe, had no choice but to remain amateur.

Thus, when Richey won the first French Championships of the Open era, she was unable to claim the $1,000 first prize. Jones, the contract pro, got $600 for her runner-up finish, while Nancy settled for a voucher worth $400.

The same situation–minus the voucher–threatened at the upcoming US Open. Richey had long bristled against the status quo of tournament-player relations in the amateur era. Tournaments, she said, “treated the players like dirt and then raked in the money.” With no way to turn pro in the eyes of the USLTA, she demanded modest “expenses” of $900–essentially an appearance fee–to play her national tournament.

The USLTA called her bluff, and she sat out the Open. It was a shame for both player and tournament. Richey had been playing brilliant tennis all year, losing only three matches against 56 wins. Maybe Billie Jean would’ve gotten the better of her on grass courts. Or maybe eventual winner Virginia Wade, who had beaten her in Wightman Cup play, would’ve defeated her again. But we’ll never know, all for the paltry sum of $900.

Looking back, Richey wishes she had handled things differently. “I do regret that I did not play…. I cut off my nose to spite my face.” Even the USLTA implicitly admitted it had been wrong. That offseason, the organization finally instituted the registered player rule.

* * *

In 1969, Richey entered the US Open, beating King in the quarters and losing to Court in the final. It was her last major final, and while she would continue to play great tennis throughout the first half of the 1970s, the 1969 season represented the beginning of the end.

She lost to Billie Jean at the South African Championships in April, then pulled a calf muscle attempting to defend her French title. In July, she finally lost her six-year stranglehold on the U.S. Clay Court title. A far inferior player, Gail Chanfreau, beat her in the final with loopy forehands and backhand slices. The combination made it tough for Richey to establish a rhythm, and both King and Casals would adopt similar tactics against her.

Personal challenges also kept Richey from sustaining her high level of 1968. As Open tennis evolved, there were fewer and fewer joint events. Nancy could no longer spend so much time with her father and brother. Cliff had surreptitiously coached her to her Roland Garros title, but with increasing frequency, there was no one from her camp sitting on the sidelines.

Then at the end of 1970, she married Kenneth Gunter. She wasn’t as motivated to spend so much time on the road, and she didn’t remain as focused on tennis. As the relationship went sour, it became an even greater distraction. She watched as Billie Jean improved her game and racked up the acclaim. By early 1972, King finally evened up their head-to-head at nine matches apiece.

* * *

King was the better player of the 1970s, and just about any measure of tennis greatness gives her the nod over her early rival. But let’s go back to that 1965 co-ranking. Long into retirement, Nancy continued to believe she deserved the top spot to herself.

Here and King and Richey’s year-end Elo ratings from 1960 to 1975:

Nancy held a clear edge at the close of both 1964 and 1965. When the USLTA judged their performances as a tie, at the end of 1965, Richey had a substantial 93-point edge.

In the years that they didn’t play each other, King faced a tougher schedule, stayed healthy, and took back the advantage. But in 1969, Richey concluded her last great season with a defeat of her rival at the Howard Hughes Open in Las Vegas, and the two women finished in a dead heat.

Eight years later, they were still fighting it out. Billie Jean spent the 1976-77 offseason rehabbing her knee, and the 33-year-old returned at the $110,000 Family Circle Cup in March. For her first match back, she drew a qualifier–the 34-year-old Nancy Richey. On the familiar clay, Richey raced out to a 6-0 first set. But King clawed back to take a second-set tiebreak and win the match, 6-2 in the third.

Nancy would soldier on for another 18 months, winning the Southern Championships in Raleigh that June, and reaching the final of the U.S. Clay Courts in August. She claimed her last US Open match victories that year, when she played her way to a fourth-round meeting with Chris Evert. Evert beat her easily, 6-0, 6-3, just as she had handily dispatched King at Hilton Head. Richey had won her first five meetings with Chrissie, but she had long since passed on her crown as the leading American baseliner.

It had been nearly three decades since George Richey told his daughter that he would only coach her if she would give 150%. Nancy more than held up her end of the deal.

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

* * *

John Bromwich [AUS]
Born: 14 November 1918
Died: 21 October 1999
Career: 1935-54
Played: Ambidextrous (right-handed serve, left-handed forehand, two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1938)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 56
 

* * *

No one has ever played tennis the way that John Bromwich played tennis.

How many people have ever so clearly stood apart? There are only so many ways to serve, or hit groundstrokes, or manage the tactics of a match. And when a player with unusual technique starts to enjoy some success, others quickly follow.

Not with Bromwich. He was impossible to imitate. Anyway, no coach would have allowed it.

Bromwich (pronounced “brummage”) picked up an adult-size racket when he was too small to lift it with one hand. Like Chris Evert a few decades later, he compensated by using both hands. At the beginning, it wasn’t just a two-handed backhand: He hit with two hands on both sides, and he hit double-handed serves and overheads.

As the Australian got bigger and stronger, the second hand came off the racket. But the unorthodox style remained. While he was a natural lefty, his improvised two-handed serve had been a righty delivery. He continued to serve and hit overheads from that side. His service was never intimidating, and it would be misleading to call his overhead a “smash”–it was accurate but not hard-hit.

You would think that for a southpaw, hitting a right-handed serve and a two-handed backhand would be sufficiently unique. Not so.

Bromwich was a true artist with a tennis racket. Roy Emerson, a big fan, said, “[H]e could make the ball talk.” His equipment was optimized for his precision game, and it was nearly as unorthodox as his strokes. He played with a very light racket, less than 12 ounces, compared to the usual 14 ounces for a wooden racket. Some of the weight was saved by a grip almost as slim as that of a golf club. For added control, Bromwich used strings so loose that friends called his rackets “onion bags.”

Taken together, the unusual package of technique and equipment was deadly from the baseline. Jack Kramer, the great practitioner of high-percentage tennis, considered that serve-and-volley was almost always the smart move–unless one of a select handful of players were standing across the net. Bromwich was one of them.

He rarely approached the net in a singles match–and there was another paradox. He was one of the great doubles players of all time. With Adrian Quist, he held the Australian national title from 1938 to 1950, and he won Wimbledon doubles twice, with two different partners. Kramer chose Bromwich and Don Budge as his doubles team for a hypothetical all-time, all-Universe Davis Cup competition. “Anytime you had Bromwich in your forecourt, you should win.”

* * *

The subtle, sophisticated Bromwich style sounds like the sort of game that would suit a veteran. He did indeed play well into his thirties, scoring shock upsets over the likes of Tony Trabert and Lew Hoad in 1954 after his first retirement failed to stick.

But John was a star from a young age. He was part of a doubles team that stretched Fred Perry and his British Davis Cup partner to five sets when he was only 16. At 18, he reached the finals in both singles and doubles at the Australian Championships. Aussie fans must have wondered what was happening with their sport. The man who beat Bromwich for the 1937 title was Viv McGrath, another early exponent of the two-handed backhand.

A few months later, Bromwich made his first trip abroad. He took a set from Budge in a Davis Cup Interzonal match, even as the Aussies were swept by their American hosts. The team from Down Under was odd enough to earn a mention in Time magazine:

When Australia’s Vivian McGrath appeared on the international tennis scene four years ago, experts could not have been more astonished had he been a kangaroo. For all backhand shots McGrath held his racket with both hands. … As a freak tennis player, Australia’s John Bromwich makes McGrath’s methods look banal. … Like 21-year-old McGrath, Bromwich is not only a freak but a prodigy.

The Australians would reach the Challenge Round in 1938. The 19-year-old Bromwich once again took a set from Budge, who was then in the middle of winning the Grand Slam. Bromwich and Quist had just lost the US national doubles title, but they bounced back to win their Davis Cup rubber against the same team–Budge and Gene Mako–thanks to what the New York Times called Bromwich’s “almost demoniacal fusillade.”

Budge was too strong for the Aussies, but by the 1939 Challenge Round, the champion had turned pro and was ineligible to compete. The visitors had a fighting chance. As Europe descended into war, Bromwich and Quist turned in a heroic performance to recover from two opening day losses. Quist played the match of his life to beat Bobby Riggs, and Bromwich won the deciding rubber in a clinical dismantling of Frank Parker, 6-0, 6-3, 6-1. While I’ve told the story of the tie at more length elsewhere, I can’t resist repeating Times columnist John Kieran’s quip about that final match:

At the end of the first set the crowd started to leave. At the end of the second set the policemen and ushers left. At the end of the third set the Davis Cup left.

* * *

Few tennis greats lost a bigger chunk of their prime playing years to World War II. When he turned 21 in late 1939, Bromwich held his national singles and doubles titles, plus the Davis Cup and the championship at the Pacific Southwest in California.

A few months later, he was in New Guinea, where he would serve in the Australian Army for much of the war. He missed a half-decade of playing opportunities. When he returned, he was out of competitive shape, both overweight and weakened by repeated bouts of malaria. The Aussies were swept by Kramer and Ted Schroeder when Davis Cup competition finally resumed in 1946. Bromwich and Quist even lost the doubles rubber.

John steadily got himself back in playing shape, and his time away from competition made him more likeable on court. He was always a perfectionist, and as a youngster, he would berate himself for the slightest mistake. The outbursts gave him a reputation as a poor sportsman, though he was certainly not: He was so modest that he would never tell you the scores of a match he won. If you demanded the details, he still might change the subject.

1950s star Ken McGregor loved to tell a story of the impossibly high standards Bromwich set for himself. As related by fellow player and Australian Davis Cup coach Harry Hopman:

Bromwich was playing a South Australian, Schwartz, in a championship match on an outside court in Adelaide and leading 6-0, 6-0, 5-0 and holding 15-40 on Schwartz’s service. Schwartz served and volleyed the return at an angle which forced Brom well off court. Brom reached it and with a wonderful recovery sent up a two-handed lob, crosscourt, to bring up backline chalk but just wide of the sideline. At the call of ‘out’, Brom stopped in his tracks, began scratching his chest through his tennis shirt–as was his nervous habit–and exclaimed in an almost heart-rending tone: “I’ll never win this if I keep making mistakes like that.”

(This story being too good to check, of course I’m compelled to ruin it. “Schwartz” was the Aussie Davis Cupper Leonard Schwartz, and the tournament in question was the 1938 South Australian Championships. Bromwich did indeed win, and he may have missed a lob or two. But the final score was actually 9-7, 6-4, 6-1.)

Post-war, Bromwich remained a perfectionist. But he had matured, and he wasn’t quite so demonstrative on court. Fans grew to like him more as he aged, especially when he scored his memorable upsets in the 1950s.

* * *

He was not the underdog at the 1948 Wimbledon Championships. Now 29 years old, he was the second seed–behind Frank Parker–in a wide-open field. Defending champion Jack Kramer had turned pro. Parker had a steady but unspectacular game, and the conventional wisdom was that it was Bromwich’s year.

Sure enough, Parker lost in the fourth round, and the ambidextrous Australian reached the final. He was the heavy favorite against a six-foot-three-inch, big-serving American, Bob Falkenburg. Falkenburg had few assets apart from the service, and Bromwich was considered to be one of the best returners in the game.

