The Greatest Generation

Tennis in Los Angeles lives on. We have this week's men's event, as well its defending champion, Sam Querrey, of nearby Thousand Oaks. But no one is pretending that it's quite like it used to be. The city was once the site of the most prestigious American tournament outside of the U.S. Open, the Pacific Southwest Championships, played at its most prestigious address, the Los Angeles Tennis Club. More important, the club was also the Bollettieri Academy of its day, if Bollettieri's only pumped out American champions. To celebrate the history of the sport in the city, I'm posting an article that I wrote on the club, its legendary major domo, Perry Jones, and its four greatest male players, Ellsworth Vines, Bobby Riggs, Jack Kramer, and Pancho Gonzalez, for a recent issue of Tennis Magazine. As you'll see, it was a different world—tennis and otherwise—in those Depression and World War II era days.

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As the United States lifted itself out of the Depression and triumphed in war, four middle-class kids were being lifted off the public courts of Los Angeles and into tennis immortality. The last of this pioneering group, Jack Kramer, died in September. We look back on their story, and how they changed the sport.

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On Tuesday, October 29, 1929, shares in the New York Stock Exchange, which had climbed to dizzying heights over the previous six years, began to crater. This is commonly thought of as the moment when the United States took a collective leap out of a Roaring ’20s skyscraper and landed flat on its back in the dust bowl of the Great Depression. In reality, what would be called the Great Crash was a disastrous moment that lasted for nearly three years. The long slide in share prices wouldn’t hit bottom until July 1932.

It’s a measure of how far the aftershocks from this economic earthquake traveled that even the seemingly safe and staid confines of amateur tennis felt the effects. Six weeks before the Crash began, Bill Tilden, a child of Philadelphia society, had won his seventh and final U.S. Championship. Two months after the market bottomed out in the summer of ’32, Ellsworth Vines, the son of a single mother from working-class Pasadena, Calif., won the second of his two U.S. titles on those same grass courts at Forest Hills.

Tilden had been a glamorous symbol of the 1920s Golden Age of Sport. By 1932, he was a figure from tennis’ past, a symbol of its slowly receding Gilded Age origins. He would be the last champion to learn the game in an East Coast cricket club. The future would belong to Vines and others like him.

Through the Depression and war years, while the nation’s wealth was vanishing and about a quarter of its country clubs were being shuttered, the sport’s center of gravity shifted, from East Coast to West, from grass courts to cement, from the upper crust to the middle class. Three players who followed Vines off those cement courts in Southern California would become tennis immortals: Bobby Riggs, Jack Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez. Seeing the sport as a way to raise themselves up, the four of them, along with Northern California’s Don Budge, would help democratize and professionalize—Americanize—tennis at the same time that the country was raising itself out of the Depression, triumphing in war, and prospering through the 1950s. While they weren’t exact contemporaries—the L.A. four were born over a 17-year period— they would form their sport’s version of our “greatest generation.” With the passing of its final living member, Kramer, last September, we look back at their era and their accomplishments in an America very different from the one we know today.

!Vines2 At first glance, they seem to have been an accidental generation. None of the four were born into a family of serious tennis players; each came to the game in his own serendipitous way. It was Vines, and his world-class athleticism, who blazed the trail the others would follow.

Born in 1911 and abandoned by his father at a young age, Vines worked to supplement the income his mother made as a department store clerk. Sports were his escape. Tall and fluid, he excelled at basketball at the University of Southern California and later became a professional golfer.

Vines’ mother bought him a $10 racquet, and with little coaching he threw himself into this sport as well, developing a gambling power game based around his serve and forehand. At 19, in 1930, Vines was sent “back East” to represent the Southern California Tennis Association in the East Coast amateur summer circuit that was still the ticket to big-time tennis in this country.

The circuit wound through old-line grass-court clubs in the Northeast before culminating at Forest Hills. It was more than a tour in the money-seeking sense; it was part of a traditional social ritual. The country’s best players came to a club for a week, mingled with the members’ families, attended its parties, and played a tournament. In the process, raw young men of various backgrounds absorbed the standards—of sportsmanship, dress, manners—of the upper class.

This was foreign territory to the kids from L.A., and they would eventually find a way to circumvent it. For his part, Vines was homesick out East, and he wrote a steady stream of love letters, sometimes two a day, to his future wife, Verle. But nothing stood in the way of his talent, which shot him to the pinnacle of the game in 1931, when he won the U.S. Championships at age 20. The next year Vines reached a peak few would ever match when he beat Britain's Bunny Austin in under an hour, 6-4, 6-2, 6-0, in the Wimbledon final. Vines finished with a flourish: Austin said he never saw the ball that his opponent aced him with on match point.

