太陽系は約46億年前、銀河系（天の川銀河）の中心から約26,000光年離れた、オリオン腕の中に位置。

Loyola University Chicago

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Pancho's Racket and the Long Road t et and the Long Road to Professional T essional Tennis

Gregory I. Ruth

Loyola University Chicago

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LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO

PANCHO’S RACKET

AND THE LONG ROAD TO PROFESSIONAL TENNIS

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO

THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

PROGRAM IN HISTORY

GREGORY ISAAC RUTH

CHICAGO, IL

DECEMBER 2017

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Three historians helped to make this study possible. Timothy Gilfoyle supervised my

work with great skill. He gave me breathing room to research, write, and rewrite. When he

finally received a completed draft, he turned that writing around with the speed and thoroughness

of a seasoned editor. Tim’s own hunger for scholarship also served as a model for how a

historian should act. I’ll always cherish the conversations we shared over Metropolis coffee—

topics that ranged far and wide across historical subjects and contemporary happenings.

I came to Loyola University Chicago to study the environmental history of cities with the

best urban historians in the country. That changed when I took Elliott Gorn’s seminar where I

wrote the first part of this project. From the beginning, Elliott discouraged me from studying

sports. Given how long it took to assemble enough archival material to write this project, he

made his point. His guidance for what makes a good story and how to tell it nonetheless helped

me conceptualize this project.

Michelle Nickerson also taught me a great deal both in and outside the classroom.

Los Angeles is a complicated city; her scholarship and counsel helped me to know it better. She

also never stopped asking me, “What kind of a historian are you?” I hope this project is an

answer to that question.

Loyola has been a wonderful place to train as a historian. The administrative and

financial support the Graduate School gave me in the form of a Crown Fellowship meant the

world. So too did the speed at which Jennifer Stegen and the Interlibrary Loan staff fulfilled my

many requests. The rest of the history faculty, many of whom I took courses from and most of

whom I learned from, showed what a department rich in scholarship and committed to teaching

looks like. Much the same can be said for my graduate student colleagues, whose own projects

and teaching encouraged me throughout our time together.

Original research at more than three dozen archives and records centers meant that I spent

a great deal of time outside of Chicago and a great deal of time with archivists. Most of them

ably facilitated my research, but Kristin Kay and her staff at UMass Amherst Libraries deserve

special recognition for going above and beyond during my many days there. Research libraries

and repositories seldom support work on sports, and those few that do deserve a share of credit

for this project.

The biggest share of credit for this project, though, rests with my family. My parents,

Harry and Jenny Ruth, read to me as a kid, supported my switch of majors in college, and

encouraged me to leave a good paying job in order to attend graduate school. They are wonderful

people, and I am very fortunate to be their son.

Courtney Burris Ruth has blessed my life beyond measure. We started dating before

graduate school, got married when this dissertation got started, and spent many a night together

tented on the closest campground to the next morning’s archive. She has taken time away from

her own graduate training and violin performance schedule to encourage my work on this

project, just as I have worked across several states and two continents to help start her own

career. I love you, Courtney.

For Courtney.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi

ABSTRACT viii

INTRODUCTION: THE LONG ROAD TO PROFESSIONAL TENNIS 1

CHAPTER ONE: LAWN TENNIS AND THE LADY SUZANNE LENGLEN 15

CHAPTER TWO: TENNIS AMATEUR ASSOCIATIONS ON AMERICAN SHORES 56

CHAPTER THREE: THE RECREATIONAL REVOLUTION 102

CHAPTER FOUR: TENNIS MOBILIZES FOR WAR 146

CHAPTER FIVE: THE “KRAMER KARAVAN” 200

CHAPTER SIX: THE METEORIC RISE OF THE KID FROM THE “WRONG SIDE

OF THE TRACKS” 249

CHAPTER SEVEN: OPEN TENNIS TOURNAMENTS, PROMOTERS, AND TOURS 303

CHAPTER EIGHT: AGENTS AND AGENCIES TAKE TENNIS TRANSNATIONAL

IN THE OPEN ERA 353

CHAPTER NINE: SEX, CIGARETTES, AND OPEN TENNIS 398

CONCLUSION: PANCHO’S RACKET AND PROFESSIONAL TENNIS IN THE

GLOBAL ECONOMY 468

BIBLIOGRAPHY 485

VITA 525

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAGBL All American Girl’s Baseball League