Bromwich should’ve won the first set, when he reached 5-4, 40-15 on his own serve. Falkenburg snatched it away, and it was a see-saw battle from there. The American was broken early in the second, and he tanked the rest of the set. Falkenburg came back in the third, then let the fourth go to save energy. Bromwich broke early in the fifth, taking leads of 3-0, 4-1, and 5-2. He reached double match point when he served at 5-3.

That’s where the story gets a bit murky. What we know for sure is that Falkenburg saved both match points, and when Bromwich earned a third in the same game, the big man saved that too. The American ran out the set and the match, winning by a final score of 7-5, 0-6, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5. Less clear is how those crucial points unfolded.

One version of the pivotal game strongly implies that Bromwich choked, overcome with the pressure of winning the sport’s biggest individual prize. Kramer wasn’t there–he was touring in South America–but he had money on the Australian to win. Here’s how he recounts it:

The first [match point] was the point that did Bromwich in. He moved up to hit a volley, which he had a real chance to put away, but instead he decided to let the ball go, figuring it was hit long. It dropped in well ahead of the baseline, however, and Falkenburg–reprieved–served his way out of the next match point, held, broke, and went on to win four straight games and the title, 7-5.

If you’ve ever read anything about Bromwich, you’ve probably read some version of this. Kramer’s version has been widely copied. It’s the rendition of the Wimbledon final that you’ll read on John’s Wikipedia page. Bromwich’s profile on the Tennis Hall of Fame website is similar, though it makes his misjudgement sound more reasonable, saying that Falkenburg’s floater hit the line.

Problem is, it’s far from clear that Bromwich’s ill-advised “take” really happened. Kramer told the story in his book, The Game, which was published in 1979, thirty years after the fact. Summaries written closer to the event–including those by people who were present–give more of the credit to Falkenburg.

Here’s Hopman, writing in 1957:

[Falkenburg] saved three match points in the fifth set with two very brave (for Bob) passing shots from his suspect backhand, and one with a magnificent undershied volley[.]

And the London correspondent for the New York Times, the day after the match:

Falkenburg turned invincible. He saved one of those match points by dropping the ball over the net where Bromwich couldn’t touch it and another by putting a fast one to the Australian’s left hand that was too difficult to get back. … Falkenburg passed him in the corner with a beautiful placement [on the third match point]. There was no holding the stringy, frail-looking American after that. He couldn’t do anything wrong.

There might be a way to reconcile the Times description of the first point with Kramer’s, but it would be a stretch.

75 years on, we may never know with certainty what happened at match point in a Wimbledon final. But I belabor the point because Kramer used it as a sort of psychological explanation that just doesn’t fit. Are we to believe that the best amateur doubles player in the world–a genius at net–simply let an easy ball float past? It may have been the man’s first Wimbledon final, but this is a player with two major singles titles to his name, one who secured the Davis Cup for his country before heading home to five years of war.

* * *

Kramer put an awful lot of emphasis on that one point. Here’s his pop-psych evaluation:

To me it never seemed that he was the same player after that. He doubted himself. He was a precision player to start with … and I suppose after he misjudged that one shot, the most important in his life, he never possessed the confidence he needed.

Except… Bromwich came back to win two doubles titles the next day. He drew Falkenburg in the Wimbledon quarters the following year, and in another five-setter, he got his revenge. He remained untouchable in doubles, winning two majors in 1949 and three–including Wimbledon–in 1950. When Australia reclaimed the Davis Cup in 1950, it was Bromwich and Frank Sedgman who secured the third point for the challengers.

We’ll never know what Bromwich would’ve accomplished on the singles court had he finished off Falkenburg and won Wimbledon. But it seems lazy–if not outright illogical–to assume that an unorthodox finesse player nearing his 30th birthday would’ve gone on even greater heights. Keeping in mind the years he lost to the war, Bromwich’s career was already a great one. There’s no need to invent a narrative to explain why he didn’t succeed at majors that he wasn’t going to win anyway.

The ambidextrous Australian was truly one of a kind, from his doubles exploits to his funky, Aga Radwanska-style backhand. No one else played like him because no one else possibly could.

Hopman once claimed, “[T]here is no one style which could be laid down as the ‘correct’ way to play.” When he said that, he must have been thinking of John Bromwich.

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

* * *

Tony Trabert [USA]
Born: 16 August 1930
Died: 3 February 2021
Career: 1948-63
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1953)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 56
 

* * *

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which California ruled American tennis in the amateur era. Westerners such as Maurice McLoughlin, Bill Johnston, May Sutton Bundy, and Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman were taking national titles even before World War I.

Philadelphian Bill Tilden kept the balance of power tilted eastward throughout the 1920s, but it was only temporary. Here is a list of the American men who won the US national title between 1930 and the end of the amateur era:

PLAYER            HOME STATE
John Doeg         SoCal         
Ellsworth Vines   SoCal         
Wilmer Allison    Texas         
Don Budge         NorCal        
Bobby Riggs       SoCal         
Don McNeill       Oklahoma      
Ted Schroeder     SoCal         
Joe Hunt          SoCal         
Frank Parker      Wisconsin*    
Jack Kramer       SoCal         
Richard González  SoCal         
Art Larsen        NorCal        
Tony Trabert      Ohio          
Vic Seixas        Pennsylvania

I’ve separated Southern and Northern California to emphasize just how much Los Angeles dominated the country’s tennis. 9 of these 14 players hailed from California, and one of the others–Frank Parker–spent some of his formative years in L.A.

If we count by titles, the gap is even more dramatic. Californians won 14 national championships to 7 for the rest of the country. It’s 16 to 5 if we class Parker with the West Coasters. Even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most of the other best Americans of the era, such as Frank Kovacs, Budge Patty, and 1948 Wimbledon champ Bob Falkenburg, also hailed from California. A similar list for women would also be blanketed by Westerners, from Helen Wills to Billie Jean King.

The Golden State, and the City of Angels in particular, offered year-round tennis weather, plenty of courts, an ample supply of skilled coaches, frequent tournament play with age-based junior divisions, and local heroes made good.

Tony Trabert grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had none of those things.

* * *

Well, okay, he had a few advantages. Cincinnati wasn’t as tennis-deprived as Chickasha, Oklahoma, the hometown of 1940 champ Don McNeill. Arch Trabert raised his sons to play any sport on offer, and there were playground courts down the block from Tony’s childhood home.

Arch wasn’t much help on the tennis court–his best sport had been boxing–but he knew enough to seek out good coaching for his son. And when Tony started showing promise as a catcher on the local baseball team, Arch sat him down and explained that if he wanted to be great, he needed to pick one sport or the other.

Tony might have picked baseball–this is Midwestern America in the 1940s, after all. Except Cincinnati had one local tennis hero who stepped in. Bill Talbert was 12 years older than Tony, and he was his country’s best doubles player. He won four men’s doubles titles at Forest Hills, plus another four in mixed with Margaret Osborne. Talbert saved his best tennis for his hometown Tri-State Championships (essentially the same event that is still played in Cinci two weeks before the US Open), where he won the singles title in 1943, 1945, and 1947.

Trabert (right) with Talbert in 1950

By the time he met Tony, Talbert lived in New York City. Still, he became a mentor to the young player, and when Tony’s game was ready, in 1950, Talbert took him to Europe as his doubles partner. The Cincinnatians were nearly unbeatable, winning the Italian Championships and adding a crown at the French, the first of Tony’s five major doubles titles.

Trabert was overmatched on the singles court, especially on the unfamiliar grass at Wimbledon. But that first European trip was enough to convince the 19-year-old that he belonged.

* * *

Even without Talbert’s intervention, Tony might have found his way to tennis stardom. He opted to stay close to home for college, attending the University of Cincinnati. College tennis was the one thing that could put a non-Californian on equal terms with the Golden Staters, as it offered promising athletes coaching, time to practice, and a few extra years to work on their games.

All of the non-Californians to win a national title between Tilden and the Open era–Wilmer Allison, McNeill, Trabert, and Vic Seixas–played college ball. Parker didn’t, but in addition to his time in Los Angeles, he was virtually adopted by Mercer Beasley, who coached the tennis team at Tulane at the same time he developed Parker.

While the University of Cincinnati was no tennis powerhouse, it gave Trabert that extra development time. Tony also took advantage of his two years as a UC Bearcat to get into better tennis shape. He was built more like a football halfback than a racket wielder, and at six-feet-one-inches tall, it took consistent work to stay at his playing weight of 185 pounds. He played for the nationally-competitive UC basketball team, discovering that hoops training helped his endurance and quickness.

After two years of college, Trabert had reason to feel good about his game. He reached the quarter-finals at Forest Hills, where he pushed Australian star Frank Sedgman to five sets. Sedgman would win the tournament, and none of his other opponents managed to take a single set from him. Tony was also a key member of the 1951 Davis Cup team, winning four singles and three doubles rubbers to put the Americans in the Challenge Round against Australia. He was limited to doubles duty (behind Ted Schroeder, who played badly in his final Cup appearance), but impressed the Aussies nonetheless.

The young man from Cincinnati was one of the brightest hopes for US amateur tennis. But with the Korean War raging, Tony’s local draft board received a few letters suggesting his university studies were just a sham to keep him out of the service. He enlisted in the navy–he felt “forced” to, even if he wasn’t drafted–and spent much of the next two years on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, trying to have serious conversations with sailors who preferred to swap comic books.

* * *

The path to Trabert’s breakthrough season in 1953 was anything but straightforward. He grew up in a tennis backwater, went to a school without much of a tennis program, and missed tournament play for months at a time.

Somehow, he came back from his time at sea playing better than ever before. He won 14 tournaments in 1953, frequently squaring off with Seixas or the 18-year-old Ken Rosewall. He reached a new peak at the US National Championships, the sole major he was able to enter that year. He didn’t drop a set in his six matches, blasting past Patty and Rosewall, then Seixas in a lopsided final. Rosewall was the only one of the three who even managed to reach 5-all in a set against him.

Trabert’s body, conditioned by basketball and the navy, dispatched shots that mere tennis players could barely handle. The South African player Abe Segal saw Tony win the Wimbledon final two years later against Kurt Nielsen, and he could describe the Trabert game only in military terms. “It was like a tank moving infantry … Trabert was driving the tank. Nielsen machine-gunned him but the bullets just bounced off!”

Tony wasn’t the first big man to win tennis matches with powerful shots. But he might have been the smartest big man ever to play the game. In the late 1970s, Jack Kramer rated Trabert one of his top 21 players of all time. He wrote, “Trabert had only a few top shots–backhand, backhand volley, overhead–but what he lacked in his strokes and in his mobility, he made up in his head.”

Trabert’s tactical savvy even went so far as to know when not to go big. Writer Joel Drucker went to one of Tony’s tennis camps as a kid, and Trabert gave him a suggestion for an upcoming match. “That guy’s return isn’t that good, so just serve your second serve first and get in quick. That’s how I beat Seixas at Forest Hills.”

He could bludgeon an opponent, sure. Even worse, he could beat you without unleashing the full force of his weaponry.

* * *

Unfortunately, Trabert spent much of 1954 at war with himself.

It started a few days before the end of the year, as the American team once again attempted to prise away the Davis Cup from the Australians. Tony’s teammate Vic Seixas wasn’t playing well, but Trabert was in form, and he fully expected to win both of his singles matches.

