Wednesday, October 8, 2003
History of New England Tennis

Was there a father of American tennis -- or a mother?  Sporting paternity or maternity?  Does anybody care?

The man whose own Bostonian father had the best claim to paternity certainly didn't. 

"Whether my father or Mary Outerbridge introduced tennis to the United States in 1874 doesn't matter," Dr. Richard Dwight mused before his death at 95 five years ago.  "Nobody knows for sure.  But the main thing is that somebody did -- in several locations -- and this wonderful game caught on almost immediately."

Amen.  

However, despite the legend and undocumented tales giving credit to young Miss Outerbridge of Staten Island, N.Y., there is no doubt that, in the light of his accomplishments, Big Daddy was little Dr. James Dwight, a 5-foot-5 inch guiding force.  Not only might he have played the first game on American soil, and in 1876 surely put together the initial tournament (both at Nahant, Mass.),  but he continued to nurture the game's development as a player and organizer.

A Harvard-trained physician, Doc Dwight had the good sense not to let the practice of medicine get in the way of his tennis.  He won the U.S. Doubles title five times between 1882 and 1887 with his protégé, Dick Sears (the first singles champ), and was the first American to win a match at Wimbledon, in 1884.  More importantly he was a driving influence in establishing the U.S. Championships in 1881, the Davis Cup inaugural in 1900, and founding of the USTA, whose president he was for 21 years between 1881 and 1911.  The true patriarch.

Quite likely there was some batting-around of balls in such way stations as San Francisco, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Arizona and Staten Island in 1874.  Nevertheless, the fact remains that our province was the fountainhead of the American game, New Englanders spraying allure south and west.
Moreover the cradle is a quaint gingerbready-timbered architectural treasure in Newport, R.I., risen from from the drawing board of Stanford White and called The Casino.

Bankrolled by James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, the 123-year-old playpen of grass courts, a clock tower, picturesque nooks, crannies, balconies and a 3600 seat ampitheatre is the elder among the world's tennis parlors.  [The present Wimbledon is only 81.]   Historic, of course, as the scene of the U.S. Championships [male version] from inception until 1915, The Casino is an up-to-date presence, too.  As the home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and a July stopover on the global ATP Tour, it presents the lone American pro tournament on the game's original surface: God's own sod.

Upcoming is the Hall of Fame's golden anniversary gala, the 2004 weekend of July 10-11, when a pair of blondes, Mrs. Andre Agassi (aka Steffi Graf) and Stefan Edberg, will be anointed to take their places among the game's immortals, amid a reunion of living Famers.  It is to be hoped that the parade will be led by the most mature of them: 1931 Wimbledon champ Sidney Wood, 92; Wimbledon and U.S. Doubles champ Gardnar Mulloy, 90; and Wimbledon and U.S. champ Pauline Betz Addie, 84.

Launched in 1954, the Hall had both a mother and father.  The idea belonged to Candy Van Alen, who had been impressed by a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.J., and wondered why tennis didn't have a similar shrine to the fuzzy ball.  Her whirlwind husband, Jimmy Van Alen, a lifetime Newporter, picked up on it.  He lobbied the USTA for approval of  an American Hall at The Casino, a spot dear to him and the game.

"This is a unique location," he said reasonably, "because it will be a living Hall.  Our championships started here, and tournaments have been played here ever since.  Nothing pertinent to baseball ever happened at Cooperstown, but The Casino has never stopped happening."

For 20 years, from the induction of the inaugural Class of 1955, it was the National Tennis Hall of Fame.  But for the irrepressible Jimmy the USA wasn't big enough.  So he brought the world along and the concept became International with the 1975 induction of the dashing Fred Perry, the last British guy to win Wimbledon (1934-35-36).  And followed up with France's Davis Cup heroes, the Four Musketeers - Jean Borotra, Rene Lacoste, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet - in 1976.

Head of the Class of '55, a group of seven no-shows inducted posthumously, was Bostonian Dick Sears.  As a 19-year-old who had learned the game from his cousin, Doc Dwight, he journeyed to Newport to win the newly-minted Championship in 1881 over a visiting Englishman, William Glyn.  After a record seven straight titles, Dick called it a career.  Bostonians Fred Hovey in 1895 and lefty Beals Wright in 1905 were the last New Englanders to wear the U.S. men's crown.

Evelyn Sears of Waltham, Mass., the only left-hander to rule the female roost before Martina Navratilova, gave this province championship representation in 1907, and she was followed by Newporter Maud Barger Wallach in 1908, and Bostonians Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman in 1919 and Sarah Palfrey Cook in 1941 and 1945.

Wightman, a diminutive Californian who, as Miss Hotchkiss,  astoundingly had won triples - singles, doubles, mixed -- at the U.S. Championships in Philadelphia three years running, 1909-10-11, became a monumental Bostonian after her marriage to George Wightman.  A member of Longwood Cricket Club as were all those aforementioned U.S. champs except Mrs. Wallach, the energetic Hazel became Lady Tennis. 

Longwood, dating to 1877, the country's oldest tennis club of prominence (although a year younger than the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club), was an inspirational setting for the transplanted newlywed. 

Only 12 years before her wedding, Longwoodians had sent the Davis Cup into motion as three of them, Harvard guys - donor Dwight Davis, Malcolm Whitman, Holcombe Ward - beat Britain, 3-0, at the club's earliest spread not far from Fenway Park on Brookline Avenue.

