Heavy Topspin

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

* * *

Anita Lizana [CHI]
Born: 19 November 1915
Died: 21 August 1994
Career: 1931-47
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1937)
Peak Elo rating: 2,244 (2nd place, 1937)
Major singles titles: 1 (1937 US Nationals)
Total singles titles: 52
 

* * *

When I started digging up contemporary accounts of Anita Lizana, I didn’t expect to see quite so many people dropping the S-word in their evaluation of the greatest player ever to emerge from Chile.

A. Wallis Myers of the Daily Telegraph, after Lizana won the 1937 US Championships: “[S]he revealed a standard of play that, for variety of stroke, speed of foot and sagacity has rarely been equaled. Santiago has provided ‘Suzanne’s’ successor.”

Five-time major winner Helen Jacobs: “[Lizana] fascinated the Wimbledon spectators for much the same reason that Suzanne Lenglen did. Her strokes were graceful, her footwork as delightful as a ballet-dancer’s. Every return she made, successful or not, showed nerve and imagination.”

Veteran journo Ned Potter: “Lizana has, it is true, much of the French woman’s grace and agility.”

The British publication, Lawn Tennis and Badminton, in 1936: “Those who visualised for Señorita Lizana a sort of Mlle Lenglen or Mrs Moody future … may be approaching respect for their foresight.”

Lizana merited a chapter of Jacobs’s 1949 book, Gallery of Champions, which closed by acknowledging that, at Anita’s peak, the same question found itself on everyone’s lips: “Was Lizana really a second Lenglen?”

Jacobs won both of her meetings with the Chilean star, including one in a Wimbledon quarter-final. But she cautiously answered her own question in the affirmative. “I still think that a possible second Suzanne Lenglen was lost to the tennis world when Anita Lizana married Ronald Ellis.”

* * *

Many of the competitors, writers, and fans watching Anita Lizana play in the late 1930s would have also seen Suzanne Lenglen, the hard-hitting, balletic Frenchwoman who didn’t lose a single match between 1922 and the end of her amateur career four years later. A comparison with Lenglen was just about the highest conceivable praise that an up-and-comer could receive.

A mere five feet tall, Lizana was probably the fastest player of her era. She loved her drop shot and hit more of them than anyone else–we’ll come back to that–but it was a mistake to underestimate the rest of her game. Her topspin backhand was a weapon in its own right. “One of the most surprising things about her game was that it could carry the pace it did,” wrote Jacobs. “[S]he could hit harder than players thirty pounds heavier than she.”

And unlike Lenglen, Lizana brought a joy to everything she did, win or lose. Lawn Tennis and Badminton called her “one of the best living losers and, now [that] she seldom loses … one of the best-mannered winners.” She was so sportsmanlike at the end of a match that she is responsible for introducing the custom of post-match handshakes with the chair umpire. She even acknowledged linesmen the same way.

Her combination of skill and charm won over British fans immediately. A teen prodigy in Chile, her abilities were so apparent that the national tennis federation put together the money to send her abroad. As a 19-year-old on her first trip to Europe in 1935, she won seven titles and lost only six matches, a stunning debut for a newcomer who didn’t speak the language (she traveled with a translator who doubled as chaperone) and faced unfamiliar conditions and opponents every week.

She returned in 1936 with an even more fearsome game, having spent the offseason slimming down and shoring up a weak second serve. She tallied 83 wins against only 4 losses that year, beating every British player of note, including Dorothy Round in two out of three tries. She was seeded eighth in her second trip to Wimbledon, and she reached the quarter-final round before losing a tight three-setter to Jacobs.

Then, the banner year of 1937. Lizana opened her season on the clay courts of the French Riviera, where she struggled against the steady baseline game of Simonne Mathieu, but lost only one more match–to Round–between March and another meeting with Mathieu at Wimbledon. In her first and only appearance at the US Championships in September, she swept the field in straight sets. After dismissing five Americans, she made easy work of the heavy-hitting Polish star Jadwiga Jedrzejowska. It was the tournament that launched a thousand Lenglen comparisons, and it inspired A. Wallis Myers to place the Chilean atop his year-end rankings list.

Ten months later, Lizana was married. Another year after that, and her career was essentially over.

* * *

The most remarkable thing about Lizana’s rise to the top of the women’s game is how fast she developed as a player. Her signature move from the moment she arrived in Europe was the drop shot, but she overused it. When she came back for her second season in Britain, she had already built better tactics around the dropper, constructing points to generate openings and deploying her pet weapon less often.

