Russ Adams saw more tennis, and more in tennis, than anyone else

LONDON—“The thing about photographing tennis,” Russ Adams told me, “is that you can never put the camera down, even when the point’s over. You don’t know what somebody’s going to do next.”

The indefatigable Adams, who took more pictures of tennis players than anyone else, was still pointing and shooting his camera 50 years after he started hunkering down on the sport’s sidelines. The Massachusetts native, who died this weekend at age 86, pioneered tennis photography at around the same time that his fellow Bostonian, and fellow raconteur, Bud Collins was pioneering tennis journalism.

Adams was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his sports work in 1955. He started shooting at the U.S. Open in 1967, and became the tournament’s Director of Photographers. He was the first photographer inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2007. Even in recent years, Adams could be found at Flushing Meadows during the Open, a fixture under his trademark floppy hat and mustache. He might not have been shooting as much, but he still loved to talk to his old friends in the game, and he could still tell a story.

As I discovered when I interviewed him for my book on men’s tennis in the ’70s, High Strung, Russ had more stories than just about anyone around the tour—more even than its official historian, Collins. Adams told me about careening around London in a car with an 18-year-old madman named John McEnroe during his debut Wimbledon in 1977. He told me about the idyllic days spent with Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis when they practiced together at Gerulaitis’ Long Island home. “Bjorn never seemed happier,” Adams said. And nobody was as good as Adams at conveying the sense of fear that pervaded Louis Armstrong Stadium during the 1981 U.S. Open men’s final. After an anonymous caller threatened to kill Borg, the New York police stationed snipers at the top of the arena. “When I tried to go up there to get some shots, Adams said, “somebody told me, ‘Don’t do it, you’ll get your head shot off.’”

Adams’s inside dope on the tennis scene was enough to make a journalist jealous, and I wondered if he should really be writing a book of his own about that era. Photographers are privy to more than writers, because they get closer to the players, both physically and socially. Unlike writers, photographers are there to help the stars shine their brightest; the more passion, joy, skill and talent a photographer can bring out in a player, the better it is for both of them. But there’s more to shooting tennis than just being able to follow the ball and take a nice action shot. Unlike in team sports, photos of tennis players are also photos of individuals as they’re revealing their personalities. They double as portraits.

Adams’ portraits helped close the gap between athlete and audience in the early days of the pro tour. At a time when the sport was gaining popularity, he helped humanize the players. Like Collins, as a full-time follower of the tours, Adams had an advantage over other photographers because he knew the players so well.

“He’s our dean, our guru, our guardian,” Billie Jean King told the Boston Globe when Adams was inducted into the Hall of Fame. “Believe me, the players look for him and love him.”

One of his most famous shots, of an 18-year-old Martina Navratilova surrounded by reporters as she announced her defection to the U.S. in 1975, came about because he got a head’s up a few minutes earlier from Martina, who had kept her decision a secret.

“I was walking toward the club house at Forest Hills when I met Martina and a girl from Virginia Slims,” Adams told David Rosenberg for *Slate* in 2013. “They informed me there was going to be a press conference with an announcement. It was held in a very small area beneath the stands. Everyone was standing around asking questions. I got on my knees between two reporters who gave me a place to shoot through the opening.”

With microphones and pens flying around the teenager, it’s hard to think of a tennis photo that feels more consequential.

But it wasn’t always Adams’ insider knowledge that helped. Like anyone else who snaps photos for a living, he had to know how to improvise.

When Rod Laver won the final point of his 1969 calendar-year Grand Slam at Forest Hills, Adams watched as Laver began running toward the net. Adams didn’t think he would actually vault over it, because the Aussie had specifically told him he had done it once, as a kid, and landed flat on his face. But when Laver, overcome by the moment, took a flying leap, Adams was ready—he even kept one eye on history as he snapped the shutter.

“I had a wide-angle lens,” Adams told Slate, “so I was able to show the scoreboard because I felt that was important to the photo.”

If Adams showed photographers the benefits of quick thinking in ’69, the year before he offered another lesson for them: How to make the best of a bad situation.

At Forest Hills in ’68, Adams captured another immortal moment: Arthur Ashe, the only black man to win the U.S. Open, with his arm over his father’s shoulder as he received the trophy. But Adams didn’t do it from the best spot on the court.

“The rules were that no photographer could be on the grass,” he said, “but an exception was being made for New York press only. Since I was from Boston, I didn’t qualify, so I took it from the photographers’ normal position. I was high enough over their heads, and as the presentation proceeded, Arthur put his arm around his dad, and I noticed a tear rolling down his father’s cheek.”

Adams died just three weeks after his wife of 65 years, Betty, passed away, and shortly after the deaths of Collins and another legendary tennis writer, Frank Deford. U.S. tennis has lost three of its original, and most loquacious, chroniclers in the course of little more than a year.

"He was always thinking about getting the best shot," says Rosenberg, a former photo editor at Tennis Magazine. "Sometimes that was based on his understanding of a player's habits. Other times, it was instinct. Sometimes, luck of course, but as any photographer knows, you have to be prepared to accept luck. You have to show up in order to take advantage of it. In that sense, he was really a photojournalist who happened to cover tennis."

But if Collins and Deford were more famous in life, Adams may have the advantage going forward. Unlike their articles, which were written for the moment, the best of the 1.6 million photos in his archive will be viewed forever. By never putting down his camera, Adams saw more tennis, and more in tennis, than anyone else.