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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Henri Cochet [FRA]
Born: 14 December 1901
Died: 1 April 1987
Career: 1920-51
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1928)
Major singles titles: 7*
Total singles titles: 101
 
* Plus the 1922 French Championships, which were not yet open to foreigners, and the 1922 World Hard Courts, which are considered by some to have been a major.
 

* * *

Down two sets to love, most players begin to recognize it’s just not their day. They might try some new tactics or look for signs that their opponent is tiring. But no matter what optimism they can muster, the odds are stacked in the other direction. In the amateur era, front-runners converted two-set leads even more often than they do now.

Henri Cochet was not “most players.” He was “an enfant terrible who love[d] to play with fire,” in the words of John Tunis. In the New Yorker ahead of the 1928 US National Championships, Tunis wrote:

[H]e is never in his real element until the tactical situation forces him to admit the possibility of defeat…. [W]ith the score two sets and four games to one against him, he becomes tight-lipped and firm, brilliant and audacious, careful and scintillating all at once. Those are the moments when his shots are so uncanny, so unorthodox, so impossible that they seem almost insolent.

We can read between the lines and deduce that at the beginning of a match, the Frenchman was not particularly brilliant or careful. His Davis Cup teammate Jean Borotra was known for steamrolling through the first two sets, then tanking the third–and sometimes the fourth–to save energy for a final push. Cochet didn’t lose the first two sets on purpose, but it sometimes looked that way. The newspapers dubbed him “Five-Set Cochet,” and Tunis’s New Yorker profile was titled “Lucky Cochet.”

But unless we’re talking about the unpredictability of his mood, luck had nothing to do with it. René Lacoste said, “At his best, Cochet is unquestionably the best singles player in the world today.” Suzanne Lenglen agreed: “On a good day, nobody in the world can stop him.”

Bill Tilden went even one step further: “In these inspired moments of his, Cochet is the greatest of all Frenchmen, and in my opinion, possibly the greatest player who has ever lived.” At various times, Tilden called him a “genius” and a “revolutionary.” Most flattering of all, the American considered Cochet to be his nemesis, the only amateur against whom he lost more often than he won.

* * *

It was a great era for nicknames. Lacoste, the diffident baseliner, was The Crocodile. Borotra, the serve-and-volleyer from the Pyrenees, was The Bounding Basque. Cochet, the all-court player with every shot in his arsenal, was The Magician. Together with Jacques “Toto” Brugnon, they were the Four Musketeers, France’s greatest tennis generation.

Before Cochet became The Magician, he was The Ballboy of Lyon. Unlike most of his contemporaries on the international tennis circuit, Henri came from working-class stock. Fortunately, his father earned his paycheck at a tennis club, first as groundskeeper, then as manager. The youngster earned pocket money chasing down stray balls, and when he could borrow a racket, he would hit with anyone willing to play with him.

The Lyonnaise club offered one particularly useful perk: a pair of covered courts. Indoor tennis was typically played on wooden boards, a surface that was quicker than outdoor clay, and one that offered a truer, more consistent bounce than grass or crushed brick. Cochet could practice year-round, and the indoor boards forced him to learn to meet the ball on the rise and half-volley with ease.

Cochet would later earn the reputation of a player who avoided hard training, but he took full advantage of his father’s occupation. He believed that there was no better way to develop strokes than to practice against a wall. The game that eventually made him the best in the world pointed straight back to all those long hours on covered courts in Lyon.

Cochet at Wimbledon in 1925

The resulting all-court game is what led Tilden to call him a revolutionary. Most players of his time were either baseliners (like Lacoste) or serve-and-volleyers (like Borotra). Plenty of men were able to do both–most notably Tilden himself–but before Cochet, no one had fully integrated a baseline game with the ability to attack at any moment. The Magician was unfazed by the threat of a ball at his feet, so he habitually took a more aggressive position than his peers. And unlike anyone else of his time, he could move in smoothly behind a half-volley.

Cochet’s unorthodox positioning didn’t stop there. He stood only five-feet-six-inches tall, so playing too close to the net just invited a lob. (Tilden, for one, was an expert lobber.) While his height left him with an indifferent serve, he was a master of the overhead smash. The smash, combined with his readiness to hit low volleys and half-volleys, meant he didn’t need to crowd the net. The Ballboy of Lyon knew how to beat you from anywhere, and when he was in the mood, he did just that.

* * *

One theory of why Cochet was so inconsistent, not just from match to match but from set to set, is that he was more temperamental than he looked and was sometimes too nervous to effectively wield his world-class weapons. The alternate theory is that he was so confident that he trusted he could always recover from a patch of bad play.

We’ll never know for sure, but the evidence points strongly in the direction of extreme confidence, self-assurance bordering on the obnoxious.

In the 1926 Davis Cup Inter-Zonal final, France took on Japan for the opportunity to challenge the defending champion United States. The Musketeers increasingly looked like they would threaten America’s dominance of the Cup: Cochet was the reigning French champion, and Borotra had just won Wimbledon. Japan had a strong side but was nowhere near the same level. Still, Cochet needed five sets to get past Tsumio Tawara, and he lost a dead rubber to Takeichi Harada in four. This was not the sort of play that would send the Davis Cup back across the Atlantic.

With the Challenge Round against the US just a few days away, Cochet admitted he was disappointed, but not discouraged. He told Tunis, “Wait until next week. I’m getting better all the time.”

The French captain wasn’t entirely assured, so Lacoste and Borotra handled singles duties. France fell to Tilden and the Americans, four rubbers to one. But at Forest Hills the following week, the Four Musketeers all reached the quarter-finals. Three of them–all but Brugnon–beat their American opponents, and it was Cochet who toppled the great Tilden. The American press dubbed it “Black Thursday.” Bill hadn’t lost a match at his national championship tournament in six years, but the little man from Lyon edged past him, 8-6 in the fifth.

Tilden served for the match at 6-5 in the decider. He showed some signs of fatigue–after all, he was 33 years old, nine years older than his opponent–and his cannonball serve wasn’t quite coming across at full speed. Cochet took the most aggressive return position he could. He didn’t just break serve at love, he won the game with four clean return winners.

Didi Vlasto, a frequent mixed doubles partner of Cochet’s, once said, “Pour Henri c’est toujours l’impossible qui est plus facile”–For Henri, it is always the impossible which is easiest.

* * *

The Magician lost to Lacoste in the Forest Hill semi-finals. The Crocodile won the title–the first ever US champion from a non-English-speaking country–but the failure to capture the Davis Cup still rankled. When the French team left Paris to try again in 1927, Cochet said, “First the Davis Cup and the American Championship. We bring them both back this time, yes?”

By now, his confidence was fully warranted.

Cochet had just won Wimbledon, his first major title outside of France. He had never lacked for self-belief, but the way he took the All-England Club title must have convinced him that he could do absolutely anything.

Cochet at Wimbledon in 1927. A reporter once asked him to explain his serve technique. “The service? Ah, yes. I throw the ball up–and then I hit it.”

In the quarter-finals, Cochet faced the American Frank Hunter. Hunter had reached the Wimbledon final in 1923, and he would come within a set of winning the Forest Hills title in both 1928 and 1929. The American took a comfortable 6-3, 6-3 lead before Cochet woke up and charged back. The Magician won in five, finishing the job 6-2, 6-2, 6-3.

Waiting in the semi-final round was Bill Tilden. Tilden remembered well what happened at Forest Hills the previous year, and he had watched Cochet erase Hunter’s early lead. He was “not going to let that little fellow get me into a long match,” so he would attack from the first ball.

It almost worked. Big Bill won the first two sets, 6-2, 6-4, and built a 5-1 lead in the third. Sportswriter Al Laney was there, and even 40 years later, he wrote, “I can still speak of it in detail … but I could not explain it then and I cannot now.” From 15-all, Tilden started missing, and Cochet’s magic wand sprung to life. Henri won 17 points in a row, and he seized the third set, 7-5. Wimbledon referee F.R. Burrow said that the crowd was “almost too spellbound to applaud.” Cochet completed the comeback, 6-3, 6-4.

Tilden’s exit ensured that the Wimbledon crown would go to a Frenchman for the fourth consecutive year, as Cochet would face Borotra in the final. Inevitably, the front-running Borotra took a two-set lead over the slow-starting Cochet. In ten previous meetings, Jean had grabbed the first two sets twice. Once, at the 1922 World Covered Court Championships, Cochet made his comeback. And once, at the 1924 French Covered Courts, Borotra had held him off.

With Borotra resting, the Magician took the third and fourth sets to even the score. The Basque bounded to a 5-2 lead in the final set, but he couldn’t convert match point. Cochet ultimately saved six match balls, including one when many onlookers (and Borotra) believed that Henri double-hit a volley. The umpire didn’t call it, and Cochet admitted nothing. The Ballboy of Lyon completed his comeback–a second-straight victory from the brink of defeat.

* * *

Cochet’s faith in himself–and his fellow Musketeers–was well-placed. In the 1927 Davis Cup campaign, there were none of the Davis Cup missteps that had made Henri look beatable against Japan the previous year. He straight-setted Einer Ulrich* of Denmark and Yoshiro Ota of Japan to help put his side back in the Challenge Round.

* Father of Davis Cup player Torben, and grandfather to Metallica drummer Lars.

This time, Cochet couldn’t beat Tilden, losing the second rubber in four sets. But his effort was good enough for his team to win. The Musketeers recognized that they needed to take at least one match from Big Bill, so they aimed to collectively wear him out. Cochet worked him hard in his opening singles, and the duo of Borotra and Brugnon kept him running in a five-set doubles rubber the next day. The Frenchmen went into the final day of play down 2-1, but Lacoste beat the exhausted Tilden, and Cochet secured the Cup with a four-set defeat of Bill Johnston.

Lacoste defeated Tilden again in the Forest Hills final, and France’s domination of world tennis was unquestioned. In 1928, Borotra would go to Australia and win the national title there, ensuring that the Muskteers would win seven straight majors between the 1927 French and the 1928 US Championships. They would retain the Davis Cup until Great Britain snatched it away in 1933.

Cochet was an increasingly large part of that success. He won the French and US titles in 1928 and ended the season ranked number one–a position he would hold for four years. He was nearly unbeatable in Davis Cup play in that span, winning both of his singles rubbers every year from 1928 to 1931 and falling short in only one doubles match. He wouldn’t lose a live singles rubber until Fred Perry bested him in a five-setter in 1933.

* * *

With Lacoste retiring due to ill-health and Borotra’s star fading with age, Cochet became the face of French tennis. He won Wimbledon again in 1929, and he added two more French titles to his tally in 1930 and 1932. His sporting goods retailer, Cochet Sports, grew from a tiny shop in Paris to a national chain with outlets in Cannes, Lyon, and La Baule.

For all of Cochet’s nonchalance and dislike of practice, he sure chose to spend a lot of his time on the tennis court. In 1932, he lost in the second round at Wimbledon, only three years removed from his last title there. Tournament organizers were shocked when he turned up to put his name down for the consolation event–which he went on to win. He would keep playing, picking up the occasional title, for another two decades.

In 1933, he turned pro, accepting an offer from Tilden for £25,000 per year. As a professional, he played exhibitions all over the world and coached everyone from the Hungarian Davis Cup team to a group of promising youngsters in the Soviet Union. The Russian adventure proved to be a bit rockier than the usual gig. His hosts accused him of espionage and kicked him out amid the purge of foreign influence in 1938.

World War II halted professional tennis in Europe, and the Magician was eventually reinstated as an amateur. He continued playing competitively under the German occupation, and when his country was freed, he featured in the Liberation Match (umpired by Simonne Mathieu) at Roland Garros–a stadium originally built for the Musketeers’ defense of the Davis Cup in 1928.

Cochet won his last title in 1949, at the age of 48, at the Barcelona International Christmas event. He beat the Australian Jack Harper, 13 years his junior. The same year, he played his last competitive match against friend, foe, and teammate Jean Borotra. Borotra raced to a one-set lead, and Henri found his form to win the second. Cochet lost his momentum and the match, but it’s only fitting that the final clash between the Magician and the Bounding Basque, like the Wimbledon final in 1927, went the distance.

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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Simonne Mathieu [FRA]
Born: 31 January 1908
Died: 7 January 1980
Career: 1926-39
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1932)
Peak Elo rating: 2,237 (1st place, 1930)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 147
 

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Helen Jacobs described her friend and rival Simonne Mathieu as a “player with limited strokes, average physical attributes and the will to win encumbered … by temperament.” That wasn’t even the worst of it:

[T]here was one great drawback to Simonne’s game that she was never able to overcome–or perhaps she did not think it necessary–the absence of any sort of effective volley or smash. This shortcoming did not prevent her winning innumerable doubles championships, but it was a tremendous handicap in singles competition against players who had the strokes and tactical sense to draw her up to the net with short, low shots and then lob deeply.

Those gaping holes in her game so thoroughly blocked Mathieu’s chances at success that she reached the Roland Garros final eight times–winning two–and claimed nearly 150 singles titles. Oh, and history remembers her as an even more accomplished doubles player, with 13 major titles in women’s doubles and another two in mixed.

Jacobs even went out of her way to make it clear that the Frenchwoman’s distinction wasn’t due to any particular strength in “match play psychology.” (Really, they were friends!) Mathieu had three assets, and three assets only: A powerful forehand, a steady backhand, and what Jacobs called an “indomitable fighting spirit.”

The last one was the most important of all. For someone competing at a world-class level in 1930s tennis without any net game at all, every match was a fight.