ALETC All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

ABA American Basketball Association

AFL American Football League

ATA American Tennis Association

ATP Association of Tennis Professionals

ALTA Australian Lawn Tennis Association

BLTA British Lawn Tennis Association

CYA California Youth Authority

CDA Community Development Association

GGOH Greg Gonzales Oral History

ILTF International Lawn Tennis Federation

IMG International Management Group

IOC International Olympic Committee

IPTA International Professional Tennis Association

ITF International Tennis Federation

ITHF International Tennis Hall of Fame

JCRS Joint Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands

LCA Licensing Corporation of America

vii

LATC Los Angeles Tennis Club

MLBPA Major Leagues Baseball Players Association

MCA Music Corporation of America

NBA National Basketball Association

NCAA National Collegiate Athletic Association

NFL National Football League

OEO Office of Economic Opportunity

PGOH Pancho Gonzales Oral History

PSLTA Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association

PAL Police Athletic League

PLTA Professional Lawn Tennis Association

RFC Reconstruction Finance Corporation

SCTA Southern California Tennis Association

TVA Tennessee Valley Authority

USLTA United States Lawn Tennis Association

USTA United States Tennis Association

UFA Universum Film AG

WITA Women’s International Tennis Association

WITF Women’s International Tennis Federation

WTA Women’s Tennis Association

WCT World Championship Tennis Tour

viii

ABSTRACT

Historians have written little on sports in the United States compared to other topics.

They have had even less to say about tennis than other popular sports in large part because the

original research necessary to complete a full treatment of the history of the game appeared too

daunting to undertake. By contrast, this study has made use of over a dozen archival collections

around the country, many of which researchers have never used before, to tell the story of how

tennis went from an amateur sport closely guarded by economic elitists and cultural purists to a

professional sport thoroughly democratized and inclusive of individuals regardless of their

financial standing or social position. That change connects a variety of heretofore unconnected

developments beginning in the French Revolution and ending in the present: European

aristocracy and Continental cultural exports; amateur athletic associations in cities and suburban

country clubs; New Deal programs and urban recreational reform; the impact of World War II on

the careers of global athletes; postwar prosperity in the United States and the growth of

America’s entertainment economy; race, ethnicity, and class in twentieth century athletics;

cultural competition during the Cold War; tax policy and the globalization of professional sports;

the cultural production of celebrity athletes; professional sports touring and stadium

construction; as well as masculinity, femininity and gay and transgender athletes. Dozens of

characters, both notorious and obscure, make this story as much about people as about social

processes and places. Many of the important stops along the way from amateur to professional

tennis took place in the United States, but given the global popularity of the game, this study

takes a transnational perspective to analyze the professionalization of this world sport.

INTRODUCTION

THE LONG ROAD TO PROFESSIONAL TENNIS

The scoreboard at the U.S. National Championships in August 1949 read 16-18, 2-6, 6-1,

6-2, 5-4. After more than four sets and more than four hours of grueling play at the West Side

Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, veteran Ted Schroeder and the twenty-one-year-old

Richard “Pancho” Gonzales were locked in a winner-take-all fifth set to decide the best amateur

tennis player in the world. While the youthful Gonzales reigned as the current U.S. champion—

owning the title after his breakout victory the previous year—Schroeder remained the favorite in

this clash. He had dominated Gonzales in their previous head-to-head matches. He was fresh off

a recent Wimbledon title won in England a month earlier. He hungered for the crown after he

had skipped the U.S. Championship the previous year. The work he did at his refrigerator

business and the time he wanted to spend with his family took precedence. Schroeder was the

ideal amateur.

The combatants were a contrast in style off and on the court. Schroeder lived the life of

an all-American hero. He hailed from the California coast, where his middle-class family ran a

local refrigerator business. He looked like the veterans on morale posters from World War II. His

blond hair sat tightly cropped against his angular jaw and high cheekbones. Tanned from the sun

but not too dark, he possessed naturally lean and muscled limbs without giving the impression of

having worked at it. In fact, he emphasized how little time he spent on the court. He was a small

business owner and a family man, after all. He and his lovely wife Brenda had two young

children, whom both parents hoped would carry on the family business when they were old

enough. Their attractive two-bedroom house sat on a modest suburban street. Schroeder spent

most of his time at work or at home. He played tennis well, but just for fun.

Gonzales, by contrast, was just barely older than a teenager. He literally carried the scars

from a troubled urban adolescence on his face. His Mexican parents had fled revolutionary

Mexico separately and met in the barrios of East Los Angeles. There they worked hard as

farmers, seamstresses, and hired hands in the fledgling Hollywood movie studios. They raised

four children in different apartments throughout the ethnic communities of Southern California.