Instead, he collided with an in-form Lew Hoad, who saved the Aussies from a 2-1 deficit on the final day in a dramatic five-setter. The crowd of 17,500 was vociferously pro-Australia, of course. Trabert finally lost his cool late in the fifth set. He missed a serve, Hoad smacked the ball back, and the crowd cheered–thinking it was a return winner. Tony thought they were applauding his service fault, and he criticized the home crowd for it after the match.

He later admitted his mistake, but at the Australian Championships a few weeks later, he lost any remaining fans Down Under. He crashed out in the second round to Aussie vet John Bromwich, when once again the crowd got on his nerves. Bromwich lost the first two sets, 6-1, 6-1, then went on a tear. The crowd that had remained mostly silent for two sets came alive as the local man evened things up. Tony couldn’t take it any more, and he tanked the final set against a 35-year-old he should’ve easily beaten.

Trabert bounced back well enough to win the French Championships. Unlike Angelenos, who grew up playing on asphalt courts, Cincinnatians learned to play on clay. Unusually for the day, Tony hit his backhand with heavy topspin. It helped, too, that he avoided the savviest of the Europeans. From the third round to the final, he faced two Australians and three Californians.

A distracted Tony Trabert in 1954

It was hardly a terrible season. He lost a five-setter to Rosewall in the Wimbledon semi-finals and picked up a couple of smaller titles. But his 1953 campaign had set a high bar that he was obviously failing to clear.

Trabert’s old mentor, Bill Talbert, asked the question in Sports Illustrated in August: “What’s the matter with Tony Trabert?” Jack Kramer, who kept an eye on Tony as a potential pro, thought he knew the answer:

One trouble with Tony is that he’s not as good as he thinks he is. He’s got to quit looking for alibis, and work hard to improve his game. Another thing—he’s got to toughen up his hide. A great champion can’t let himself be upset by a bad call or a heckler. Finally, he’s got to eat, sleep and live tennis. You can’t do this if you’re worrying about outside problems.

That’s a harsh assessment of a player who had won a title and reached a semi-final in last two majors, but Trabert’s performance at Forest Hills bore out the judgment. As the top seed and defending champion, he lost in the quarter-finals to the streaky Australian Rex Hartwig.

* * *

Kramer mentioned “outside problems.” What else did Trabert have on his mind?

In 1953, he met Shauna Wood–Miss Utah, no less–and they were soon married. He found a sales job that allowed him to take advantage of his travel schedule and wouldn’t get too much in the way of his tennis. So Tony’s life was more complicated than that of the typical discharged sailor.

That might have been enough to distract him from his game. But in the eyes of some of his contemporaries, Trabert was unhealthily focused on a pro contract. Kramer–the man who would sign him–probably knew this. Young Australians were in no hurry to turn pro, as their federation would support them financially in ways that were against the rules in the States. Tony, on the other hand, knew he probably had a brief window as a top gate attraction, and he didn’t want to miss it.

While his 1954 season wasn’t good enough, it proved to be the exception. His 1955 campaign–“The New Tony Trabert” in another Talbert article for SI–was the outstanding single-year performance of the decade.

Again, the season effectively began in the final days of 1954 and the Davis Cup Challenge Round. This time, Trabert got the better of Hoad, and the Americans won the first three rubbers to bring back the trophy. He lost to Rosewall in the Australian Championships–his last defeat as an amateur at a major. As a consolation prize, he and Seixas followed up their Davis Cup triumph with a doubles title over Hoad and Rosewall.

Trabert would play 109 singles matches in 1955. The loss to Rosewall was one of only five defeats.

He told Sports Illustrated in August, “I never have–or never would–admit to a weakness, because I don’t think I have a particular weakness.”

That year, his rivals were forced to agree. He had never been particularly deft with low volleys, so he simply crowded the net more, racking up points with high volleys. As he had in 1953, he often took a bit off the serve, so as to hit fewer seconds. He became increasingly aggressive on the return, as well. The pressure on his opponent was relentless.

Trabert defended his title at the French, beating Swedish clay-court specialist Sven Davidson. He tacked on another doubles title when he and Seixas defeated a pair of Italians. At Wimbledon, Tony turned his howitzer on Kurt Nielsen. And at Forest Hills, he avenged his loss in Australia, defeating Ken Rosewall.

At Wimbledon, he won the title without losing a single set. He was just as untouchable at the US Nationals. Trabert was clearly the best amateur in the game–but not for long. Kramer signed him for a $75,000 guarantee, and by the end of the year, he was on the road, facing off in a pro tennis showdown against Richard “Pancho” González.

* * *

Trabert had a solid, if not great, professional career. He wasn’t as good as González–no one was, especially on fast indoor courts. But Tony’s aggressive game kept the scores respectable. In a series of 100 matches, Trabert won a quarter of them.

He continued to play pro tournaments until the early 1960s, and he took charge of Kramer’s European operation in 1960. After a spell away from tennis, he returned as a television commentator, a plain-spoken yet authoritative voice over the air.

When Michael Chang won at Roland Garros in 1989, he was the first American champion there since Trabert took his titles in 1954 and 1955. Tony saw it live, calling the match for Australian TV.

By then, Trabert was the consummate tennis insider. He had captained winning Davis Cup teams and served as president of the Tennis Hall of Fame. Not bad for a husky kid from Cincinnati, Ohio.

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

* * *

Stan Smith [USA]
Born: 14 December 1946
Career: 1964-83
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1971)
Peak Elo rating: 2,248 (1st place, 1973)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 64
 

* * *

Stan Smith’s first love was basketball. Even while Pancho Segura was turning him into a junior tennis champion on the public courts of Pasadena, he continued playing hoops. Baseball and football, too. He played on his high school basketball team until his senior year, when it was finally impossible to pursue more than one sport.

It was always clear where his sporting future laid, even as he grew to six-feet-four-inches tall. Journalists tended to make too much of his time as a hoopster, and he joked in 1972, “[T]he better I get in tennis, the better I become in basketball. If I ever win at Wimbledon, I think they’ll make me an All-American in basketball.”

The scribes who sought to explain Smith to their readers talked about basketball for a reason. Stan was, first and foremost, a team player. By the end of his career, in the early 1980s, the collective aspect of tennis had been obliterated. In an individual sport where everyone was competing for the same lucrative prizes, there was too much at stake.

But Smith’s career was defined by his teams. He played college tennis at USC, winning national singles titles and doubles championships with Bob Lutz. The 1967 Trojan squad, led by coach George Toley, was one of the best of all time. Toley had spotted Stan at the Los Angeles Tennis Club and given him a scholarship, betting on the big kid’s raw talent.

From there, Smith earned a place on the United States Davis Cup team. Australia had held the cup since 1964, and Stan was hardly expected to be the man to bring it back. Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner were in charge of singles; Smith was there, with Lutz, to play doubles.

The USC grads did their job, winning four out of four rubbers in the 1968 campaign. Ashe and Graebner won their singles matches in the Challenge Round against Australia to bring back the trophy. Yes, it was a depleted Australian team–the country’s biggest stars were ruled ineligible because of their professional standing. But there are no asterisks in tennis.

* * *

The American squad beat all comers for five years running. Smith, more than anyone else, ensured that his country held on to tennis’s most coveted trophy. The main challenge to US dominance was the Romanian team of Ilie Năstase and Ion Țiriac.

Năstase was the most mercurial of stars, a flashy shotmaker who could embarrass you for a set, then lose interest and let the match go in thirty minutes. Țiriac had none of his teammate’s talent, but he made up for it with tactical savvy and gamesmanship that occasionally crossed over into outright cheating. The “Brașov Bulldozer” had played ice hockey for Romania in the 1964 Olympics, and I suspect he was the team’s enforcer. He also played rugby, because of course he did.

The only way to beat the Romanians was to ignore their antics. Fortunately for the American side, Stan Smith was the most unflappable of them all.

Even as a junior, Stan realized that he was unaffected by the match pressure that caused his rivals to crumble. He was poker-faced on court. His gestures on court were limited to the nervous tic of brushing back his hair between points. At his most demonstrative, he would fix his hair a bit more slowly.

In contrast to characters like Năstase and Jimmy Connors, Smith was a throwback. Michael Mewshaw offered a sketch in his book, Short Circuit:

Tall, blond, and regally slim, he is the sort of player Wimbledon loves. He has the stiff upper lip and proud carriage of a Grenadier Guard, never complaining, never responding to success or adversity with much more than a bemused smile.

For Stan, it went back to his grounding in team sports. “You don’t see basketball or football players getting upset at themselves and throwing tantrums,” he said. (This was more accurate in 1972!) He recognized the benefit of his late start in tennis, which allowed him to become both an all-around athlete and an adult with a perspective that extended beyond the locker room.

His first five years on tour would put that perspective to the test.

* * *

The first US-Romania showdown was in 1969. The American defending champs set up shop in Cleveland, where they would force the Europeans to play on a fast hard court. The visitors were realistic about their chances. They figured they could win two of the five points–that is, the pair of singles matches against the newly-promoted Smith.

Instead, the 22-year-old American won every match he played. He took on Țiriac in the second rubber, and came back from a two-sets-to-one deficit to win. Frank Deford wrote for Sports Illustrated that the Romanian was “complaining, glowering, stalking and weaving like a bull at bay.” Smith just focused on getting his serve in, and he held off the Brașov Bulldozer.

Smith and Lutz secured the championship with a doubles win the following day. The reverse singles rubbers didn’t count, but the fans still got their money’s worth. Stan had lost to Năstase in the second round of the US Open just a few weeks before. The two men would ultimately face off 18 times in a 13-year span, reaching a fifth set on five memorable occasions. This was the day that Smith made it clear he could hold his own. He upset the top Romanian in an 11-9 fifth set.

Stan would tell Tennis magazine in 2016, “The team thing really affects you. You don’t want to let them down. It’s not just the country. It gets a little more personal at the point. Your result is as a team, so you wanna see the other guy win.”

He watched the “other guy”–in this case, Cliff Richey–win in the Challenge Round against West Germany in 1970. (Australia was still forced to field a non-competitive squad of “two koala bears and a wallaby,” as Deford put it.) Smith was limited to doubles duty. Once again, he and Lutz scored the decisive point with a straight-set win against the visitors.

When the West Germans came to Cleveland, Smith was still flying under the radar, an obviously skilled doubles player but no more than the third-best American on the singles court. Almost immediately afterward, his reputation began to soar. He opened November in Stockholm, where he upset Ashe and Ken Rosewall, the top two seeds, for the title. A month later, he beat Rosewall and Rod Laver to win the year-end Masters championship. His days as the Davis Cup doubles specialist were over.

* * *

For an athlete willing to throw his weight behind the collective, Stan was surprisingly standoffish. He teamed with Lutz for years, winning doubles titles and rooming with him on the road. But Lutz said, “[W]e hardly knew each other…. I only met him on the court.”

Journalist Richard Evans was one of many who felt that Lutz was the more naturally talented of the pair. He just didn’t work as hard. Few players did. Early on, Smith’s independence had a whiff of superiority to it, but in time, Lutz and others realized that Stan was simply going to do his own thing. When a group went out of the town, that might mean he stayed at the hotel to jump rope.