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Simonne Passemard started fighting–and winning–almost as soon as she first picked up a racket. Of fragile health as a girl, she took after her older brother and began playing at the Stade Français club in Paris. By the time she was 15, she was collecting national trophies.

Sportswriters were dismayed when, aged only 17, Simonne married the writer and editor René Mathieu. Few women balanced family life with a tennis career in those days, so it seemed that France would lose one of its best hopes before she could make a mark on the world stage. She had two sons in 1927 and 1928*, further decreasing the chances that the young prospect would pursue the sport.

* Several sources claim that when Simonne won the French junior championships in 1926, her baby was sleeping courtside. The story is almost too good to check, but the dates don’t add up. The couple married in October 1925, so even if it was a shotgun wedding–admittedly, as good a reason as any for Simonne to marry at 17–it’s tough to reconcile that with her tournament play in January, March, and May of 1926. The only information I can find about her son’s birthdates is one vague, unsourced mention of 1927 and 1928. There are indeed two separate 10-month gaps in her playing record: one before the 1927 French Championships and the other before the German Championships in August of 1928. She may well have played some matches with one eye on a stroller, just not as a junior.

The young Mme. Mathieu refused to conform to expectations. She handed over her sons to her parents, who then moved out of Paris. Her sons, understandably, felt they had been abandoned. A grandson, Bertrand Mathieu, was able to see the separation with the benefit of greater distance. He thinks of his grandmother as an early feminist.

Simonne would certainly prove to be a formidable character during the war, when she founded the women’s auxiliary to the Free French Forces, marched with Charles de Gaulle, and was condemned to death in absentia by the Vichy government. First, though, she had a lot of tennis to play.

* * *

Records from European tournaments in the 1920s and 1930s are incomplete, but the best career tally I’ve been able to put together gives Mathieu 510 wins against 94 losses. That tally is an approximation, but it probably understates her actual performance. Her losses were newsworthy, so they’ve generally survived in the historical record. Her wins, especially in early rounds, could be forgettably routine. Whatever the exact numbers, it’s virtually certain that she won more than half of the tournaments she entered and close to 85% of her matches overall.

Rare as they were, her losses seem to paint the most vivid picture of her experience on court. Her skills came into relief when an opponent faced down the challenge they offered. Dorothy Round beat her in the 1933 British Hard Court Championships, and a newspaper report said that Simonne “is one of the most difficult players in the world to beat outright either with a drive or a drop shot.” When Round knocked her out again at Wimbledon the following year, Mathieu lost a three-setter despite missing long only three times.

Helen Jacobs faced her at Wimbledon in 1932–it was their second meeting–and despite winning by the fairly routine score of 7-5, 6-1, the American recorded it as “one of the most difficult I have ever played.” Mathieu left herself little margin of error for her groundstrokes, slugging forehands with a short backswing and a whiplash follow-through. By the second set, Simonne was trying underarm serves, and she was still dogged enough that the two women played a 98-stroke rally. She was so frustrated by the end of the match that she stormed off without waiting for her opponent, a serious breach of etiquette.

Mathieu (left) with Helen Jacobs at Wimbledon in 1933

Mathieu held her own against Round and Jacobs, as she did with almost all of her rivals. The one exception was her exact contemporary, the German (and later Danish by marriage) star Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling.

Mathieu and Sperling played each other at least 15 times*, and the Frenchwoman lost all but one. Their clashes included the 1935, 1936, and 1937 Roland Garros finals, as well as a 1936 Wimbledon semi-final, one of Simonne’s four missed chances to reach the title match at the All-England Club.

* Jacobs wrote that the pair had met 15 times before what I believe to be their tenth encounter, so it’s possible that we’re missing some results.

The two women had similar styles. Sperling’s advantages: She was taller, and she was not entirely allergic to the forecourt. British journalists ascribed her Wimbledon victory against Mathieu to her “stonewalling tactics” and “impregnable defence.” The Frenchwoman knew how to handle every game style except her own. Jacobs wrote, “[H]er game was extremely steady but her patience was not.” She tried to end points early, but Sperling had an answer to all of Simonne’s attempts at aggression. The German didn’t lose a single set until their eighth meeting.

* * *

Sperling was particularly dominant on Mathieu’s home court. In the 1935 French final, the home favorite was helpless, winning only three games. A news report dismissed the match as being “utterly devoid of interest.”

A year later, Mathieu came a bit closer, losing 6-3, 6-4. Both women were content to wait for the other to make a move, and one observer felt “there seemed no reason why the rallies should ever end.” Individual points often required 50 strokes or more. The crowd booed and whistled until Simonne said, “If you don’t like it, why not come down and take our places?” Mathieu couldn’t outlast the German, and presumably no one in the grandstand could, either.

Mathieu had more support on the Riviera. Since 1929, she had made the annual trek to France’s south coast, taking advantage of the mild winter climate and the hospitality at one Mediterranean resort after another. The competition wasn’t up to quite the same standard as it was at the majors, and Simonne feasted on it. She won all 16 Riviera tournaments she entered in 1935, then went undefeated again over 14 events in 1936. In her career, she won more than 50 singles titles along the coast, plus another 86 doubles trophies.

In 1937, the Frenchwoman’s home-away-from-home-court advantage would be put to the test. Sperling, her nemesis, made her first trip to the Riviera. The two women met in the final at Beaulieu-sur-Mer in February. Mathieu had squeaked past another newcomer, Anita Lizana, in the semis, while Sperling clobbered British player Mary Hardwick, 6-0, 6-1. The German hadn’t lost on a clay court in two years.

Sperling built a 5-2 lead in the opening set, and it looked like it would be yet another one-sided victory for the German. But this time, Mathieu had the patience to out-steady the steadiest player of her era. She fought back to 5-all. The match was an hour old–an eternity for ten games in 1937–but it was just beginning. It took another 25 minutes for Simonne to break for 6-5, and 35 minutes more to seal the set. One report says that some rallies reached 70 strokes which, given the time they took, sounds like a conservative count.

After the two-hour battle for the first set, Sperling had nothing left in the tank. Mathieu won the second, 6-1, in “only” 45 minutes.

Beaulieu represented Simonne’s 36th straight singles title on the Riviera. Alas, the triumph was short-lived. Both her winning streak and her hopes against her rival ended just one week later. At Monte Carlo, it was Sperling who won the protracted first set, 8-6, and Mathieu opted to retire and save energy for the doubles. In four more meetings, she would never again win a set against the German champion.

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Mathieu’s consolation prize was a good one: a pair of Roland Garros titles. In 1938 and 1939, the French Championships were played a bit later than usual, so competitors had to choose between a trip to Paris and proper grass-court preparation for Wimbledon. All the Brits and most of the Americans picked grass over clay. Political tensions also contributed to the limited field in 1939.

Simonne didn’t have to defeat Sperling, Helen Jacobs, or Helen Wills to hoist the trophy, but there’s no record of her complaining about that. In 1938, she brushed aside Nelly Landry of Belgium, 6-0, 6-3, and she defended her title in 1939 with a narrower win over Jadwiga Jędrzejowska. Now 31 years old, she had hardly lost a step. Ja-Ja tested her with drop shots in the second set, and the London Times wrote of the champion, “[O]ne has rarely seen her covering a court so quickly.”

In the same two years that she won her French titles, she made her only trips to the United States to play the American grass-court circuit. In 1938, after a career of annual trips to Wimbledon, she struggled to adapt to the slower turf and the higher bouncing balls on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1939, she didn’t even make it on court at Forest Hills. France declared war on Germany a week before the tournament began, and Mathieu headed back across the ocean.

She immediately threw herself into the fray, offering her services to the British Auxiliary Territorial Service in London, then founding a similar organization, the Corps Féminin Français, for women to support the Free French Forces. She ended the war with a rank of captain, though a fellow volunteer later said that the hierarchy was rather improvised, and that Mathieu was given her command only because of her tennis stardom. However she gained her position, she earned the respect of her charges.

When Paris was liberated in 1944, Simonne had spent four years away from her family. She been forced to give up her sporting career just as she was recording some of her best results. The tennis community celebrated the end of the German occupation with a match between Henri Cochet and Yvon Petra at Roland Garros. Cochet was a legend, a seven-time major winner and one of the his country’s beloved Four Musketeers. Petra was the two-time defending champion of the wartime Tournoi de France. But there was room on court for one more champion. In the umpire’s chair, in full-dress uniform, was Simonne Mathieu.

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

* * *

David Ferrer [ESP]
Born: 2 April 1982
Career: 2002-19
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (2013)
Peak Elo rating: 2,219 (4th place, 2012)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 27
 

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Like it or not, the 21st century has not been an easy time to be an old-school, clay-court grinder. Part of the problem is that whenever Rafael Nadal turns up at a clay-court event, he tends to win. Beyond that, the compressed European clay season–which includes the speedier-playing conditions in Madrid–just isn’t long enough that a dirtballing standout is guarantee to place near the top of the rankings.

This wasn’t entirely clear in the first few years of the 2000s, but if it had been, it would’ve spelled doom for David Ferrer. For one thing, he was five-feet-nine-inches tall–respectable for a ball kid or a Rochus brother, but puny for a tour-level player. More to the point, the combination of his size and the clay-court game he developed in Valencia just didn’t play on hard courts.

Ferrer broke into the top 50 in 2004, when he was 22 years old. It was not because of his hard-court prowess. He won just 3 of 13 tour-level matches on hard that season, one of them against a wild card and another against a qualifier. He made some progress the following year, reaching the semi-finals in Miami, but only because Xavier Malisse cursed a linesman and was defaulted to give Ferrer a second-round victory.

By 2005, he was already a major force on clay. He reached a final at his hometown tournament in Valencia, made the semis in Rome, and reached the final eight at Roland Garros. He twice defeated former French Open champion Gaston Gaudio, 6-0, 6-1 at the Italian and again in a four-hour five-setter in Paris. Had Nadal not developed into a star at almost the exact moment that Ferrer did, the older of the two Spaniards would have enjoyed an even more significant breakthrough.

The difference between the two men would keep Ferrer busy for the next decade. Nadal was seemingly born with a weapon of a lefty serve and the tactical know-how to win points behind it. The Valencian… well, Ferrer served like a five-foot-nine clay-courter. Both men were among the best returners in the game, with Rafa winning 44% of his return points in 2005 and Ferrer winning 43%. But while Nadal won more serve points than the average tour player, Ferrer’s offensive statistics left him behind nearly all of his peers.

Such an impotent service game wasn’t good enough for him to become a dominant clay-court player–especially with Rafa around–and it virtually guaranteed that his hard court results would always be anemic.

* * *

After my Andy Roddick essay this week, you probably don’t want to look at any more serve-points-won graphs. Still, you’ve got to see this. Here is Ferrer’s rate of service points won for each season from his first full campaign in 2003 to his winningest year of 2012:

56%, where he started, is just abysmally bad. Diego Schwartzman has never posted a full season on tour below 58%, and among today’s top 50 players, no one has served below 59.5% over the last 52 weeks. Ferrer didn’t get within spitting distance of 60% until his third year on the circuit.

Like just about every dirtball-grinder made good, he learned–he had to learn–how to flatten out his serve, how to be more aggressive with his first delivery, and how to shorten points by attacking as soon as his opponent was on the defensive. What separated Ferrer from all the other would-be all-surface threats is that he continued to improve along all of those dimensions for a full decade. With the rounding-error exception of 2007 to 2008, when his rate of service points won decreased by 0.3%, he boosted his numbers every single year from his fledgling age-21 campaign to his command performance as a 30-year-old.

All the while, he continued to make other servers look like, well, a young David Ferrer. From 2004 to 2016, he won at least 41% of his return points every single year. Even Nadal didn’t quite manage that, dropping below the 41% mark (albeit barely) twice in that span.

Here’s the list of players who have won at least 41% of their return points in six or more seasons, since the ATP started keeping complete(ish) stats in 1991:

Seasons  Player               
14       Rafael Nadal
13       Novak Djokovic          
13       David Ferrer               
11       Andy Murray          
10       Andre Agassi         
8        Michael Chang        
7        Lleyton Hewitt       
7        Magnus Gustafsson    
7        Thomas Muster        
6        Alberto Berasategui

Ferrer’s best serving season puts him even more elite company. Only ten men have posted even a single season in which they won at least 41% of their return points and 67% or more of their serve points: Agassi, Jim Courier, Djokovic, Stefan Edberg, Roger Federer, Daniil Medvedev, Murray, Nadal, Marcelo Rios, and David Ferrer.

* * *

These lists start to give you an idea why Ferrer, with a single unsuccessful appearance in a grand slam final, ended up so high on the Tennis 128 list. His peak Elo rating of 2,219–achieved early in 2013, largely on the back of that outstanding 2012 season–ranks 20th among Open Era men.

By 2012, he had truly figured out how to win on hard courts. He went 33-8 on the surface that year, and three of those losses were to Djokovic. Another one was a first-set retirement. He won back-to-back titles indoors in Valencia and Paris Bercy, and he even won two of three round-robin matches at the World Tour Finals, defeating Juan Martín del Potro and narrowly missing a place in the semi-finals. He finished the season with more indoor heroics, winning both of his singles rubbers in Spain’s losing effort to the Czech Republic in the Davis Cup Final.

Ferrer finished the 2012 season ranked fifth–behind the Big Four, naturally–for the second year in a row. He wouldn’t play quite as well in 2013, but the combination of good timing and a letdown from some of his rivals meant that a year later, he’d be ranked third, ahead of Murray and Federer. Fortuitous draws, and his usual ability to capitalize on them, meant that he reached his sole major final at Roland Garros, as well as Masters finals in Miami and Paris. He won only two titles (compared to seven the previous year), but he made it to the nine title matches.