They knew the intolerances their children would face from neighbors and municipal authorities

because they lived and continued to live a life of struggle. They were not surprised when their

oldest son Richard, whom everyone called Pancho after the machismo Mexican-American

“Pachuco” youths, encountered trouble with the truant officer at his junior high school. They

were surprised and troubled when he came home one day with a gash across his face that

resembled a knife wound. A string of burglaries put the teenaged Gonzales before a local

delinquency court, where the presiding judge removed him from parent custody and placed him

in a notorious youth prison hundreds of miles away. Released only to serve in World War II,

how could this juvenile delinquent become the standard bearer for U.S. tennis?

Back on the manicured lawns of the Forest Hills Tennis Club, Gonzales knuckled down

and began to fight out of a two sets to love deficit. Only four players in the sixty-year history of

tennis in America had made such a comeback. None ever did it as a defending titleholder of a

major amateur championship. This particular tournament, the U.S. Nationals, made the pressure

even more palpable. The fifty thousand spectators far exceeded that of most of the other summer

tennis tournaments combined. Unlike the baseball bleachers, the football stands, or coliseum

seats of America’s major cities, viewers at Forest Hills sat and walked around the grass courts

right next to the competing players. Journalists too fluttered around the edges of the court in

numbers not seen at any other tennis match.

The architecture and very history of the Forest Hills Tennis Club added to the millstone

on the players’ shoulders. Built in the 1881, this New York mainstay was the cradle of tennis in

the United States. The normal exclusivity of Forest Hills put the class differences between the

players on the court and the members in the clubhouse into sharpest relief. Players like Gonzales

could not afford to stay in a hotel; they relied on patronage to eat and sleep near the Forest Hills

courts. Officials from the International Lawn Tennis Federation, the United States Lawn Tennis

Association (USLTA), and the sixteen geographic sections of the USLTA all watched the

matches, ready to decide which players they would continue to sponsor and which players would

be put out to pasture. To hold both the trophy and the respect of the United States Lawn Tennis

Association, Gonzales needed to overcome youth, self-doubts, sports history, as well as the

expectations of failure from fans and the tennis establishment. He needed to serve out the

match.1

His own body’s ability to move in the patterns of play that made up the game of tennis

was the only thing Gonzales ever relied upon. As an adolescent, other boys mocked him for his

size, another reason for the Pancho nickname he carried with him from youth. In adolescence, his

1 Steve Snyder, “Gonzales Proves He Is Top Net Amateur,” Olean Times Herald, September 6, 1949, p. 10; Pancho

Gonzales and Cy Rice, Man With a Racket: The Autobiography of Pancho Gonzales (New York: A.S. Barnes and

Co., 1959), 90-92. Gonzales preferred ending his name with an s rather than the z favored by Chicano activists who

also called him Ricardo and used his middle name of Alonso rather than Pancho, as he was popularly called. The

spelling used here will reflect the time and tenor of the source.

210 pounds of weight filled out across a six-foot four-inch frame. His arms were long, his

quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes taut, his calves like the trunks of a hardwood, his hair black

and wavy, and his skin dark. He moved quickly across the court with a surprisingly low center of

gravity. He could change directions in a split-second after returning a shot by driving the ball of

one of his size-twelve feet against the surface of the court, rotating his hips, planting his opposite

foot, and pushing off with explosive force to recover to the middle hash-mark of the court. His

quick movement often surprised spectators and opponents. The ferocity of the pace of the ball

moving from one of Gonzales’s serves, however, filled opponents with dread and spectators with

awe. He was ready should his opponent return the serve.

Most of this happened in too short a time for the gallery to see. Their view of Gonzales

was obscured.2 Gonzales broke Schroeder’s serve at 4-4 in the fifth set, raising the stakes for the

longest championship match in United States tennis history. A tense game ensued. A far cry

from a stoic competition, 13,000 mostly East Coast fans chattered loudly between points. A

routine hold for the strongest server in the game turned into an opportunity to look past the

points at hand and to the significance riding on the match. As amateurs, neither player would

receive any prize money for the victory; however, the chance for tennis to become the livelihood

of one of the two players did rest on the server’s shoulders. Bobby Riggs, the promoter of the

professional tennis tour, waited in the wings to sign Schroeder to a $75,000 contract to play the

reigning professional champion, Jack Kramer, in a one-hundred plus match barnstorming circuit

across the U.S. and the rest of the world. Trailing early in the game through a double-fault, an