Still, the gentlemanly Californian was destined to be a transitional, rather than a transformational, figure in American tennis. By the 1940s, he had grown bored with the sport. Kramer, his lifelong friend, summed it up: “Elly was a lazy guy.” But Kramer also said, “On his best days, Vines played the best tennis ever.”

Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer, born in 1918 and 1921, respectively, came of age on opposite sides of a similar World War II-era coin. Kramer was tall, lean and blond; Riggs, at 5-foot-8, was scrappy and impish. Both were sports-mad as kids, and they loved to play the odds. Both did a hitch in the Pacific during the war.

Riggs was a minister’s son and the youngest of seven children. At 11, he followed one of his brothers to a tennis court, where he acquired his first racquet after seeing it on the ground and outrunning a dog to it. “I could use the racquet better than the dog can,” he said. Kramer was the only child of a railroad worker. A baseball lover, he picked up tennis because it was something he could do with his father. But it wasn’t until he was 14 that Kramer would hear of the man who would become his tennis father. Stung by a first-round loss at a tournament in Santa Monica, Kramer came back the next day to watch the better juniors. He asked where he could learn to hit the ball the way they did. Go see Perry Jones, he was told.

Perry Jones was, in the words of Los Angeles sportswriter Jim Murray, the “last of the Victorians,” a fussy, natty, snobbish bachelor and lumber executive who lived for tennis. More specifically, Jones, president of the USLTA’s Southern California section, lived for developing tennis talent. From his office at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, he made the section his fiefdom. Along the way, he also made the LATC an incubator of tennis champions, all of whom knew him as “Mr. Jones.” It was the Bollettieri academy, the dream factory, of its day.

“Factory,” however, wasn’t the right word to describe the Jones method. Saying he “was more interested in how [his players] live than how they play,” he tried to transport the high-toned atmosphere of the All England Club and the East Coast grass circuit to the hard courts of Los Angeles. He turned the Pacific Southwest Championships, which were held at the LATC, into a powerhouse. Seating members of L.A.’s fashionable society on one side of the court, and movie stars like Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks on the other, Jones made the tournament a signature event of the city’s social calendar.

The Pacific Southwest also gave Jones’ young players a glimpse of top-flight tennis. On the more class-stratified East Coast, it was virtually impossible for a player who started on a public court to be taken in by a private club. But the doors at the LATC were open to talented kids wherever they could be found—as long as they played by Jones’ rules. In his autobiography, Don Budge recalled winning a match as a junior at the LATC and being summoned by Jones afterward. “I hustled over to him to pick up a compliment,” Budge wrote. “Instead, with a distinct frown, he looked me up and down. ‘Budge,’ Mr. Jones finally snarled, ‘those are the dirtiest tennis shoes I ever saw in my life. Don’t you ever—don’t you ever—show up again on any court anywhere at any time wearing shoes like that.’ . . . I know it made an impression on me, for I’ve never gone on court since that day with even scuffy shoes.”

Not all of Jones’ kids were so amenable; he and Riggs would clash for years. In 1930, as a 12-year-old, Riggs dominated his age division, and his first coach, Esther Bartosh, secured him a junior membership at the LATC. While Bartosh believed that Riggs, who was crafty and consistent but terminally undersized, had serious potential, Jones and the SCTA didn’t share her faith. “They like their players long and rangy, husky and powerful,” Riggs said of California officials. “I didn’t fill those basic requirements at all. All I could do was beat the people the big shots were sure I couldn’t beat.”

Riggs kept beating them, and the powers-that-be kept writing him off. He was put on the Davis Cup team one year only to be relegated to practice-partner status. “Every time I turned my back, they gave me a kick in the pants,” he said. Finally, in 1939, the USLTA bigwigs caved and let him have a crack at playing Wimbledon. Riggs tried to place a bet on himself to win the singles, doubles and mixed—he was allowed to bet on only one—and then did just that, recording a rare Wimbledon triple.

The rangy and hard-serving Kramer, on the other hand, fit the Southern California ideal to a T, and his respectful attitude made him a favorite of Jones at the LATC. That’s where Kramer met an older member and student of the game named Cliff Roche. The two men would change how the sport would be played for decades.

Roche, a hydraulic engineer in his 40s, had observed the tactics of the world’s best players as they passed through the club. He evolved a strategic theory that Kramer would call “percentage tennis.” More popularly known as the Big Game, the style made the serve and volley a core tactic, but it wasn’t about blind aggression. The goal was to put yourself in a position where you were most likely to win a point. “Cliff Roche showed me that the odds on a court could be the same as with a deck of fifty-two,” Kramer said.