Late in 1936, she played her first tournaments on covered courts–lightning-fast wood surfaces that she had never before encountered. The wood rendered her drop shots harmless, and at the National Covered Court Championships in London, she lost the first set of her first-round match to an otherwise unthreatening player named Vere King. Lizana learned quickly. She came back to win that match, and didn’t lose another set at the tournament. She won her first four matches at the next tournament in straight sets as well, before needing three to defeat Dorothy Round for the season-ending title at the Torquay Palace Hotel.

Still, she had a tendency to opt for entertainment over tactical savvy. Earlier in 1936, Lawn Tennis and Badminton wrote:

Señorita Lizana is so fond of the game for its own sake that her delight in stroke-making, which is obvious, is her primary urge, to the exclusion of the more important object of match winning. … she will sacrifice a tactical advantage for the sake of a momentary thrill shared by the spectators.

A year later, a feature titled “Drop-Shot Lady” suggested that she hadn’t entirely changed her ways. But her signature stroke was now so deadly that it didn’t matter:

Her sheer joy in life makes her deadly drop-shot, the terror of the tennis world of women, a sugar-coated pill. Other people play drop-shots, but Lizana’s are different. It is a kind of anti-climax which stops you dead in your tracks, whether you are playing or looking-on. Bang-bang-bang–and then a sudden, silent, softly-stealing gas attack. The ball comes over the net, but only just, and it dies on you.

Helen Jacobs noticed that the 20-year-old Lizana changed her strategy for each new set of their quarter-final battle at Wimbledon in 1936, ultimately settling on a drop-shot-lob-combo that was nearly good enough for a place in the semis. Jacobs was already one of the smartest players on the circuit, and she acknowledged that facing Anita “sharpened my wits.”

* * *

Chile’s “Smiling Señorita” never did beat Jacobs. They met only one more time, at the Birmingham Priory tournament in 1939, when Lizana was no longer solely focused on her tennis. But the opponent that more frequently stood in Anita’s way was the steady, indefatigable Simonne Mathieu.

Mathieu beat Lizana three times, in consecutive weeks, on the Riviera in 1937. The Chilean won a set and pushed two others to 7-5, but for a woman who had lost only four matches the previous year, it was a wake-up call. Two months later, Lawn Tennis and Badminton warned that Lizana had “yet to prove that she is invulnerable against super-steadiness and speed of shot on grass courts … the type of game exploited so successfully by [Hilde] Sperling or Mme Mathieu.”

Anita got her revenge at Bristol, winning a three-set semi-final over Mathieu two weeks before Wimbledon began. She was seeded third at The Championships, and her victory over the Frenchwoman–followed by a defeat of Sperling in the final the next day–boded well. Even Lizana would say that she thought it was her year. But she ran into Mathieu again in the Wimbledon quarter-finals, and the veteran won in routine style, 6-3, 6-3. Mathieu was “terribly accurate,” and Anita didn’t have the answers.

As we’ve seen, 1937 ended happily. Mathieu spent September on the Continent, leaving the United States open for Lizana to pile up victories. Anita had more to celebrate beyond her Forest Hills title: She became engaged to Scottish player Ronald Ellis, and on her third time of asking, she convinced her parents to allow the marriage.

There was only one condition: The couple would wait until after Wimbledon in 1938. The delay would give Lizana another opportunity to win the coveted trophy for Chile and–incidentally–give herself one hell of a wedding present.

Alas, wedding planning was the only thing that went as intended. When the Smiling Señorita returned home as the US Champion, she was in such demand that she suffered a nervous breakdown. Back in England in April, she twisted her ankle and won only one tournament in four tries, losing at the Middlesex Championships to Mary Hardwick, a player she had beaten in straight sets in all eight of their previous encounters. The only highlight of Lizana’s Wimbledon prep was a pair of wins against Hong Kong native Gem Hoahing, a plucky 17-year-old two inches shorter than Anita herself.

The Wimbledon seeding committee reacted to her mediocre season by leaving her unprotected in the draw. Then came the final insult. Her first opponent would be the fifth seed, her old nemesis, Simonne Mathieu.

This time around, the score was a bit closer–6-4, 6-4 to the Frenchwoman–but the press coverage reads like the death knell for a career. The Daily Mail headline read, “Drop-shot Plan That Was a Failure.” Lizana’s season was a “tragedy.” The match was a “lamentable display.” She went to the drop shot more than ever, and Mathieu chased down nearly all of them. Anita’s nuptials would have to proceed without a Wimbledon trophy.