2 Gayle Talbot, “Pancho Gonzales Defeats Schroeder for Net Title,” Hagerstown Morning Herald, September 6,

1949, p. 11.

unforced error, and striking a shot that would have fallen out, Gonzales leveled the game at

deuce through a combination of big serves and Schroeder errors. Another winner, and Gonzales

stood at match point. With his opponent in deep concentration across the net, Gonzales kissed his

racquet before delivering one final serve and charging to the net. Schroeder swung for a downthe-line forehand that at first appeared in as a puff of chalk-dust floated into the air. A linesman

called the shot out, however, and the young Mexican-American had upset the best laid plans of

the amateur and professional tennis promoters. Even commentator Vin Scully could hardly

believe his eyes, speaking in a surprised and slightly derogatory tone: “If you’re still not sure, we

thought we’d show you the shot over again…Keep your eyes on the right side-line. Convinced?

Can’t believe that call, can you?” The excuses to justify Gonzales’s victory began before the

players reached the locker room.3

Half a century after Gonzales played Forest Hills as an amateur tennis player for the last

time, more spectators attend the United States Tennis Championships held at Flushing Meadows,

New York, than any other annually contested sporting event in the world.4 The tournament is the

high-water mark on the entertainment calendar of the world’s most cosmopolitan city. Despite

the unrivaled popularity of the two-week-long tournament, few of the hundreds of thousands of

fans who crowd the United States Tennis Association (USTA) Billie Jean King National Tennis

3 Pancho Gonzales Interview, Oral History Collection, International Tennis Hall of Fame (ITHF), Newport, Rhode

Island; Bud Collins, History of Tennis: An Authoritative Encyclopedia and Record Book (Chicago: New Chapter

Press, 2010), 454-64; Oscar Fraley, “Kramer Professes Sorrow at Schroeder’s Setback, though He Gains $50,000,”

Reno News, September 11, 1949, p. 15; Gonzales Man With a Racket, 93-97; The Big Moment, “Sports Newsreel

from Hearst Metrotone—with Bug Palmer,” Metrotone Collection, Movies and Television Division, Library of

Congress.

4 Rob Steen, Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sport (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 33-37.

Center know anything about the history of the sport in America. And why should they? Those

whose job it is to write that story have largely missed the major points or have chosen simply to

focus on other subjects.

The standard accounts of the professionalization of tennis are those written by sports

journalists filled with rich detail on the years immediately leading up to the summer tournaments

of 1968 when amateur players and professional players first competed openly in famous events

like Wimbledon. These accounts then go on to follow important moments over the next decade

or two, where “Open Tennis” worked out the difficulties that went along with becoming the last

of the world’s major sports to allow unfettered competition between amateurs and professionals.5

Some sports writers tend to focus on a particular match or particular player—often times with

great perception but without a view to how and why tennis moved from an amateur to a

professional sport.6 Others tend to look at tennis from a literary point of view and thus forgo

archival research in favor of published fiction and nonfiction accounts that shed light on the

meaning of the sport.7 In a similar vein, great novelists have made the sport of tennis a setting to

explore broader themes such as entertainment and capitalist competition—the best recent

5 Richard Evans, Open Tennis, 1968-1988: The Players, the Politics, the Pressure, the Passions, and the Great

Matches (New York: Viking, 1989); Herbert Warren Wind, Game, Set, and Match: The Tennis Boom of the 1960s

and 70s (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969).

6 John McPhee, Levels of the Game (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969); Marshall Jon Fischer, A Terrible

Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, A World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played (New

York: Crown Publishers, 2009); Frank Deford, Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1976).

7 Elizabeth Wilson, Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2016).

example being David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest.

8 The few professional

historians who have studied tennis have tended to publish work with relatively narrow focus: the

European origins of the game; the celebration of amateurism in the elite clubs and associations

on the American Eastern Seaboard; the events that immediately led up to the first “Open”

Wimbledon Championship in 1968; the impact that the Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs

1973 Battle of the Sexes match had on women’s sports in late twentieth-century America; how

Arthur Ashe used his status as a tennis champion to become a civil rights leader.9

By contrast, “Pancho’s Racket” is a historian’s view with a wider and a longer look at the

professionalization of tennis. It is not the biography of a particular player; it is the narrated

analysis of how tennis went from a cloistered amateur game to a more inclusive and thoroughly

professionalized international sport. Explaining that means telling the individual yet interlocking

stories of dozens of players, promoters, associations, agents, social policies, and sporting venues

across the twentieth century and around the world.