As a player, Kramer was a pioneer of pragmatism; the Big Game would dominate the sport through the 1960s. Tilden, the emblematic player of the amateur ’20s, considered himself an artist on court, even a scientist of tennis. He believed that the goal should be never to miss. Kramer, who left the amateur circuit behind after winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Championships in 1947 for the kill-or-be-killed wilderness of the pros, believed in trade-offs and percentages. He was happy to take it easy on return games if it would help him save his energy for holding serve— in the days before tiebreakers, if you were never broken, you could never lose. It was a mind-set that another champion from Southern California, Pete Sampras, was still putting to good use 50 years later.

Kramer was equally pioneering off the court. He played, promoted and organized on behalf of the professional game for decades. But he may have made his biggest splash in his first year as a pro, in December 1947, when he and Riggs kicked off their two-man tour at Madison Square Garden in New York. A crowd of 15,000 fought their way through a blizzard to watch.

That auspicious beginning aside, Kramer and Riggs were 20 years ahead of their time; the amateur establishment would survive until 1968. It’s an historical irony that the next, more rebellious tennis generation, led by Billie Jean King, which brought the amateur establishment down for good, also ended up rebelling against these trailblazers of the pro game. King, like Riggs, was a pugnacious, undersized Southern Californian who had never forgotten her childhood clashes with Jones. In 1970, along with Gladys Heldman, she founded the WTA tour after leading a boycott of Jones’ crown jewel, the Pacific Southwest. By then it was run by Kramer, and it was paying its men’s champion nearly 12 times more than its women’s winner. Three years later, King would slay another of the LATC fathers when she trounced Riggs before a worldwide audience at the Astrodome in Houston.
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!Gonzalez2 The Battle of* the Sexes was fought in 1973. Vietnam was winding down, Watergate was winding up, and trust in authority was taking a nosedive, much like it has in recent years. None of that could have been foreseen in the 1950s, when, after the democratizing influence of Franklin Roosevelt and a new level of post-war prosperity, confidence in government was high. The democratization of tennis at mid-century would peak with two events: the breaking of the sport’s color barrier by Althea Gibson at Forest Hills in 1950, and the rise of the first Mexican- American champion, Pancho Gonzalez, who would win the U.S. Championships in 1948 and ’49.

Gonzalez, an L.A. native, chose to open his 1959 memoir, Man with a Racket, at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, where he was preparing for his first adult tournament. “Deep inside,” he wrote, “something seared me with its white heat. I’ve heard it described as desire.”

It was a white heat that would take Gonzalez from his Mexican neighborhood in L.A. to the top of the sport, where he remained for more than a decade. Starting with a racquet that was even cheaper than Vines’—it cost his mother 51 cents— Gonzalez, a lean serve-and-volleyer and famously vicious competitor, would win the U.S. Professional Championships eight times.

Gonzalez’s white heat also burned up everything around him. As a teenager, he was banned from SCTA events by Jones for chronic truancy, and his reputation grew darker through the decades. Even his friend Pancho Segura said, “the nicest thing Gonzalez ever says to his wives is ‘shut up.’” Gonzalez would die in 1995 in poverty, estranged from most family and friends.

There's no reason to doubt this version of Gonzalez’s story, but another side of him emerges in Man with a Racket. A product of his era, he respected the concept of authority even as he fought it. Discussing his early ban by the “brass hats” of the USLTA, he writes, “I caused trouble. To some of the disgruntled, a brass hat is a cuspidor upside down. To me it was a badge of authority placed on an intelligent head . . . somebody had to wear those mythical hats.”

What comes through more than rebellion is a discomfort with all types of formal society, with anything that hems him in or slows him down. Gonzalez can’t stand neckties—they “bind me,” he says. He has no patience for cocktail parties, where he feels trapped. On the pro tours, he drives from match to match in his own car, on his own schedule.

Gonzalez likes, more than anything, to be alone on one side of tennis court, where he controls every inch of ground and moves through it at will. The sport was the perfect vehicle for this particular American immigrant’s dream. “Pancho Gonzalez is America,” Segura writes in his introduction to Man With a Racket, “and America is Pancho Gonzalez. Here is a man who does what he wants to do in a nation where he can do it.”

It could also be said that Gonzalez was American tennis, and American tennis was Gonzalez. A product of Jones’ ideals, the competition at the LATC, and Kramer’s pro tours and Big Game, Gonzalez left them all behind. While he died virtually alone, he also became the ultimate lone wolf in a lone wolf’s sport, the greatest of the greatest generation, a man who loved the solitude of a tennis court because it was the only place where he could do whatever he wanted, in a nation that let him do it.