* * *

When Anita Lizana became Mrs Ronald Ellis, she was still only 22 years old. In a later era, her career would just be beginning. But she skipped the remainder of the 1938 season to get settled in at her new home in Scotland, and she played only a handful of tournaments–including a second-round loss at Wimbledon–in 1939 before becoming pregnant with her first child.

Even if a serious comeback had been in the cards, World War II wiped out British tennis for six years. In 1946, Anita won a pair of titles in Scotland, and in 1947, she returned to Wimbledon, losing again in the second round. She won a title as late as 1955, and she made her last tournament appearance in 1960.

In the end, Chile’s Smiling Señorita was not the second coming of Suzanne Lenglen. But for two magical seasons, she showed British fans just how much fun one could have on the tennis court, and just what one could achieve with a five-foot frame and a deadly drop shot.

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

* * *

Frank Kovacs [USA]
Born: 4 December 1919
Died: 9 February 1990
Career: 1937-55
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (among professionals, 1945)
Peak Elo rating: 1 (1941)
Major singles titles: 0 (1941 US Nationals finalist)
Total singles titles: 40
 

* * *

There are a lot of different ways that an all-time great tennis player can end up underrated. Frank Kovacs somehow combined them all.

First: Bad timing. Kovacs was born in 1919, so he was 22 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had recently reached his first major final, at Forest Hills, where he lost to Bobby Riggs. Tournament tennis survived in the US throughout the war, but playing opportunities were sharply curtailed just as Kovacs reached his peak.

Second: He turned pro early. The currency of tennis greatness is major titles, and when amateur-era players joined the professional ranks, they passed up the most important kind of record-book glory. Kovacs had tussled with the amateur authorities since he was a teen, so when he was offered $25,000 to go pro alongside Riggs at the end of 1941, he took it. Professional careers tended to be short, and even the most prestigious pay-for-play tournaments of the era are largely forgotten.

Third: He was a clown. Newspaper reports gave him credit for a backhand to rival that of Don Budge, but Kovacs’s unpredictable personality got far more coverage. Riggs called him a “likable screwball.” Time magazine called him a buffoon. He once laid down on a court, mid-match, to get a better view of a passing airplane. He liked to toss three balls in the air, then strike one for his serve. Once, he pulled that trick at match point, and hit an ace. He was a crowd-pleaser, and his antics improved the gate receipts for his pro matches. But when your reputation is that of a “court jester,” it’s tough to be taken seriously.

Fourth: His peers didn’t respect him much. The clowning didn’t help here. Jack Kramer, whose television commentary and 1979 book, The Game, made him an authority on 1940s and 1950s tennis, wrote, “Frankie never won anything … [H]e didn’t have any idea how to go about winning.” Kovacs had enormous raw talent, and even that didn’t help his case. Bill Tilden was one of many who thought that Kovacs’s backhand was second only to Budge’s, but he was disappointed by Kovacs’s lack of commitment to improve his game. Finally, the clowning often went too far, and Riggs was one of many contemporaries who thought he sometimes crossed the line into rule-breaking gamesmanship.

Fifth: He spent his entire career in the shadow of another legend, and the rival himself is underrated. Kovacs and Riggs played each other at least 64 times, including 15 as amateurs (11 of them finals), 19 at professional tournaments, and another 30 on pro barnstorming tours. Bobby got the better of the matchup, but only barely, winning 35 times to Kovacs’s 29. Riggs is underrated for some of the same reasons that Kovacs is, as he lost some of his peak to World War II and chose to turn professional early. His well-earned reputation as a hustler, blowhard, and misogynist has led history to judge him harshly. But Kramer wrote, “I guarantee you he is the most underrated champion in the history of tennis.”

All the accusations are true. And yes, Kovacs wasn’t as good as Riggs. But when you look past the reputation, the unfulfilled potential, and the biases of history, you’re left with one of the best players of his era, a man who–albeit briefly–could beat anybody.

* * *

Frank Kovacs grew up in Oakland, down the street from Don Budge. He was only four years younger than his neighbor, but by the time he got serious about tennis at 14, Budge was already a big tennis name in California. As Kovacs sprouted to 6-foot-4 and developed his own weapon of a backhand, comparisons were inevitable. He was dubbed “the second coming of Don Budge.”

Kovacs won his first tournaments as a 17-year-old in 1937, and he claimed his first of three straight California State crowns in 1938. The same year, he made his first trips east, to Florida in January, then to the Northeast for the National Championships. Nearly everything that would define his career was already present. He lost to Bobby Riggs four times that year, including a 6-4, 6-0, 6-4 drubbing at the Longwood Bowl in Boston. He crashed out of the Nationals in the third round to Gene Mako, a fellow Californian who had no patience for the youngster’s hijinks. Kovacs showed up late, played tricks with the pre-match racket toss, and hit tweeners during the warmup. Mako beat him in straights, and looking back, he had one word for the teen’s behavior: “chickenshit.”