Even after his ranking dropped back to a more modest level, Ferrer retained his ability to win regardless of the conditions. Hanging on to the last place in the top ten, he opened his 2015 campaign with a tournament win in Doha, beating Ivo Karlović in a three-tiebreak match in the semis before defeating Tomáš Berdych for the title. He pulled off an unusual trick a month later, taking the trophy in Rio de Janeiro on clay, then winning a hard-court title in Acapulco the following week. In the championship match in Mexico, he didn’t hit a single ace, but the surface switch didn’t faze him. He won half or more of his return points in four of five matches there.

Fans sometimes wrote off Ferrer as little more than a “vulture,” a player who picked up titles only when the field was weak or the draw opened up for him. He certainly won his share of tournaments that way, although defeats of then-7th-ranked Berdych and then-5th-ranked Kei Nishikori in Acapulco don’t really fit that bill. He didn’t stand much of a chance against the Big Four, so he mostly added to his laurels in their absence. Still, in the first years of the 2010s, ranking among the top five–even a distant fifth–required some very high quality tennis.

* * *

Because of his relatively late start and his perennial place in the shadow of the Big Four, fans and pundits were slow to realize just how good Ferrer really was. And even when they embraced the Spaniard’s dogged persistence, few realized how unlikely it was that a player would make a dent in a historically great era the way that he did.

A few years later, Stan Wawrinka would become the poster boy for late-developing stars, winning three majors after his 28th birthday. While Ferrer never posted such signature wins, his belated rise was just as unexpected. After a breakthrough and a year-end #5 finish in 2007, he fell to 17th in the season-ending rankings two years later. No one would’ve been particularly surprised if he had run out the remainder of his career on the fringes of the top ten.

Instead, Ferrer improved to 7th in 2010, his age-28 season. He finished 2011 and 2012 in 5th place, and as we’ve seen, he reached number three in 2013.

It’s one thing for players to be great into their 30s. It’s uncommon in men’s tennis, but a handful of stars have been able to hang on. What’s so remarkable is when a mid-career player gets so close to the top of the game for the first time. When I analyzed historical aging patterns in late 2013, Ferrer was only the 12th player in 30 years to post a four-year streak of ranking improvements after age 24. Only Ferrer and Wayne Arthurs did it after age 27, and Arthurs started from the much lower perch of #52.

Ferrer continued to defy the aging curve. He wouldn’t leave the top ten until May of 2016, and even that season, when he fell out of the top 20 entirely, he was still the bane of servers worldwide. For the 13th straight season, he won 41% of his return points. Only Djokovic, Nadal, Murray, and David Goffin did better.

* * *

For many fans, all of this is beside the point. Ferrer (they might say) isn’t the kind of player who can be summed up with statistics. Commentators never missed a chance to tell the story of when he quit tennis as a teenager. After a week working on a construction site, he realized tennis had its advantages, and he picked up where he left off–working harder than ever.

The work ethic never budged, and it was evident in every game of his 1,100-plus matches. Of all the men with 20 or more matches logged by the Match Charting Project, he’s one of only three recent players (Diego Schwartzman and Gilles Simon are the others) to average at least five shots per point. Somehow it felt like more, because he put so much into every one of them.

However hard he worked just to get through a routine match, he always seemed to have more in the tank. He played 37 five-setters in his career, winning 23 of them, and he was particularly dangerous when national pride was on the line. He contributed to Spain’s Davis Cup wins in 2008, 2009, and 2011, winning crucial five-set matches against Andy Roddick, Radek Štěpánek, and Juan Martín del Potro, respectively. Sharing a side with Rafael Nadal meant that the team could probably have squeaked through without any Ferrer victories, but you never would’ve guessed it when the Valencian was on court.

In a 2015 interview, Ferrer told Rolling Stone that he thought, in five to ten years, “players like me, around my height, are going to be extinct.” The continued success of Schwartzman and the rising Sebastian Baez suggest otherwise. In a big-serving game that seems to feature more high-bouncing topspin every year, it will never be easy for a smaller guy to hold his own. But it wasn’t easy 20 years ago, either. David Ferrer, of all people, should know that.

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

* * *

Andy Roddick [USA]
Born: 30 August 1982
Career: 2001-12
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2003)
Peak Elo rating: 2,181 (1st place, 2003)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 32
 

* * *

Pretend for a moment that you don’t know who I’m writing about today. Take a look at this graph of service points won, for each year over a span of a decade, and try to pick out the player’s best season:

2005 sticks out, both because the mark of 72.7% is the highest of any season in the span, and because it is considerably better than the years immediately before and after. As far as multi-year spans are concerned, the last four seasons are the best.

Service points won can be a bit deceiving, because a player might have a particular good or bad stretch in clutch situations. A serve-related metric that is more closely tied to match results is hold percentage. Here is the same player, over the same decade, measured by the rate at which he held serve:

This plot tells a similar story, also highlighting a peak season in 2005. There’s not much change from year to year, with seven of the ten years within a half percentage point of 91%. That, by the way, is incredibly good. John Isner’s career average is 91.8%. Even the 2002 outlier below 88% is an outstanding hold percentage–this is a guy who was consistently very difficult to break.

One more graph. I’ve ignored return points so far, partly because this player’s game was so serve-dominated, and partly because the year-to-year changes in return points are about as consistent as his serve performance. Still, it’s worth seeing the whole picture.

The Dominance Ratio stat expresses the ratio of return points won to serve points lost, so it takes both sides of the ball into account. A player who wins half of their points will have a DR around 1.0. 1.2 is very good, and 1.3 is usually good for a place in the top five, if not better. Here is the decade in question by DR:

The 2004 season now looks almost as good as the 2005 peak, with the other years noticeably lower. Setting aside the weak campaign of 2007, when our player won only 34% of return points, the entire 2003-10 span, or at least 2003-09, is quite strong.

* * *

So yes, of course, all of these numbers belong to Andy Roddick. The same Andy Roddick whose on-court career is best remembered for one great season, when he won the US Open and finished the year as number one on the ATP computer. That year was 2005 2004 2003.

Whatever the stats say about it, 2003 was a memorable campaign for the American, who turned 21 years old in August of that year. He reached his first major semi-final in Australia, then after winning titles on both clay and grass, he appeared in his second slam semi at Wimbledon. He was nearly unbeatable on North American hard courts, winning four titles in the course of a five-tournament span between Indianapolis in July and the US Open in September. He even upset Roger Federer in Montreal.

The season began with Roddick clinging to a spot at the outer fringe of the top ten. He came to New York as the fourth seed, he left it as the newly-minted number two in the world rankings, and he ascended to number one by the end of the season. The sky was the limit for the hyperactive Texan with the electric serve.

Then, at the 2004 Australian Open, Roddick lost in the quarters to Marat Safin. Federer won the tournament and knocked the American from his ranking perch. You might have heard about what happened next. 237 weeks later, when Federer finally lost his death grip on the top spot, Roddick was no longer seriously in the mix. Rafael Nadal became the new number one in August of 2008, and Roddick was ranked eighth.

Let me show you the Dominance Ratio graph again, this time superimposed with Roddick’s ATP ranking points at the end of each year. (The points system changed between 2008 and 2009, so the 2009-10 points are adjusted accordingly.) His DR fluctuated, but after 2003, the points went in only one direction:

The stats–at least the ones I’ve shown you thus far–clearly don’t tell the entire story.

* * *

At the point-by-point level, Roddick improved on his breakout 2003 season, and his peak years were in 2004 and 2005. By contrast, the rankings–not to mention the all-important grand slam count–suggest that things went downhill more or less immediately after he straight-setted Juan Carlos Ferrero to secure his sole major trophy.

Which is right? The stats might be fooling us, and his 2004 and 2005 seasons (and beyond) might not be as good as they look. Alternatively, if the rankings are the ones telling a misleading story, we may be underrating a player with unfortunate timing.

There are many possible explanations for the clash of narratives. Here are the three I find most compelling:

1. He was lucky. That is, he didn’t really deserve the number one ranking (and possibly even the US Open title) in 2003.
2. He didn’t get worse, but he field overtook him. To put it another way: Federer happened.
3. His schedule became more favorable, possibly because he chose to play fewer events on clay, or because he opted to play tournaments with weaker fields. If that is true, his stats from those seasons may be artificially inflated.

Let’s dig into each one.

He was lucky

How you feel about this explanation depends on lot on your take on deciding-set tiebreaks. Roddick played 42 of them in his career, winning 27, for a respectable 64% success rate. His overall career tiebreak winning percentage was a similarly strong 62%.

In 2003, he played eight third-set tiebreaks, winning six of them. One of those–a loss to Rainer Schuettler–came at the season-ending Masters Cup after he had secured the number one ranking–so the more relevant group of matches are seven final-set shootouts, of which he lost only one.

Most of the nailbiters had a significant impact on Roddick’s ranking point total, either because they occurred in an important match, or they saved him from losing early in an event where he went on to greater success. He just barely edged Hyung-taik Lee in the Memphis second round, then went on to reach the final. He won a third-set tiebreak (8-6, no less) from Andre Agassi in the Queen’s Club semi-final, then won the final the next day. He narrowly escaped a first-round defeat in Indianapolis to 101st-ranked Cyril Saulnier, and he went on to win the tournament.

Most important of all: He needed a third-set breaker to beat Federer in Montreal (where he won the title), and he won a squeaker against Mardy Fish, 4-6, 7-6(3), 7-6(4), in the Cincinnati final.

And then there was the US Open semi-final against David Nalbandian. The third-set tiebreak didn’t decide the outcome, since it was a best-of-five-set match. But the shootout was every bit as crucial as the ones against Federer and Fish. The Argentine won the first two sets and earned a match point on Roddick’s serve at 5-6 in the breaker. Nalbandian failed to get either of his next two returns back in play, lost the tiebreak 9-7, and collapsed, dropping the final two sets, 6-1, 6-3.

“Luck” may be the wrong word here. A better way to put it might be that there was a mismatch between his point-level stats and his overall performance. In Dominance Ratio terms, a victory via deciding-set tiebreak doesn’t look very good. To take an extreme example, Roddick’s DR in the win over Saulnier was a below-average 0.84, a rate that almost always means that the player lost.

The mismatch leaves us with a new unanswered question. Do Roddick’s point-level stats underestimate him, because he could be counted on to win a lot of those close matches? Or was he bound to regress to the mean?

The answer is probably some of both. A big server is always going to have some matches decided by narrow margins, but he can’t depend on winning so many of them. This explanation accounts in part for the difference between Roddick’s 2003 and, say, 2006, when his full-season DR was the same, but he won three of six deciding-set breakers, not six of eight. But it doesn’t explain the ranking-point drop-off between 2003 and 2004. For that, we need another factor.

Federer happened.

In 2003, Roddick won 72 matches and lost 19. In 2004, he won 74 and lost 18. Like the charts I started with, these numbers suggest that he was every bit as good–and possibly a bit better–in the latter season.

But in that second season, Federer also won 74 matches… and he lost 6. It was the first year that one man won three of the four majors since Mat Wilander did it in 1988.

Roddick didn’t stand a chance. When the American won his major in September 2003, Federer had beaten him four times in five meetings–and as we’ve seen, the one win required a third-set tiebreak. When Roddick played his first tournament as number one, at the 2003 Masters Cup, Fed knocked him out in the semi-finals. The two men played three more times in 2004, in the Wimbledon final and two other title matches. Roddick managed to win only one set.

Federer, of course, wasn’t going anywhere. Roddick ultimately reached five major finals in his career. The last four all pitted him against Fed, and even though he won a set in three of them–even reaching 14-all in the deciding set at Wimbledon in 2009–he never made it across the line. They faced off 24 times in all, and the Swiss maestro won 21, including an 11-match streak that ran from the 2003 Masters Cup through the same event four years later.

Roddick finished 2004 at number two in the rankings, so had it not been for Federer, he probably would’ve stayed on top.

Still, there’s more to explain. Federer’s presence tells us why Roddick couldn’t stick at number one, but by July of 2006, when the American lost to Andy Murray in the Wimbledon third round and failed to defend finalist points, he dropped out of the top ten entirely. According to the stats, he was still playing well, with a DR of 1.28 that year–the same as what he posted in 2003. But he finished the year ranked behind not just Federer and Rafael Nadal, but also Nikolay Davydenko, James Blake, and Ivan Ljubičić.

His schedule became more favorable

Roddick won 32 career titles, and most of the tournaments he won had a lot in common. More than half were in the United States, and they typically came on fast courts. He won a handful of titles on clay, but three of them were on the fast-playing, artificial surface in Houston. Only one came on European dirt.

Most of his titles came at second-tier events, as well. He beat top-ten opponents in finals only twice, and he earned nine of his trophies with championship-round victories against players ranked outside the top 50.

The theory, then, is that after his first successful years on tour, Roddick’s schedule got “cheaper”–fewer matches on clay (excepting Houston) and more time on court against sub-standard opponents. Both of those changes, if true, would make his statistics look better, but they wouldn’t do much for his ranking.

It’s true that he steadily reduced his time on clay courts. In 2003, he played 21 matches on dirt, 5 of them in Houston. He would never again play double-digit matches on non-Houston clay in a single season, and from 2007 on, he cut out Houston as well.