In 1971, the extra work began to pay off. Technically, he was a corporal in the US Army, but the military saw his public relations value. His tournament schedule was barely affected. After a surprisingly successful clay court campaign–he won a title and reached a career-best quarter-final at Roland Garros–he beat John Newcombe at Queen’s Club. He went into Wimbledon as the 4th seed and reached the championship round. He nearly upset Newcombe again, losing to the Australian in the fifth set.

Smith took the final step at the US Open. His career at Forest Hills had begun with some nasty draws: Tony Roche was his opening-round opponent in 1968, and he faced Năstase in the second round in 1969. Finally the tennis gods were ready to repay him.

Stan beat compatriot Marty Riessen and 4th seed Tom Okker to reach the final. Waiting there was the Czech Jan Kodeš, mostly known at that time as a threat on clay. Kodeš had knocked out Newcombe, the top seed, in the first round and followed it up with a five-set victory over Ashe in the semis.

With the help of his childhood coach Segura, Smith went in with a game plan. He served well, threatened the weaker Kodeš service, and kept the Czech player honest with lobs when he crept too close to the net. At age 24, he had his first major singles title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2l4zZ4XIQ

The Davis Cup defense was, by comparison, a walk in the park. The Americans shifted venues to Charlotte, where they welcomed the Romanians with the slightly less US-biased green clay. It didn’t matter. Smith straight-setted Năstase in the opener. With a new partner, the young and inconsistent Erik van Dillen, he lost the doubles. But he kept his streak of decisive victories alive. In the fourth rubber, he dispatched Țiriac in three, sealing the trophy with a 6-0 final set.

* * *

In 1983, Smith proclaimed, “A truly great player should be able to win on all surfaces.” By that standard, Stan would establish himself among the legends of the game in 1972.

The American Davis Cup defense would be more complicated than usual. The tournament finally gave up the archaic Challenge Round format, in which the previous winner sat out until the rest of the field had been whittled down to one. To win a fifth-straight championship, the US side would need to work through the Americas zone and play four ties just to earn a place in the title round.

Smith remained a stalwart for the cause, winning all seven matches he played in the first three ties. In the meantime, he solidified his status as one of the world’s best. He opened the season by winning four tournaments in a row, two of them in finals against Năstase and another with a five-set victory over the fast-improving 19-year-old Jimmy Connors.

He failed to defend his Queen’s Club title, perhaps distracted by the news that was roiling the tennis world. We tend to remember the 1973 Wimbledon boycott, in which 81 men skipped the Championships over an internecine dispute between the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) and the fledgling players union. But the 1972 tournament had every bit as much controversy.

Few things went smoothly at Wimbledon in 1972

That year, the ILTF banned the pros under contract to World Championship Tennis (WCT), the richest of the professional circuits. It was the same dispute that had kept the best Australians out of Davis Cup competition. (It was also the reason why Smith now partnered van Dillen. Lutz had signed up with WCT, making himself ineligible for Davis Cup play.) The details of the conflict are murky to a modern reader, but the broad strokes are familiar to anyone who watched tournaments jockey for calendar position amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Both sides wanted prime spots on the schedule, access to the best players, and full control of as much of the sport as possible. In other words, it boiled down to money, money, and money.

For Stan Smith, it meant that defending champion Newcombe–and a host of others–would spend much of the Wimbledon fortnight at the WCT event in St. Louis instead. Smith, along with Năstase, Kodeš, and others, was an “independent” pro, unsullied by any direct financial link to the competing tour. He entered Wimbledon as the top seed, unthreatened by Newcombe, not to mention Laver, Rosewall, and Ashe.

It was impossible to ignore the decimated draw, but Smith fell back on his usual strategy of blocking out everything that didn’t directly affect his tennis. “You don’t try to lose just because all the best players aren’t here. The subject isn’t even worth my time. This is still the greatest tournament in the world, and the pros know it. For me, this championship would be the pinnacle.”

Or as a less serious competitor put it, it was still Wimbledon, “even if they threw out everybody and seeded two monkeys onto center court.”

Stan beat Kodeš in the semi-finals for yet another showdown with Năstase, who had lost only two sets en route to the final. It might not have been the championship match that the tournament would have delivered with WCT stars on hand, but the clash between top-seed Smith and second-seed Năstase was everything the All-England Club could’ve hoped for.

It was the 9th meeting between the two men. Each had won four: Smith with the Davis Cup victories, and Năstase with successes at Roland Garros and in the 1971 year-end Masters final. Still, the American was confident. He told reporters, “If I have to, I can always go to my guts to beat this guy.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufLIhebvS5I

He had to. The Romanian was brilliant, putting service returns on Smith’s shoetops and–most remarkably of all–generally keeping his emotions in check. Stan could only wait for his opponent to falter. With what he called “80 percent guts and a little luck,” he came through, converting his fourth match point on a missed Năstase smash to win, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 7-5.

The lengthy New York Times recap of the match said nothing of the absent stars. There are no asterisks in tennis.

* * *

The Wimbledon final was, of course, played on grass. The US Davis Cup team had three rounds remaining in their 1972 campaign, and all three would be played on clay.

First they went to Santiago, Chile, where they made quick work of the hosts. Smith won three matches, including a five-set doubles victory alongside van Dillen. Two weeks later, they were in Barcelona for another dose of the red stuff. Stan lost to Andres Gimeno in the opening match. But by now, you can probably write the next sentence yourself. He and van Dillen won the doubles, and in a deciding fifth rubber, Smith straight-setted Juan Gisbert.

Waiting in the championship round: Romania. Unlike in 1969 and 1971, the Davis Cup would be decided in Bucharest.

Back in 1969, Țiriac had fumed after he failed to figure out the shower faucet in a Cleveland locker room and suffered through a cold mid-match shower. The Romanians, hosting a Cup final behind the Iron Curtain for the first time in history, aimed to pay back every slight, real and imagined.

The surface, in particular, was chosen to ensure a US defeat. Țiriac said, “The U.S. players not like the soft stuff,” he said. “Wait till they see ours. Godzilla, he feel like he serving on the beach.”

“Godzilla” was Țiriac’s nickname for Stan Smith.

The crowd was rowdy, the Romanian linesmen were blatantly biased, and the Americans were accompanied around town by 20 “translators”–bulky men with guns and conspicuously absent language skills. Țiriac, the master gamesman, pushed his advantages to the limit, leaving Tom Gorman–the second US singles player behind Smith–in tears. The Romanian antics were so bad that after the first two matches, American captain Dennis Ralston called it “the most disgraceful day in the history of the Davis Cup.”

Few men could excel under such conditions. Fortunately the Americans had just such a player in Smith.

The tie opened with a rematch of the Wimbledon final. Năstase held his own for 18 games in the opening set, but he was finally thrown off his game by an unexpected double fault call. Smith broke to get on the board first, 11-9. For all of his bluster–Năstase had said the Romanians were 10-1 favorites–the Romanian star simply went away.

Or maybe Smith slammed the door. Herbert Warren Wind described the American’s dominance for the last two sets of the match:

He served with explosive power, he blasted Năstase’s serve for outright winners, and he ranged swiftly around the forecourt, hitting one biting volley after another. I have never seen a man hit his shots on clay with the pace that Smith maintained in winning the next two sets, 6-2 and 6-3. He played exactly as if he were playing on grass–fast grass.

After Țiriac beat Gorman to even the tie, it was van Dillen’s turn to shine. Alongside the ever-steady Smith, he defied the hostile crowd and turned in the match of his life. The Americans won the doubles, 6-2, 6-0, 6-3.

The visitors led, two matches to one, and once again, Stan was in position to finish the job. It wasn’t easy. Țiriac simply refused to give in, and he had help. The linesmen were so bad that after three blatant mistakes in the same game, Ralston was able to get one of them removed. On another occasion, Smith hit a return winner off a Țiriac first serve, only to hear the service line judge pipe up with a belated “out” call. That gave the Romanian a second chance.

After splitting four long and winding sets, Smith was too calm, and his game was too strong for the wily man from Brașov. He hit an ace to open the fifth, and from there, he played what Wind called “an almost perfect set.” He dropped a 6-0 frame on Țiriac, just as he had in Charlotte the year before. The Americans won their fifth straight Davis Cup.

* * *

Thus ends the usual list of Smith’s outstanding accomplishments. In the space of 14 months, he won two singles majors and led his country to two Davis Cup titles.

Yet his best tennis was still to come. He joined the WCT circuit in late 1972 after completing his military obligations. He won his first tournament among the contract pros in Los Angeles a few weeks before the trip to Bucharest.

The level of competition took some getting used to, and he lost matches in early 1973 to Laver and Rosewall. He quickly adapted and went on a tear beginning in March. He won four consecutive tournaments, beating Laver and Richey three times apiece. A month later, he and Lutz won the WCT World Doubles title in Montreal, and Smith followed it up with a victory at the season-ending championship in singles in Dallas. He overcame Laver in the semis and Ashe in the final.

Even before the Dallas final, Stan was confident: “I’ve always claimed Laver was the best. Today is the first time I feel comfortable in saying that maybe I am.”

The ATP wouldn’t roll out its ranking system for another few months, but my Elo ratings support Smith’s contention. They put him at the top of the table midway through his four-tournament run. After Dallas, he had opened up a meaningful 50-point lead over Laver and Năstase.

He later said, “I was probably playing the best tennis of my career right about then.” A couple of months later, he would even win a title on European clay, beating Manuel Orantes and a young Björn Borg in Båstad.

But in that summer of 1973, he wouldn’t defend his Wimbledon title. This time, he found himself on the side of the boycotters. The ILTF suspended Yugoslavian player Niki Pilić for skipping a Davis Cup tie, and the players union–the ATP–took his side. A compromise was within reach: If the ILTF backed down, Pilić was willing to withdraw to let everyone save face. But Wimbledon didn’t take the boycott threat seriously, and Smith was one of 81 men who stood on their principles instead of chasing the most coveted title in tennis.

* * *

It was an unlucky break. Smith never again recovered the form that won him so many laurels in a such a short span. Even the Davis Cup slipped away. The Australians were able to deploy their best players again in 1973, and the duo of Laver and Newcombe handed Smith three defeats in a final-round sweep.

But Stan was rarely one to complain. He has always recognized the role that luck played in his career. He grew up in the tennis hotbed of Southern California, and met Segura at exactly the right age to start him on the path to stardom. A few years later, he secured the final tennis scholarship that USC had to offer that year.

Upon graduation, his timing couldn’t have been better. He and Lutz won the doubles title in their first appearance at Forest Hills, claiming thousands of dollars in prize money that had never been available before. Smith wasn’t drafted into the military until long after he was eligible, and even then, he was able to continue playing tournament tennis.

And the biggest break of all: Stan Smith became a shoe. When Adidas realized that a stylish shoe called the “Haillet”–after a French player–wouldn’t have much traction in America, they turned to Stan. 100 million pairs later, Smith is a wealthy man, and his name is known far more widely than that of the typical Wimbledon champion.

The ultimate irony is that it’s Stan’s name–and only his–on some of the world’s most recognizable footwear. Sure, endorsements don’t really work any other way. But of all the tennis stars to parlay their success into lucrative name recognition, Smith is the one who, in his glory days, tended to deflect attention.

A few big-name players ignored the boycott and entered Wimbledon in 1973. But for the defending champion, it was never an option. It would have been a betrayal of his friends and colleagues, not to mention a blow to player’s rights in the crucial early days of Open tennis. As someone with Stan’s track record could have predicted, luck would eventually tilt back in his favor. He missed his chance to win back-to-back Wimbledon titles. But the first championship was enough for Adidas to make him an icon.