Kovacs was also already at war with the United States Lawn Tennis Association. The federation wouldn’t support him unless he disclaimed any relationship with his coach, George Hudson. He did so, at least publicly, but Hudson sued, and the public controversy meant that Kovacs wasn’t considered for the Davis Cup team. We might throw that in as yet another reason that history underrates him. In an era when everyone wanted to play for their country, the off-kilter youngster never did.

Kovacs strikes a pose

He lost much of 1939 to an arm injury, but recovered well enough to reach the final at the Pacific Coast Championships in October and push Riggs to a fifth set in the title match. He took another step forward in 1940, winning four tournaments and getting on the board, at last, against Riggs. At the Southampton Invitation just before the National Championships, he upset his primary rival in a four-set semi-final.

By now, word was out about the clown prince of American tennis. He was one of the main attractions at Forest Hills in 1940, and the tournament wanted to be ready for him. USLTA president Holcombe Ward wrote to Kovacs: “My dear boy, your deplorable clowning on the court, which has marred the current lawn-tennis season, will not be tolerated at Forest Hills. We strongly urge you to be serious.” Kovacs responded: “My dear Mr. Ward, I will try very hard to be serious on the court during the coming tournament. But something tells me I shall not succeed.”

The Californian was right. In the early rounds, he was exiled to the outer courts in a failed attempt to keep him out of the public eye. By the quarter-finals, there was little choice but to put him in the stadium, where 10,000 fans would be watching. Just as he did in the Mako match two years earlier, Kovacs started his act before the first ball was struck, posing for photographers and ignoring his opponent, Joe Hunt, during the warm-up. By the third set, Hunt was sufficiently enraged to sit down on court, refusing to play on. Kovacs countered with a sit-down of his own, relaxing on his own baseline and pretending to knit. Play eventually proceeded, and after a few more games, Hunt secured a 6-4, 6-1, 6-4 victory.

Kovacs had yet to convert his clowning into an effective form of gamesmanship, but his results were good enough to merit a third-place ranking among American amateurs. My Elo ratings are even more positive, placing him behind only Riggs, the Australian John Bromwich, and Budge, who had turned pro. In 1941, the court jester would take another big step forward.

* * *

Two years into the European war, America was the only remaining site for top-level competitive tennis. That year, American tennis was all about Bobby Riggs and Frank Kovacs.

Kovacs opened the season with a dramatic statement, winning five titles between December and March, including four wins over Riggs. The crowning achievement of the circuit was at the US Indoor Championships in Oklahoma City. Kovacs wore out his rival with a 6-4, 17-15, 6-4 victory in the semi-finals, then seized his first national-level title with a 6-0, 6-4, 6-2 drubbing of Wayne Sabin. The New York Times said Kovacs “was never more serious in his life.”

Maybe. That year, Don Budge said, “When Kovacs forg[ets] his horseplay … there’s nobody he can’t beat.” The 20-year-old replied, “[W]hen I get grim on the court I dump the ball into the net or drive it over the fence. I can’t stand the strain of being tense. … I’ve got to have laughs to play good tennis.”

Kovacs (right) with Fred Perry

Kovacs’s search for a laugh sometimes went too far. The most egregious incident that has made it into print doesn’t quite line up with the historical record, but I can’t possibly leave it out. Tom LeCompte’s 2003 biography of Riggs, The Last Sure Thing, relays a story told by Gardnar Mulloy, a player a few years older than Kovacs and Riggs who entered many of the same tournaments in 1940 and 1941.

The rivalry between America’s top two players extended off court. After Kovacs faked an injury and quit a match early at Newport to avoid exhausting himself in the heat, Riggs wouldn’t stop needling him about it. Finally, the clown prince had had enough and worked out his revenge. According to Mulloy, at the US Indoors, Kovacs took several opportunities to express his admiration for Riggs, for his skill and his commitment to never default a match. Sure enough, Bobby came down with something the night before the final, and barely survived through the final. In Mulloy’s telling, Kovacs taunted him about a possible default throughout the match, but Riggs stuck it out, losing 6-4, 6-0, 6-2.

Kovacs later told Mulloy that he had spiked Riggs’s drink the night before. Mulloy thought it became common knowledge on tour.