In his masterful three-volume social history of African American athletes, the late tennis

champion and world humanitarian Arthur Ashe used the symbol of the “road” to explain the

struggles African Americans endured as part of the sporting tradition of the United States.10

8 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006), 3-4, passim.

9 Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (London: Leicester University Press, 1998; E. Digby Baltzell,

Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar (New York: The Free Press,

1995); Kevin Jeffreys, “The Triumph of Professionalism: The Road to 1968,” The International Journal of the

History of Sport 26, no. 15 (2009): 2253-69; Susan Ware, Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in

Women’s Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Eric Allen Hall, Arthur Ashe: Tennis and

Justice in the Civil Rights Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

10 Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete, 1619-1918 (New York: Amistad

Press, 1993); Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete, 1919-1945 (New

Ashe’s road is an apt metaphor for understanding the interplay of race and sport in America, but

it is also more than that. The touring professionals who drove the most to arrive at Open Tennis

literally spent most of their careers on the road because amateur officials barred them from

playing the courts that hosted the sport’s most prestigious tournaments. “Pancho’s Racket”

follows the important stops they took to get to the professional game as it is played today.

The genesis of lawn tennis as a sport first and foremost for women is the subject of

chapter one of this study. The large number of women who played tennis when compared to

other sports meant that, statistically speaking, the first professional tennis player of any influence

stood a good chance of being a woman. In her 1926 American tour, the Frenchwoman Suzanne

Lenglen set a pattern for barnstorming professional tennis that continued until the game fully

opened to amateur and professional players in 1968.

The movement of tennis from East Coast clubs to Southern California is the topic

addressed in chapter two. Hailing from genteel and wealthy backgrounds, the men who founded

the early tennis clubs that formed the United States Lawn Tennis Association believed in

absolute amateurism within the sport they sought to control. At the same time, they enforced

their code of amateurism selectively across the country. This allowed affiliated tennis clubs in

different areas of the country freedom to promulgate their own junior development programs

outside of the control of the national office. The best of these juniors turned professional in the

late 1930s and 1940s. .

York: Amistad Press, 1993); Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete, Since

1946 (New York: Amistad Press, 1993).

Chapter three places the evolution of professional tennis firmly in the twentieth-century

American city and moves alongside the work of urban historians and sports historians who

describe popular amusements, urban recreation, and athletics as primarily an urban

phenomenon.11 The New Deal transformed tennis at its grassroots. City space was reorganized

during the 1930s when broad-based efforts to manage urban youth aided in the evolution and

partial democratization of elite amateur sports to classes and ethnic groups who previously

thought little about such competitions. Tennis players of that generation benefited from a

recreational revolution that swept America during the first half of the twentieth century. Taken

together, these first three chapters form a sort of prequel to professional tennis whereby the

amateur origins of the game remained but were eroded through a combination of popular

individual players, specious administration on the part of the game’s amateur associations, and

an influx of new people to the game thanks to infrastructure spending on urban recreation.

Part II of “Pancho’s Racket” is a close examination of professional tennis from World

War II into the fifties and sixties. Chapter four traces the effects of the recreational revolution on

American and international tennis from the late thirties through to the war’s conclusion. A whole

new generation of American tennis players with names like Bobby Riggs appeared with a view

to challenge the amateur rules of the game. The war modified the careers of these players just as

the construction of public park courts gave them the opportunity to play the game in the first

place, and tennis players, like athletes across the country, joined the American war effort as

soldier-entertainers both on the home front and overseas. The increased mobility of people

11 Frederic L. Paxson, “The Rise of Sport,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 4 (1917): 143-68; Melvin

Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-70 (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1986), 2; Steven Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports

(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 2.

spurred by the war thus created conditions that better suited professional tennis tours than

amateur tournaments held in elite private country clubs.

Chapter five picks up that theme of mobility and money in tennis by recounting the

barnstorming tennis tours of the fifties. The postwar years saw remarkable changes in living

standards, spending habits, family life, gender relations, transportation, housing, race relations,

and leisure time, and savvy tennis player-promoters like Jack Kramer recognized that

professional tennis could earn a tidy profit if managed correctly. At the same time the nation’s

economy and infrastructure boomed, a half-dozen tennis professionals led by Kramer drove

around the country playing for a new crowd night after night. In so doing, they further

popularized the idea of professional tennis players competing openly with amateur tennis players

in the minds of people across the United States and around the world.

