Month: March 2022

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

* * *

Shirley Fry [USA]
Born: 30 June 1927
Died: 13 July 2021
Career: 1941-57
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1956)
Peak Elo rating: 2,258 (2nd place, 1956)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 63
 

* * *

At the end of the 1955 season, Shirley Fry’s long-time doubles partner, Doris Hart, turned professional. A few months past her 30th birthday, Hart had plenty to be proud of: six major singles titles, including the career grand slam; a place in the top ten dating back to 1946; and a whopping 33 major doubles titles. She would play a few professional events in the late 1950s, but she was effectively retiring from competition, trading the amateur game for a new life as a teaching pro.

Eleven of those doubles titles were shared with Fry. Shirley was just a couple of years younger, born in 1927 to Doris’s 1925, and they’d been playing singles against each other and doubles together since 1941. For a stretch in the early 1950s, the team was unstoppable: They won the French, Wimbledon, and the US Nationals in 1951, 1952, and 1953. Neither one traveled to Australia in that span, so they were unbeaten at majors for more than three years.

When Hart left the tour, Fry kept at it. Allison Danzig said of Shirley in the New York Times, “it was her fate to play second or third fiddle,” and her friend’s retirement opened up new possibilities. Fry had played her entire career in the shadow of some American “amazons”–Hart, Louise Brough, and Margaret Osborne duPont. She was not only several inches shorter than her most successful peers, but she had losing records against each. At the same time that Hart turned pro, Brough was slowing down, and Osborne duPont was predominantly a threat on the doubles court.

There were other contenders on the horizon, but 1956 was shaping up to be a good year for Shirley Fry.

* * *

One of Doris Hart’s first orders of business after stashing away her luggage was to publish an autobiography. She called it Tennis with Hart. It was a breezy recap of her career, primarily a tool to convert her newfound surfeit of leisure time into some cash.

“Tennis with Hart” is also a handy three-word summary of Shirley Fry’s first decade and a half on the circuit. Between 1941 and 1955, Fry entered 169 singles events, not counting exhibitions and team competitions such as the Wightman Cup. Of those 169 tournaments, she shared the draw with Doris 120 times. Modern-day pros typically all follow the same global tour, so it might not sound odd for a pair of players to turn up so often in the same field. Seven decades ago, it was a different story. When Shirley was in the draw, Hart was present almost twice as often as any other woman. The next most common foe at Fry’s tournaments was Louise Brough, who played 61 of the same events as Fry. Only nine other players showed up in as many as 40.

Hart and Fry frequently chose to travel together, often as the top two seeds at tournaments in the Caribbean and the American South. When they did, woe betide the third and fourth seeds. At the 120 events that they both entered, they combined for 69 singles titles. They also accounted for 63 of the runner-up showings, and they faced off in the final 46 times.

Fry (right) and Hart
with the 1952 Wimbledon doubles trophy

Unfortunately for Shirley, she was clearly the junior partner of the dominant duo. She won only 12 of the 46 finals and a mere 17 of their total 64 meetings.* They met three times in major finals, splitting their two title matches at Roland Garros, while Hart clobbered her friend, 6-1, 6-0, at Wimbledon in 1951. The pair would often talk strategy, even when they were about to play each other. Later, Hart would tell author Bruce Schoenfeld, “I didn’t consider her a threat.”

* Fry’s record against Hart is 17-47 in adult circuit events. Tennis Abstract has a few other results, including junior and college matches, bringing the (probably still incomplete) career total to 18-50.

Doris was only part of Shirley’s problem in a strong era for American tennis stars. Fry reached the quarter-finals or better in every major she played in the 1950s. But the draw rarely opened up for her. In her career at slams, she lost to Hart five times, Maureen Connolly another five times, and Brough three times. To win her one singles major in the Doris Hart era, at Roland Garros in 1951, Fry needed every bit of her speed and resourcefulness to get past Osborne duPont, 6-2, 9-7 in the semi-finals, and Hart, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 in the championship match.

* * *

By 1956, a new crop of stars were taking over. Beverly Baker Fleitz, Wimbledon finalist in 1955, was playing as well as ever. Angela Mortimer continued her dominance of fellow Brits, and snuck off with the 1955 French championship. The tall, hard-hitting Althea Gibson kept improving and looked every bit as imposing as the Amazons of the previous generation.

Shirley Fry almost didn’t last long enough to test herself against the fresh batch of rivals. A bad case of tennis elbow finally caught up with her in 1954, and after a rough season, she announced her retirement. She took a job with the Tampa Bay Times, and–in an oft-told story that is too good to omit–one of her first tasks was to send the story of her own retirement down to the composing room.

The article Shirley handled reveals that her retirement was always intended–or, at the very least, hoped–to be temporary. She compared herself both to Maureen Connolly–who she said worked as a copygirl before becoming the national champion–and Sarah Palfrey Cooke, who took most of three years off before winning at Forest Hills in 1945.

It doesn’t take a very clever reader to deduce that Shirley still had her eye on a US national title.

In the 1950s, the only cure for tennis elbow was rest. That, apparently, wasn’t Fry’s strong suit. Less than three months after her retirement announcement, she entered the Dixie Championships in Tampa. Four matches and eight sets later, she won the title.* Glamour girl Karol Fageros gave her a test in the final, and Shirley came through, 9-7, 8-6. Fry and Fageros teamed up to win the doubles.

* The level of competition was mixed at regional events like the Dixie. Fry’s first opponent was 11-year-old Sandy Warshaw. Warshaw was the under-13 state champion, but she’s better known for becoming the first female mayor of Tampa, 31 years later.

Her elbow handled the strain just fine. The next week, she played the Florida West Coast Championships in St. Petersburg, where she beat Fageros again and advanced to the final. Waiting there was old friend Doris Hart. Shirley lost, but not before making Hart fight to a 7-9, 6-4, 7-5 decision. It almost goes without saying that they put the band back together: Hart and Fry won the doubles, losing only two games in three matches.

Shirley took it easy for the rest of the 1955 season, playing two events in Florida in February, one in Havana in April, plus one warm-up ahead of the US Nationals. Before falling in the quarter-finals at Forest Hills to Dorothy Knode, she reached four finals. Twice she beat Hart, and twice Doris beat her.

* * *

Fry’s performance as a part-timer in 1955 was good enough to earn her an invitation to join the US Wightman Cup team the following year. The international competition between the US and Britain was prestigious enough on its own, but it meant more than that for Shirley: It was a free trip across the Atlantic at just the right time to enter Wimbledon.

After another off-season at the Tampa Bay Times copy desk, Shirley’s elbow was as good as new. She entered ten tournaments in the first four months of the year, and she won nine of them. Dorothy Knode was the only woman who managed to beat her, and even she rarely gave Fry much to worry about. In that four-month span, Shirley won four of their five meetings.

Shirley at Wimbledon in 1956

The first stop for the Wightman Cup team that summer was in Manchester for the Northern Championships. The visitors were the class of the field, as Fry, Knode, Louise Brough, and Althea Gibson brushed aside the local challengers and made it an all-American final four. Fry drew Gibson, setting up their first meeting since Queen’s Club in 1951.

Five years on, Gibson was a completely different player. She was in the midst of a tour that took her around the world, through India and Egypt in addition to the traditional tennis stops in France, Italy, and England. The Manchester semi-final against Fry was her 63rd match of the season (it was still June!), and she had lost only three times, all to Angela Mortimer. The win streak included triumphs at the Italian Championships in Rome and her first major singles title at Roland Garros.

The two women would face off 13 times in a span of eight months. Fry enjoyed playing Gibson–more specifically, she liked to beat her. She told a reporter in 2013, “I think I had Althea’s number. She didn’t like to play against me. Off the court, she was a very nice person. But she’s somebody you want to beat when she was on the court.” It was clear that Fry didn’t have half the natural talent that Gibson did. Shirley knew it, and Shirley knew that Althea knew it–which made her victories all the sweeter.

But in Manchester, Gibson held sway. It was a sloppy match, with Gibson evidently fatigued from her long half-season of tennis. Fry couldn’t quite pull it out, losing a 6-3, 6-8, 7-5 decision. Later, Shirley said, “I beat her when I should have,” and it’s true, the Northern meeting wasn’t one of the big ones. Those would come soon enough.

* * *

Two weeks later, Fry split her two Wightman Cup singles matches, saving a match point to beat Angela Buxton and losing to Mortimer. She partnered Louise Brough to tack on a doubles win that finished off a 5-2 victory for the Americans. The outcome was not particularly noteworthy–the Brits hadn’t won since 1930.