It’s not true, however, that his opponents got worse. Quite the contrary. Here is the median opponent rank for each of his seasons, 2001-10:

In 2003 and 2004, Roddick’s median opponent was ranked just inside the top 50. From 2005 to 2007, his typical opponent was closer to 45th, and it only got tougher from there. On the reasonable assumption that we can use ranking as a proxy for opponent skill, his schedule got tougher throughout the decade, even if he more often played on his preferred surface.

* * *

What are we to make of all of this? If you believe the top-line stats that we started with, Roddick was more or less the same player at the end of the decade–when he ranked 8th on the ATP computer–that he was in 2003. Federer’s arrival derailed any hope that the American would enjoy a second year-end finish at number one, and Roddick fell much further behind than that.

Again, “luck” might not be the right word, but the season that made Roddick number one in 2003 was always going to be difficult to duplicate. His back-to-back Masters titles in Montreal and Cincinnati not only relied on a pair of third-set tiebreaks, but they were also possible because of a field in flux. Federer and Sébastien Grosjean were the only top-tenners Roddick played in the course of the two events, and Ferrero was the only single-digit seed he faced at the US Open.

The rest of the 2003 season previewed the rest of the decade, and not just because his year ended with a defeat at the hands of Federer at the Masters Cup. Roddick lost close matches to Nalbandian and Tim Henman, and he lost a Masters Cup round-robin match to Rainer Schuettler in a third-set tiebreak. He won 36.4% of his return points that year, just above the 36% threshold I’ve defined as the “minimum viable return game” for a would-be elite player.

Roddick spent his entire career hovering around that line, winning 37.5% of return points in 2004 but only 34.0% in 2007. I’m not sure why 36% in particular is the threshold, but it’s extremely rare to find a player in the top five who can’t defend at least that well. Around that number, every match can turn into a close one, and as the men’s field got stronger and stronger throughout Roddick’s career, he never again had the opportunity to string together so many narrow victories.

Over the course of a full career, though, a player with Roddick’s weapons is bound to have a stretch when form, clutch play, and perhaps a bit of luck come together to show what is possible. In 2009, that meant a four-hour heartbreaker of a Wimbledon final against Federer. But in the land of opportunity that was 2003, he posted a series of accomplishments that, all by themselves, make up a solid case for the Hall of Fame.

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

* * *

Budge Patty [USA]
Born: 11 February 1924
Died: 4 October 2021
Career: 1940-60
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1950)
Peak Elo rating: 1 (1954)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 89
 

* * *

Take a quick glance at the Budge Patty biography and you might think you’ve found the impossible: a mid-century American champion who didn’t come from California. He was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1924, and after serving in the US Army during World War II, he settled in Paris, working as a travel agent and playing the majority of his tennis on the Continent.

Patty broke the mold, to be sure. Allison Danzig called him the “glamour boy” of men’s tennis, and Harry Hopman likened him to the fashion pioneer Beau Brummel. He always balanced the sport with other interests, and he rarely appeared to be working hard. Tony Trabert joked, “[P]hysical training for him meant breaking his cigarettes in two and then smoking only half the amount.”

He developed into a one-of-a-kind character, an unlikely American in a strong era of American men. But despite the unorthodox biography, his path did, indeed, run through California.

His father died when he was young, and the family moved to Los Angeles. He lived near Pauline Betz–with whom he would win the 1946 French mixed doubles title–and the pair were frequent practice partners. Patty took his first lessons at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, where he found playing partners and patronage. When his coach, Bill Weissbuch, couldn’t convince him to develop a strong net game, Weissbuch brought in Bill Tilden to show the young man why it was necessary. The aging Tilden beat the youngster, 6-0, 6-0, 6-1.* Message received.

* Patty wrote, “I don’t remember now, but I am sure I must have won my solitary game by hitting four net-cords.”

Budge was born J. Edward Patty, and he gained his nickname when his older brother thought him so lazy–or stubborn, in one rendition–that he wouldn’t budge. On court, however, he proved to be quite flexible. He didn’t grow to his full height until his later teens, so some creativity was required as he won one junior title after another. Hopman wrote,

The ‘slam bang’ big-hitting service and volley game was not for one who was not much higher than the net post, so he studied court-craft and the tactics of visiting stars who were not all-out net-rushers and he experimented in his own way as he progressed.

Even as a six-footer, Patty would always do things his own way.

* * *

Patty won the 1941 and 1942 United States junior titles. The Army drafted him just as he was about to enter the University of Southern California, and when he was sent to Europe for the duration of the war, he was forgotten by American tennis fans.

In his first entry at Forest Hills after the war, in 1946, the 22-year-old Patty quickly reminded them of his promise. He scored the upset of the tournament in the second round, straight-setting Wimbledon champion Yvon Petra. The six-foot-five-inch, big-hitting Frenchman wasn’t accustomed to opponents who would take advantage of a short backswing to return his serve from inside the baseline. In the New York Times, Allison Danzig couldn’t resist punning on the newcomer’s name. Petra had break point to even the third set at 4-all, “But Patty refused to budge.”

He lost in the fourth round to another big man, Bob Falkenburg, but the rest of the circuit was on notice that the suave expatriate was a force to be reckoned with.

Patty would solidify his reputation at Wimbledon the following year. At the 1947 Championships, he pulled through one nail-biter after another, needing five sets to beat Australian Davis Cupper Bill Sidwell in the first round, another five to advance past Atri Madan Mohan in the second, and four to defeat the unheralded Brit Derrick Barton in the third.

Patty at Wimbledon in 1949

In the fourth round, he recorded the outstanding upset of yet another major. After another five sets, he knocked out second-seeded Australian John Bromwich in a roller-coaster of a match, 6-4, 0-6, 6-4, 1-6, 6-4. Patty’s exhaustion accounts for some of the set scores, as he admitted to throwing the fourth set to save energy. He couldn’t afford to do the same against Jaroslav Drobný in the quarter-finals, falling behind two-sets-to-one after a 9-7 third frame. In the first of many memorable matches against the sixth-seeded Czech, he came through in still another five-setter. No wonder he blamed fatigue for his semi-final loss to fellow American Tom Brown.

Funnily enough, Drobný considered Patty’s (probably legitimate) exhaustion to be gamesmanship. He wrote, “So often during the match he looked near exhaustion, leaning on his racket, sitting down as we changed ends that I took pity on him and allowed my concentration to wander.” Drobný likened his opponent to Ted Schroeder, another five-set master: “Patty is not only an artist on the court but a great match player as well. He … knows what points to win and those that do not matter.”

Another contemporary with praise for Patty’s match-management skills was Jack Kramer. Kramer was not exactly the humblest of champions–decades later, he made a hypothetical list of Wimbledon and Forest Hills champions, had professional players been allowed to compete. In the reconstruction, lifelong amateur Patty lost his 1950 Wimbledon title to–you guessed it–Jack Kramer. Still, Kramer said that Patty’s forehand volley “came close” to the best he’d ever seen, and he credited Budge with an unusual clutch skill:

[T]he strangest competitive stroke was the backhand that belonged to Budge Patty. It was a weak shot, just a little chip. But suddenly on match point, Patty had a fine, firm backhand. He was a helluva match player.

Kramer’s decision to go pro meant that the two men never faced each other after 1946. Drobný wouldn’t be so lucky.

* * *

For the next two years, Patty settled into a life of cosmopolitan comfort in Paris. He reached the semi-finals at Roland Garros in 1948, losing in five sets to Drobný. He made the 1949 final, where Frank Parker out-steadied him. The Wimbledon title, on the other hand, crept further away–he lost to Bromwich in the 1948 quarters, and to Drobný in the third round in 1949.

The losses were still fresh in his mind when he wrote his 1951 autobiography, Tennis My Way: “When the draw is made … the thought that immediately runs through most players’ minds is, ‘I hope I’m not in Drobný’s half.'”

On the Continent, Patty learned, winning wasn’t everything. He explained in his book why he chose to play in Europe. The short answer: “Because it is more amusing.” The longer answer involved money and respect. In the US, a handful of prestigous tournaments held all the power, and they treated players accordingly. Across the Atlantic, a larger number of events competed for a relatively small group of high-profile players, of whom Patty was one. They were willing to pay higher “expenses” to secure the stars.

Plus, European crowds took to the debonair American. Harry Hopman wrote, “[T]he French gallery [went] ‘overboard’ for ‘Pat-tee’ almost as if he were a Cochet, Lacoste or Borotra playing Davis Cup for La Belle France.” In Rome, Patty won over the raucous, partisan Italian crowd when he stopped play mid-way through a point, turned to the crowd, and shouted, “Silencio!”

The American would spend another decade pleasing galleries around the Continent. But in the third-round loss to Drobný at Wimbledon, he threw the fourth set only to discover he didn’t have enough energy for a victorious push in the fifth. “I decided then and there,” he wrote, “that next year I was either going to give myself the chance to play properly or give up tennis altogether.”

* * *

Patty thought himself a changed man, but his new training schedule would get him laughed out of a modern-day clubhouse.

For one thing, the decision he took at Wimbledon in 1949 didn’t exactly spur him into immediate action. He started seriously working out the following May, a few weeks before the French. Only then did he give up smoking. He made sure to get ten hours of sleep every night, and he jogged one to three miles each morning. It was a step in the right direction, but Emil Zátopek he was not.

Somehow, it was enough. At the French, he faced an unexpected quarter-final challenge from Irvin Dorfman, an American who never advanced past the third round at another major. Dorfman won the first set, 6-0, and he led 4-2 in the fifth. Patty came back for a 11-9 victory in the decider. The semi-final, against another American, Bill Talbert, was even closer. The contest was frequently stopped due to thunder, usually when Talbert had the momentum. Patty pulled that one out too, 13-11 in the fifth.

Waiting in the final was, of course, Jaroslav Drobný. Budge won the first two sets, then conceded the third and fourth. The pair were playing their fourth match at a major in four years, and every time, it went five sets. The few weeks of moderate training paid off. Drobný wrote, “I doubt whether, since that day, he has reached such a peak of physical fitness.” Patty won the fifth set, 7-5, and claimed his first major victory.

A few weeks later, Wimbledon tested his fitness even further. Once again on the other side of the draw from Drobný, he coasted through the singles, relatively speaking. He won a pair of four-setters to beat Talbert in the quarter-finals and American up-and-comer Vic Seixas in the semis. Drobný lost in the semi-finals to the top seed, Australian star Frank Sedgman.

Sedgman needed five sets to get past Drobný, and he had used another five to beat Art Larsen in the quarters. Both finalists could’ve used a day off, but the scheduling committee had another idea. The two men got a preview of each others’ games in a men’s doubles quarter-final, Patty pairing Tony Trabert and Sedgman with Ken McGregor. On a different day, it might have served as a light warm-up. Instead, the match took nearly six hours, with a second set that ran to 31-29. At Wimbledon, balls were only replaced for each new set, and midway through the marathon frame, Trabert had to threaten to hit the dead balls out of the stadium just to switch back to the lightly-used balls from the first set.

The Americans won the doubles, but Trabert didn’t have much hope for Patty the following day. Sedgman was the typical, hyper-fit Australian, while Budge… well, Budgie had been off tobacco for seven whole weeks!

Patty’s fitness didn’t let him down, but it was his tennis mind that won him the Wimbledon crown. Hopman wrote that “no other player in world tennis puts as much thought into the game,” and the American went into the final with a plan. While the two men had never played a singles match against each other, Patty had seen plenty of the Australian, both in singles and in the previous day’s interminable doubles struggle.

Sedgman didn’t like to face a net-rusher, so Patty came in behind every serve. Sedgman didn’t usually come in behind his own serve, preferring to attack a weak service return and come in behind that. So Patty sliced his returns as deep as possible. Sedgman tended to crowd the net, so Patty lobbed at every opportunity–including three times on match point. The Parisian from Arkansas triumphed, 6-1, 8-10, 6-2, 6-3.

* * *

Patty is still one of just three Americans to win the “Channel Slam,” the Roland Garros/Wimbledon double. Don Budge did it in his Grand Slam year of 1938, and Trabert accomplished the feat in 1955.

Both Trabert and Don Budge finished their historic summers with a title at Forest Hills. Patty didn’t even make it on court. He hurt his ankle at a warm-up event in Newport and withdrew from the national championships. The injury also derailed his hopes of playing in the 1950 Davis Cup Challenge Round against Australia. The defending-champion Americans could’ve used him. Both Ted Schroeder and Tom Brown lost to Sedgman, and the trophy went back Down Under, where it would stay until 1954.

Patty continued to tour the European circuit, but he wouldn’t again be fully fit until 1953. His reward: a Wimbledon draw in Drobný’s quarter. The last time they had played, at the Italian in 1952, the Czech exile won in a rout, 6-1, 6-0, 7-5.

Their third-round meeting at Wimbledon would push both men to their limits. It lasted almost four and a half hours, and its 93 games set a record that would stand until 1969. Patty reached match point six times, three each in the fourth and fifth sets. At 10-all in the decider, in the fading light, the tournament referee announced that only two more games would be played before the match was postponed. Drobný mustered one last bit of energy to push himself across the line, 8-6, 16-18, 3-6, 8-6, 12-10.

It was a tough match.

The crowd rose to their feet and gave the warriors a five-minute ovation. Despite cramps that attacked each player seemingly in turn, the play was of high quality throughout. Drobný wrote, “Patty and I kept our touch and accuracy to the last shot.” The American won 304 points to his opponent’s 301.