It’s a memorable story, and it’s just within the range of things I’m willing to believe Kovacs would do. The only problem is that Kovacs never beat him by that score. And the one time they faced off at the US Indoors, it was a semi-final. And that semi-final was two and a half years after the Newport incident. The score that Mulloy recalled is similar to how Kovacs beat Sabin in the 1941 final. A local news story from that year’s semi-final against Riggs reports that Bobby was “so tired he could hardly lift his racquet when the third set started,” but the 17-15 second set is a much more plausible explanation for fatigue than a felony in the guise of a practical joke.

A lot of details can get lost in sixty years, so my fact-check hardly proves that nothing of the sort ever occurred. Regardless of just how vicious the off-court rivalry became, Riggs knew that he’d eventually face Kovacs with much more on the line, and he was willing to play the long game.

* * *

The big match arrived in September. At the 1941 US National Championships, Riggs and Kovacs were the first and second American seeds, atop a strong list that included defending champion Don McNeill and future titlists Ted Schroeder, Frank Parker, and Jack Kramer. Kovacs reached the final in straight sets, setting aside Kramer and McNeill, while Riggs had a more difficult time, needing four sets to beat Parker and five to escape past Schroeder in the semis.

Kovacs’s path was so routine that the New York Times reduced what must have been a typically zany semi-final performance to something that almost sounds boring: He brought “an occasional cheer with his ‘cosmic’ forehand* and super backhand and occasional gyrating exploits.”

* Anybody know what a “cosmic” forehand was? While it sounds impressive, Kovacs was better known for the backhand. The Times mentioned it on multiple occasions, but newspaper keyword searches are confounded by the contemporary racehorse, Cosmic Ray.

Whether or not Kovacs had ever drugged him, Riggs came into the final having lost four of his last five matches to the clown prince. But he was confident: Kovacs’s mental fragility was an open secret, and Bobby had been taking notes after every encounter. LeCompte writes that Bobby was “dead sure he could outthink and outfight him.” Riggs put his money where his mind was, betting all his loose cash on himself–the underdog–to win at 2-to-1 odds.

It was a windy day, and Riggs needed time to adjust to the conditions. Kovacs took the first set, 7-5, finishing the job with three straight aces. From there, things went downhill. The Times tells the story as seen from the grandstand:

[T]here was nothing cosmic any longer in the game that has invited comparison on occasion with William Tilden’s.

The outcropping of errors that had marred Kovacs’s play became epidemic as he lost three love games to start the second set. It was perceived then that there was too little real substance behind the gingerbread and tinsel that pulls in the customers, and that the calculating, concentrating young man on the other side of the net was too resourceful, too smart and too fundamentally sound in his equipment to be beaten by spasmodic eruptions of power in the raw.

That’s what the spectators saw. At court level, Riggs knew he had Kovacs on the ropes after winning the second and third sets. But there was a standard ten-minute intermission before the fourth set, and Riggs feared that if Kovacs were able to talk to his coach, he’d be able to shift tactics and make a comeback.

It was Bobby’s turn for a gentle taunt. Riggs tells the story in his book, Court Hustler:

“You look tired, Frankie,” I told him, as I toweled myself. “I guess you want to go in and lie down awhile.”
Frankie flared up. “Who’s tired? Not me. Let’s go out there and finish this.” I had outpsyched the master psycher.

Skipping the intermission, Kovacs lost the fourth set and the match, 5-7, 6-1, 6-3, 6-3. It was as close as he’d ever get to a major title.

* * *

Kovacs had always been open about the under-the-table payments from tournaments that kept “amateur” players out of the poorhouse. Between those indiscretions and the on-court antics, the USLTA sprang at the first opportunity to punish the clown prince. Two months after Forest Hills, rumors swirled that Riggs and Kovacs would turn pro. The national federation struck first, suspending Kovacs in late November of 1941.

Kovacs (right) with the runner-up trophy

It was a pointless gesture. The deal was done: Riggs and Kovacs each accepted $25,000 to turn professional. They would make their debuts at Madison Square Garden at the end of December, in a round-robin tournament also featuring Don Budge and Fred Perry. American tennis couldn’t churn out new stars as fast as the professional ranks swept them up, so the clash of established pros and recently dominant amateurs was the tennis event of the year. Budge was still only 26 years old, three years removed from winning all four amateur majors in 1938.

For Kovacs, that first pay-for-play event would turn out to be the highlight of his career. He beat Budge in his first pro match, at one point reeling off five games in a row. He followed that up with a win against Riggs, again displaying his ability to go on a tear. Kovacs won the first 16 points of the third set. While an injury robbed him of the chance to face Perry, Kovacs won the round robin against the two best players in the world.