In retrospect, what sticks out about the 1956 Wightman Cup is the fact that Shirley Fry lost a singles match. She wouldn’t do that again for a long time.

Shirley cruised through the first four rounds at Wimbledon. It was her eighth trip to the Championships, and the opponents who had bedeviled her in the past–Doris Hart in the 1951 final and Maureen Connolly in the 1952 and 1953 semi-finals–were out of the picture. The draw didn’t do her any favors this year, though. She would face Gibson in the quarters, and defending champion Louise Brough potentially awaited in the semis.

She started off poorly against Althea. Her serve was never an asset (“I had the worst serve in tennis,” she once said), and it frequently found the net as Gibson took the first set, 6-4. In the second, Fry attacked the Gibson forehand, and inexplicably, Althea abandoned her usual aggressive game. Fry was an outstanding retriever–among the greatest of the era, according to Connolly–and Gibson wasn’t fit enough to beat her at her own game. Shirley came back to win the last two sets, 6-3, 6-4, and the only highlight left for Gibson was a deadpan joke at the post-match press-conference: “It was easier to beat small fry elsewhere than big Fry at Wimbledon.”

In the semi-finals, it was Brough who struggled with her serve. The 1955 champ was flummoxed by the wind, and Fry, even more dogged than usual, pulled out a 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 upset. The final, against 20-year-old Brit Angela Buxton, was a mere formality. Buxton had nearly beaten Fry in Wightman Cup, but the championship match was all Shirley. She pummelled the Buxton backhand until it fell apart, and she secured her long-awaited Wimbledon title, 6-3, 6-1.

Fry wouldn’t lose again until November. She wouldn’t drop another set in her next 14 matches. Her first event back home was the US Clay Courts in Chicago, where she lost only ten games in her first five matches, before she straight-setted Gibson in the final. After that, it was the traditional Forest Hills warm-up in Manchester. In the title match there against Brough, she finally dropped a set, but she came out on top and headed to the US Nationals on a 22-match win streak.

* * *

The only player capable of stopping the streaking Shirley Fry was Althea Gibson. But according to Althea, “When Shirley beat me at Wimbledon I think I cultivated a complex. Every time I played her I felt that she had me.” That, right there, is your two-sentence summary of the 1956 US National Championships.

Fry had little problem reaching the final, stumbling only in a three-set victory over Margaret Osborne duPont. Gibson was even better, straight-setting her way to the championship match. With the title on the line, Althea showed flashes of the brilliance that would win her the 1957 and 1958 titles, but she couldn’t sustain her form against Shirley’s steady baseline game. Unlike the Wimbledon quarter-final, this one wasn’t even close: 6-3, 6-4 to Fry.

Fry’s success came in her 16th entry at Forest Hills. No woman had ever waited so long before finally winning this title. When Doris Hart turned pro, Shirley moved up to the top spot in the national rankings, and that, in a roundabout way, gave her some motivation: “Some people thought I hadn’t earned it, so I decided to go out and win this year. That’s what I’m doing.” How confident was the Wimbledon champ? She said that before the final against Gibson.

A New York Times profile the day after her victory teased the new titlist about her break from the game two years earlier: “She has been as unsuccessful as can be in her pursuit of retirement.” What the writer didn’t know–and perhaps Shirley didn’t, either–is that Fry was only a few months away from another attempt to say goodbye. This time, she would make it stick.

Fry and Gibson headed to Australia in November, the first trip down under for both women. Once again, Shirley had a traveling partner with whom she could dominate tournaments in both singles and doubles. The two Americans would play five tournaments, and they met in the final each time. Gibson won three of the five, plus another three exhibition matches. Althea was clearly gaining the upper hand. Even one of Fry’s victories, at the Victorian Championships in Melbourne, was marred by controversy, as Gibson was called for 21 foot faults.

You might recall what Fry said of the rivalry: “I beat her when I should have.” Shirley’s only other win on the tour was at the event that counts in the history books, the Australian Championships. In their match for the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest title, Gibson struggled again with foot faults, and the prominent stage may have brought back her mental block about beating Fry. Shirley matched the score from Forest Hills, winning 6-3, 6-4.

The Australian title secured the career grand slam for Fry, and by teaming with Gibson to win the doubles championship, she completed her set of majors in that discipline, as well. As if that weren’t enough for one trip, Shirley reunited with an American, Karl Irvin, now living in Australia, who moonlighted as an umpire. They married in February. When Shirley lost in the first round of a tournament in Sydney in March, she had an excellent excuse: She was pregnant.

* * *

Shirley Fry was one of the humblest of former champions. After all, she had plenty of practice. After her victory at Wimbledon, she went up to the BBC booth for an interview. First question: “How many Wimbledons have you played in, Doris?”

Althea Gibson liked to say that it was hard to get cocky when you weren’t even the best player in the front seat of your rental car. Fry spent a decade of her life sharing rides with Doris Hart, and if Doris wasn’t sitting next to her, another all-time great probably was.

Fortunately for Shirley Fry, her legacy rests in the hands of others. Billie Jean King, for one, considered her an idol. Ever self-deprecating, Shirley was ready with a response. “That flatters me, because I really wasn’t that good of a player.” Even Doris Hart wouldn’t have let her get away with that one.

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

* * *

Karel Koželuh [CZE]
Born: 7 March 1895
Died: 27 April 1950
Career: 1911-45
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1929, among professionals)
Major singles titles: 0 (4 pro majors)
Total singles titles: 15 (and probably many more)
 

* * *

This list is premised on the idea that you can measure players against their eras with reasonable accuracy. That isn’t the only factor that goes into a ranking–some eras are stronger than others. But certain men and women earned their status as legends because they so clearly dominated their peers.

What if they weren’t allowed to play against the best of their contemporaries? While it’s common to hear the term “Open Era,” it’s easy forget exactly what it means. Before 1968, the vast majority of tournaments were, in one sense or another, closed. Until the 1950s, almost all events in the United States were white-only. Tournaments on the French Riviera circuit were often limited to members of the hosting club, with temporary membership passes granted to any member of the social or tennis-playing elite.

And then there’s the whole basis of the “open tennis” debate: the long-lasting proscription against professionals. The men who ran international tennis considered it a game for amateurs, and a global army of bureaucrats carefully policed the ranks, ensuring that it stayed that way.

The strangest–and most infuriating–facet of this history is that a huge fraction of the players who either elected to turn professional or were kicked out of the amateur ranks never played matches for money. No, their crime was that they taught tennis and got paid for it.

Some traditionalists could speak eloquently about keeping the game free of filthy lucre, but however pure their rhetoric, the point was always exclusion. Players without family wealth who needed to earn a living were welcome–sort of–but only if they could do so in a respectable pursuit like business. Someone who could pay the bills only with their tennis racket didn’t pass the upper-class entrance exam.

This is all a long-winded way of explaining why you probably haven’t heard of Karel Koželuh.

* * *

Koželuh was born in Prague in 1895, and he didn’t take up tennis until he was 16. He was already competing in just about every other sport. Before he made his name as a tennis star, he played international ice hockey and soccer–the latter for both Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Early on, he took a job as a tennis teaching pro, thus killing any shot at a sparkling career on the amateur circuit. Before World War I, professional tournaments occasionally took place, but they were rare and little heralded. The gatherings of coaches that resulted fell far short of what we now think of as professional tennis.

The situation didn’t change immediately after the war, either. Two things finally catapulted Koželuh into the international tennis world. First, he traveled to the Riviera, where well-heeled holidaymakers wanted to play tennis and sought out quality instruction. Second, promoter extraordinaire C.C. Pyle turned his attention to the sport and essentially invented marquee pay-for-play tennis.

Pyle convinced six-time Wimbledon champion Suzanne Lenglen to turn pro in 1926. Fans in Britain and the United States flocked to see her, and for the first time, professional tennis was played in front of thousands of fans. Lenglen didn’t last on the barnstorming circuit, and Pyle quickly moved on to other interests. But their short collaboration demonstrated that a market existed. Without an impressive amateur resume, Koželuh could never be a headlining superstar like Lenglen was, but every star needed a foil with enough skill to keep things interesting. That role was tailor-made for the Czech.

Remember the timeline. Opportunity finally arrived for Koželuh in 1928, when he was 33 years old.