A match like that hardly needs a postscript, but it has one anyway. Patty and Drobný were doubles partners, and they came back the next day to play their second-round match. They won in four, even though neither had the energy even to pick up stray balls. Drobný had torn an abductor muscle in the singles match, and Patty–presumably without much argument–agreed to default in the doubles before sleep-walking through another round. Drobný, remarkably, reached the semis in the singles tournament. He believed that, had they not physically destroyed each other in the third round, he or Patty would’ve won the tournament.

The Czech exile would win his long-awaited Wimbledon title the following year, beating Patty in the semi-finals. Budge would never again get closer than that to a major title, losing to Trabert in the semis both at the French in 1954 and Wimbledon in 1955. He remained one of Europe’s elite, winning 14 titles in 1954, including the Italian and German championships.

In 1953, an Egyptian artist drew Patty, one side in tennis gear, the other in evening dress. One hand held a racket, the other a cigarette. A career like his would have been impossible in the States, where the game belonged to t-shirt-clad strivers in the Jack Kramer mold. Patty was the strangest of juxtapositions, an elegant Parisian from Arkansas, a dilettante willing to fight for hours on the tennis court. Of all the men who have managed both a French and Wimbledon title in the same year, no one else so adroitly kept their feet in two different worlds.

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

* * *

Maria Esther Bueno [BRA]
Born: 11 October 1939
Died: 8 June 2018
Career: 1957-77
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1959)
Peak Elo rating: 2,184 (1st place, 1959)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 63
 

* * *

In her later years, Maria Esther Bueno loved Roger Federer. Of course she did. The vocabulary that commentators resurrected to describe the Swiss star–balletic, graceful, effortless–had been employed decades earlier for Bueno. Long before Federer first picked up a racket, the lithe Brazilian was the very definition of elegance on the tennis court.

Virginia Wade faced Bueno four times in the late 1960s. She lost all four, and it’s possible that Virginia was just starstruck:

She had presence. She had that fantastic body and feline grace on the court and you were left with a fabulous memory. Her tennis presence really came from her heart. It’s like when Nureyev stands on the stage. You can’t take your eyes off him. It’s physical but it’s the soul out there as well.

Another famous Brit who fell for the Bueno allure was dress designer Ted Tinling. Tinling cut his tennis teeth in the 1920s as a personal umpire for Suzanne Lenglen, and he parlayed his insider status into a player-liaison gig at Wimbledon. He became the go-to guy for distinctive female tennis attire, and he even designed a wedding dress for 1934 and 1937 Wimbledon champion Dorothy Round.

By the time Bueno came along, Tinling was cast out of Wimbledon, the result of the controversial lace underwear he dreamed up for American glamour girl Gussie Moran in 1949. He remained as in-demand as ever. Women on the circuit knew they had made it when they wore an original Tinling. For years, one of the few champions he didn’t dress was Angela Mortimer. She preferred to wear shorts on court, and the designer eventually gave in and made her a specially tailored pair.

For much of the 1960s, Maria Esther was a one-woman runway show for Tinling. He didn’t just make dresses for her–he often made her a new dress for every match she played. She claimed that she once wore 21 of his creations in the course of a single tournament. At home, she had a closet filled with hundreds of them. The designer considered her to be a worthy successor to the great Suzanne.

* * *

Bueno’s on-court performance also–occasionally–reminded fans of Lenglen. At age 19, she swept to her first major title at Wimbledon in 1959. She defeated her friend and doubles partner Darlene Hard, 6-4, 6-3, in only 43 minutes.

Half a decade and one near-retirement later, she claimed her sixth major singles title at Forest Hills, a 6-1, 6-0 bludgeoning of Carole Graebner in 1964. She won the last 16 points in a row. No one had sealed the US national title in such lopsided fashion since Molla Mallory in 1916. Another two years on, she was nearly as good against Nancy Richey, winning her final Forest Hills trophy in 1966 after running off 10 of the last 11 games in a 6-3, 6-1 victory.

Bueno won a lot of matches–641 of them, by my best count–but when a good player stood on the other side of the net, things could get complicated. In the 1960 Wimbledon semi-finals, she faced Christine Truman, the tall, hard-hitting British hope. Bueno won the first set, 6-0, in nine minutes. (Nine!) She broke early in the second, then suddenly her serve couldn’t find the court. Truman took the second set, as Sports Illustrated put it, “aided by some thoughtless shots by Maria and some plain bad ones.”

Bueno’s poor form continued into the third set, when Truman broke her in the first game and built a 40-0 lead in the second. Somehow, the Brazilian woke up, fought back to nab the second game, and ran out the set for a 6-0, 5-7, 6-1 victory.

Angela Mortimer, the other great British player of the era, knew first-hand just how unpredictable Bueno could be:

Maria is a strange player. She is temperamental in the extreme. One day she is brilliant. The next, she is brilliantly inaccurate. One day she is smiling and chattering to everyone, the next she is silent, and passes her friends without a word.

Mortimer lost to Bueno in the 1960 Wimbledon quarter-finals, 6-1, 6-1, and she wasn’t even playing badly. Three weeks later, she held a match point against the Brazilian in Hamburg. Mortimer hit a passing shot that would’ve finished the match against anyone else. Not the Brazilian, who replied with a “perfect forehand cross-court drop-shot. If I had been wearing wings I could have landed nowhere near that ball.” Bueno came back to win, 5-7, 9-7, 6-3.

* * *

Bueno’s colleagues on the circuit called her Maria, but to her legions of fans back home in Brazil, she was Maria Esther, Esther, or the diminutive Estherzinha. She took an unusual route to the top, one that starts to explain her highs and lows. She told an interviewer in the 1980s,

To me tennis was more of an art than a sport. I was a very natural player. Everything was done by impulse or intuition. I could never be programmed like most of the players are today. Maybe it would have helped me if I had had some special advice. But I think I would never change.

She occasionally worked with the Australian coach Harry Hopman, but a more formal arrangement didn’t last a week. Hopman championed a steady program of hard training, while Bueno preferred the beach.

This isn’t to say that all of her skills came effortlessly, even if that’s what she claimed herself. While tennis was not popular in Brazil in the 1940s, her father was a recreational player with a family membership to the club across the street from their home. She treated the club as her personal playground, batting a ball against any surface she could find. When she wasn’t practicing, she’d study older players.

Eventually she found a book with detailed action photos of Bill Tilden’s serve. She worked for hours to replicate it perfectly, occasionally seeing results when a ball rocketed off her racket. Her gift, from the beginning, was mimicry. When world-class players visited Sao Paulo, she watched closely and tried to replicate their strokes.

Her efforts on serve, in particular, were a success. When Herbert Warren Wind assessed Bueno’s game for Sports Illustrated in 1960, he likened her movement to Lenglen’s and her serve to that of Alice Marble. Maria Esther approved of the latter comparison. Marble was the first female player to hit an offensive twist serve that equalled the deliveries of the male stars of her day.

In 1965, Los Angeles Times columnist Sid Ziff thought it would be fun to get a returner’s-eye look at the famous serve. Bueno said, “I hope I don’t hit you in the eye.” In Ziff’s telling:

Her serve swooped straight at me, hit the cement almost at my feet and hooked sharply to the right, leaving me feeling like the victim of the old-fashioned shell game. She did it again. Zip, wham and off it went at a 45 degree angle to right.

Bueno didn’t blind him, but if she had, he wouldn’t have fared any worse.

* * *

Even after Estherzinha took the Wimbledon and Forest Hills crowns as a 19-year-old, there were detractors. Wind’s Sports Illustrated profile acknowledges the case against:

The not-so-pro-Bueno group takes a much more conservative view. As they see it, her quick ascent to the top was made possible only by her arrival on the scene at one of those arid periods when there were no first-class women players around. A pretty strokes-maker, yes, with tremendous potential, indeed, but whom has she beaten?

Uncertain, roller-coaster wins like the one against Truman only solidified the case. Had Althea Gibson remained an amateur, or if Beverly Baker Fleitz continued to play the circuit, there might have been fewer laurels available for the flashy youngster to claim. When that issue of Sports Illustrated was on newsstands, a 6-4, 10-12, 6-4 loss to Hard in the Forest Hills final hardly silenced the doubters.

Just when Bueno began to show that she could pair her stylishness with steadiness, disaster struck. She began the 1961 season with only a single loss in 21 matches, winning three titles on the Caribbean swing with a trio of final-round victories over Hard. Her only loss came to Yola Ramírez in Naples, and she beat Ramírez on the way to an Italian Championships title in Turin the following week.

Before Bueno and Hard could play the doubles final to defend their Roland Garros title, Maria Esther came down with a debilitating case of hepatitis. She withdrew from the doubles and was ultimately bed-ridden for eight months. She couldn’t take her shot at a third straight Wimbledon title, and for a time, it looked like she might never play tennis again.

She was back in the spotlight soon enough–a Tinling-designed dress with pink-trimmed underwear at Wimbledon the following year made sure of that. Her game was remarkably resilient, and she won two titles in the Caribbean in March of 1962. Still, she was a shadow of her former self. She lost to a young Billie Jean Moffitt (later King) in the 1963 Wimbledon quarter-finals. “[S]he played as though she was her own ghost,” wrote David Gray of The Guardian. “[I]t seemed beyond belief that she could ever win a great singles title again.”

* * *

No one would’ve questioned Estherzinha had she chosen to retire. She had won three singles majors and another eight slam titles in doubles. She had done well financially out of the amateur game, commanding appearance fees that her fellow players could only envy. She had the adoration of an entire nation, which gave her a ticker-tape parade and put her image on a stamp after she became Wimbledon champion.

But Bueno knew that she was much closer to the top than the sportswriters gave her credit for. While she worked her way back into form, the young Australian Margaret Smith (later Court) consolidated her hold on the game. Smith won three of the four majors in 1962, and she completed her career grand slam when she claimed the Wimbledon title in 1963, still shy of her 21st birthday.

Smith was just beginning what would be a decade-plus of nearly uninterrupted domination, but she hadn’t really figured out the Brazilian ballerina. Bueno had beaten her easily just before hepatitis laid her low. The pair met four times in 1962, and while the Australian won the lot (she lost only two matches the entire season), three of the four went to a deciding set.

Years later, Bueno said that the two women brought out the best in each other. There were certainly no secrets: Between 1960 and 1968, they played 22 times, 17 of them in finals. Five of the title matches came at grand slams.

Just two months after David Gray thought Maria Esther was playing like her own ghost, she reached the Forest Hills final with the loss of just one set. Waiting for her there, of course, was Margaret Smith, who had been equally dismissive of the field. Bueno won a close first set, 7-5, then struggled in the second. She fell to 0-3, 0-40, then 1-4, 0-30. Just when Smith must have felt she was getting the match under control, the Brazilian produced what the New York Times called “one of the most electrifying bursts of super shot-making produced by a woman at the championship.” Bueno won the last five games on the trot. 18 months after picking up a racket again, she held another major trophy.

The next year, she did it again. Smith was as imperious as ever in 1964, winning her fifth straight Australian Championships along with her second French title. The defending champion arrived at Wimbledon riding a 33-match winning streak. She made it 38 by coasting through the first five rounds at the Championships.

The Forest Hills title the previous year had proven that Bueno could once again compete at the highest level. But in the amateur era, Wimbledon was a pinnacle above all others, and she had yet to climb it since her comeback. Commentators still doubted Maria Esther’s fitness–she had won the first set from Smith in the Roland Garros final, but she collapsed to a 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 loss. At Wimbledon, once again, it would be–in Bueno’s words–“three sets against the best of the world.”

If the head-to-head record is to be believed, Bueno was the weaker of the two players on court that day. And as Billie Jean King observed a couple years later, the Brazilian had a lost a step to her various injuries. But as Smith struggled under the pressure, Estherzinha showed the Centre Court crowd what had made her a champion just four years before. Gray wrote,

[I]n the crisis of the match she invariably found it possible to produce luxurious quantities of shots which were rich and imaginative, graceful and deadly. She was the more effective server; she did not miss a smash and, in the recollection of even the oldest members, no woman has hit so many beautiful and piercing volleys.

Bueno won the epic duel, 6-4, 7-9, 6-3, and when Smith lost early at Forest Hills, she tacked on a sixth major with her 25-minute dismantling of Carole Graebner.

The Brazilian had always held herself to the highest standard. She said, “I was never satisfied if I did not play beautifully. I was always going for the impossible shots.” She didn’t always manage to play the graceful tennis that she so admired in Roger Federer. And she missed more than her share of low-percentage shots, even when the smart play would’ve been a safer one.

Yet even on the biggest stages, against the best players of her era, she was capable of serving like Marble and moving like Lenglen. When everything came together, the result was everything she aimed for: impossibly beautiful.

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

* * *

Jack Crawford [AUS]
Born: 22 March 1908
Died: 10 September 1991
Career: 1926-51
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1933)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 66
 

* * *

Winning the Grand Slam has never been easy. If the variety of surfaces and conditions don’t get to you, the pressure will, as the target on your back keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Before the advent of commercial air travel, the logistical challenge was almost as significant. The first big tournament of the year was played in Australia, and that meant multiple weeks of traveling in each direction for anyone not lucky enough to reside Down Under. Even when Australians headed to Europe for Wimbledon and the Davis Cup, they didn’t always continue across the Atlantic to the fourth major of the year.

The modern tennis calendar took shape after World War I, and the majors took their present form when the French Championships opened up to foreigners in 1925. By the end of the 1920s, players were already talking about winning the four major titles. No one played all four until 1928, when Jean Borotra paired a round-the-world tennis tour with business travel in 1928. He won the Australian Championships, but he wasn’t quite good enough for a serious Grand Slam attempt. He didn’t win another major that season. The next year, Brits Bunny Austin and Colin Gregory made the trip. Gregory won the Australian title, but he didn’t bother to complete the quartet, skipping Forest Hills.