Much of the burden of the barnstorming tour fell on the World Champion who year after

year lived the peripatetic lifestyle of the barnstorming professional. Pancho Gonzales’s heritage,

if not his personality, made him an enigmatic standard-bearer for professional tennis before

1968. Class background and ethnic identity guided much of Gonzales’s life whether he wanted it

to or not. His perch at the top of the professional game for a decade also warrants a closer look at

his life than that afforded to other characters in these pages. The sixth chapter of this study shows

how Gonzales’s childhood in Depression-era Los Angeles gave him both opportunities to play

tennis not available elsewhere in the country while at the same time his adolescence there

branded him as an irascible individual—a stereotype that existed for the entirety of his amateur

and professional tennis career. At the same time he solidified his position as the most visible

representative of his sport, Gonzales remained beholden to his tour promoter, his fellow players,

and the reality of professional tennis before the sport opened to full competition in 1968.

The final third of this study recounts how professional tennis exploded in commercial

popularity right at the moment when the barnstorming professionals of the postwar period could

no longer compete at the highest level. Well past his playing prime, Gonzales missed taking

advantage of the regular tournament schedule, higher prize money, product sponsorships, and

player unions that set professional tennis on the path to becoming a world sport in the seventies.

Sports journalists have given a preliminary sketch of the after-effects of Open Tennis beginning

in the summer of 1968, but have said little about the long-term and proximate causes of the

International Lawn Tennis Federation vote authorizing that change in the spring of 1968.12

Chapter seven uses well known and untapped sources to go behind the scenes of that important

year in sports history. The rest of the chapter examines how old and new stakeholders such as

World Championship Tennis owner Lamar Hunt both built upon and departed from the

barnstorming tours from the past to adapt to the expanded economic outlook for the sport.

Beginning in the 1960s, a new breed of sports agents led by Mark McCormack and his

International Management Group (IMG) made individual athletes into commercial celebrities

without rival. The pioneering sports marketing firms such as IMG and Donald Dell’s ProServ

began with athletes from individual sports such as golf and tennis who made sports into the

moneymaking enterprise that is ubiquitous today. That is the subject of chapter eight, which

explains how and why they created the most visible of sporting spectacles.

12 Evans, Open Tennis, 1968-1988, passim.

The most striking of developments actually took place in the most personal of places.

With a few important exceptions, commercial sports had long belonged almost exclusively to

men until women professionals began playing tennis for money in significant numbers in 1968.

Over the next half-decade, women such as Gladys Heldman and Billie Jean King created a tour

of their own that rivaled the men’s game in popularity and prize money while differing in

substance and style. Whereas historians of women’s tennis in the seventies emphasize change,

the final chapter of this study suggests more continuity than change and more compromise than

courage on the part of these women’s sports player-promoters.

Tennis, which originated in Britain, grew first on the American Atlantic Coast before

moving west, where it found a home along the Pacific. All the while it remained a sport that

separated amateur and professional players—at least in the minds of the clubs and associations

who ran the game for the first half century of its existence. Government and individual responses

to the major upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II greatly undermined the

authority of those associations by creating conditions in which a whole new generation of players

with social backgrounds different then the men who ran the amateur associations could take up

the game. The best of those players held far more liberal views when it came to money in their

sport and they shared those views across the country and throughout the world year after year on

professional barnstorming tours in the late forties through mid-sixties. The visibility and viability

of those tours eventually coaxed reluctant amateur association members to vote to allow the

opening of tennis’s major tournament venues to professional players in 1968. Almost

simultaneously, sports marketers, professional promoters, and sports publishers popularized the

game into much the same form that it retains today.

Twenty years after his five-set victory over Schroeder at Forest Hills, Gonzales played an

even more grueling match. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, which hosted the

Wimbledon Championships, had begun allowing professional players such as Gonzales into

Wimbledon the year before. In the 1969 Championships, Gonzales made the most of that

opportunity. On opening day the veteran professional met the talented Puerto Rican player

Charlie Pasarell, fifteen years his junior. Pasarell won the first set 24-22, more games than most

matches. The second set went fast to Pasarell. Gonzales refused to quit. He knew how to fight

because circumstances had forced him to fight his entire career.13

Facing match points, Gonzales managed to break Pasarell’s serve and win the third set