* * *

Koželuh caught the eye of Bill Tilden in 1927, and his results in professional tournaments in France sealed his reputation as the best pro player in Europe. In 1928, he would take on the baby-faced American Vinnie Richards, a former Tilden protege and 1924 Olympic gold medalist who had been part of C.C. Pyle’s Lenglen tour.

Richards never reached a major final as an amateur, but thanks to a glittering junior career, a closet full of doubles trophies, and a strong all-around game, he was considered among the best players of his era. In 1927, he won the first US Pro championships, a tournament initially devised by Pyle (though never run by him) to provide a showcase for pay-for-play competition on par with the great amateur tournaments.

The Koželuh-Richards competition began with a three-match series, played in Prague, London, and New York, pitting the strongest European pro against the reigining US champ. Koželuh won all three, demonstrating a total mastery of clay-court tennis. Ray Bowers, whose book Forgotten Victories is an essential guide to this era, describes the Czech’s style of play:

Koželuh was master of the defensive game, staged from well behind the baseline using a single grip both forehand and backhand. If his opponent also stayed deep, Koželuh was usually content to deliver softish, safe shots endlessly, waiting for his opponent’s eventual mistake. His superb court speed made an opponent’s winner from the baseline achievable only at high risk. An opponent at net could expect no easy volley opportunities, and if the attacker’s approach shot was weak Koželuh’s accuracy in delivering lobs and passing shots would probably prevail.

On the flip side, his footwork was sometimes sloppy, and he hit most of his shots from the same upright position. It didn’t matter, because he was so blindingly fast. On a clay court, it was near impossible to hit one past him.

Unfortunately for someone looking to make it big in front of American audiences, clay courts were not as common as they were in Europe. The US Pro was played on grass, and the one-night stands that made up so much of professional tennis were often played indoors, on temporary courts of canvas stretched over cork.

Koželuh didn’t care for either surface, especially when a drizzle made the Forest Hills turf courts even slipperier during his 1928 US Pro final against Richards. The American defended his title there, but over the course of their entire series, the Czech proved himself the world’s strongest professional. He won 15 of 20 matches against Richards in 1928, only a few of them on clay.

For the first time, the 33-year-old Koželuh could get some idea of how he stacked up against the world’s best amateurs, as Richards had been one of the stronger members of that tribe only two years earlier. In a combined ranking of amateurs and pros for 1928, Bowers places the Czech fourth, behind Tilden, René Lacoste, and Henri Cochet. Such a placement doesn’t shed much light on the previous 15 years of Koželuh’s career, but a spot in the top four at a very strong moment in men’s tennis history is a good place to start.

* * *

Koželuh came back the next year and got his revenge on Richards at the 1929 US Pro, outlasting the American in a five-set final. He won five of the seven matches they played that season, inspiring one American journalist to claim that his defense would be too strong for Lacoste, the previous year’s Wimbledon champion.

Much of the money in professional tennis was concentrated in the States, so the Czech became a regular feature of the American pro circuit. He would ultimately reach the final of the US Pro seven times, winning in 1929, 1932, and 1937*, when he was 42 years old. In 1932, he held off the rising German star Hans Nüsslein in straight sets. Nüsslein, who like Koželuh did some coaching as a youngster and was never welcome in the amateur ranks, was 15 years his junior.

* The 1937 title came against Texan Bruce Barnes, who is primarily known for one of tennis’s best one-liners. After a practice session with Ellsworth Vines in 1934: “It’s hit and miss with us. When he hits, I miss.”

By then, the pro game had received a big boost. Koželuh and Richards were recognized experts, but they paled–probably in skill and definitely in box-office appeal–to Tilden, Lacoste, and Cochet, the biggest stars of the amateur game. At the end of 1930, Tilden turned pro.

Big Bill’s foil for his first pro tour would be none other than Karel Koželuh. Finally, in 1931, with both men north of 35, the Czech could test himself against the best in the world. The pair would kick off their rivalry with a nine-match series, opening at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The crowds loved it, but Koželuh did not. Tilden beat him in 65 minutes at MSG, and the Czech didn’t win a set in their first two matches. Only in the tour’s final stop, in Omaha, did Koželuh make things interesting, pushing Tilden all the way to 10-8 in the final set. Big Bill was simply too good.

At least, Tilden was too good on indoor canvas courts. Since his first trip to the States in 1928, Koželuh had gotten plenty of practice on the surface, but he could only do so much to adapt his patient, defensive game to conditions that favored net-rushing and cannonball serves. The pair played another series in California, many of them on outdoor, asphalt courts. With more room behind the baseline to maneuver and the occasional gust of wind complicating Tilden’s overheads, Koželuh won five of eight matches on the more favorable surface.

* * *

Unfortunately for the Czech, professional tennis in the United States would remain primarily an indoor and grass-court game. The US Pro was the exception, switching surfaces until finally settling on hard courts in the mid-1950s. Koželuh’s titles in 1932 and 1937 came on clay, though he also lost finals on dirt to Nüsslein in 1934 and Tilden in 1935.

Koželuh’s legacy, then, is based on a few years of top-level play and a long list of what-ifs. What if he had evaded the amateur tennis police as a young coach? There were prominent clay-court events for amateurs all over Europe during his prime, and he would have been a top contender for any of them. What if pro tennis’s center of gravity had been on the Continent, instead of across the Atlantic? Then many more of his battles with Richards and Tilden would’ve taken place on clay.

Does Karel Koželuh’s documented match record justify his position among the top 128 players of all time? I have no clue. I had to throw away the algorithm for this one. What is clear is that his ability–which we can only judge from his performance as a 30-something–ranked among the best players of his era. Had he offered his coaching services for free and competed in the amateur ranks, the question wouldn’t be whether he belonged on this list. You’d be asking why on earth I placed him so low.

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

* * *

Andrea Jaeger [USA]
Born: 4 June 1965
Career: 1980-84
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1981)
Peak Elo rating: 2,305 (3rd place, 1981)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 11
 

* * *

Andrea Jaeger might have set more records per season in her four-plus-year tennis career than anyone else in tennis history. Virtually everything she did in her debut season of 1980 was a first for someone her age. Every age-based mark set by Tracy Austin in 1978 and 1979–and there were many–fell by the wayside when Jaeger appeared, playing a similar game, one year younger than when Austin did it.

Back when the women’s professional tour was less than a decade old, when Jennifer Capriati was just an athletically-gifted toddler, Jaeger redefined what was possible for teenagers. She was the top-ranked American among under-18s when she was 13. She turned pro and beat a slew of established veterans when she was 14. Three weeks after her 15th birthday, she was seeded at Wimbledon–where she beat Virginia Wade and reached the quarter-finals.

By the end of her debut pro season in 1980, she had reached the US Open semifinal, won three titles, and racked up wins over Austin, Wade, Martina Navratilova, Hana Mandlikova, Evonne Goolagong, and Pam Shriver. In three years, she’d be the tour’s youngest millionaire.

Jaeger and Austin came along at an opportune moment, when Chris Evert was suddenly vulnerable and Martina had yet to evolve into a superhuman destroyer of tennis players. They established a new sporting archetype–the teenage girl tennis prodigy–that would play an outsized role in the sport for another two decades. They also gave sportswriters a vocabulary to use for the next several generations of teen queens–bratty, arrogant, spoiled–that suggested the journalists were always encountering their first teenagers.

In another decade and a half, the experiences of Austin and Jaeger, coupled with the injuries and early retirements of Capriati and a host of others, were responsible for a new set of rules governing teens on tour. Now, 14-year-olds are limited to no more than eight pro events, and 15-year-olds can only play ten.

Andrea Jaeger would’ve benefited from those rules, but boy, would she have hated them.

* * *

Mary Carillo said of Jaeger: “She plays tennis like she’s double-parked.” Tour officials constantly reminded her to wait out the full length of changeovers, since that time was sold to advertisers. She wrote in her autobiography* that she had an “inexhaustible storehouse of energy,” switching sides “as if I was racing to catch up with a soccer ball.”

* Entitled First Service, proof that there truly is a tennis pun for any situation.

Jaeger first tested the professional waters when she was 14 years old, in January 1980, at the Avon Futures of Las Vegas. She had a wild card waiting for her hometown Virginia Slims event in Chicago later that month, but her father insisted that she wait to turn pro until she had proven herself at the lower level. Winners of Futures events earned two free passes into top-level Slims tournaments.

Events on the Futures circuit were free-for-alls. As the likes of Navratilova, Goolagong, and Billie Jean King played for $125,000 on the main tour in Kansas City, 199 women signed up to fight for a $25,000 pot in Vegas.