The novelty of the pro tour, which set up shop in a new arena every few days and offered players cash rewards for victories, kept Kovacs on top for a little while. He won his first five matches against Budge. But to no one’s surprise, the youngster couldn’t keep it up. Budge won the tour, winning 52 of 70 matches. Riggs came next at 36-36, and Kovacs finished third. At the US Pro tournament in the summer of 1942, Riggs beat him in a four-set semi-final.

After a few years in the Army, the jester was back at it. He and Riggs went on tour together, and Kovacs remained a box-office draw. But the spirit of fun that made him such a popular player had faded. LeCompte writes:

The “Clown Prince” had since become more bitter and caustic, intimidating ball boys, showing up late for matches, and offering to fight heckling spectators. At the Philadelphia tournament, Kovacs swigged from a large soda bottle full of Rum Collins mix during the changeovers. When he finished the bottle, he sent a ball boy out for a refill. When the boy came back with plain soda, Kovacs held up the match while he waited for the youngster to go out and retrieve the requested libation.

Professional barnstorming tours needed new attractions, and while Kovacs held his own against Riggs, he didn’t have the drawing power to bring in crowds year after year. He continued playing pro tournaments until 1959, winning his last event in Florida in 1954. He played several epic matches against Pancho Segura, and even defeated Richard “Pancho” González in 1952.

By then, nothing Kovacs did would change the stories people told about him. Riggs once told Jack Kramer, “[D]on’t worry about Frankie. He looks great, but give him long enough and he’ll find some way to keep you in the match, and give him a little longer and he’ll find a way to beat himself.” It’s a good line, and if the stakes were high, my money would’ve been on Bobby, too.

Kovacs’s unpredictability made it easy to ignore just how good he was: very possibly the best player in the world in 1941, and a man who beat Riggs at least 29 times. Kramer called Riggs the most underrated champion. As for Kovacs, it’s hard to think of a more unsung runner-up.

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

* * *

Goran Ivanišević [CRO]
Born: 13 September 1971
Career: 1989-2004
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1994)
Peak Elo rating: 2,185 (3rd place, 1993)
Major singles titles: 1 (2001 Wimbledon)
Total singles titles: 22
 

* * *

In the late 1990s, men’s tennis was in crisis. The women’s game had the stars, the drama, and the ratings. The ATP had a bunch of tall guys hitting big serves, some clay courters who didn’t like to play on other surfaces, and the perennial question of whether Andre Agassi would make an effort this year.

Rick Reilly voiced the dilemma for Sports Illustrated after Wimbledon in 2001:

The women play amazing, long, topsy-turvy, edge-of-your-seat points. The men hit 140-mph aces nobody can see, and then ask for a towel. Everything is serve and towel, serve and towel. It’s like being at a cocktail party with Boris Yeltsin. In a third-round Wimbledon match Ivanišević had 41 aces against Andy Roddick, who had 20. It is unclear how the rest of the points were won because the official statistician fell asleep. If men’s tennis is to be saved, somebody had better start decompressing these guys’ balls. Then something has to be done about the equipment.

Ironically, Reilly’s column was printed just as the tide turned for the men’s game. That Wimbledon marked the arrival of a 20-year-old Roger Federer, who upset seven-time champion Pete Sampras in the fourth round. Roddick would live up to his potential and energize American men’s tennis. Two months later, another young star, Lleyton Hewitt, would win his first major at the US Open.

Most of all, the 2001 Championships at Wimbledon gave the sport’s biggest stage to one of its most engaging personalities. Fans could gripe about Goran Ivanišević’s one-dimensional game, but no one has ever said the man was boring. Suffering through shoulder injuries and holding a ranking outside the top 100, he needed a wild card just to enter the tournament. The Croatian turned in the best fortnight of his career, winning the title with a series of dramatic matches against some of the best of his peers.

Reilly wasn’t the only one to find Goran’s game aesthetically displeasing. But in general, the press found him to be a godsend, a colorful character with a comment on everything, and a ranking high enough to make his wacky utterances newsworthy. By the time he finally got his sole major title, he was an even better story: the ultimate underdog. He gave men’s tennis a shot in the arm when the sport needed it most.

* * *

Ivanišević was given to on-court theatrics that caused a generation of tennis fans to misjudge him. He broke rackets, cursed at line judges, and openly tanked points (occasionally entire matches) throughout his career. He was the first to recognize his own mercuriality, referring to his different in-match personas as “Good Goran, “Bad Goran,” and “Crazy Goran.” There was also “Emergency Goran,” who mediated disputes among the others.