In 1933, a group of Americans made their own tour. The tall, slender Ellsworth Vines had ridden his unreturnable serve to titles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills the previous year, and he was seeded first in Melbourne. His Slam quest ended before it began, at the hands of 16-year-old Australian Vivian McGrath and his unorthodox two-handed backhand.

Fred Perry would complete the career slam by 1935, though an early exit at the French that year would stop him from winning all four titles in the same calendar year. The feat itself would need to wait only until 1938, when Perry had turned pro and Don Budge carefully executed his attack on the most hallowed courts of the tennis world.

But back in 1933, when Vines was supposed to pick up an easy win Down Under, the man who won the Australian title nearly pulled off the Grand Slam himself.

Jack Crawford, a 24-year-old farmer’s son from New South Wales, beat two of Vines’s traveling companions to win his own national title for the third consecutive year. After becoming the first foreigner to win the French title, he outlasted Vines in a Wimbledon final for the ages. He was within a set of the Grand Slam when, at Forest Hills, he finally ran out of gas and watched as Perry ran away with the trophy.

* * *

As the first man to win three majors in a single season, Crawford could tell you that winning four was an entirely different type of challenge. The accomplishment didn’t have the same cachet it does now, but fans were certainly watching. It was in Crawford’s great season of 1933 that sportswriter John Kieran borrowed a term from bridge and gave the four-major target its moniker: the Grand Slam.

Crawford could tell you how difficult it was, but he wouldn’t. Dubbed “Gentleman Jack” by his admirers worldwide, he was a throwback in almost every way. When he won, he said it was luck. When he lost, all credit to his opponent’s skill. At the same time that Bunny Austin began to popularize shorts on the tennis court, Crawford not only stuck with trousers, he wore long sleeves as well.

Crawford even preferred vintage equipment. After a friendly game with Norman Brookes, the 1907 and 1914 Wimbledon champion from Australia, Brookes offered him one of his old rackets, a model with a flat-topped head. It was old-fashioned even in Norman’s heyday, but Crawford adopted it when he realized it gave him a bit of extra power when he had to reach for his shots. He ultimately endorsed the racket and caused a belated fad in flat-tops in the 1930s.

What made the “Gentleman Jack” label so apt was that Crawford was absurdly economical of motion. He made tennis look easy because, most of the time, he didn’t bother to try very hard. Paul Metzler, who devoted a chapter to Crawford in his 1969 book, Tennis Styles and Stylists, wrote, “Never has there been a champion so indolently content to reach for wide shots or high lobs, or one so loath to run or leap for them.”

Jack played almost exclusively from the baseline. It took an awful lot of effort, after all, to make a dash up to the net.

Beneath the laid-back façade, however, was probably the most aggressive baseline player of his era. He rarely took more than a step behind the line, and he used the whole of his opponent’s court like no one else. He handled the fearsome Vines serve by stepping in to take it on the rise, and in rallies, he would concede so little territory that, in Metzler’s words, he “[gave] the impression of commanding the net, almost in the manner of a volleyer.”

* * *

Still, appearances were not entirely deceiving. Gentleman Jack sometimes needed to be encouraged to make an effort. He won his first major mixed doubles championship at Wimbledon in 1930, paired with the 38-year-old Elizabeth Ryan. Ryan had been winning Wimbledon titles since 1914, and she wasn’t about to miss another chance because of a lazy partner.

Harry Hopman–who also won doubles majors with Crawford–tells the story in his book, Aces and Places:

The hustling Miss Ryan found Jack’s lethargic mixed doubles game more than her patience could stand. She could see nothing funny in the half-joking references of their mixed play as “Ryan and Miss Crawford” because she was playing the net game more than her partner; she wanted to win the event and make it her sixth Wimbledon mixed doubles. So she kept niggling at Jack to make him intercept more and to move in to the net quicker–and she got results.

Crawford’s next three mixed doubles majors came alongside his wife, the former Marjorie Cox. Hopman credits Marjorie for a good portion of the competitive spirit Jack would develop:

Marjorie’s greatest success was in the power of her influence on Jack’s determination and will-to-win and in the intensification of his dislike of defeat which her support and encouragement so strongly increased. She was both a restraining influence and, at times, an acceptable excuse for the refusal of friendly but wearying offers of hospitality which provide so much fun, but do so little to raise an international sportsman’s competitive calibre.

Hopman would go on to train generations of Australian stars, instilling unshakeable work ethics in the best of them. Crawford clearly didn’t measure up to that standard. Writing of Jack just five years after his marriage, Hopman added, “He was beginning to take things a little more easily … [H]e did not practise so hard as before, nor as strenuously as some of the younger and ‘hungrier’ players.”

Hopman must have wondered what his friend could’ve accomplished had he possessed the work ethic of a Ken Rosewall or Ashley Cooper. Strong an opponent as Fred Perry was, a worn-out Crawford missed his Grand Slam by just one measly set.

* * *

Or, maybe Jack knew what he was doing.

Before his almost-magical season of 1933, the six-foot Crawford had gained 15 pounds, settling in at a distinctly un-tennis-like 185 pounds. John Tunis, writing for the New Yorker ahead of the US National Championships, called Jack “tremendously fast for a big man” and opined that his size worked in his favor:

[The additional weight] not only enables him to burn over a service ace now and then, and to put additional speed when necessary into his drives, but has also given him the stamina and resources to help him go through a twelve-month campaign which has almost ruined the game of a slender, nervous boy like Vines.

Journalists were unanimous that he was a joy to watch. Al Laney wrote, “I do not think any tennis player has given me more genuine pleasure than Jack Crawford.” Yet it was difficult to pin down exactly what made him so great.

He didn’t have an obviously powerful serve, especially when compared to someone like Vines. But Laney called him “one of the finest of servers,” and he used his flat delivery to open up the court. He was acclaimed for his low volleys–the flat-topped racket helped here–but he rarely came to net.

The most puzzling paradox is that observers couldn’t even agree which wing was Crawford’s strongest. Mercer Beasley, coach of Vines (and later Frank Parker), wrote, “We wouldn’t play a ball to Crawford’s forehand around the service line on a bet.” Vines agreed that Jack’s backhand was more fragile, and their Wimbledon final included long stretches where the two players simply tested each others’ weak points with backhand after backhand.

Yet less than two months after Crawford won his third major of the year, Alison Danzig of the New York Times wrote that his backhand “was thought to have no equal in its steadfastness.” Perry attacked Jack’s backhand at Forest Hills, and in Danzig’s interpretation, the strategy was meant to break down the Australian’s best shot, not his worst.

Hopman gives us a way out of the riddle. Writing in 1957, he ranked Crawford’s forehand higher than that of any Australian since. In his telling, the quality of the forehand, combined with Jack’s otherworldly anticipation, made the backhand look better than it was.

Whichever side was stronger, opponents barely had time to react, and they rarely knew what was coming. Crawford lost the 1934 French final in a five-setter to Gottfried von Cramm. He still made quite the impression on the German, who said, “I had never seen a man make such perfect lobs.”

* * *

Thanks to the reticence of Gentleman Jack, we don’t know exactly what happened between the third and fourth sets of the 1933 Forest Hills final. With the Grand Slam on the line, he dropped the first set to Perry, 6-3, came back to win a marathon second frame, 13-11, and took the lead in the third, 6-4. By convention, players took a ten-minute intermission between the third and fourth sets.

Crawford had asthma, and it had occasionally sidelined him earlier in his career. He learned to drink a little brandy during matches to manage the ailment, and he did so on this day. He seemed to struggle in the warm, muggy conditions, and he had appeared to be in physical distress during his semi-final victory over Frank Shields, as well.

It’s possible that the asthma was too much to overcome. Another theory is that he overdid it with the brandy. The cumulative fatigue of the long season might have gotten to him–he admitted that “he felt himself in a daze” even before the intermission.

A further possibility is that he was a bit too, well, gentlemanly during the intermission. Perry changed his clothes and got himself a massage. Jack, however, chatted with his wife while relaxing with a cigarette.

Perry’s account of the fourth and fifth sets? He “went mad.” The rest of the match barely took as long as the interval. Perry stormed back to win, 6-0, 6-1, taking 13 minutes for the fourth set and 15 minutes for the fifth. Was it the asthma, the brandy, the conditions, or the characteristic indolence? Or was Perry just that good? Crawford wouldn’t say. All that was certain was that, for at least one more year, grand slams would be limited to baseball and bridge.

* * *

Perry’s prowess doesn’t fully explain the result, or else Jack wouldn’t have built up a two-sets-to-one lead. But after that fateful intermission, the Brit had the better of the rivalry, and it wasn’t even close.

The two men faced off nine more times, and Perry won seven. In 1934, he straight-setted Gentleman Jack in the Australian final, and he won 12 games in a row to take that year’s Wimbledon in a rout. It was an awkward scene that Perry wouldn’t soon forget: Plenty of the home fans clearly sided with the Australian, and a Wimbledon club official told Crawford that the better man lost–in Perry’s hearing.

The casual classism further fueled Perry’s competitive fire. Crawford got the better of him in the 1935 Australian final, but when they met at Wimbledon that year, Perry once again put him away comfortably.

By then, Jack was earning a comfortable living endorsing his unusual rackets, and he was content to let Perry have the limelight. He remained competitive on the doubles court, winning the 1935 Wimbledon title with Adrian Quist and reaching the men’s doubles final in Australia as late as 1940. His casual on-court demeanor disguised an abiding love for the game: He entered the Australian Championships every year until 1951, and he played seniors tennis after that.

It was common practice for decades that, when a match concluded, one player would jump the net on the way to shaking his opponent’s hand. When Perry won the Forest Hills final, he was so fast across the net that he greeted Jack at the Australian’s service line. The low-energy Crawford only did it once–without even thinking about it–after beating Vines for the Wimbledon title. He said, “I didn’t realize I could clear such a high barrier.” Had he been a bit healthier, or had his opponent been a bit less formidable, he would’ve cleared the highest hurdle of them all–and I suspect he would’ve had exactly the same reaction.

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

* * *

Lleyton Hewitt [AUS]
Born: 24 February 1981
Career: 1998-2016
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2001)
Peak Elo rating: 2,192 (1st place, 2002)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 30
 

* * *

It was impossible not to have an opinion about Lleyton Hewitt. In 2002, when Hewitt ruled the men’s tennis roost, Billie Jean King said:

How can you not love Hewitt? He’s incredible for all of us that aren’t 6’2″…. He’s giving everybody hope again to play this sport. This guy loves it so much he just loves every ball, he’s just like… give me the ball. God, I love him. How can you not love this guy?

Plenty of people were ready to answer Billie Jean’s question. In the London Times in 2003, Simon Barnes spoke for many fans as he basked in Lleyton’s first-round exit at Wimbledon:

He looked–and behaved–as if he had left his skateboard parked outside. … He was the most unpopular champion since Jimmy Connors did his brat’s stuff in 1974 and has the air of a stormtrooper who has been ostracised by the other stormtroopers because they find him a bit on the fanatical side.

Part of the problem was that he became a star so early. It’s a rare teenager who finds himself on the world stage and doesn’t act like a jerk. When he was 18, he proclaimed that the Australian public was stupid. Two years later, he called umpire Andreas Egli a “spastic,” and then gave one of the worst apologies in the history of lame athlete apologies: “If I did say it, it’s not something I’m proud of, that’s for sure. I apologise to whoever it may be.”

He hinted that a line judge was giving calls to James Blake because both men were Black. He hated the practice of congratulating opponents on excellent shots. He constantly yelled C’MON!–every two seconds, according to Greg Rusedski–even if it was his opponent’s mistake that decided the point. When Juan Iganacio Chela spit at him on a change of ends in 2005, we all knew that it was wrong… but we understood.

Many of Hewitt’s peers were careful to make the distinction between his on-court and off-court personalities. He was pleasant enough out of the heat of competition, at least if he wasn’t talking to journalists. But with a match on the line, as Roy Emerson put it, “He plays every point as if it’s World War II.” Inevitably, there were casualties.

Nobody liked to face him–partly because of the abrasiveness, and partly because Lleyton usually won. But it was impossible not to respect the way he played the game.

* * *

Hewitt certainly didn’t look like an elite tennis player. He stood only five-feet-ten-inches tall, and when he arrived on tour as an outspoken 16-year-old, he weighed barely 130 pounds. Reporters couldn’t decide whether he looked more like a surfer or a skateboarder.

Vince Spadea, who played him in the quarter-finals of the 1998 Adelaide tournament, thought he looked “weak, inexperienced, unrehearsed, and unpolished.” Three sets later, Spadea was sent packing and Hewitt was in the semi-finals. The teenager backed up the win with a two-tiebreak victory over an out-of-form Andre Agassi. He took the title in a third-set breaker over fellow Aussie Jason Stoltenberg.

Hewitt in 1998

Over the years, Hewitt was often criticized for his apparent arrogance. But as baseball great Dizzy Dean once said, it ain’t bragging if you can do it. Hewitt became the third-youngest player ever to win an ATP title, behind only Aaron Krickstein and Michael Chang. He was just getting started.

In 1999, he beat top-ten opponents six times, and won four singles rubbers for the champion Australian Davis Cup team. Hewitt kicked off his 2000 season with 13 straight victories Down Under, beat Pete Sampras for the Queen’s Club title, and reached the semi-finals of the US Open. He became the youngest player ever to qualify for the season-ending Masters Cup, where he beat Sampras again.