Each Avon main draw was a standard 32-player, five-round bracket, and four of those places were open to the winners of a three-round, 32-player qualifying draw. The level of competition was uneven, but every good player of the late 1970s and early 1980s made an appearance on the Avon circuit en route to bigger things. In the Las Vegas qualifying draw were future Wimbledon doubles champion JoAnne Russell and Rita Agassi, Andre’s sister.

Jaeger’s only experience was in junior tournaments, so she didn’t even merit a spot in the qualifying field. Andrea–like anyone who owned a racket–could sign up for the pre-qualifying draw, and with great hopes for the new year, 143 women did. Andrea drew a first-round bye, so to earn one of the four coveted spots in the qualifying draw, she needed to win a mere five matches.

The reigning junior champion did that and more:

PQ1: Andrea Jaeger - bye
PQ2: Jaeger d. Tracy Tanner 6-0 6-0
PQ3: Jaeger d. Debbie Brink 6-0 6-0
PQ4: Jaeger d. Betsy Blaney 6-2 4-6 6-3
PQ5: Jaeger d. Kate Brasher 6-1 6-1
PQ6: Jaeger d. Yvonna Brzakova 6-3 2-6 6-3

Q1: [Q] Jaeger d. Candy Reynolds 6-1 6-0
Q2: [Q] Jaeger d. Nancy Yeargin 6-3 6-1
Q3: [Q] Jaeger d. Renee Blount 6-2 6-4

1R: [Q] Jaeger d. [7] Rosalyn Fairbank 6-3 5-7 6-4
2R: [Q] Jaeger d. Anne Hobbs 6-2 6-4
QF: [Q] Jaeger d. Iva Budarova 6-2 6-4
SF: [Q] Jaeger d. Barbara Jordan 6-4 6-2
FI: [Q] Andrea Jaeger d. [5] Barbara Potter 7-6 4-6 6-1

Her 13 matches to win a single tournament constitute a record that still stands. She went home, turned pro, and won her first match on the big tour, beating the veteran Kathy May Teacher*, 6-3, 6-3. After a second-round loss to Kathy Jordan, she went straight to Seattle, where she reached the semi-finals on the back of victories against Rosie Casals, Wendy Turnbull, and Sue Barker. She’d never play a Futures tournament again.

* These days, Kathy is more focused on the men’s tour. Her son is the second-ranked American man, Taylor Fritz.

When Coco Gauff made her famous run through qualifying to the Wimbledon third round in 2019, she was the same age that Jaeger was in her rookie season. Gauff was able to play only four more events before the end of the year, and her entire pro campaign that year amounted to 25 matches. In 1980, Jaeger played 93.

* * *

No one questioned that Andrea Jaeger, as the record-breaking wunderkind of the tour, had a compelling story. Her game was more difficult to appreciate.

She described herself as “a defensive player,” which is a fancy way of saying she hit a lot of moonballs. My friend Jeff McFarland remembers watching Jaeger-Austin lobfests that, he says, “made curling look like F1.” In the fourth round of the 1983 US Open, she and Bonnie Gadusek subjected the crowd to a 180-shot rally.

Put the young lady on slow clay, and it’s miracle the matches ever ended. The Match Charting Project has a shot-by-shot log of the 1982 French Open semi-final, where Jaeger lost to Chris Evert. The pair averaged a whopping nine strokes per point. The nature of their play almost broke the Aggression Score metric, which rates players by how often their shots end points, for good or bad, via winner or unforced error. The usual range is from -100 for extremely passive play to +100 for nonstop aggression. Zero is average. Against Evert that day, Jaeger’s score in rallies was -142.

A rare move forward at the 1983 French Open

It was an odd choice of game style for the teenager who refused to slow down. Beating an elite defender like Evert, Jaeger, or Austin required steady concentration, and most women on tour couldn’t sustain it. Often, Andrea couldn’t either. She struggled with unpredictable conditions like gusty wind, and sometimes, internal distractions were enough on their own.

After Zina Garrison beat her early in 1983 in Houston, she said that Jaeger “always started off as if she didn’t care.” (I don’t doubt Zina, though I do wonder how Andrea pulled off a 6-2, 6-1 victory in their first meeting with that sort of attitude.) That summer, Jaeger reached her sole Wimbledon final, crushing Billie Jean King to get there. How did she do it? “I decided to concentrate on every point. I usually don’t do that, but I was determined.”

By then, Jaeger’s wavering motivation was clear to anyone who was paying attention. A 1984 Sports Illustrated profile begins with a list of seven matches that she lost easily. For most of them, she had an excuse ready, ranging from a cold to menstrual cramps. The press wasn’t convinced. One WTA official was backed so far into a corner as to say, “tanking is subjective.”

* * *

Jaeger’s run lasted a little more than four years. When we tally up all the ailments that might have knocked her off the tour between ages 14 and 18–even discounting many of them as the usual post-match gripes–it’s amazing she lasted as long as she did.

She told reporters in 1983, “I get hurt a lot because when you’re young you don’t know how to take care of yourself,” she said. “It’s like you have to get hit by a truck before you learn to look both ways.” It was an odd thing to come out of her mouth, since she was still pushing herself to the limit, playing almost 80 singles matches that season alone and complaining about nagging injuries after many of them.

At the French Open the following year, she was finally hit by that truck. Her right shoulder popped midway through her first round match, and she couldn’t continue through the pain–only the fourth mid-match retirement of her career. She would come back for the Los Angeles Olympics later that year, but her shoulder would never be the same. A few days short of her 19th birthday, her career was essentially over.

The warning signs had been blaring at her for years. A 1983 Washington Post profile by Jane Leavy detailed a list of injuries from the previous 18 months: “a pulled groin muscle, a stress fracture in her pelvis and tendinitis in both feet.” She also coped with ankle, knee, and elbow problems. She had a response ready for those who considered her a malingerer: “I’ve been hurt more than I said. It’s not like every time I get a hangnail I call UPI.”

And then there was her relationship with her father. Roland Jaeger was nearly as competitive as Andrea herself, and he was relentlessly negative–he’d even explain to you why his constant carping was the only appropriate parenting style with a daughter like his. Andrea would sometimes complain that she never got a compliment from him, but just as often, she’d leap to his defense. Even decades later, she wrote, “[H]e was there to remind me of my place.”

Overbearing tennis fathers were nothing new–the type goes back at least as far as the 1910s and Suzanne Lenglen’s father, Charles. But many people on tour recognized that things weren’t quite right. Owen Davidson, an Australian doubles specialist who had served as a coach and hitting partner, said in 1983, “What she’s going through now doesn’t surprise me at all. There are real problems there. I got out when I realized the father wasn’t playing with a full deck.”

When Jaeger reached the 1983 Wimbledon final, she had a spat with Roland that–in her telling much later–led to her father locking her out of their room. Andrea has hinted that she tanked the final the next day. Martina Navratilova, who won the championship match, 6-0, 6-3, might take issue with that. She had won seven of their last eight meetings, and as she told reporters after winning the title, “I kept reminding myself that I was playing Andrea Jaeger and I should win.”

From this distance–and perhaps from any vantage point outside the family itself–it’s tough to know exactly what toll the father-daughter relationship took on the teenage star. At least she could take solace in the fact that her dad wasn’t the worst among them. Hungarian sensation Andrea Temesvari was the closest thing Europe had to their own Andrea Jaeger, and she had an overbearing father of her own. When one reporter wanted an insider’s take on whether Otto Temesvari took things took far, he flipped through his rolodex and called someone with a bit of perspective on the subject: Roland Jaeger.

* * *

The women’s tour would’ve been better off with a healthy, happy Andrea Jaeger who stuck around for a decade or more. But Andrea’s physical and psychological struggles meant that a long career was never really an option.

It’s reassuring, then, that the story ends happily for all parties. The brief, sometimes soporific reign of Jaeger and Tracy Austin gave ammunition to critics of the women’s game, but by the time Andrea enrolled in community college in 1984, fans could point to an astonishing crop of rising stars, including Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini, and a very young, promising, and oh-so-marketable Mary Joe Fernandez. Every mention of a new prospect pointed to Jaeger as a cautionary tale, and some parents and coaches took heed.