Eleven years after, in 1923, Hazel's intention to start a similar team competition for women, and her gift of a trophy, materialized in the Wightman Cup rivalry of the U.S. and Britain.  It was in the day that the Brits were players.  It lasted for 60 meetings (including U.S. victories in 1951 and 1973 at Longwood) until 1990, disbanded because the pitiful Brits,  no longer competitive, were behind, 50-10.

All along, Hazel, a virtuoso volleyer, kept winning U.S. titles, 34 of them altogether, principally in doubles, her last the Indoor Doubles at age 56 with Pauline Betz in 1943, as well as two Olympic golds in 1924, doubles with Helen Wills Moody and mixed with Dick Williams.  She was at the top of the game for decades, but also the bottom, giving free tennis lessons to countless kids in her Chestnut Hill garage.

One of  eight New England players in the Hall of Fame, Hazel is accompanied by Dick Sears, Doc Dwight, Fred Hovey, Beals Wright, Eleonora Sears, Sarah Palfrey Cooke, Maud Wallach plus the founder, Jimmy Van Alen.

Van Alen, Newport's cherubic commandant in planter's straw hat and burgundy blazer,  ran the tournaments, amateur and professional for a long time.  As his boyhood haunt The Casino was to Jimmy what Rosebud meant to Citizen Kane.  When it fell on hard times and appeared about to become an entrée for termites, he was the financial prop that saved it until the Hall was better funded and its museum transformed into an engrossing showplace.

Appropriately a bequest from his widow, Candy, who died last year, has set forth in perpetuity the Jimmy Van Alen Cup as the prize for the ATP tourney, won this year by Robby Ginepri.  Perhaps Jimmy's greatest gift to the game was the tie-breaker that he sired in 1965 for use in his pro tournament - and his incessant lobbying on its behalf that reached fruition when the USTA startlingly accepted it four years later.  For the record, the first one was won by Mike Davies over Ken Rosewall, 5-points-to-3, neither (though guided by the umpire) having any idea what was happening or recollection of the occasion.

Jimmy and a Bostonian named Ed Hickey were tremendous influences during the 1960s on the transition of the upper level amateur game to the bonanza of "open tennis" today.  Prior to the dawn of opens in 1968, pro tennis was a struggling, shaky venture involving a mere handful of barnstorming athletes doing the best they could on one-night stands across the planet.  Although the best players were pros - notably Rod Laver, Pancho Gonzalez, Ken Rosewall, Pancho Segura, Lew Hoad - they were barred from the traditional circuit including the four majors: Australian, French, Wimbledon, U.S. Championships.

Hickey, a PR man at the late New England Merchants Bank, thought a pro tournament would be an attraction at Longwood (already the venue for the U.S. Doubles from 1917), and call attention to his firm.  He convinced the presidents of the bank and Longwood, respectively Dick Chapman and far-seeing John Bottomly, to give it a try in 1964.  Thus the defunct U.S. Pro Championships, salvaged for $ 10,000 in prize money -- seeming a fortune at the time -- was to run at Longwood through 1999.  In the Boston revival Aussie Laver beat American Gonzalez, an incredible, treacherous match during a nor'easterly downpour, and Russian Marat Safin beat Brit Greg Rusedski in the farewell, a tournament for which the pot was $ x.

Encouraged by Boston's resuscitating of the desperate pros, Van Alen extracted $ 10,000 from his piggy bank as a lure and invited them to Newport the following July as guinea pigs for his scoring innovations such as the tie-breaker and VASSS (Van Alen Streamlined Scoring System).

The Boston-Newport combo of three years was the basis of a pro circuit that solidified the demands for open tennis, integrating amateurs and pros. Eventually the operation became what we know today,  thoroughly professional  men's and women's tours offering unimagined cash, embracing all the important tourneys.

Although television, a mainstay of the sport, didn't begin here, tennis coverage first flourished and set the pace through the pioneering of WGBH (Channel 2) 40 years ago.  Conceived by WHDH executive David Ives, produced and directed by Greg Harney, those PBS telecasts - ever live, showing singles and doubles - awakened the nation to tennis.  America's introductory glimpse of Arthur Ashe came in 1968 as he won the U.S. Amateur Championship at Longwood in five exciting sets over Bob Lutz.

Such as Jimmy Connors, Stan Smith,  Bjorn Borg, Guillermo Vilas, Margaret Court, Virginia Wade, Maria Bueno had their first American TV exposure on those telecasts that continued until 1980 when escalating rights fees priced PBS out of the business.

Sadly New England, the fountainhead, has gone almost dry.  Newport's Hall of Fame week and the Pilot Pen WTA at New Haven are all that remain of topflight tennis that used to amount to at least four international tournaments annually, sometimes more. 

Among those fallen by the wayside: the U.S. Pro, the U.S. Doubles, the Longwood Bowl at Longwood; the U.S. Women's Indoor Championships at Longwood Covered Courts, and Winchester Indoor Tennis Center; the Virginia Slims of Boston at Boston University; the World Cup (U.S. vs Australia) at Harvard, Boston College and Hartford; the ATP of Springfield; the Ladies Invitational at Essex County Club, Manchester, Mass.; the ATP of Hartford; the WTA of Wellesley; the Volvo of Bretton Woods, N.H., and North Conway, N.H.; the Boston Lobsters of World Team Tennis.

The good news is that the Lobsters may have a reincarnation.  However, in the other direction, Longwood, a club of altered character, turning away from a glorious tradition of more than a century, demolished its stadium and has left the tennis public bereft.

This doesn't mean that another promoter won't step forth and restore big league tennis to our neighborhood, so rich in the game's history.  I live in hope.  Don't you?

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