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

* * *

Elizabeth Ryan [USA]
Born: 5 February 1892
Died: 6 July 1979
Career: 1905-34
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1927)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 214 (at least)
 

* * *

Six hundred and fifty nine.

According to Elizabeth Ryan’s obituary in the New York Times, that’s how many tournaments she won–singles, doubles, and mixed doubles–in a 19-year span.

Yes. Six hundred and fifty nine. Thirty five per year for almost two decades.

Most women would be lucky to win so many matches at the top level of competitive tennis. Among active players, only Serena Williams, Venus Williams, and Svetlana Kuznetsova have tallied that many singles victories, and only a few more have amassed as many across all disciplines. Ryan–“Bunny” to her friends and “Bouny” to doubles partner Suzanne Lenglen–won that number of championships. The resulting haul of trophies and commemorative knickknacks was enough, one wag wrote, to stretch from her adopted home in London all the way back to New York.

Here’s the thing–659 probably isn’t even the complete list. Another source says 662, and when a researcher at tennisforum.com went in search of the full list, he identified 568 of them with five seasons left to finish. What’s more, while the Times assigned the 659 titles to a 19-year span, Ryan collected hardware for nearly three decades. She won her first tournaments in 1906, and she might have snagged a doubles trophy in 1905, when she was 13 years old. She was still occasionally coming out on top in 1934, her last season as an amateur.

When she turned pro–to teach, since she needed to earn a living–a journalist estimated that she had reached 1,500 finals. That’s probably a bit high: Bud Collins came up with a list of 365 tournament entries, and some events didn’t include both women’s doubles and mixed doubles draws. But four digits is within the realm of possibility.

We do have some concrete numbers. Wimbledon historian Alan Little has made a careful study of tournaments on the French Riviera, where she was a “terror” to the rest of the field. On that winter circuit alone, Ryan won 251 titles: 73 singles, 99 doubles, and 79 mixed. Separately, I’ve come up with a list of 214 singles titles (including those Riviera victories), which don’t yet include tournaments from before the war.

So it’s safe to say that 659 is a lower bound. We’ll never know exactly how many competitive matches Elizabeth Ryan won, but it’s well into the thousands. It’s probably more than any other woman in the history of the sport.

* * *

The first thing that many people noticed about Bunny Ryan was her eyes. Greyish-green in color, or perhaps bluish-grey, they were “perpetually in a twinkle” when she was off the court, according to journalist John Tunis.

Behind the twinkle, Tunis saw “a reserve of mental power.” On court, her eyes revealed her determination. Under pressure, you could watch as she became even more focused.

By the time Tunis profiled her for the New Yorker in 1925, she had won ten Wimbledon titles: seven in women’s doubles, three in mixed. She was 33 years old. She had been born in California and learned her tennis on the asphalt courts there, but she had spent most of her adult life in Europe after her sister, Alice, married an Englishman. In 1917, she wrote on an American passport application, “I cannot state definitely, but I do intend to return.”

The occasion for the New Yorker piece was Ryan’s long-awaited return. She had played Wimbledon since 1912, and oddly enough, she had even managed to enter the French Championships in 1913, before it was open to foreigners. (She and a handful of other overseas players probably got in thanks to membership in a French club.) But only in 1925 would she make her first appearance at Forest Hills.

The American press coverage of Ryan is revealing. She is remembered now as a doubles specialist–the doubles specialist of the era–but she was nearly as dangerous on the singles court. Tunis, among others, saw her as the favorite for the US national title, even in a field with defending champion Helen Wills and 1924 Wimbledon titlist Kitty Godfree.

Bunny helped her own case in her very first American tournament in more than a decade. At Seabright, the traditional Forest Hills warm-up on the New Jersey coast, she needed only 40 minutes to dispatch Wills in the final, 6-3, 6-3. Wills hadn’t lost a match since the Wimbledon final the year before, but on the damp grass, Ryan’s forehand chops and imperturbable volleying were too much. Bunny struggled on the faster turf at Forest Hills and lost to Godfree in the quarters. Yet all told, the American trip boosted her reputation even further.

* * *

It was impossible to follow tennis in the mid-1920s and not recognize Ryan’s prowess. If you were the sort of person to scan each week’s results in your favorite tennis periodical, you’d see her name so often you might wonder if there were two players named E. Ryan.

In 1924, the year before she made her triumphant return to the States, Bunny played a jaw-dropping schedule. She entered 36 tournaments a 43-week span between Christmas of 1923 and mid-October the following year. She played every single week for five months starting in mid-May. The closest thing she got to a break was the second week of Wimbledon where, uncharacteristically, she didn’t make any of the finals.

I want to give you a taste of how a player could possibly amass 659 (or more) titles over her career, and a look at her 1924 campaign is the perfect way to do it. You might want to skip ahead to the next section, though. Bunny’s schedule is exhausting just to read about.

She started her season in Monte Carlo at Christmastime. She went on to play 14 straight weeks on the Riviera, winning nine singles titles, ten in women’s doubles, and five in mixed. In four of the tournaments where she didn’t win the mixed, she lost to Lenglen in the final; twice, the victorious team was Lenglen and Henri Cochet. Still, when Lenglen paired the Swiss champion Charles Aeschlimann, Ryan was considered the best player on court. She pushed Suzanne’s team to 15-13 in a deciding set.*

* Bunny’s partner that week was the Canadian Henry Mayes, but I get the sense that it hardly mattered.

After a few weeks off, Bunny played the British Hard Court Championships, where she won all three titles. It was her fourth “triple” of the year–a single week with victories in singles, doubles, and mixed–and it was only April.

Another few weeks, and the real work began. Ryan played six straight weeks before Wimbledon, winning five singles titles, including a triple at the “Gipsy” Club in North London. Her only singles loss was a final against Godfree.

Wimbledon was a letdown: not even a semi-final in three events. But in a way, it was her most impressive performance of the season. She met Lenglen, her doubles partner, in the singles quarter-finals. Ryan took the second set from the great Suzanne, 8-6. It was the first set Lenglen had lost since her Forest Hills defeat at the hands of Molla Mallory in 1921. Toward the end of the lost set, Lenglen was visibly imploring her father to let her default. He encouraged her to press on, and she won the final set, 6-4.

But the damage was done, possibly to Lenglen’s health, and definitely to her fragile nerves. She withdrew from the tournament, leaving Ryan a loser by default in the doubles quarter-finals. She and Randolph Lycett had lost early in the mixed, so for the first time in more than a decade, Bunny was absent from all three finals.

She made up for it with a vengeance. Here’s what she did for the next seven weeks:

• Welsh Championships: Triple
• Nottinghamshire Championships: Triple
• Midland Counties Championships: Triple
• Shanklin: Triple
• Sandown: Triple
• Worthing: Triple
• West Sussex Championships: Triple

Add singles and women’s doubles titles in Budleigh Salterton the week after that (she lost the mixed final in three sets), and that’s 23 championships in less than two months.

All told, Ryan won 72 titles in her 36 tournaments between December of 1923 and October of 1924. It could be even more than that. We don’t have doubles results for every one of the events, though in some cases it’s because none were played. In singles alone, she tallied 129 wins against 7 losses.

Bunny won 15 triples, and of the three dozen tournaments she entered, she won at least one title at 33 of them. Even the shutouts make her record sound impressive. One week on the Riviera in February, she pulled out of all three with a bad cold. At the Middlesex Championships in May, she reached all three finals (beating Mallory in singles), but lost two of the title matches to Godfree. And at Wimbledon, she nearly beat Suzanne, indirectly knocking herself out of the women’s doubles. Under any other circumstances, the five-time defending champions would have won easily.

You start to see how she got to 659.

* * *

Ryan was not the first woman to master the volley. But in a field made up mostly of baseliners, she was one of the first great net players, and probably the best of them all, at least until Alice Marble reached her peak in the late 1930s. Tunis called her “a master of her art.”

Bunny was dominant at net, and she made it a point to get there quickly. American Lawn Tennis sketched her playing style in 1923:

It is hard to imagine her on the defensive because she rarely allows herself to get into such a situation, and, when in, gets out of it as quickly as possible. Her strokes are all aggressive except a safe back court chop, which she employs only when forced to take drives from the base line.

The “chop” was once much more common. Struck with heavy underspin, it was sometimes a dropshot, sometimes hit deep, and always–at least to the modern sensibility–very annoying.* Ryan was sometimes known as “Miss Chop and Drop,” and her forehand chop was the stuff of nightmares, especially on slow grass. She used the chop to upset Helen Wills at Seabright in 1925, and she repeated the feat, with the loss of only five games, a year later.

* The hard-hitting Molla Mallory wrote in her 1916 instructional book, “The player with a great repertoire of cuts [chops] may disconcert an opponent for the time being, but so would a server who turned a somersault on her delivery.” Bunny and Molla were not friends.

Unfortunately, her chops weren’t as steady as her net play, and the lack of a reliable baseline game kept Bunny from ever winning a major singles title. Part of the problem was that, despite her killing schedule, she just didn’t play that many majors. Aside from her 16 appearances at Wimbledon, she played the French seven times and the US championships three times. All of the non-Wimbledon entries came after her 33rd birthday.

She also had the bad timing of playing her tennis during the Lenglen years. Three times at Wimbledon, she gave Suzanne an unaccustomed challenge, particularly in the 1919 semi-final, when they met for the first time. But the Frenchwoman won them all. Bunny had her best chance at a major title at Forest Hills in 1926, when Wills was absent. Ryan faced Mallory in the final, and built a 4-0 lead in the decider, even reaching double match point at 5-1, 40-15. But Molla came alive, and in the words of Allison Danzig, Bunny “wilted before the devastating attack.”

Ryan would come close one more time. At age 38, she beat Betty Nuthall and Cilly Aussem to reach the Wimbledon final. On dry turf, she had little chance against Wills (by then Helen Wills Moody), and she went down to a quick defeat, 6-2, 6-2.

* * *

The Elizabeth Ryan story that pops up most often in the history books is an ambiguous one. For decades, Bunny held the record for most Wimbledon titles: 19, comprising 12 women’s doubles and 7 mixed. When Billie Jean King closed in on the mark in the late 1970s, Ryan was still alive. She continued to make annual appearances at the All-England Club.

She clearly had mixed feelings about losing the record. She was reported to have said, “I hope I don’t live to see my record broken, but if someone is to break it, I hope it is Billie Jean.” But she refused to do a joint interview with King when Bud Collins requested it, and Billie Jean found her unfriendly.

In 1979, King finally won her 20th Wimbledon crown, a women’s doubles championship alongside Martina Navratilova. Bunny never saw it. The day before, she collapsed on the tournament grounds after the men’s doubles final, and she died.

It’s a shame that the amateur-era tennis record book has always been so spotty. Yes, Ryan could always point to her remarkable feats at Wimbledon, and she surely knew that her three-decade career had few parallels. But when Billie Jean overtook her most famous mark, Bunny lost her most notable claim to fame. It was the one solo accomplishment that confirmed her as so much more than just Lenglen’s doubles partner.