The game was in good hands. For her part, Jaeger was a 19-year-old millionaire who had spent her high school years on the road. She had plenty of time to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

Few former greats have done better. She finished school, earning her degree in theology. For a time, she became a nun. With her winnings–along with contributions from many familiar figures in the tennis world, such as John McEnroe–she launched the Silver Lining Foundation. Since then, her life has been focused on supporting children with cancer. Her autobiography makes clear that she found her calling.

While her teen years were a mere stepping stone for Andrea, we should be careful not to understate her importance in the evolution of the women’s game and its fan base. In 1983, a Virginia Slims executive named Anna Laird said of Jaeger:

She wouldn’t have existed before 1970. Chris [Evert] became a role model for a certain generation that liked ponytails, earrings and makeup. Andrea became a role model for kids who want to be able to play soccer and watch football and know all the stats about the best pass defense. Before they had to keep it all within. Now they can afford to have male attitudes about sports and be female and be feminine. Andrea helped make it acceptable for women to have a male attitude about sports.

It’s unusual to think of Jaeger as helping bring about Billie Jean King’s vision for women’s tennis, but she came along at the right time to play her part. She managed to do so while still making sense of her own life. In 1984, tour veteran Kathy Jordan expressed her sympathy for the teens competing full-time: “The circuit is a tough place to grow up.” That Jaeger emerged from the WTA grinder to contribute so much is as impressive as anything she accomplished on court.

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

* * *

Rosie Casals [USA]
Born: 16 September 1948
Career: 1962-83
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1970)
Peak Elo rating: 2,274 (3rd place, 1971)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 29
 

* * *

Rosie Casals was one of the greatest doubles players of all time. She won 112 titles, half of them with lifelong friend and rival Billie Jean King. She was no slouch on the singles court either, racking up over 800 career match victories and at least 29 titles. She reached another 56 finals in a two-decade span from 1961 to 1981.

Among her singles championships are two of the most important events in the early history of professional women’s tennis. In 1970, Gladys Heldman arranged a pro tournament in Houston for the Original Nine, the women who were so outraged by the staggering difference between men’s and women’s prize money at the prestigious Pacific Southwest that they opted for an upstart event instead. Casals beat Judy Dalton in the final to secure the $1,600 first prize.

Three years later, Rosie claimed the title at the first-ever women’s event with a six-figure purse. At the 1973 Family Circle Cup on Hilton Head Island, Casals edged Billie Jean King in the semi-finals and squeaked past Nancy Richey in the final, 3-6, 6-1, 7-5.

She was more often the bridesmaid. She lost to King 50 times, Margaret Court 32 times, and Chris Evert 21 times in 22 matches. (As a consolation, she was 29-0 against Val Ziegenfuss.) Rosie peaked at #3 in the accepted rankings of the day, and she more often found herself in the back half of the top ten. Not bad for a largely self-taught woman from a working-class family who stood a mere 5-foot-2.* In fields with all-time greats such as King, Court, Richey, Evonne Goolagong, and Virginia Wade, every second- or third-place finish counts as a triumph.

* and a quarter!

Yet the talented Casals got tagged early on with the “underachiever” label. Depending on who explains it, she was too short, insufficiently motivated, psyched out by King, or–this one comes from Rosie herself–“too creative.”

Billie Jean even danced on the line of calling her friend lazy. Counterfactuals are tricky–maybe Casals could’ve achieved more had she worked harder off the court. But a look at her record throughout the 1970s, and especially in the early part of the decade as independent professional women’s tennis found its footing, suggests that she was working as hard on the court as anyone in the game.

* * *

First, the charges. King wrote in an early autobiography:

It did sort of irritate me when people wrote all that junk about Rosie getting psyched out by me when it counted. … I was not only a much better player than Rosie, but she was also much lazier.

I often told her–and remember we were doubles partners for seven straight years–that if she were going to try and play the net game, as short as she was, even far shorter than I, then she was going to have to be five times better conditioned than anybody else. But she didn’t want to hear that. Rosie was quite content being number five or six in the world. … She’d rather have a good time with her friends. You know what Rosie loves the best in all the world? Amusement parks. I’ll bet she’s been to every one on the face of the earth that’s worth anything.

Billie Jean has become more circumspect over the years, and Casals’s work ethic didn’t come up in King’s recent book, All In. The author gives herself credit for surviving a killing schedule in 1971 as she played alongside Rosie in the first full season of the Virginia Slims tour:

Despite the relentless schedule, I took seventeen of the thirty-one singles titles I played for and had a 112–14 record. If you tossed in the twenty-two doubles titles I won, nearly all of them with Rosie, I easily played more matches that year than Johnny Bench played baseball games (149).

All those titles, combined with the steadily growing prize purses for women’s tennis, meant that King became the first female player to earn more than $100,000 in a season. Rosie won enough to come in third in the prize money race. She earned $62,000–over $400,000 in present-day dollars.

She did it by matching Billie Jean’s workload every step of the way. King played 126 matches… Casals played 123. King won 22 doubles titles… so did Rosie. (They won 19 together, and Casals added two with Judy Dalton and one with Françoise Dürr.) I don’t have complete doubles results for every event that year, but she may have lost as few as four doubles matches in the entire season. Oh, and when one event was short of ballkids, Rosie filled in.

Casals (left) and King at Wimbledon in 1972

Rosie’s schedule was almost as demanding again in 1973, and from 1974 to 1978, she tacked on as many as 44 World Team Tennis ties each year to the regular tournament season. No woman played as many events on the 1971-78 Virginia Slims tour. At the end of her 1974 WTT campaign for the Detroit Loves, she said, “Everybody’s tired.”

* * *

There’s a persistent narrative throughout tennis history that the best shotmakers tend to have flighty personalities and fail to live up to their potential. You rarely hear Novak Djokovic called a “great shotmaker”–though of course he is–because he’s also so good at everything else. Even when an all-time great like John McEnroe is recognized for his spectacular physical feats, commentators tend to seize on what the athletic genius didn’t do. Somehow, McEnroe’s career, with its seven singles majors, has gone down in history as a disappointment.

So it is with Rosie Casals. Veteran Australian coach Harry Hopman watched her as an 18-year-old and pronounced her the best junior prospect in the world. Bud Collins called her the greatest shotmaker in women’s tennis history. She didn’t live up to the billing, reaching only two major singles finals and losing both.

Short women had a better chance in the game of the 1970s than they do today–Billie Jean was only 5-foot-4. But even then, the deck was stacked against someone as small as Casals. A 5-foot-2-inch netrusher could just barely survive in the 1970s game, and to do so, she needed an extensive bag of tricks. Journalist Grace Lichtenstein, who wrote a book about the 1973 season, said she was “among the most powerful and the most acrobatic, with an overhead that could take the cover off a ball and a few flat-on-the-floor and behind-the-back shots that hadn’t been named yet.”

Casals on the run in 1974

Margaret Court was rarely one to give unnecessary praise, but she snuck some into a backhanded compliment: “[S]he gets around the court pretty well, too. She’s built so close to the ground, you know.”

If Rosie wanted to convince the public that she was more than just an impulsive raw talent, she didn’t exactly help her own cause. She would grab cigarettes from fans after matches, and she was often seen with a post-game beer in hand. Later, she switched to cigars. After dropping the first set to a player she should’ve beaten easily in 1973, she said, “Shit, I just forget how to play from day to day, and it takes me a set to learn again.”

King puts it down to fundamentals:

On the court she loved to discover new ways to hit the ball, but she never really worked hard enough on developing the kind of sound, basic game you need to reach the very top. All champions, I think, have one great shot, what I call their bread-and-butter shot, the one they can call on at any time to get them through a crisis. With Rosie, there wasn’t any. Very flash on everything, very colorful. But also very erratic–and just not conscientious enough.

You can see why Rosie eventually sought out other doubles partners.

* * *

Despite all the ups and downs–or maybe because of them–Casals was made for professional tennis. She came from a poor family of El Salvadorean immigrants, and she often felt out of place among the country club set that represented so much of tennis in the 1960s. Even in the Bay Area, with its ample supply of public courts and history of middle-class stars, she was an outsider.

Before the start of the Open Era in 1968, it was possible for a few of the best female players to make a good living from federation stipends and under-the-table payments from “amateur” tournaments, but the economy was extremely top-heavy. Some estimates suggest that a superstar such as King or Court was able to make $25,000 a year, while most of their opponents barely covered expenses. As the Virginia Slims tour became established, Billie Jean said, “The money wasn’t important, but the principle involved was.” Rosie would’ve agreed with the second part of that statement, but I doubt she was on board with the first.