16-14. Darkness descended on the court, and the umpire halted play until the next morning. “I

went home and I immediately flashed back to Forest Hills and the finals against Ted Schroeder

when I lost the first two sets and I tried to say to myself, well if I wasn’t nervous then why

should I be nervous now,” said Gonzales. As the oldest player in the tournament Gonzales

certainly had experience, but much of his career was filled with bitter experience. He “enjoyed

the competition” but he also continued to play because professional tennis “was still a source of

income” much needed.14

His effort in the final two sets against Pasarell showed just how much of that history he

actually lived. After 111 games and two days of play, Gonzales won his eleventh game in the

fifth set to Pasarell’s nine games. That two-game margin gave Gonzales the final set 11-9 and the

match three sets to two. Five hours of play, 112 games for a first round match, one of 64 first

13 Pancho Gonzales Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

14 Ibid.

round matches, six more rounds to go if Gonzales was to win the Wimbledon Championships.

“I’m one of the fortunate ones to know what a Bill Tilden was like, to know what a Don Budge

played like, to know what it was like on the early days of the pro grind, to know what it was like

at the beginning of the Open tournaments and to know what it’s like today,” said Gonzales.15

15 Ibid.

CHAPTER ONE

LAWN TENNIS AND THE LADY SUZANNE LENGLEN

European kings popularized the progenitor of the modern sport of tennis. Court tennis

began in continental Europe in the fourteenth century. Sometime before 1400, the game crossed

the channel from France to England and grew into a favorite pastime of English aristocrats in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The game spread in popularity as the nobility from emerging

nation-states aligned through marriages, treaties, and cultural missions. Nobles would square off

on either side of a three-foot-high net that divided a rectangular court seventy feet long by thirty

feet wide. The court sat indoors with walls on all sides. A wood paneled floor made for a soft

surface for the round felt-covered ball, roughly the size of a plum. Players swung racquets, which

were between three and four feet long and woven with string made of cat guts, to generate the

force that propelled the ball over the net and against the back or side-walls, or onto the floor on

the opponent’s side of the court. Before the ball bounced twice on their side of the net, a player

would redirect the ball with their oak or maple racquet back over onto the opponent’s side of the

net. A player earned a point for every failure of his opponent to hit the ball from their side of the

net before a second bounce. A stroke into the net would also result in a point for the opposing

player.

The nobility and their courtiers referred to court tennis as the “sport of kings” because of

the game’s popularity with the Bourbon dynasty in wealthy France. That popularity extended

beyond aristocrats so that by the early seventeenth century, an estimated 18,000 courts dotted the

French nation. In their love for the game the French stood apart from other countries only in the

early date at which they embraced the game. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Italy

boasted courts of their own along with professional guilds to instruct the wealthy leaders of

Italian city states. Fifty years earlier, France’s first well known tennis professional, Pierre Gentil,

gave the same sort of instruction to Louis XIII in exchange for annual payment of 500 francs.

Gentil belonged to a court tennis professional’s guild that by the 1600s stretched back a full two

centuries—close to the recorded beginning of the game. The French King Charles IX gave royal

blessing to those guilds in 1571 when he issued monopoly protection to the Corporation of

Tennis Professionals who, over the following two decades, standardized the game’s rules.1 Since

near its inception, then, court tennis played by aristocratic amateurs grew up with professional

players willing to share and exhibit their own talents for payment.

The blurred lines between amateurism, professionalism, and aristocracy in the formative

years of court tennis gave the game an illicit underground and criminal element. Royals such as

Duke of Lorraine, Henry VIII, and the Earl of Essex would strike their lesser or even their equals

with palm, ball, or racquet. Verbal abuse proliferated. On rare occasion, disputes on the court led

to death. The Italian artist Caravaggio, for example, recreated the violence of his Biblical

paintings when he murdered a court tennis partner over an on-court dispute.2 The tennis court

thus became a mock royal court, where aristocrats could mete out rewards and punishments

1 Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History, 34-38; François Alexandre, “Art du paumier-racquetier et de la paume” in

Les Arts des instruments (Genéve: Slatkine Reprints, 1984 [1767-1780]), 34, plate 1-5, Call#f T44.D37, Rare Book

Collection, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware; Steen, Floodlights and Touchlines, 81-83. Unless

otherwise noted, all translations of foreign language sources are by the author.

2 Steen, Floodlights and Touchlines, 83.

while minimizing the political repercussions that accompanied the real day-to-day decisions they

made for their realms.