Even though we don’t always know the exact numbers, there are many more categories in which Ryan stands alone. No one won more Riviera titles than she did. Her 72 (or more) tournament victories in 1924 surely tops the single-season list.

And those 659 career titles? With better record-keeping, it’s a number that every tennis fan would know. No woman has come close in the last ninety years, and Bunny’s name will surely hold pride of place for the next nine decades, too.

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

* * *

Lew Hoad [AUS]
Born: 23 November 1934
Died: 3 July 1994
Career: 1950-72
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1953)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 52
 

* * *

Tennis’s GOAT debate will never be resolved, even if Rafael Nadal wins another ten majors. There are just too many different ways to define “greatest of all time.” Are we looking for the longest span of sustained excellence? The most untouchable peak? Some particular combination of the two?

Many fans prefer the all-time grand slam count, which is essentially a vote for longevity over a shorter peak, no matter how brilliant. The Tennis 128 ranks players by a combination of the two. Many former players, however, tend to recall the best tennis they ever saw in person, often because they were right across the net, on the losing end of it.

One 1950s-era Australian player said, “[W]hen you play [Lew] Hoad, it’s like you’re not even there.”

My friend Charles Friesen tracks GOAT claims over the years from any source he can find–books, magazine articles, forum posts, broadcasts, and more–where a player or expert has offered a their personal list of the best of all time. In Charles’s tally, 17 different men have gotten at least one number-one vote, from William Renshaw back in 1890 to Novak Djokovic last year. Only eight of those players have been named five times or more.

Charles has found eight votes for Hoad, submitted from the 1980s to the early 2010s. More than Richard “Pancho” González, more than John McEnroe, more than Pete Sampras, even more than Djokovic–at least so far.

González never went on record with a GOAT pick of his own. Still, he made a good case for the rival he faced nearly 200 times:

Hoad was the only guy who, if I was playing my best tennis, could still beat me.  I think his game was the best ever, better than mine.  He was capable of making more shots than anybody.  His two volleys were great.  His overhead was enormous.  He had the most natural tennis mind with the most natural tennis physique.

González summed it up: “If there was ever a Universe Davis Cup, and I had to pick one man to represent Planet Earth, I would pick Lew Hoad in his prime.”

* * *

Had Hoad ever gone off to represent his planet in a one-match battle for galactic domination, us earthlings would’ve had plenty of reason to be nervous. The Australian’s career record doesn’t match his imposing reputation because, well, he often wasn’t that imposing.

Jack Kramer, who would spend two years trying to convince Hoad to join his professional troupe, had recognized Hoad’s talent as early as 1946. Kramer and Ted Schroeder were in Australia to compete for the Davis Cup, and they saw the 12-year-old Lew play an exhibition against Ken Rosewall, who was three weeks older. Hoad lost badly–as he usually did against Rosewall in those days–but his raw shotmaking ability was already evident.

Kramer was one of many figures in Hoad’s life who would try to round out his game and help the young man become more consistent. Some of the coaching worked, but most of the efforts on the mental side of things didn’t. Even when Kramer offered cash bonuses for winning matches–on top of the $125,000 Hoad received for turning pro–you never quite knew which Lew would show up.

In the final reckoning, Kramer was a bit harsh on his golden boy. He called Hoad “overrated,” and “the most inconsistent of all the top players.” The promoter even had an explanation for the rosier assessments from others: “[H]e is held in greater esteem than he deserves, I think, because he was so damn popular with everyone that people in tennis wanted to believe he was better.”

Rod Laver was definitely one of those people. Rocket Rod was four years younger than Hoad, exactly the right age difference to make Lew his idol for life. Laver loved his “majestic” game, and he sought to emulate Hoad’s friendly, generous personality. Lew didn’t go in for gamesmanship, and like his mentor Harry Hopman, he barely had any tactics.

Much as he admired Hoad, Laver recognized the man’s shortcomings. “Lew could be lackadaisical in preliminary matches or in minor tournaments, and was knocked out by blokes not fit to tie his shoelaces.” Especially early in his career, he struggled to focus on court. For years, Rosewall–as intense as Lew was casual–didn’t like to play doubles with him because he was so easily distracted.

Laver only played Hoad after they had both turned pro, when injuries had limited the older man’s game. Still, Laver claimed that “an on-song Hoad was the best player I ever played against.” Some sources drive home the point by saying that Hoad usually won. In fact, Laver won 34 of the 60 meetings I’ve found records for. Because those matches came at the tail end of Hoad’s career, they don’t tell us much about his greatness. But they do serve as a reminder that memory is tricky. For every one match Hoad played that left his peers with their jaws on the floor, there was another when he inexplicably lost a set or just couldn’t find the range with his groundstrokes.

* * *

When everything was going right, Hoad did indeed play some of the best tennis in history. His last match as an amateur was the 1957 Wimbledon final against countryman Ashley Cooper. He gave Cooper a 6-2, 6-1, 6-2 beatdown in less than an hour, winning more than one-third of the points with aces or clean winners. The London Daily Express called it “Murder on Centre Court.”

Nicola Pietrangeli lost all eight sets he played against Lew. “For one match he was unbeatable. He could do anything.”

Mal Anderson, an Australian who took advantage of Hoad’s absence to win the 1957 US National Championships, never missed a chance to see Hoad and González play. “It was unbelievable tennis. We … were like beginners compared to them.”

Art Larsen, the eccentric American who won at Forest Hills in 1950, said that Lew served harder than Andy Roddick. “He was the best I’ve seen.”

When Kramer wasn’t driven to distraction by Hoad’s inconsistency, he sat back in awe:

I’d marvel at the shots he could think of. He was the only player I ever saw who could stand six or seven feet behind the baseline and snap the ball back hard, crosscourt. He’d try for winners off everything, off great serves, off tricky short balls, off low volleys. … He could flick deep topspin shots with his wrist that González couldn’t believe a human being could hit.

Like all the Australians of his era, Hoad was well-trained in doubles tactics. Yet he had the self-belief to throw them away with the match on the line. In the 1955 Davis Cup Challenge Round, he partnered Rex Hartwig against Tony Trabert and Vic Seixas of the United States. Lew served at 5-all in the deciding fifth set, and the Americans reached break point. In the ad court, the proper serve would’ve been a conservative kicker out wide to open up the court.

Instead, Hoad went big. He hit it flat at full speed, and Trabert could barely make contact. Twice more, the Americans earned a break point, and twice more, Lew gambled with the cannonball. The Aussies held. They took the match 7-5, secured the 1955 championship, and wouldn’t give back the Davis Cup for three more years.

Hoad (right) with Hartwig and Hopman. Ironically, Hoad considered Hartwig to be a streaky, unpredictable player without precedent: “I reckon it is safe to say that there will never be another like him. He has patches of eight or nine games in which his tennis is so breathtakingly brilliant nobody in the world, amateur or professional, can hope to cope with him.”

Six years later, Hoad and Trabert faced off in the deciding rubber of the Kramer Cup, the fledging pro equivalent of the Davis Cup. Lew was as brilliant in that match as he had been as an amateur. Trabert could only say, “Trying to stop Lew … was like fighting a machine gun with a rubber knife.”

* * *

The only things that could stop Lew were his own mind and, all too often, his body.

His first major breakthrough came in 1953, a year in which he won eight titles, six of them with victories against Rosewall in the semi-finals or final. He failed to make an impact at the majors, losing to Seixas both in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon and the semis at Forest Hills. Hoad got his revenge on Seixas in the Davis Cup Challenge Round, and that was just the beginning.

The Australians were going for their fourth consecutive Davis Cup title. But with the stalwart Frank Sedgman lost to the pro game, they had to rely on “two babes and a fox”–19-year-olds Hoad and Rosewall, coached by the ever-present Harry Hopman. Hoad kicked things off with a straight-set victory against Seixas, and Trabert–fresh off his first major title at Forest Hills–brushed aside Rosewall. The Americans won the doubles rubber as well, making quick work of Hoad and Hartwig.

Lew needed to beat Trabert to keep his country’s hopes alive. In front of 17,000 fans, the 19-year-old delivered one of the most memorable matches in Cup history. Trabert wasn’t as flashy as the Australian, but he played Kramer-style “Big Game” tennis that aimed to keep Hoad on the back foot. Neither man had a tactical lob to speak of, so the result was non-stop aggression, each man looking for the slightest opening to come forward.

Hoad built a 13-11, 6-3 lead, but in a drizzle, on a slippery grass court, he lost the next two sets. Hopman’s craftiness may have been the difference. When Hoad slipped and fell in the fifth set, his coach teased him (something like, “Get up, you lazy bastard,” though recollections differ) to defuse the tension. As the match got even tighter, Hopman slipped him a dry racket when Trabert wasn’t looking. Hoad won, 7-5 in the fifth, and Rosewall sealed the deal with a four-set win over Seixas.

Lew’s performance in the Challenge Round was so impressive that some journalists rated him the number one player in the world, an honor almost never given to someone without a single major to his name. Unfortunately, it would take him a few years to live up to the acclaim.

Immediately after his Davis Cup heroics, Hoad was called up for national service. He missed the 1954 Australian Championships, and in training, he suffered a spider bite that was initially misdiagnosed and left him in a coma for two days. He returned to the tennis grind after his three-month stint in the army, but it took some time before he was back at full strength.

In 1955, Lew reached his first major final at home in Australia, where he lost to Rosewall in straight sets. Except for a Wimbledon doubles title with Hartwig, the rest of the season was a forgettable one. Hoad had even more reason than usual to be distracted: He was courting fellow player Jenny Staley. After they learned she was pregnant, they got married in a secret ceremony just before Wimbledon began. The press, especially in Australia, had been relentless in their speculation about the couple, and it showed in Lew’s on-court performance.

* * *

Back in shape, happily married, the press at bay, and with a baby due soon, Hoad finally showed the world what he was capable of. In 1956, he won 13 titles, including the first three legs of the Grand Slam. He beat Rosewall for the Australian and Wimbledon titles, and took the French title from Sven Davidson despite spending the night before the final splitting a bottle of vodka with a Russian diplomat.

The Wimbledon final was Lew at his best. He took a two-sets-to-one lead over Rosewall but fell behind, 4-1, in the fourth. Recognizing that his longtime rival could quickly take away the set and the match, he sprung into action. Modest as he was, even Hoad couldn’t deny that he had achieved perfection:

Of the last 23 points, I won 20, 14 of them from outright winners, five with aces, and in the fifteen minutes we took for the last five games the ball did not once land where I did not intend it to go, and I did not make a single tactical mistake.

Hoad barely had a chance to bask in his success before a new problem presented itself. He developed back spasms so severe that he opted to spend a week sailing across the Atlantic rather than subject himself to a cramped airplane seat. The pain would come and go, but it would be two decades before he found a doctor who knew what to do about it. The first specialist he saw told him that he needed more exercise.

When Forest Hills came along two months later, Lew had begun to learn how to manage his back, and he reached the final. He met Rosewall once again. On a gusty day, his steady, intense countryman better handled the conditions. Rosewall won in four sets, and it seemed to Lew that his old friend was more disappointed at the Grand Slam near-miss than Hoad was himself. He didn’t blame his back, but it must have been a factor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O1qgqc38rw

The injury didn’t improve, and he spent several weeks in early 1957 immobilized in a plaster cast. He recovered in time to play only a handful of events before Wimbledon, but the abbreviated preparation didn’t hurt him. He worked his way into form throughout the fortnight, facing his only real challenge in a quarter-final battle with countryman Mervyn Rose. He played the best match of his life in the final, leaving Ashley Cooper in the dust.

