Bud Collins's writing helped show the progressive potential in tennis

Who’s the GTWOAT—the greatest tennis writer of all time? These days, in the eyes of some, the list of contenders is an exceedingly short one. It consists of one name. Actually, it consists of three initials: DFW.

In the 12 years since his death, David Foster Wallace’s personal reputation may have taken a hit, but the five essays he wrote about tennis remain sacred texts among lovers of sports literature. I’m one of those lovers, of course, and I’ve sung the praises of the holy DFW oeuvre many times.

But I’ve also wondered what Wallace’s work would have been like if he really had been a tennis writer. If he had, in other words, needed to come up with a new story each day. I can hear his editor telling him, “OK, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ was a fun way to cover Fed’s third-round match. Now what’s the angle going to be for his fourth-round match?” I’m guessing even DFW would have had his off-days, like the rest of us.

I want to take the opportunity to recommend another tennis writer whose words on the page have long been overlooked. If you’ve memorized the DFW essays, put him down for a few hours and pick up ABC—Arthur “Bud” Collins—instead.

I can hear the reaction, especially from fans under 40: “You mean the pants guy?” Yes, the pants guy. At first, Collins may seem like an odd fit for “underrated” status. He is, after all, the only tennis journalist to become a household name. But Bud’s reputation rests on his TV work; he was a tireless proselytizer for the pro game for 50 years on NBC and CBS. Even if you’re aware of his writing, it’s probably through the tennis encyclopedias that bear his name. They’re essential reference books, but they’re composed by a committee of authors.

AP Photo

From the early 1960s on, Collins was also a daily journalist—he really did have to come up with a new story each day. I came to appreciate his reportorial work while researching my book about the men’s game in the 1970s and 80s, High Strung. Bud’s Boston Globe columns from that era inevitably revealed a behind-the-scenes detail or two that the writers from the other major papers didn’t have. No one knew the players as well as Bud, and it paid off in a clearer, more informative picture of the sport for his readers.

While reading those columns, I was also reading—for the second or third time—Bud’s 1989 memoir, My Life with the Pros. This is where his writing style and worldview come through most clearly, and the book’s relative unavailability is a big reason why Collins’ writing isn’t better appreciated. Unlike DFW’s modest tennis-related output, which has now been collected in two separate books, My Life with the Pros has never been reissued, and isn’t available for Kindle. The original cover—a close-up of Bud wearing a trademark multi-colored tie and red-fringed game-show-host jacket—is probably less than enticing for a Millennial audience. Trust me, though, it’s worth the 37 cents you can pay for it on Amazon right now.

My Life With the Pros is, as the title suggests, a story that links Collins’s life and evolution with the life and evolution of the pro tours, and the characters he encountered there. Flipping through the many short chapters—47 in all—it becomes clear that Bud was a tennis Zelig. If there was a crucial event in the sport’s modern history, he was there.

The first important men’s pro tournament, at Longwood Cricket Club, in 1963? Bud helped get it financed. The Newport event in 1965 where Jimmy Van Allen introduced the tiebreaker? Bud had a front-row seat. The first open tournament, at Bournemouth, in 1968? Collins crossed the pond to cover it. The first CBS broadcasts from the US Open, and the first Breakfast at Wimbledon broadcasts for NBC? Bud was in the booth for both. The advent of WCT, Virginia Slims, World Team Tennis, Flushing Meadows, and Andre Agassi’s hair—Bud gives us first-person accounts of them all. At a certain point, you start to wonder whether the history of tennis is really just the history of what Bud Collins saw. Today we call Steffi Graf “Fraulein Forehand,” Billie Jean King “Mother Freedom,” and a shot that’s hit high in the air a “moonball” without bothering to acknowledge that Collins came up with all of them.

Jon Wertheim on the naming of the US Open media center after Collins in 2015

Of course, just because Collins was a pioneering reporter doesn’t mean he was a great tennis writer. For that, you need two other things: a style and a worldview. Bud had them both, and both hold up well 30 years later.

Judging by his TV persona, you might suspect that Collins’s writing would be glib and cutesy. It’s true, a lot of the chapter titles in My Life With the Pros do end in overzealous exclamation points, and he does refer to his childhood self as a “barefoot boy with cheeks of freckle.” But for the most part, Bud brings a friendly, upbeat, humorous poetry to these pages.

Here he is on his first view of his personal Mecca, Forest Hills, after making a three-day pilgrimage with a pair of friends from his native Ohio:

“Two men in white were still playing to a congregation of perhaps two hundred. The minarets of the Forest Hills Inn and the groves of Forest Hills Gardens, the comfortable residential pocket in which the club nestles, stood confidently in the gloaming, sturdy defenders of the faith, gray against an azure evening. Laughter and the crystal-and-ice melodies of the terrace bar drifted from the distant clubhouse.”

On the debut of a demure killer, Chrissie Evert, at the 1971 US Open:

“Ponytailed and prim, although a delinquent cutting high school classes, the 16-year-old from Fort Lauderdale swooshed into the Forest Hills stadium like a Florida hurricane.”

On his first sighting of an 18-year-old Jimmy Connors in 1970:

“Here was Raggedy Andy in tennis costume, a rag doll throwing himself into every shot with such exuberance it couldn’t possibly last beyond 1990 or so. Hair, arms, legs flew with plenty of fur as Connors bashed his way in a game he so obviously loved.”

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So Bud could turn a phrase and set a scene. But perhaps more relevant today is his worldview. A small-town kid, he was, like many of us, a bumpkin drawn to the elegance and cosmopolitan nature he saw in tennis. But once he made it behind the sport’s country-club walls, he wanted to bring as many people along with him as he could. Collins always lamented the snobbishness that had made tennis, in his words, a “secret sport,” for so long. He was a democratizer with a live-and-let-live attitude.

What may be most notable about reading My Life With the Pros today is how casually progressive Bud was. He loved the game’s history, but he also loved to see that history move forward. He was thrilled to have a chance to cover Althea Gibson’s US Open victory, and to follow Arthur Ashe on his pathbreaking journey in the 1960s. He loved the dual-gender theatrics of World Team Tennis, a league that he described as a “delightful sexual aberration.” And, unlike many sportswriters of his era, he treated the men’s and women’s tours as equal attractions. If anything, Bud was more closely associated with WTA stars like Evert and King than he was with the top men.

In that sense, Collins’s writing helped highlight the progressive potential that has always existed in tennis. That might not make him the GTWOAT, but it’s an attitude that the sport’s readers, and leaders, could still learn from today.

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