Casals jumped at the chance to be one of the four women in George McCall’s pioneering women’s pro tour in 1968 and 1969. And even later, when the entire circuit turned professional, a quirk of the Slims tour offers an interesting illustration of how Casals performed when there was money on the line.

The 1970s Virginia Slims events offered an extra attraction on the final day of tournaments. In addition to the singles and doubles finals, the semi-final losers would play a match (usually a pro set to eight games) to determine the third-place finisher. The winner took home more money. To give an example at random: In the third-place match at the 1973 Virginia Slims of Columbus, Georgia, Julie Heldman beat Rosie, 8-5, and received a check for $1,950. Fourth place was only good for $1,650, $300 less.

The loss to Heldman was an aberration. Casals played more of those third-place matches than anyone else, and she won at a rate just behind only King and Betty Stöve. Here are the ten women who contested the most third-place matches, sorted by wins:

Player               Matches  Record  Win %  
Rosie Casals              38   28-10  73.7%  
Virginia Wade             25   15-10  60.0%  
Kerry Reid                18    13-5  72.2%  
Betty Stöve               12    10-2  83.3%  
Nancy Richey              11     6-5  54.5%  
Billie Jean King           8     6-2  75.0%  
Martina Navratilova       10     5-5  50.0%  
Julie Heldman              9     5-4  55.6%  
Françoise Dürr            11     3-8  27.3%  
Wendy Overton              7     1-6  14.3%

Even though semi-final losers often ended up in the consolation round due to fatigue or minor injury, Rosie skipped the third-place match only once.

* * *

Casals loved the pro ranks, and fans in the evolving, rowdier era adored her in return.

Lichtenstein wrote:

You didn’t applaud a Rosie Casals, you cheered her until your throat got hoarse, because that’s what her game was all about. Even more than Billie Jean, Rosie brought gut-clutching excitement to the women’s game, an excitement that was the natural extension of her personality.

Rosie embraced the chaos of World Team Tennis, which encouraged spectators to get involved. There were no requests of “quiet, please,” and cheap beer ensured that the crowd wouldn’t heed one anyway. Casals recognized that WTT appealed to would-be fans like she used to be, “the common person” who would feel out of place at a country club and would never travel to Wimbledon or Forest Hills.

And she wasn’t afraid to jump in the fray. In 1974, she said, “Hecklers don’t bother me. I’m glad I’ve played well enough to make them mad as hell.” She once responded to catcalls by launching a serve into the grandstand.

She also rarely hesitated to speak her mind. She was one of the few women professionals who were vocally committed to the women’s lib movement, while Billie Jean–who put her tennis first and feared alienating the masses by moving too fast–set a more cautious standard. This is the woman who, in the run up to the Battle of the Sexes, called Bobby Riggs “an old, obnoxious has-been … who can’t hear, can’t see, walks like a duck and is an idiot besides.”

* * *

Casals never turned into a has-been. While she eased off the singles tour in the early 1980s, she continued to play doubles at an elite level. She reached five major finals with Wendy Turnbull between 1980 and 1983, and they were crowned champions at the 1982 US Open. She won her last tour-level doubles title in 1988, aged 39, partnering another ageless wonder, Martina Navratilova.

Rosie was one of a kind, and the players who came after her made her look even more unique. In a 1982 interview, she told the New York Times, “There’s not enough contrast from No. 1 down to No. 100. Too many people play the same now.”

In the presence of WTA royalty 💜@SabalenkaA and @paulabadosa posed with Rosie Casals ahead of their match. pic.twitter.com/tx2PeYmerA

— wta (@WTA) November 12, 2021

The trend has continued. Certainly there are no modern contenders of her stature. Even with 5-foot-5-inch Ashleigh Barty atop the ranking table, no one shorter than Camila Osorio’s 5-foot-4 ranks in the top fifty. In a 2019 podcast with Carl Bialik, Casals said there were no modern players who reminded her of herself. Unfortunately, she’s right. Today’s women’s game is thriving, but a modern-day Rosie Casals would make it even better.

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

* * *

Ted Schroeder [USA]
Born: 20 July 1921
Died: 26 May 2006
Career: 1938-51
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1949)
Peak Elo rank: 2 (1948-49)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 25
 

* * *

The amateur era produced some weird-looking careers. Travel was more expensive and time-consuming–especially before the dawn of commercial airlines–so only a small number of players took part in any kind of global circuit of the sort we’d recognize today. And many players had jobs! Not cushy gigs with equipment manufacturers like the faux-sponsorships enjoyed by generations of Australian stars, but actual, butt-in-chair-by-nine occupations.

So players compromised. Every tournament they played incurred a direct cost to work or family, and travel funding was often touch-and-go. Viewed in this light, it’s no surprise to find the record books full of partial seasons. Many elite competitors semi-retired in their mid-20s or earlier, entering only local tournaments as their professional and family lives moved on.

Add that mix of conflicting forces to the global maelstrom of World War II, and you can begin to explain the career of Ted Schroeder.

Schroeder came on the scene as a local teen star in Southern California, often playing doubles with exact contemporary and lifelong friend Jack Kramer. He played tournaments throughout his time as a student at Southern Cal and Stanford, winning the national intercollegiate title in 1942, the same year he graduated. The cherry on top of his breakthrough year came at Forest Hills, where he defeated the veteran Frank Parker in five sets to become the national champion. The New York Times called the final “one of the most enthralling matches the tournament ever has provided.”

Two days later, he got measured for a Navy uniform. He wouldn’t play another major for seven years.

* * *

Toward the tail end of this year’s Australian Open, a surprising stat made the rounds. In the Open Era, no man has won the next major immediately after winning his first title at that level. Andy Murray was the first to come close, following up his initial slam championship with a final. Daniil Medvedev had a chance to surpass Murray in Australia, but he fell just short of adding a second title to his 2021 US Open winner’s trophy.

Like Murray and Medvedev, Ted Schroeder didn’t start his major-winning career with back-to-back titles. I’ve already told you that after his first slam, he didn’t play another major for seven years. With Wimbledon and the Australian Championships suspended for the duration of the war and the French converted to an ersatz Championships of Occupied France, there weren’t many opportunities. Some elite players in the US military were able to take leave to play their national tournament, but in 1943, Schroeder was not among them. Instead, his undefended title went to Joe Hunt, who himself would not be able to return in 1944 and would die in a plane crash before the end of the war.

Back-to-back first and second majors were more common before 1968, at least when war didn’t get in the way. In the half-century after World War I, nine men won the major right after the one where they claimed their first big title. It’s an impressive list: Tilden, Lacoste, Perry, Budge, Riggs, Frank Parker, Budge Patty, Rosewall, Hoad, and Newcombe. Parker comes with an asterisk, because he grabbed his first two titles at Forest Hills in 1944 and 1945, when the other majors weren’t played.

Schroeder qualifies for a variation on the list, though, and his company is equally strong. Here are the men between 1919 and 1967 who skipped at least one slam, but won the next major that they entered after winning their first major title:

Player           First Major  Next Major  
Jack Crawford    1931 Aus     1932 Aus    
Ellsworth Vines  1931 US      1932 Wimb   
Jack Kramer      1946 US      1947 Wimb   
Ted Schroeder    1942 US      1949 Wimb   
Alex Olmedo      1959 Aus     1959 Wimb

Winning consecutive entries isn’t quite as impressive as the cross-surface feat of, say, Lacoste, who won the French and Wimbledon in 1925, or Rosewall, who won the Australian and the French in 1953. But there isn’t much separating it from the Wimbledon/Forest Hills back-to-backs of Tilden, Budge, Riggs, and Newcombe.

And then there’s the fact that only a one-of-a-kind character could deliver a multi-major career with a seven-year gap in the middle.

* * *

After his 1942 Forest Hills title, Ted Schroeder didn’t return to regular tournament play until 1946. The closest he came to elite competition in the meantime was in 1944, when he found himself at the same Navy base as Joe Hunt, the man who took his place as national champion. The 1942 and 1943 US titlists faced off in front of a large crowd that enjoyed what must have been the highest-quality tennis in Pensacola, Florida for a long time. Hunt won.

By 1946, Schroeder was married and expecting a baby. Still, he committed to the Davis Cup team, which was headed to Australia to reclaim the trophy. He would take unpaid leave for that trip, leaving no flexibility to play that year’s circuit of Eastern tournaments. He worked his way back into form in time to reach the final at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles, winning two five-setters before losing to Jack Kramer. Kramer was considered the best amateur in the world, so there was little shame in coming up short.