By 2001, no one was underestimating the brash young Aussie. With wins in Sydney, Queen’s Club, and ‘s-Hertogenbosch already under his belt, he advanced to his first major final at the US Open, where he whipped Sampras, 7-6(4), 6-1, 6-1. He blitzed the field at the Masters Cup, scoring five top-ten wins in a week with the loss of only two sets. Aged 20 years and 9 months, he became the youngest number one in ATP history.

* * *

Pete Sampras was one of the great servers in history, and he was not accustomed to losing sets by scores like 6-0 and 6-1. Before the 2001 US Open final, the only men to win such lopsided sets from Pete in the previous five years were Agassi and Hewitt himself. Andre was the only man in memory who could return like Hewitt, and the Australian was a better mover. After the 2001 US Open final, Pete said, “The kid is so quick it’s unbelievable.”

How about this for unbelievable: Going into the US Open final, Sampras had held 87 straight service games, 24 of them in the quarter-finals against Agassi. Hewitt broke him six times in the championship match. Pete won 73% of his service points in his first six matches at the tournament and less than 55% against Lleyton.

Hewitt pulled the same trick at Wimbledon the next summer. David Nalbandian, his opponent in the final, was another baseliner. His serve was nothing like Pete’s. In his first six matches at the Championships, he won 63% of his service points. Lleyton still had the same effect he had on Sampras, holding the Argentinian to a pathetic 44%, breaking him eight times. The unlikely grass-court final, in which neither player serve-and-volleyed a single time, was over in less than two hours. Hewitt won, 6-1, 6-3, 6-2.

Sampras and Nalbandian had nothing to feel bad about. Lleyton defanged everybody. Between 1999 and 2002, Hewitt broke serve in at least 187 consecutive matches. The streak might run as high as 230 matches, though I haven’t been able to determine whether he broke Sébastien Grosjean in a 1999 Davis Cup dead rubber. Either way, it’s the longest such streak in the 30-plus years that the ATP has recorded break point statistics.

What’s less clear is how he did it. Sampras wrote, “It was very tough to get the ball by him, or to ace him.” Yet in the US Open final, Pete still hit aces on more than 10% of his serves–lower than Sampras’s average, but not by a wide margin. Roger Federer aced him 12% of the time, a better rate than he managed against the tour in general.

C’MON!

The Match Charting Project has logged 120 of his matches. It’s not a random sample–it’s biased toward finals and late-round grand slam matches against quality opponents, so it understates his peformance in general. In those matches, he put the return in play only 67.6% of the time, a rate that both was and is below average. But simply getting the ball back wasn’t the point. Like Agassi, Hewitt took his return position with aggression in mind, accepting that some serves would get past him. The ones he could reach, he sent back with interest.

Sampras wasn’t alone in the belief that Lleyton was particularly hard to ace, or that he got an unusually large number of serves back. It’s understandable that Hewitt’s rivals got it wrong. Agassi considered him to be “among the best shot selectors in the history of tennis,” and he loved a target. Those skills were enough to end the domination of serve-and-volleyers at Wimbledon and to alter the trajectory of the game as a whole.

* * *

When Hewitt retired at the 2016 Australian Open, Tom Perrotta of The Wall Street Journal explained the magnitude of his effect on men’s tennis:

Before Hewitt, there used to be a clear division between defensive and offensive players. Hewitt blurred that line, which [Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic] have since erased. Like Hewitt, they can all defend with bursts of speed and quick hands, but also attack from a defensive position. Like Hewitt, they have no glaring weaknesses.

Lleyton’s former coach, Darren Cahill, told Perrotta:

The past champions of every era always had a place to get to, a safe zone. Pete’s backhand wasn’t that strong. Andre’s movement wasn’t that strong. You go through every single player and they all had a slight weakness that you could attack. Lleyton of that period, he did not.

You could say the same about any of the Big Four. Early returns suggest that Carlos Alcaraz fits the same mold. The best players of the post-Hewitt era have better and worse parts of their games, to be sure, but it is no longer possible to reach the top while covering up for a true weakness like the Sampras backhand.

Hewitt had an even more direct impact on the modern game. He forced Federer to develop the game style that would win him 20 major titles.

Hewitt (left) and Federer in 2004

Lleyton is only six months older than Fed, but he owned their early rivalry. He won their first three meetings, and when he came through a five-setter in the 2003 Davis Cup semi-finals, he led the head-to-head, seven matches to two. In those days, Federer serve-and-volleyed more, and he frequently attacked the net behind middling approach shots. It worked well–after all, Roger was ranked third in the world by the 2003 Davis Cup encounter–just not against the Australian.

Federer said, “Lleyton made me figure out my game.”

Starting in 2004, Roger won their next 15 meetings. It was sometimes close–they went to four sets at majors on three different occasions–but the result was never really in doubt. Hewitt didn’t win 48% of the total points played in any of them. More data from the Match Charting Project illustrates how Federer changed his approach to solve this particular puzzle. He serve-and-volleyed less and less, and he was incrementally more careful about approaching the net at all:

Match             Winner   S&V%  Fed App%  
2002 Masters Cup  Hewitt    16%       26%  
2003 Davis Cup    Hewitt    24%       23%  
2004 Aus Open     Federer    7%       19%  
2004 Wimbledon    Federer    9%       19%  
2004 US Open      Federer    7%       19%  
…                                          
2005 Wimbledon    Federer    3%        9%

The final column shows Fed’s net approaches, as a percentage of total points played. By 2005, even on the grass at Wimbledon, he’d learned not to challenge Hewitt with anything but a can’t-miss approach shot.

* * *

It’s odd to think of the brash teenage champion turning into one of the game’s elder statesmen, but tennis fans tend to embrace almost anyone if they stick around long enough. Hewitt didn’t say goodbye until the 2016 Australian Open, eight years after a hip injury essentially ended his chances of returning to the game’s elite.

What was once “abrasive” became “no-nonsense,” and the on-court behavior that used to be called “obnoxious” was recast as “fiery.” Hewitt’s intensity reached a particularly high pitch when he played for his country. He was a key part of the champion Australian teams in 1999 and 2003, he handled singles duties as late as 2015, and he wrote in his own name for doubles after he became team captain. He and John Peers took the Bryan Brothers to five sets in 2016, and they won a match two years later.

The 1999 Aussie champion Davis Cup team

Hewitt said early in his career, “[W]hen I set my schedule at the start of the year, Davis Cup is the first thing that I write down.” He never wavered from that commitment. Lleyton holds just about every Australian Davis Cup record there is. He played 40 ties, winning 42 singles rubbers and another 16 in doubles.

No one compared him to surfers or skateboarders anymore, but as retirement approached, Lleyton was still the same player he had always been. Wally Masur, the Davis Cup captain who preceded him, said in 2015, “The very first point I saw him play was as a junior at the US Open. He hasn’t changed a bit since then. He’s full of enthusiasm…. I used to say: ‘Whatever you think about Lleyton Hewitt, if you pay the price of admission, he gives you full value.'”

The early, peak Hewitt–and his effect on an opponent–remains impossible to forget. “I’ve always enjoyed watching him. Playing against him has been cool at times,” Federer said at Lleyton’s final Wimbledon. “Not always so much fun.”

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

* * *

Svetlana Kuznetsova [RUS]
Born: 27 June 1985
Career: 2002-present
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (2007)
Peak Elo rating: 2,192 (3rd place, 2007)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 18
 

* * *

The two longest matches of the 2011 season lasted exactly four hours and 48 minutes each. At the Australian Open, David Nalbandian outlasted Lleyton Hewitt in the first round, 3-6, 6-4, 3-6, 7-6(1), 9-7. At the US Open, Juan Carlos Ferrero beat Gaël Monfils, 7-6(5), 5-7, 6-7(5), 6-4, 6-4. There were 17 five-setters that reached the four-hour mark that year, including the US Open final between Novak Djoković and Rafael Nadal.

The third longest match of 2011 wasn’t one of those five-setters. No, it was a fourth-round women’s match at the Australian Open. Svetlana Kuznetsova and Francesca Schiavone battled for four hours and 44 minutes before Schiavone came out on top, 6-4, 1-6, 16-14. It was the second-longest WTA match in history, behind only the wacky 1984 contest with the 643-shot rally.

The Melbourne marathon had everything. 80 deuces, 50 break points, and 17 breaks of serve–over 1,800 shots by the time it was done. Both women even serve-and-volleyed–Schiavone led that category by doing it twice. To say it was topsy-turvy would be a bit like calling Isner-Mahut “long.” The contributor who logged the match (all 358 points of it!) for the Match Charting Project noted at the 4:25 mark, “Both players starting to look a bit tired.”

The Kuznetsova-Schiavone head-to-head is one of the wilder subplots of 21st century women’s tennis.

Kuznetsova won 10 of the 16 meetings, but Schiavone snuck off with half of the six three-setters. Sveta won the first of their epic clashes in the 2007 Fed Cup final. Four years after their meeting at the 2011 Australian Open, they did it again, going to 10-8 in the third in Paris. That match didn’t quite clear the four-hour mark, but like the gutbuster in Melbourne, it had just about everything else.

Kuznetsova’s history against her Italian rival represents her career in miniature. She has enjoyed the occasional triumph in between struggles with inconsistency. She has fought out one slugfest after another, losing many of them by the smallest of margins. Most of all, she has played lots and lots of tennis.

* * *

Ironically, both of Kuznetsova’s victories in major finals were rather tidy affairs. At the US Open in 2004, she outplayed Elena Dementieva, 6-3, 7-5, and at the French in 2009, she defeated Dinara Safina, 6-4, 6-2. Both opponents had their own internal demons to grapple with, and Sveta took advantage.

It was rarely that simple. The Spring after her US Open victory, she suffered a sequence of near-misses that would’ve sent lesser competitors into early retirement. At Indian Wells, she lost to Dementieva, 7-5 in the third. In Miami, she fell to Ana Ivanović, 7-5 in the third. A month later in Warsaw, she beat Kim Clijsters but lost in the final to Justine Henin–you guessed it–7-5 in the third. Another month down the road at Roland Garros, she lost another three-hour heart-breaker to Henin. You don’t need me to tell you what happened from 5-all in the third set.

She bounced back to reach the Wimbledon quarter-finals, but when it came time to defend her US Open title, her nerves could no longer keep up. In Flushing, she lost to 97th-ranked Ekaterina Bychkova in straight sets, making her the first female US Open champion to lose the following year in the first round. Her ranking, which had reached a career-best number four in August, careened back out of the top ten.

Her defense of the 2009 French Open title was nearly as punchless. Her entire 2010 clay court campaign lasted seven matches, including first round exits in Rome and Madrid to Maria Kirilenko and Shahar Peer, respectively. (Both were in three sets, but the Peer match ended 6-0.) At Roland Garros, she reached the third round only to lose once more–in three sets, of course–to Kirilenko. Her ranking had climbed back to number three after winning the 2009 Beijing title, but with the French Open points gone, she fell out of the top ten again.

Kuznetsova’s peak came in between the two slam titles, when she reached number two on the WTA computer (and 3rd on the Elo list) in late 2007. She won the US Open warmup in New Haven in the strangest way possible: a three-setter over Agnieszka Radwańska and then three victories by retirement. In the season as a whole, she won 17 of her 24 deciding sets. Unfortunately, two of the seven losses came at the year-end WTA Tour Championships in Madrid. She failed to win a match against the elite field, falling to Ana Ivanović by a score of (what was that again?) 7-5 in the third.

* * *

I trust that you’ve noticed a pattern. In 2009, Pete Bodo called Sveta “a complicated young lady who never met a match she couldn’t choke away.” That isn’t quite right, even if it has sometimes felt that way. She is plenty complicated, to be sure, and she has a knack for making any match she played as complicated as she is–often emerging through the muddle as an exhausted winner.

Here are the active leaders in three-set matches played:

Player                    Deciders  Wins  Losses  
Svetlana Kuznetsova            355   215     140  
Venus Williams                 306   187     119  
Angelique Kerber               271   152     119  
Alize Cornet                   261   140     121  
Petra Kvitova                  254   149     105  
Sara Errani                    251   125     126  
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova       246   133     113  
Serena Williams                236   170      66  
Vera Zvonareva                 234   137      97  
Karolina Pliskova              208   131      77

These numbers might be off by a couple of matches here and there–they may include the occasional ITF or a misclassified retirement or two. If you look up the results using Tennis Abstract’s filters, you’ll get slightly different records. But the margins here are so big that the details don’t matter. Kuznetsova has played way more three-setters than any other active player. She tops the list in both wins and losses as well.

It’s a bit surprising, given all of the Russian’s memorable defeats, that her winning percentage is so high, at 61%. She’s just a tick behind Venus Williams (also 61%), and the only other women on this list who win their three-setters at a higher rate are Serena Williams (72%) and Karolína Plíšková (63%). Jelena Janković, who had a great deal in common with Kuznetsova, also played more than 300 three-setters in her career but lost more often than she won.

Kuznetsova also stands out when we limit our view to the tightest three-set contests. Here are the active leaders in matches that reach 5-all in the decider:

Player               3rd 5-alls  Wins  Losses  
Svetlana Kuznetsova          80    46      34  
Venus Williams               75    41      34  
Serena Williams              56    32      24  
Angelique Kerber             54    31      23  
Karolina Pliskova            53    31      22  
Caroline Garcia              49    33      16  
Petra Kvitova                49    27      22  
Andrea Petkovic              47    22      25  
Varvara Lepchenko            47    20      27  
Kristina Mladenovic          45    20      25

In this category as well, Sveta has played more matches than any other active player. She has won more of them, and she’s tied with Venus for the most losses. Again, for all the painful 7-5 defeats, her win rate is respectable. Janković played 78 of these, and she lost more often than she won. Another contemporary with a reputation for circuitous routes from coin toss to handshake, Sam Stosur, won just 24 of 67 matches when they were so close.