Emergency Goran wasn’t always available. At Brighton in 2000, he smashed three of his rackets, and without another one to finish the match, he was defaulted.

The people who knew him best realized that there was nothing artificial about the antics. In 1992, his manager Ion Țiriac said, “Everybody has a certain craziness if he wants to be a superstar.” His coach, Bob Brett, added, “There’s a thin line between creativity and self-destruction.” 

Ivanišević in conflict, in 1999

In the 2001 Wimbledon final against Pat Rafter, he needed four match points to finish the job. Serving at 8-7 in the fifth set, he hit two aces to reach 40-30. He clasped his hands in prayer to ask for assistance from a higher power… then he double faulted. Another unreturned serve, then another double fault. When he earned a third match point, he got down on his knees to plead even more emphatically for help. He landed his first serve, but this time it was Rafter that didn’t cooperate, ending the point with a lob winner.

Back at deuce, Ivanišević hit yet another unreturned serve, his 73rd of the match. Now with a fourth match point, he had no more gestures. Rational Goran kicked in, and after he missed his first serve, he went with a conservative second offering, trusting that his opponent was under as much pressure as he was. Rafter missed the return, and the match was over.

It wasn’t the first time Ivanišević acknowledged that he needed more than what mere earthly coaches could offer. It was one of many matches in which he failed to convert a crucial point or two. But while it’s tempting to draw conclusions from a handful of memorable anecdotes, the stats tell a different story. Goran played his best when the pressure was at its highest.

* * *

Ivanišević was one of the best servers in modern tennis history. He hit 206 aces in his first run to the Wimbledon final, in 1992, and he smacked another 213 at the tournament in 2001. Like most big servers, his return game was mediocre in comparison. For players with that sort of game style, the path to superstardom is extremely narrow, and it depends heavily on clutch play.

In 2015, I introduced a concept that I dubbed the “minimum viable return game.” Most men win between about 32% and 42% of their return points. Only the very best returners will do better, as Andre Agassi did when he won nearly 44% of his return points in 1993. A handful of players will do worse, surviving purely on serve dominance. John Isner has won only 29.6% of his career points on return.

Players can thrive at either end of that range, but for those who win less than about 36% of their return points, there’s an upper limit on how much they can achieve. In the 30-plus years for which we have match-by-match return stats, only two men have finished a season in the top five of the ATP rankings while winning fewer than 36% of return points. One of them was Pete Sampras, who ended 1996 as the world’s top-ranked player despite managing only 35.3% on return. The other was Goran Ivanišević.

The man could serve (at Wimbledon in 1998)

The gap between 36% and, say, 39% sounds tiny. But like so many small differences in tennis, its effects are enormous. 36% means breaking serve once every five return games instead of once every four. That translates to more close sets, more tiebreaks, and more deciding sets. A big-serve, weak-return game makes it unlikely that either player dominates, so matches are more likely to turn on a few high-pressure points.

Sampras’s 1996 campaign is an example of what is possible with middling return results, but Pete himself didn’t usually depend on such narrow margins. From 1991 to 1998, he won at least 38% of his return points in seven of the eight seasons. (He probably did so in 1990 as well, but stats are incomplete before 1991.) Ivanišević, on the other hand, spent his entire career on the tightrope. His career average was only 35.1%, and he never posted a full season above 36.7%. Goran possessed the very definition of the minimum viable return game.

For Ivanišević to manage three top-five year-end ranking finishes and four Wimbledon finals with such a one-dimensional game demanded that he play well in the clutch. He did exactly that. 

In 2011, researcher Amir Bachar compared every player’s number of break points won with their expected break points won, based on their winning percentage on all points. In his career from 1991, Goran played just over 6,400 break points (combining both serve and return), and he won 3,362 of them. If he had won break points at his average rate for all points, his total would’ve been only 3,229. The difference of 133 points–entirely due to exceeding expectations when returning–is greater than any of the other 430 players that Bachar considered.

Break points are worth much more than average return points, and Ivanišević became a better returner when it mattered. Another way to measure his effectiveness is to compare his return points won with his breaks of serve. Return points won don’t themselves matter, unless enough of them are bunched together to create a break of the opponent’s serve. Goran’s 35.1% career average would typically translate to breaking serve 17.2% of the time. In reality, he broke 19.2%–still far from elite, but meaningfully better. A break rate of 19.2% is roughly equivalent to winning return points at a rate of 36.2%, a number that sits (barely) on the positive side of my threshold of minimum viability.