Then, at age 22, for a signing bonus of $125,000, Lew Hoad turned pro.

* * *

Hoad had always been a work in progress. Even when he beat Trabert in the 1953 Davis Cup Challenge Round, he had little in the way of groundstrokes, a glaring hole in his game that had allowed Rosewall to beat him since they were 12 years old. Hopman split up the Hoad-Rosewall doubles team so that Lew would be forced to play the left court beside Rex Hartwig. The unfamiliar side gave him some much-needed backhand practice.

It sure seemed to work. The more well-rounded Hoad won four of his last five singles majors as an amateur. But Jack Kramer signed him to be the next big professional star, and that meant he would need to hold his own with Richard González. The pro game, with its relentless schedule of one-night stands, was more physically demanding than the amateur tour. The temporary indoor surfaces that served for so many pro matches were unfamiliar to amateurs, while experienced pros like González spent years adapting to them. Most players, no matter how talented, struggled to make the transition.

Kramer knew that Hoad would struggle more than most. His casual approach to the game would clash with the rigors of the pro circuit, and on the technical side of things, he needed more work on his defensive skills. Kramer designed Lew’s first several months as a sort of boot camp. Pancho Segura taught him how to hit a proper lob, and the new star was, for the most part, kept away from González.

It all sounds a bit like pro boxing because, well, it was. The Hoad-González duel–the challenger versus the champion–wasn’t a one-night-only showcase in Las Vegas, but it was the biggest drawing card in pro tennis. Kramer needed to build it up as an arena-filling attraction, and he had to make sure it would live up to the billing.

For a few months, Hoad-versus-González was everything Kramer had hoped for. González didn’t like the way Kramer had kept the challenger away from him in late 1957, but there was nothing he could do about it, just as there was little he could do to stop the young Australian’s power game. The two men were slated to play up to 100 matches to decide the new champion; Hoad got off to an early 8-5 lead, and then built up an 18-9 advantage.

But then, on a chilly night in Southern California, in front of a packed house full of celebrities, Lew’s back seized up again. He never really recovered. For the remainder of the tour, he could barely tie his own shoelaces. González would say he used “every trick I ever learned” and “a maximum of determination” to overcome his compromised foe. The champion came back from his early deficit and won the series from Hoad, 51 matches to 36.

* * *

Hoad continued playing professional tennis for a decade, winning another three dozen matches against González and nearly holding his own against the younger, healthier Laver. He entered Wimbledon a few times after Open tennis became a reality in 1968, though by that point, he was no longer fully committed to tennis. His back wouldn’t have allowed it, anyway.

It wasn’t until 1978 that his back problems were properly diagnosed and treated. He had played more than a decade of professional tennis with two ruptured discs. The doctor who operated on him couldn’t fathom how Lew had continued to compete–or even walk, for that matter.

When he was healthy and focused, Hoad had an effect on spectators–and opponents–much like that of Roger Federer at his peak. The effortless power, the improvised winners–the type of tennis that takes years of practice but somehow looks entirely inborn.

The Australian legends who once considered Hoad to be the greatest of all time seem to have moved on. Laver and Rosewall, in particular, once put Lew atop their lists. They’ve since gone on record for Roger. Perhaps now, in a hypothetical battle for the fate of the universe, peak Federer will play for Earth. Still, Lew Hoad should suit up as first alternate.

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

* * *

Virginia Wade [GBR]
Born: 10 July 1945
Career: 1962-85
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1975)
Peak Elo rating: 2,285 (2nd place, 1976)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 78
 

* * *

A strange aspect of women’s tennis in the amateur years, and even the first decade of the professional era, is that coaching was virtually nonexistent. There was certainly nothing like what we expect to see today. Most players took lessons as children or teenagers, and some had fathers or brothers who helped them, occasionally even joining them on tour. With rare exceptions, like Eleanor “Teach” Tennant with Alice Marble and Maureen Connolly, there were no traveling coaches.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Marble and Connolly won so many slams.

Virginia Wade later explained how coaching worked for most of the players on the circuit. You’d try to find an acknowledged expert–someone like Richard “Pancho” González–and get him to spend a few minutes with you. You’d hit a few serves, he’d pass judgment, and that was that.

Somehow, that sort of one-off advice helped Wade win her first big title. Heading into the 1968 US Open, she hadn’t won a title in nine tries, since taking the first Open-era professional trophy in Bournemouth back in April. After losing to Maria Bueno at the US Amateur Championships in Boston in a three-set semi-final, she sought some advice.

González wasn’t on hand, but Doris Hart was. The American had won six singles majors between 1949 and 1955, and in her day, her serve had been as feared as Wade’s was more than a decade later. There was no dedicated training block–Virginia merely sought out the former great for a conversation. On the strength of Hart’s advice, Wade believed she started making 30 percent more of her first serves.

Whatever Hart charged for her time, it should’ve been more. Wade went to Forest Hills and simply overwhelmed the field. She averaged only 40 minutes per match, and after knocking out Rosie Casals in the round of 16, she beat the top three seeds in succession. She finished the job with a 6-4, 6-2 dismantling of Billie Jean King, who had beaten her in nine of their ten previous meetings. She had turned down the prize money to retain her amateur status at Bournemouth, but she happily accepted $6,000 for her efforts in New York.

The press had long called her “imperious,” but before 1968, they were usually referring to her bearing–and it wasn’t always a compliment. Finally, the service motion that many pundits considered to be the best in the women’s game paid dividends. Her results–at least for those two weeks–were every bit as imperious as her manner.

* * *

Wade could’ve used some of Hart’s advice at Wimbledon. From 1968 to 1971, she lost at her home major to Christina Sandberg, Pat Walken, Cece Martinez, and Judy Tegart–none of them seeds, and none of the matches later than the fourth round. She remained one of the prime British hopes at the tournament, but her early exits became a running joke. Headline writers liked both “Ginny Flops” and “Ginny Fizzes.”

The results steadily improved–Wade reached the quarters for eight years running starting in 1972–but it took another round of external help to push her over the finish line.

Ginny was initially reluctant to join up with World Team Tennis (WTT), the upstart American league that paid guaranteed salaries to top players and put on carnival-like exhibitions around the country from 1974 to 1978. When she gave in, she eventually found herself a teammate of Billie Jean King on the New York Sets (later the New York Apples).

The 1976 WTT campaign was, as it turned out, some of the best training Wade could’ve asked for. King told her that you start preparing for Wimbledon the day the previous Wimbledon is finished. Playing for the Apples meant daily practice with male hitting partners and coach Fred Stolle, not to mention near-nightly matches in a newfangled format designed to keep the crowd involved and the tension level high. King would write, “[P]layers had the sensation of being on center court every night.”

Won over to the benefits of regular coaching, Wade assembled a brain trust consisting of Americans Hamilton Richardson–a longtime top-tenner and 1958 US doubles champ–and Jerry Teeguarden, who had previously worked with Margaret Court. In 1977, Teeguarden traveled with her for three months before Wimbledon. The two men helped her rebuild the serve which–while imposing–was once again failing to get the results Wade felt it should. The new delivery was less fluid but more technically correct.

It worked. At Wimbledon, she played the best match of her career in the semi-final against Chris Evert. A few years earlier, Evert had told the journalist Grace Lichtenstein that Wade’s serve was so strong that, “[I]n the first couple of games … [I] had to fight the urge to duck.” Yet Chrissie usually handled the onslaught just fine, and Ginny had won only 5 of their 24 encounters. The top-seeded American had an off-day and Wade kept her nerves in check, winning 6-2, 4-6, 6-1.

She turned in another confident performance to win the title two days later. Against surprise finalist Betty Stöve and in front of the Queen, her self-assurance was so solid that it didn’t waver even after Stöve took the first set. She had come back from match point down against the Dutchwoman twice in 1976, and she knew if it came to that, she could do it again. Stöve was known for her streakiness, and Wade turned the tide, serving so well that one-third of her first offerings didn’t make it back. In her 16th appearance at Wimbledon, Ginny finally won the title, 4-6, 6-3, 6-1.

* * *

There’s a lot to learn by viewing Virginia Wade’s two biggest titles through the lens of coaching. My intent isn’t to take away any of Ginny’s credit for her wins–after all, by modern standards, she barely had any coaching at all. She won 78 career titles in a 17-year-span, most of them with no more than a friend or doubles partner in her corner.

Indirectly, Wade’s peaks shed some light on the media coverage she (incessantly) received. Even if your only reference point is the press hyperventilation over Tim Henman or Johanna Konta, you probably understand how the British media treated their country’s underperforming greatest hope. Ginny noticed, and she lampooned the newspapermen in her 1978 book, Courting Triumph:

My results fluctuated like a yo-yo. There was always a story for the press who loved every see-sawing minute. There was scarcely a report that didn”t mention the word “temperamental”. Sometimes I had “ice-blue eyes”, sometimes “blazing”. Most commonly I was “tempestuous”, “explosive”, “unpredictable”, “arrogant”, “sultry”, “scowling”, “glowering”.

While losing the first set of the 1977 Wimbledon final:

I could just hear some dippy reporter from an obscure tennis biannual calling me a wounded lioness while the others sat in conclave over the riddle of my atavism.

Presumably Wade remains the only Wimbledon champion to have considered the riddle of her atavism before coming back to win a final.

(I had to read this one with a dictionary close by. Thanks to Virginia and her co-author and partner Marylou Mellace, I can now define morphetic and contraviety, as well.)

Certainly, Ginny suffered some losses that she shouldn’t have. The pressure of entering Wimbledon as a home favorite got to her, and it didn’t get easier over time. But with their focus on the “temperamental” star, journalists rarely considered that Wade simply wasn’t yet good enough. It’s a mistake that pundits have made over and over again for decades. Yeah, Nick Kyrgios may be a headcase, but he also has one of the weakest returns in the game.

* * *

The Wade narrative began long before she had any real chance to contend for a Wimbledon title. She qualified for her first appearance at the Championships in 1962, a month before her 17th birthday. She spent the next four years at Sussex University studying mathematics and physics, sometimes finishing her final exams the day before she was due at the All-England Club.

Billie Jean spent 50 weeks of the year preparing for Wimbledon, and she won the first of her six titles there in 1966. Ginny got 24 hours.

When Wade became a regular on tour, the news coverage fed a vicious circle:

Once my ‘temperament’ was latched onto, I became so conscious of my behaviour I’d be unable to think properly during a match. If I missed an easy shot I’d get furious, then waste time trying to control my anger and miss another easy shot. Getting mad made me feel guilty, and suppressing myself scuttled my involvement in the match.

With the benefit of hindsight, Ginny would divide her career into two phases. The first ran through her defeat in the 1974 Wimbledon semi-finals to Olga Morozova–yet another match she should’ve won. The second comprised two of her best seasons–in 1975 and 1976–along with the Wimbledon title in 1977. She refused to accept that her early struggles were due to temperament–she called that “rubbish”–but instead saw two “tennis lives” separated by her perfectionism.