* * *

It’s a cliché that tennis players struggle when they think too much. In Kuznetsova’s case, it might be true. She certainly has more going on upstairs than the direction of her next serve.

Journalist Matt Cronin described Sveta as more introspective than the other Russian stars of her generation. He interviewed her in early 2013, when she returned to the tour after a six-month hiatus. Her excitement to come back wasn’t quite wholehearted:

When you play over and over every year the same tournament, the same players, it’s quite difficult. I never feel sick of the game because I love tennis a lot. I have been sick from travel and sick from staying away from home, from my family, from my friends. But I never hated tennis. I love tennis and I enjoy tennis.… But I’ve been watching matches, and I didn’t really feel like I wanted to be out there.

She may have had reservations, but she picked up where she left off. For three years, she played a full schedule, coming through qualifying when necessary and reaching the occasional final. It wasn’t until 2016, after her 30th birthday and more than a decade past her first major title, that she returned to the ranks of the elite.

She started the 2016 season ranked 25th, and quickly made a statement, knocking top seed Simona Halep out of Sydney in three sets. If fans needed any more proof that Sveta was back in all her glory, she turned in another performance for the history books in Fed Cup the next month. She and Richèl Hogenkamp went at it for four hours, the longest match in the competition’s history.

She lost the Hogenkamp match, 10-8 in the third, but she won a whopping 22 three-setters that year. That’s not quite a record–Petra Kvitová won 25 in 2013–but it was by far the most of Kuznetsova’s third-set packed career. One of the third sets got her past world number one Serena Williams in Miami; another put her in the second week at Wimbledon when she beat Sloane Stephens, 6-7(1), 6-2, 8-6. In October, she needed to win the title in Moscow to qualify for the elite year-end championships, and with three-set wins in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, she did just that.

Less than 48 hours after securing the Moscow trophy, she was 5,000 miles away in Singapore, taking on Agnieszka Radwańska in her first round-robin match. She had climbed back into the top ten after more than six years, so she must have felt that she could handle anything–even some unwanted hair in her face.

A newswire reported that she looked to be “on the verge of exhaustion and close to breaking down,” yet she got the better of Radwańska for the 13th time in her career. She went on to beat Karolína Plíšková in a third-set tiebreak, qualifying for the elimination rounds of the season-ending event. In the semi-finals against Dominika Cibulková, she finally ran out of gas, taking the first set 6-1 but dropping the next two. It wasn’t quite the fairy-tale ending she’d hoped for, but it re-established her as a force on the tour, and she remained in the top ten throughout 2017.

Wrist surgery ended her comeback, and she has played a limited schedule since. As recently as the summer of 2019, she flashed the power and persistence that made her a major champion, ousting both Plíšková and Ashleigh Barty to reach the final in Cincinnati. She’s been out of action since Wimbledon last year as she tries to get back in playing shape. A month away from her 37th birthday, a return to the top seems unlikely, but opponents should remain ready for battle. She only won 5 of her 16 matches last year, but half of them went three sets.

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

* * *

Margaret Osborne duPont [USA]
Born: 4 March 1918
Died: 24 October 2012
Career: 1935-62
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1947)
Peak Elo rating: 2,302 (1st place, 1951)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 48
 

* * *

In the early 1930s, Hazel Wightman made a trip back to her old stomping grounds in San Francisco. Now established in Boston, the four-time national champion was the doyenne of American tennis. She surveyed the local talent, including a hard-hitting teenager from Oregon named Margaret Osborne.

Osborne’s mother asked what she thought. Wightman didn’t consider the youngster to be national champion material. “She’s too nice. She doesn’t have the killer instinct.” Wightman knew a thing or two about what it took to destroy an opponent on the tennis court. Back in 1910 as Hazel Hotchkiss, she had won a golden match–48 points in a row–against a poor girl in Seattle.

Wightman was a keen judge of talent, but she was wrong this time. She didn’t misjudge Osborne’s personality–the youngster really was that nice, and her main flaw as a young player was her inability to finish points. But the apparent kindness wasn’t what defined her on the tennis court. More than anything else, Margaret was calm, ignoring the annoyances that derailed other players and keeping her head when matches were tight.

In one title match after another, her unflappability was put to the test. Osborne won her first major at the 1946 French Championships, saving match points against Pauline Betz. Betz had beaten her in every previous meeting on clay and in most of their matches on other surfaces, too.

Margaret won her first US national championship in 1948 in circumstances that are almost impossible to believe. They would’ve overcome just about any other player. Two days before she was set to face the defending champion, her great friend and doubles partner Louise Brough, Osborne had learned that her father died after being hit by a car back home in California. Her mother convinced her to play anyway–that’s what Dad would’ve wanted.

The match that ensued was, by games played, the longest in the tournament’s history. Two rain delays stretched the contest even longer, further testing the players’ nerves. Osborne and Brough both possessed devastating American Twist serves–“two bombs,” as Doris Hart put it–and neither could break for the first 26 games of the third set. Some spectators lost their patience with the stalemate, chanting “Bring on the men!” Somehow, Margaret made the first move, and she won the match, 4-6, 6-4, 15-13.

Maybe she didn’t have the killer instinct, but at age 30, she had what it took to become the national champion.

* * *

Margaret Osborne duPont–she gained a last name when she married businessman and horse breeder Will duPont in 1947–is best known for her feats on the doubles court. With Brough, she won the title at Forest Hills for nine years running and 12 times overall. (She also won the women’s doubles title the year before the streak began, with Sarah Palfrey Cooke.) Altogether, Brough and Osborne duPont won 20 majors together. Margaret added another 10 mixed doubles titles with four different partners over a span of nearly two decades.

It’s easy to forget what a formidable–and versatile–singles player she was, as well. She won a second Roland Garros title in 1949, making her just the second American woman, after Helen Wills, to win the French twice. She is one of only 13 women to win two French titles as well as two (or more) other majors:

Suzanne Lenglen
Helen Wills
Margaret Osborne duPont
Doris Hart
Maureen Connolly
Margaret Court
Chris Evert
Martina Navratilova
Steffi Graf
Monica Seles
Justine Henin
Maria Sharapova
Serena Williams

If you wanted to compile a ranking of the 13 best players of all time, you could do a lot worse than to start with this list.

Osborne duPont’s career haul of six major singles titles–three at Forest Hills, two at the French, and one at Wimbledon–puts her in elite company. The strikes against her were largely out of her control: her peak was relatively short, and she excelled during a relatively weak era, when Pauline Betz had just turned pro and the European game was still recovering from World War II.

The war limited her playing opportunities when she could have been at her peak. She didn’t win her first major until 1946, when she was 28. She cut back on travel after her marriage in late 1947, and the 1950 season was the last time that she played at least 30 matches. An elite doubles player for two decades, she packed a lot of results into a much shorter span as a world-beater on the singles court.

* * *

It’s ironic that family life limited Osborne duPont’s playing opportunities, because she married one of the great tennis fans of the 20th century.

William duPont, Jr. was a scion of the Delaware duPont family, whose fortune dated back nearly a century to its origins in the gunpowder business. Will was more interested in horses, and he turned the family’s 400-acre estate, Bellevue Hall, into a center for his thoroughbred breeding and training operation.

He also converted Bellevue into a luxurious stop on the women’s tennis circuit. He built eight tennis courts–including grass, cement, and both outdoor and indoor clay. During World War II, some long-established tournaments were suspended, and duPont stepped into the breach. The estate in Wilmington, Delaware became part of the summer grass-court swing.

Pauline Betz played at Bellevue in 1944 and 1945, beating Margaret both years. She described the experience:

As many as thirty-six players at the same time have been living at [Bellevue] wondering what the poor folk were doing. We drop tennis clothes on the floor and receive them back laundered and ironed; breakfast and lunch at any hour; converge on the dinner table for home-grown steak or roast beef; raid the ice box once or twice per night for home-made ice-cream, and just can’t understand how we gain weight during an exhausting tournament.

Margaret said of Will, “He wasn’t very good, but he sure loved to play.” Perhaps it was inevitable that after he divorced his first wife in 1941, he would marry a tennis player. Alice Marble claimed that Will said he’d leave his wife for her. Louise Brough told an interviewer much later in life that he had hit on her as well. Both Brough and Betz reported that Will always smelled bad, a trait they attributed to his eccentricity but might have been because he spent so much time with his horses.

When Margaret married Will, her life changed. She would never again need to worry about money, and she developed a love of horses that would last for the remainder of her life, long after the couple divorced in 1964. But Will was set in his ways, and some of those habits got in the way of competitive tennis. She knew what she was getting into, but it must have bristled that her schedule was no longer her own.

The first thing that the world top-ranked singles player lost when she became Mrs. duPont was any kind of opportunity for post-match celebration. Will was a homebody, so after Margaret finished her last match at Forest Hills–even if it was decided by an epic 15-13 third set–they caught the 8:30 train back home to Wilmington.

More damaging to Osborne duPont’s legacy, the marriage prevented her from ever playing in Australia. Will took his annual holiday in January, and he expected Margaret to accompany him to California. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a succession of American stars–Hart, Brough, Maureen Connolly–made victorious trips Down Under. Given the opportunity, Osborne duPont probably would’ve picked up another major and won the career slam–very possibly doing the same in doubles as well.

* * *

I mentioned that Margaret was known for her calm under pressure. That didn’t mean that her opponents had much chance to relax.

S. Wallis Merrihew, the editor of American Lawn Tennis, assessed her game in 1942:

She has all the strokes and they are men’s strokes. Maurice McLoughlin and Billy Johnston at their highest and best could scarcely surpass it. Her serve is ideal to go to the net on, her volley is on a par with it, she can smash and drive with the best of them.

Pauline Betz was particularly impressed by Margaret’s overhead smash. In her autobiography, Wings On My Tennis Shoes, she made a brief list of the players with the best smashes. It was all men–Jack Kramer, Richard “Pancho” González, and so on–except for one woman: Osborne duPont. Betz poked fun at her own shaky smash and said that unlike her, the likes of Kramer and Osborne “cannot understand why there should ever be a question of missing.”

Margaret was a few years older than Kramer, and she reached her peak at about the same time. Kramer, along with González, Ted Schroeder, and others, popularized the “Big Game”–relentless, high-percentage serve-and-volley tennis. The women’s game had always been more baseline oriented, especially as generations of Americans tried to emulate the slugging prowess of Helen Wills.

Osborne duPont and Brough didn’t quite adopt the all-out net attack that came to define the men’s game, but they displayed an all-court prowess rarely seen at women’s tournaments. It’s part of what made them so deadly as a doubles team. Betz said that Osborne duPont was “almost impossible to hit through or past in a doubles match,” even if she sometimes missed volleys in singles.

* * *

Forty times in their career, “Ozzie” and “Broughie” faced off in singles. (This was not a strong era for nicknames.) Brough won their first eight meetings, and they split the rest down the middle. 27 of their encounters were in finals, 4 of them with a grand slam title on the line.

Osborne duPont’s one triumph over Brough in a major final came in the epic 1948 match at Forest Hills. The other three didn’t quite measure up to the same standard, but the big-serving duo always made things interesting. At Wimbledon in 1949, Brough won by the oddball scoreline of 10-8, 1-6, 10-8. Margaret had four set points in the first set, and she was two points away from closing out the match on her own serve at 6-5 in the third. This is in the era before sit-down changeovers, and unlike Forest Hills, Wimbledon didn’t give players a ten-minute intermission after the second set. The two women were on their feet, without pause, for 43 games.

The 1949 Wimbledon final also stood out in memory for another reason. Cynthia Starr and Billie Jean King interviewed the two women for their 1988 book, We Have Come a Long Way. Osborne duPont’s reputation was that she never choked. She said, as humbly as she could manage, that she couldn’t remember ever choking. The two women rarely disagreed, but Brough “gently disputed” the point–surely thinking back to that marathon title match.

Margaret certainly didn’t choke very much. Her last major title came when she was 44, in mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1962. She and Neale Fraser finally secured the trophy after 41 games, beating Ann Haydon and Dennis Ralston, 2-6, 6-3, 13-11. In another classic mixed doubles match, Ozzie and Bill Talbert beat Gussie Moran and Bob Falkenburg, 27-25, 5-7 6-1. In Margaret’s memory, “The wind was so strong … that you couldn’t possibly win a game on one side of the court.” The match was postponed at 22-22 in the first set, and sanity prevailed in the less extreme conditions of the following day.

Osborne duPont was at Wimbledon in 1962 as the coach of the US Wightman Cup team. Mixed doubles at the Championships was just a bonus. It had been three decades since Hazel Wightman herself–the original force behind the annual international meeting–had doubted Margaret’s potential. Since then, Osborne duPont had won 37 grand slam titles. She went undefeated in 19 Wightman Cup matches. She ranked among the US year-end top ten 14 times, three of them after she became a mother.

She didn’t think there were any particular secrets to her success. In 1962, she told a reporter, “I just enjoy tennis very much and play the game a lot. It’s as simple as that.” Sure, yes, that, plus a serve with so much spin that spectators could hear a swish as the racket made contact. Wightman was wrong, but no matter. “In a way it was a compliment. I considered her one of my very best friends in tennis.”