* * *

Up to this point, I’ve used the word “clutch” to describe Ivanišević’s ability to generate better results than his return game appears to deserve. You may be skeptical that Ivanišević was reliably better under pressure, and you may even dispute that players can be consistently clutch.

The numbers don’t lie, but the explanation is hardly set in stone. A player can post Goran-like results by tanking unimportant points, as it appears that Nick Kyrgios does. And “clutch” doesn’t require constant, unwavering mental strength. Ivanišević once said, “The trouble with me is, every match I play against five opponents—umpire, crowd, ball boys, court, and myself. It’s no wonder sometimes my mind goes to the beach.”* All we’re talking about is an improvement from “bad” to “mediocre” on break points. He might have simply been less likely to go to the mental beach on obviously important points.

* Notice that he doesn’t count his actual opponent.

Goran’s big-point performance was never more important than at Wimbledon in 2001. In those seven matches, he won 31.1% of return points, by far the lowest single-tournament rate for a major winner since 1991, and even lower than the single-tournament for a major finalist. Of the 120 or so slam winners of the last three decades, only four other men won their title with a return-points-won percentage below 36.8%. Pete Sampras did it three times, and Roger Federer did it once.

As usual, Ivanišević was better when it mattered. After a routine first-round victory, the Croatian earned 34 break points in 25 sets–a miniscule number of opportunities in line with his poor return performance throughout the fortnight. Yet of those 34, he converted 14, good for a rate of 41%. Remember, anything that starts with a 4 is elite return territory. Somehow, presented with only a couple of big moments per hour on court, Emergency Goran usually convinced Good Goran to show up.

The margins were particularly tiny in the semi-final and final. Tim Henman took Ivanišević to five sets in the semi-final, winning a 6-0 third set before rain arrived, stopping the Brit’s momentum in a match that would ultimately stretch over three days. The Croatian generated a mere six break points in five sets, and he converted just two. He won only 48.5% of the 326 points they played, but when the match reached a fifth set, only one point really mattered. At break point on Henman’s serve in the eighth game, Ivanišević came up with a good-enough return to coax a volley error from his opponent. He double-faulted twice in an attempt to serve out the set, but as usual, the serve was more triumph than tragedy. At deuce, he came up with a second-serve ace out wide, and sealed the result on the next point with another unreturnable delivery.

Goran with the Wimbledon trophy

Against Pat Rafter in the final, Ivanišević once again scraped together a mere six break points in five sets. This time, he converted three, and remarkably, the two big servers didn’t reach a tiebreak in the first four sets. Rafter also broke serve three times, but he made the mistake of bunching two of them in a single set. Goran won 153 points to his opponent’s 150, a heartbreaker for the Australian but a life-changer for Ivanišević, who would never again be referred to as the best active player without a major.

* * *

Fans have never known quite what to think of the big-hitting Croatian. Two months after his Wimbledon title, Liz Robbins of the New York Times called him “the wacky racket-kissing comedian with a cannon serve,” a description that few would challenge.

But just as Ivanišević’s on-court reputation can’t explain his results, his off-court complexities get the short shrift. He was a national hero in Croatia long before the Wimbledon title–before, in fact, his country was widely recognized as an independent nation. He insisted that the ATP identify him as Croatian when the organization still labeled him a Yugoslavian, and he turned in one of the most strenuous performances of his career to bring home two bronze medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Goran has more recently gained credit for the tennis mind that spent so long hidden behind the clown suit. In a 1992 profile for Sports Illustrated, Frank Lidz jokingly differentiated between the energetic Mr. Goran and the quiet Dr. Ivanišević. The doctor is increasingly in demand. For nearly a decade, he has coached a series of top players: Marin Čilić, Tomáš Berdych, Milos Raonic, and now Novak Djoković. He helped Čilić to the 2014 US Open title, and he’s been part of another five slam-winning teams as a member of the Djoković camp.

Now, as in the 1990s, it’s easy to think of the big-serve, weak-return game as the most mindless version of tennis. In some hands it is, and from a fan’s perspective, it’s rarely the most compelling style to watch. Rick Reilly’s 2001 screed shows its age, but he was right about one thing–there’s nothing worse than waiting for the server to go to his towel after one swing of the racket.

But players with limited skillsets need to think that much harder to reach the top. While the ball wasn’t in play for very long in the typical Ivanišević match, that left him with a larger fraction of the match time to consider his next move. Without the natural return skills of an Agassi or Djoković, Goran needed to weigh his options and take calculated risks. For a player to show up with those limitations plus an injured serving shoulder and win the Wimbledon title–that’s a feat that deserves every bit of the celebration it has received, and more.

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

* * *

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.