Schroeder at full stretch

The American side swept the competition in Australia and brought the Davis Cup back home, which made life easier for everyone. To retain the trophy, the defending nation needed to win only one tie, a Challenge Round played late in the season, hosted by the defenders. When the Americans held the Cup, the Challenge Round was usually scheduled immediately before or after the national championships at Forest Hills.

In 1947 and 1948, Schroeder continued to play his part for the home team, winning two singles matches each year against the now-challenging Australians. But he didn’t play Forest Hills. Perhaps business commitments allowed just so much time for tennis and no more, but Kramer offered a different explanation. Schroeder felt he had been burned in the past by the favoritism displayed by the Eastern tennis establishment. That–at least in Kramer’s telling–was reason enough to skip the season’s central individual event.

Whatever the reason behind his scheduling choices, it was clear that tennis was just one of many demands on Ted’s time. According to TennisArchives.com, he entered exactly seven tournaments (not counting Davis Cup) in each of the first three seasons after the war. Two of the 1946 tournaments were part of the Davis Cup trip to Australia. Schroeder played well, but only when time permitted.

* * *

Schroeder took the plunge and returned to grand slam tennis in 1949. A month away from his 28th birthday, he made a whirlwind trip to England, arriving in time to play the Queen’s Club warmup and booking a flight home the Monday after Wimbledon. He planned to be back at his desk on Tuesday.

Ted’s Davis Cup exploits were enough for the Wimbledon seeding committee to rank him first. He lived up to his billing, but bettors who backed him at 7-4 odds lost plenty of sleep during the fortnight. By the end, the Brits were calling him “Lucky Ted.” He overcame a two-set deficit against fellow American Gardnar Mulloy in the opening round, and needed five sets in the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and the final triumph against Jaroslav Drobny. Schroeder escaped two match points in the quarter-final versus Frank Sedgman, even after he was called for a first serve foot-fault on the second of them.

Schroeder himself wasn’t sure how much credit he deserved. He wrote to Harry Hopman afterwards: “I played some bad tennis in this tournament to get myself into trouble and then played some good–and lucky–tennis to get out of it.”

The mix of bad, good, and lucky continued two months later. He came through in five sets against Bill Sidwell in yet another Davis Cup Challenge Round against the Aussies, and he reached the final at Forest Hills (yes, he opted to play) after sneaking past Sedgman and Billy Talbert in two more matches that went the distance. Kramer was so baffled by his friend’s uneven form that after Talbert took a two sets to one lead, he accused Ted of tanking.

21-year-old defending champion Richard “Pancho” González awaited in the final. It promised to be a meeting of huge serves and easy holds, and so it proved. The first set went to 18-16, establishing a record for the longest frame in the tournament’s history. Schroeder didn’t get to deuce on return until the 25th game, and he finally broke in the 34th. After Ted won an easy second set, his form abandoned him, and González’s serve was too strong. After yet another five-setter, Schroeder went home with the runner-up trophy.

* * *

Jack Kramer was rarely afraid to speak his mind, but he didn’t often accuse his friends of tanking. There was a backstory here.

After the 1947 season, Kramer went pro. The professional game depended both on the presence of a big-name star and on a viable challenger who could keep matches interesting. In 1949, even before Wimbledon, Kramer and promoter Bobby Riggs decided that Schroeder was that challenger. They agreed on a contract, but Ted soon decided the pro game wasn’t for him, and he begged off. That left Kramer and Riggs in a tough spot: Schroeder was now the Wimbledon champion, and whoever replaced him would look like a very poor challenger indeed.

Schroeder recognized the problem. Kramer and Riggs thought that Ted agreed not to play Davis Cup and Forest Hills, which would allow Richard González–next in line to turn pro–an opportunity to emerge as a bigger star. While González would be the same player with or without Ted hanging around, professional tennis depended on selling a lot of tickets, so the goal was to get González’s name in as many laudatory headlines as possible before his amateur career concluded.

Agreement or not, Schroeder played. He and Kramer were close, so he must have had mixed feelings. When Kramer accused him of tanking, the rationale was obvious: A loss to Talbert would open the way for González to win the title. It would remove any lingering pressure for Ted to turn pro.

Kramer was similarly skeptical of Ted’s motivation in the final. He later wrote of Schroeder’s approach after taking a two-set lead:

[T]he book called for Schroeder to relax, let Gonzales have the set; then with the intermission [after the third set], come back relaxed and win in four. Instead, Schroeder fought like a tiger for every point but lost 6-1. Ridiculous.

Kramer knew what Schroeder should have done, because the two men had spent their careers playing from the same book. They learned tactics together as teenagers at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Kramer became famous for his prototypical “Big Game” of high-percentage serve-and-volleying. And Jack thought that the system–devised by a local club player named Cliff Roche–helped Ted even more than it did himself.

* * *

We’ll never know if Schroeder gave his best effort in the 1949 Forest Hills final. Kramer settled on the face-saving conclusion that Ted might have “subconsciously” let his opponent win.

What we do know is that Schroeder very, very rarely lost five-setters. His style was physically demanding; Bobby Riggs called him “the most spectacular, most aggressive player I’ve ever seen.” The Cliff Roche game plan balanced aggressiveness with careful conservation of energy–basically, serve-and-volley combined with strategic tanking.

Before the González match, Schroeder had a career record of 20-2 in deciding fifth sets. Fifth sets are typically contested between closely-matched competitors, so a mark north of 90% defies belief. Novak Djokovic has won 35 out of 45, a rate of 78%. Bjorn Borg won 26 of 32, good for 81%. Schroeder was hardly in the same league as those two, but put him in a decider and he was untouchable. Through the 1949 semi-final at Forest Hills, he hadn’t lost a fifth set since before the war. While he was called “Lucky Ted,” it’s unlikely his record can be fully explained by good fortune.

Kramer explained some of the roundabout wins:

The funny thing was that early in a tournament, Schroeder could not help himself from trying to play a classic game, imitating [Don] Budge. He would try gorgeous textbook strokes, staying back, trading groundstrokes, and then he’d fall behind and have to fight his way back scratching and hustling, playing like Ted Schroeder.

Ted’s greatest matches do give the impression that he could crank things up to eleven, virtually at will. In the 1949 Wimbledon quarter-final against up-and-comer Frank Sedgman, he twice faced match point in the fifth set. The second time, on his serve at 5-6, he was called for a foot-fault on his first serve. He shook it off, charged the net behind his second, and hit a volley winner off the frame.

In the final of that tournament against Drobny, the correspondent for the New York Times essentially signed off on the conservation-of-energy hypothesis. The match went five “none-too-well-played” sets, but Schroeder was “never so extended as the scores would seem to indicate. [He] played only as hard as he needed to win.”

None of this is to say that the five-setters were all tactical. Observers were unanimous that Schroeder’s fighting spirit was unparalleled. Harry Hopman wrote, “It is his outstanding characteristic … to him it is natural to fight.” But he was essentially a part-time player, and he didn’t keep up with any special training regimen while at home. Cliff Roche-style percentage tennis was the only way for him to win five-setters against the best players in the world, and for whatever reason, he abandoned the game plan with so much on the line against González.

* * *

Schroeder’s career spanned nearly two decades, from his first junior tournaments in 1938 to his final local outings in 1956. Yet in that entire time, he played fewer than 100 tournaments. If we count Davis Cup ties, we can nudge the total into triple digits.

What-ifs abound. Had he come along five years sooner, he could’ve played a few more full seasons in his early 20s before the disruption of World War II. Had he tolerated the slights of the tennis establishment, he might have played Forest Hills more often, possibly challenging Kramer in 1946 and 1947 and delaying the rise of Richard González in 1948. If he had more of an appetite for the daily grind of professional tennis, he could have made a lot of money and perhaps even altered the top-heavy landscape of the late-1940s pro game.

But except for the timing of the war, the counterfactuals tend to be variations on the question, What if Ted Schroeder had been less like Ted Schroeder? The type of guy who skips warm-up tournaments and then takes the scenic route to three major singles finals and two titles doesn’t fit the profile of a day-in, day-out pro tennis warrior. The hypothetical version of Ted that entered 20 tournaments every season would’ve quickly soured on the game or sacrificed the qualities that sparked so many dramatic victories.

The career that Schroeder did have was truly one-of-a-kind. Few men have ever eked out so much triumph from so few matches, even if he often needed to play the full five sets to do so.