The first Virginia was the one who said, “I would rather play beautiful tennis than win.” Onlookers saw her outbursts and assumed she was spoiled; she thought the flashes of temper stemmed from perfectionism. When everything clicked, as it did at the 1968 US Open, she could play beautiful tennis and win.

Preparing to serve in 1975

But that was never sustainable. Wade eventually learned to play high-percentage tennis, to accept a serve that was less fluid but more effective, and to save her energy for the ball. King told her, “You never have time on the court to waste getting mad,” and in her 30s, Ginny finally learned that lesson.

Wade may have been unlucky to play in an era with such limited coaching, but she was fortunate that her career extended into the professional era. Prize money ensured that women who could compete past their mid-20s would continue to be rewarded for doing so. She wrote in 1978:

Ten years ago, a woman was expected to reach her peak by twenty-five at the latest. I am so much better in every way now, including physically, that age obviously has become an arbitrary gauge.

Ginny would never entirely lose the reputation of the temperamental perfectionist. But with her Wimbledon title after so many failed attempts, she ensured that British journalists would never again have to speculate about why she couldn’t win the big one.

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

* * *

Pam Shriver [USA]
Born: 4 July 1962
Career: 1978-97
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1984)
Peak Elo rating: 2,266 (3rd place, 1984)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 21
 

* * *

Pam Shriver was apparently the sort of player that, if you watched her in action, you just had to give her a nickname. Soon after arriving on tour, she was dubbed the “Lutherville Lamppost.” She hailed from Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, and “lamppost” was the best alliterative description of a six-footer that the wags were likely to come up with.

Bud Collins did a little better. He called Pam the “Great Whomping Crane,” a nonsensical tag that is nonetheless one of his better coinages. Shriver serve-and-volleyed while the rest of her generation mimicked Chris Evert from the baseline, so she swooped into the net–just like a crane. With arms that nearly covered the breadth of the net and an oversized racket to cover the remaining inches, the swoop often did indeed end with a whomp.

One of the most articulate players off the court, Shriver couldn’t quite be pinned down as a mere lamppost or crane. She kept herself busy, often taking on obligations that other players skipped. Her longtime coach, Don Candy, dubbed her “the Florence Nightingale of women’s tennis”–a positive spin on her charitable nature and packed schedule, even if he didn’t always approve of the distractions.

Pam made her first appearance as a television commentator in 1981 (when she was 18!) and by the middle of the decade, her friends in the Republican establishment were urging her to run for office. She had so many interests away from the sport that John Feinstein suggested she go by yet another nickname: Pam “Not a Tennis Player” Shriver.

Not just a tennis player, to be clear.

* * *

One writer described the 16-year-old Shriver as “gangly as a newborn colt.” Her youth and her undisguised emotion on court–no one ever had to wonder what the young Pam was thinking–gave the impression that she was inexperienced, even naive.

Her results told a different story. She had been playing tennis for more than a decade, and she took her first lesson when she was nine years old. Candy, her coach from day one, was an unlikely character to be teaching beginners in suburban Baltimore. A canny Australian who had won the French doubles title in 1956, he would work with Shriver for more than a decade. Within a few years, she was winning matches for her high school’s boys’ team. By the time she was 15, she was considered the second-best player her age in the nation, behind only Tracy Austin. Candy felt she had nothing more to gain from junior competition.

Her coach was right. Pam started 1978, six months short of her 16th birthday, by winning a local qualifying tournament for a place in the draw of the Virginia Slims of Washington. In that first event on the circuit, she won her opening match against Pam Teeguarden and lost a close second-rounder to Virginia Ruzici. The same month she headed to a Futures event in Columbus, Ohio, where she won twelve straight matches to come through pre-qualifying and qualifying to win the title. At Hilton Head in April, she beat Teeguarden again and took a set from Martina Navratilova.

That summer at Wimbledon was her first appearance at a major. She served for the match and a place in the second week, but ultimately fell in the third round to Sue Barker, 2-6, 8-6, 7-5. She bounced back well enough to win four matches in the consolation event and reached the semi-finals. Candy said, “It takes some experience to know how to win at Wimbledon,” but Shriver would quickly prove she could accomplish great things with only a bit more seasoning than she already had.

At Forest Hills just two months later, she became the youngest finalist in the history of the event. She reached the semis without dropping a set, knocking out the Aussie veteran Lesley Hunt 6-2, 6-0 in the quarters. That earned her a meeting with Navratilova, the top seed who had already won ten tournaments that year. The 16-year-old showed a few signs of nerves, losing her serve twice, each one right after she broke Martina. But she survived two rain delays and airplane noise from LaGuardia traffic that was the worst reporters could remember.

Barry Lorge wrote for the Washington Post that she “served oppressively,” and her first serve was reliable when it mattered. She saved four set points in the opening set, and she took full advantage of her height to serve wide to Navratilova’s lefty backhand. Candy’s guidance had made her a tactician beyond her years. Martina said after the match, “She played like a grown-up, a 25-year-old.” Shriver won in two tiebreaks, 7-6(3), 7-6(3).

Pam’s opponent in the final was Chris Evert. She feared the embarrassment of losing 6-0, 6-0 in a grand slam final, but there was no reason to worry. Evert had a better handle on the serve than Navratilova did, and the decision was still a close one, 7-5, 6-4, in favor of the veteran.

A 16-year-old grand slam finalist, Shriver went back to Baltimore–and her last year of high school–thinking the sky was the limit.

* * *

Nine months after beating Martina at the US Open, in June 1979, Shriver was warming up at the grass court event in Chichester, England. She hit an overhead and felt a pop in her right shoulder. The injury would cause her to pull out of her second-round match at Wimbledon, and she wouldn’t win another match until November.

Shoulder–and later elbow–problems wouldn’t completely derail her career, but they halted her progress at just the time that she could’ve been figuring out how to challenge Evert and Navratilova at the top of the game. Instead, it was Tracy Austin who made headway while Shriver managed her injuries. Six years later, Frank Deford described her appearance at a press conference, “her one shoulder all iced up as usual, bulging like a tuberous potato.”

Shriver wrote five years later, “My right arm has become a focal point in my life, and I hate that.”

We’ll never know whether an unimpaired Shriver could’ve consistently challenged Chrissie and Martina. With her shoulder as it was, all she could do was join the scrum fighting for third place. When David Letterman asked Andrea Jaeger if she thought she could made it to number one, Jaeger spoke for many when she explained just how many tournaments she’d need to win–and how many times Navratilova would have to lose early–for the top spot to even become a possibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOXwt10gwdQ

Pam lost her first 14 meetings with Evert, not claiming a set until their 10th encounter and not recording a victory until 1983. She beat Navratilova again at the US Open in 1982, but it was a mere blip in a big picture, as Martina won 41 of their 44 head-to-heads. One indication of Navratilova’s dominance is that even those three defeats made an impression on the champion. She wrote in 1985, “Actually, [Pam’s] given me some of my biggest losses, and she constantly comes up with big matches against me.”

Shriver reached nine major singles semi-finals in her career. After her initial win in 1978 against Martina, she lost four against Navratilova, one to Evert, one against Hana Mandlikova, and two to Steffi Graf. By the time she could finally hold her own against Evert, a new generation–Graf, Gabriela Sabatini, and a non-stop parade of hard-hitting teenagers–came along to make the 20-something serve-and-volleyer feel like a museum piece.

* * *

There’s another what-if in the Shriver story, one that only became public knowledge this year. In April, Pam wrote in The Telegraph that her relationship with Don Candy crossed the line into a sexual–and sometimes emotionally abusive–one. Candy, who died in 2020, was married and 33 years her senior. She is careful not to demonize her former mentor, but she is also clear about the negative effects of the relationship:

It was horrible. I can’t even tell you how many nights I just sobbed in my room–and then had to go out and play a match the next day. [Candy’s wife] Elaine would arrive just in time for the slams: Wimbledon or the US Open. Now I can see that my most disappointing results often correlated with these moments. So, even from the most pragmatic perspective, I look back and think, “Jeez, was this good for your tennis?”

She took four months off from the tour in 1984 to clear her head, rest her shoulder, and find new coaching and management arrangements. Candy retained an advisory role, and as late as 1991, Shriver still sometimes called him for advice. He told Michael Mewshaw, “When the dark clouds gather, Pam still acknowledges me.” It was one thing to recognize that a relationship is unhealthy. It was another to figure out how to replace the voice that had always been in her ear.

Shriver and Candy in 1980

The transition was not easy, but Shriver emerged to play some of her best tennis. Apart from one blip, she held on to a place in the top five on the WTA computer until March of 1989. She won multiple titles every year from 1983 to 1988.

Most importantly for her legacy, her doubles game remained unaffected.

* * *

The Tennis 128 ranking doesn’t consider doubles accomplishments, but writing about Pam Shriver without mentioning her doubles records would be almost as bad as leaving out the “Great Whomping Crane” nickname.

It’s no surprise that a tactically sound six-footer with good control of her serve and even stronger volleys would become a standout doubles player. She reached her first major final with Betty Stöve at the 1980 US Open, where the pair lost to Navratilova and Billie Jean King. The winning team soon split, and Martina plunked down a quarter to call Shriver, who had proposed earlier that year that they join forces.

Navratilova was the best doubles player of her era, probably the greatest of all time. Shriver was her strongest partner. They reached the 1981 Australian final at their first major as a team, and they won Wimbledon the same year. They would go on to win 20 slams together, including all four in 1984. Between 1983 and 1985, they won 109 matches in a row, and they took the trophy at the WTA Tour Championships ten times in a twelve-year span.

Shriver didn’t have a problem competing alongside the woman who beat her so often on the singles court:

People often ask if it’s difficult to play against Martina in singles and then team up with her in doubles. Well, it would be much worse to play against her in singles and then not team up with her in doubles.

At one point in the Navratilova-Shriver glory days, Martina said in a speech that she never wanted to play with another partner. Pam jokingly jotted it down on a cocktail napkin and got her teammate to sign it. The partnership didn’t quite last forever–after eight-plus years, Navratilova chose to play with Hana Mandlikova at the 1989 US Open. But while Shriver would’ve preferred to stick with what worked, the breakup gave her the opportunity to cement her legacy apart from Martina’s. She had already taken a doubles gold medal at the Olympics in Seoul with Zina Garrison in 1988, and 1991, she paired with Natasha Zvereva to win the US Open.

* * *

Shriver kept a journal throughout 1984, her year of inner conflict. Some of it appeared in Sports Illustrated, and it was later expanded into a book, Passing Shots: Pam Shriver on Tour. It’s one of the better tennis memoirs: candid, insightful, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Frank Deford was one of the editors on the project, and he gained some insight both into the player and his own framework for understanding athletes:

Most champions are a good deal more inner-directed than she. … It is my own view that when we journalists go prattling on about “the killer instinct,” we are really employing a colorful phrase for the more prosaic “self-centered.”

He explained, by contrast, how focused–and egocentric–Chrissie and Martina could be. Shriver couldn’t have been more different. She said in the book, “Tennis alone doesn’t satisfy me,” something that observers had correctly inferred for years.

Still, in the slightly more other-centered game of doubles, Shriver proved to have every bit of the killer instinct necessary to win the biggest titles. Give her a healthy player-coach relationship and a functional right shoulder, and I suspect her killer instinct would’ve been sufficient on the singles court, as well.