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

* * *

Darlene Hard [USA]
Born: 6 January 1936
Died: 2 December 2021
Career: 1954-64
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1957)
Peak Elo rating: 2,128 (2nd place, 1963)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 39
 

* * *

It’s safe to say, Darlene Hard would’ve trended on Twitter.

Had the world been better connected in the early 1960s, Hard would’ve received more global acclaim for her three major singles titles, not to mention thirteen women’s doubles and five mixed doubles championships at the grand slam events. Billie Jean King called her “the best doubles player of her generation,” and it’s hard to argue with that.

But that’s not what would’ve gotten Darlene going viral. When Hard died last December, obituaries settled on the word “outspoken” to capture her personality. They focused on a couple of standard-issue clashes: one with tour organizers in Australia, and another with a stodgy Wightman Cup captain. We’re meant to understand that Hard was a bit of a rebel, but not so much that we judge her negatively for it.

It’s true–the Californian was an independent woman in a milieu that didn’t always want young ladies to think for themselves. Hard bristled against unspoken rules that many of her peers were more willing to accept. She knew that she had found her calling, recognized what rewards she could get out of it, and then did everything she could to reach her goals. In time, the controversies faded, and like every other amateur-era star, she eventually starred in fuzzy, nostalgic profiles explaining that it was a different time, and back then, everyone played because they loved the game.

Yeah, that was part of it.

* * *

On the doubles court, Darlene Hard deferred to no man. She paired with a young Australian in the mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1959, and she began their partnership by announcing, “I’ll serve first and take the overheads.”

She wasn’t joking. Her partner later said, “I’d go out onto the court with her and I’d tell the other team that I wouldn’t have to hit any overheads. Darlene would hit them all. They’d start hitting hard shots at her at the net and she would get them all back. Pretty soon, the word was out. You better hit the ball at [me].”

That’s how Rod Laver won his first grand slam title. The pair won again in 1960, and they added a third at the French in 1961. Laver called her “a great doubles player, maybe one of the best ever at mixed.”

If anything, Hard was even better at women’s doubles. Her 13 major titles came with 8 different partners and spanned a decade and a half, from the 1955 French Championships with Beverly Baker Fleitz to the 1969 US Open with Francoise Durr. She won Wimbledon in 1957 alongside Althea Gibson, and a year later, she paired with Jeanne Arth to defeat Gibson and Maria Bueno in the final at Forest Hills.

Two years later, she won her first major title with Bueno. The pair won three-quarters of the grand slam in 1960 (skipping Australia) and tacked on two more majors in 1962 and 1963. The duo’s sway over women’s tennis was nearly total in 1960. They dominated the doubles, and depending on whose rankings you prefer, may have been the top two singles players as well.

* * *

Hard and Bueno were close off the court, as well. In 1961, Bueno fell prey to a nasty attack of jaundice during her European tour. She was bedridden, and her national federation offered little support. Hard stayed with her through the ordeal, even skipping Wimbledon that year to remain with her friend.

Bueno wasn’t expected to recover fully, but she was back in the Wimbledon semi-finals a year later. From that point until Hard retired from the amateur game in early 1964, the pair were inseparable. They monopolized the trophies on the South African circuit in the winter of 1962-63, played events in Florida and the Caribbean in the spring of ’63, and returned to South Africa in 1963-64. They faced off 24 times on the singles court, and fittingly, they split them 12 apiece.

The pair also worked together to make the best of a complicated financial situation. The early 1960s were the peak of “shamateurism,” when tournaments attracted elite players with under-the-table payments in the guise of expense money. Everyone knew that cash changed hands, and the seaminess of it was one force that led to the push for Open tennis. But the revolution remained several years away. There was no viable women’s professional tour, so young players without family wealth were forced to live off the often fickle largesse of national federations. The only alternative was to play where they could exchange backhands for backhanders.

The first step toward maximizing “expense money” was to make your reputation, and the surest way to do that was to win Wimbledon. Bueno did so, and Hard twice reached the final–in addition to her long list of doubles feats. Beyond establishing one’s on-court prowess, there was room for off-court machinations. Ann Jones, the top British player who played Hard 31 times between 1957 and 1969, gave credit to the duo:

One or two players had themselves better organised in this respect, particularly Maria and Darlene. In fact, wherever I went, they negotiated such high expenses that there was little left for anyone else.

Jones also spent early 1964 in South Africa, losing to Hard six times and Bueno twice. The country’s economy was booming and its tournaments were sponsored by major firms, so one suspects that the three foreign stars were well-compensated for their geographically inconvenient tour. If Jones is to be believed, two of them did much better out of the deal than the third.

* * *

Darlene Hard’s efforts to get the best of her opponents weren’t limited to aggressive volleying and off-court negotations. Julie Heldman called her “one of the great gameswomen of all times.” Ann Jones, who was apparently unconcerned about staying on Darlene’s Christmas card list, concurs:

If a match stood at 1-1 she was always a good sport, calling ‘good shot’ in her opponents favour when the ball landed near the line, but if it reached 5-all and deuce it seemed to me that she would try her best to influence the linesman in her favour. This used to infuriate me.

She certainly had an effect on other players. Heldman was talking about a grand slam mixed doubles final in which Hard twice ran off the court without a word. Later, she explained she needed to change underwear, but Heldman–presumably speaking for many women on the circuit–added, “you never knew what to believe.”

I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t include this photo.

Hard’s most famous on-court reaction inspires wildly differing reactions even now. As the two-time defending champion, she reached the 1962 Forest Hills final, where she faced Margaret Smith (now Court). Darlene had beaten Smith in a tough semi-final the previous year, but she had lost to the 20-year-old Australian five straight times since. The protracted first set finally went to Smith, 9-7, after the Australian saved a set point and Hard’s serve abandoned her. She hit 16 double faults in the match.

Midway through the second set, two line calls went against the American. The second of them secured the sixth game, giving Smith a 4-2 lead. Hard argued, and when that didn’t avail, she broke down in tears. Play stopped for several minutes. Sports Illustrated called it a “weeping spell,” while Rod Laver remembers it as “a tantrum, wailing and stalking around the court.” For her part, Smith described it as “one of the most extraordinary incidents I have ever seen on a tennis court, and if it was prompted by gamesmanship and a wish to unsettle me it certainly had the desired result.”

The crowd got behind Hard, who returned the favor. Darlene bounced back, holding serve and then breaking Smith to love to even the set 4-all. But the reprieve was only temporary. Hard double-faulted again to lose her next service game, and when Smith looked sure to polish off the win, the American barely tried to return the last two serves. In Smith’s retelling:

Darlene stood twenty-five feet away from me at the presentation ceremony which followed on the stadium court. … Darlene’s behavior was inexcusable in a player of her caliber and experience. Or anyone else for that matter.

* * *

In the stories that survive, Darlene Hard comes across as clever, occasionally brilliant, and often petulant. Her 1962 tour of Australia was a failure for all parties, save the tabloids. Hard was recovering from hepatitis, and she felt mistreated throughout, probably for good reason. But one journalist made a plausible claim that the root of the trouble was elsewhere: she “arrived in Australia with a chip on her shoulder because her request for higher expenses had been refused.” One of her more sympathetic hosts concluded that she seemed happiest when she had something to be unhappy about.

Had the American come along a decade later, her place in tennis history would be very different. She retired from the amateur game aged 28, still one of the top three singles players in the world. She had little hope of overtaking Margaret Smith, and she had mentored a young Billie Jean Moffitt (later King), so she knew that the fellow Californian was coming for her as well. Her days at the top would’ve been numbered.

But by the mid-1970s, there was a lot of money in women’s tournament tennis, and financial rewards weren’t limited to just one or two savvy operators. Many women who couldn’t beat either Margaret Court or Billie Jean King still did quite well for themselves. Controversy didn’t hurt, either. It’s appropriate that Heldman’s story about Hard’s purported mid-match “Tampax breaks” took place in the early 1960s, but didn’t see print until Grace Lichtenstein’s book, A Long Way Baby: Behind the Scenes in Women’s Tennis, came out in 1974.

Hard played a few professional events–including the 1969 US Open, where she won her final major doubles title–but quickly fell back into a quiet life as a teaching pro. Her legacy was left to admirers such as King and Laver. I’m sure she told the truth when she said she played because she loved the game. But she pushed the limits of what was acceptable in early 1960s women’s tennis, cracking the door a bit further open so that Billie Jean and her friends could remake the sport into something that would’ve suited Darlene Hard much better.