Not surprisingly, European nobility created and kept for themselves most sports prior to

the nineteenth century. England famously executed peasants who hunted game on the lord’s

lands. The means and rights to race horses and chase foxes belonged exclusively to the wealthy

and landed. When the everyday people of the seventeenth century threw quoits, hurled weights,

or batted and fielded rounders, they did so under the watchful eye of the gentry who understood

the cathartic role leisure played in forming social cohesion and avoiding societal anomie. Up

until around 1900, sports could not survive without the financial sponsorship of elites because

rural people lived too far apart to congregate in numbers substantial enough to stage contests

funded by attendee admissions. In London and the few other cities sprinkled throughout England

and the European continent, the landed gentry’s grip on the leisure activities of the common

people loosened. The urban working class wagered on racehorses and fighting cocks, picked

champion pugilists in contests of brawn, and washed it all down with ales from local taverns.

Away from their social betters, working-class men cherished their amusements and forged a

masculine solidarity apart from and over their families.3

The new and radical perspectives in the Enlightenment that swept through Europe did not

directly break down class barriers in recreation and sport. In fact, as European powers expanded

their colonial holdings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, settlers strove to recreate the

social structure they were familiar with by using leisure and games to reinforce the hierarchy in

3 Elliott Gorn and Warren Goldstein. A Brief History of American Sports (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,

2004), 6-8, 13-17.

much the same way that they had back in Europe.4 In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, for

example, a rigid class divide between a small number of wealthy tobacco planters and a growing

number of indentured servants prompted social unrest that culminated in the class uprising

known as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. In the aftermath of the Rebellion, the tidewater gentry

understood that sharing a passion for horse racing and wagering could help them perpetuate their

class position and stave off further civil unrest. Their gamble paid off in spades, as they enjoyed

a remarkable degree of social stability and consolidation of power during much of the eighteenth

century.5

In the eighteenth century Atlantic world, where people’s leisure time was largely shaped

by patriarchy and aristocracy, one of the most serious challenges to these old orders literally

played out on the court tennis court. The calls for liberty, equality, and fraternity that swept

revolutionary France in 1789 found clear expression on the very tennis court where Louis XVI

and the leading nobility of the First Estates swung their racquets. After having found the doors

barred to their entry by the king and his noble allies, members of the Third Estate representing

nearly the entire population of France took over the king’s court on July 20, 1789, where they

drafted The Tennis Court Oath, the manifesto outlining the political principles of what became

the French Revolution.6 In a profound moment of historical irony, the sport most associated with

4 Ibid., 21-23.

5 T.H. Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia,” The

William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 2 (April, 1977): 239-57.

6 Assemblée Nationale Constituante, Extrait du Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée nationale: Du Samedi 20 Juin 1789

(Paris: Baudouin, 1789), no pagination, no Call#, Rare Book Room, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington,

Delaware.

monarchical and aristocratic power and privilege served as the setting for the radicalism that

most undermined the power and privilege of monarchies throughout the Atlantic world.

A second and in many ways more epochal revolution further eroded the aristocratic

stranglehold that gripped court tennis and other sports in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries. Industrialization, taking root first in eighteenth-century Britain, and then in America

and continental Europe, catalyzed the popularity of sports with a growing suburban and urban

working class. The specialization of labor, a hallmark of the industrial revolution, bled into

athletics where just as workers became increasingly skilled in fewer and fewer tasks, so too

athletes became more and more skilled in the rather limited skills of the one game they chose to

play.7 For aristocrats whose wide-sampling of leisure activities marked their elite social status,

the focus on one sporting activity to the exclusion of all others smacked of class heresy. That

reluctance on the part of elites thus allowed some working-class men with far less time to spare

for training to become widely regarded champions in sports such as boxing, running, and football

in the first half of the nineteenth century. Class conflict continued to underpin sports throughout

the nineteenth century, however, and with the diffusion of Victorian culture throughout the

British Empire and America during the second half of the nineteenth century, a whole host of

new sports developed by and reserved for elites arose. Croquet, polo, and lawn tennis were three

sports that began on the private leisure grounds of British lords and ladies. 8 Of the three, only

lawn tennis became available to the middle and working classes—and then only after three-

7 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 305-6.

8 Steen, Floodlights and Touchlines, 79-81, 90.

quarters of a century and a third revolution—the subject of a later chapter. In the interim, the

sport of tennis went green.

The first game of lawn tennis took place on the expansive green lawns of a Welsh

country estate in the late summer months of 1873. Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented his

game in February 1874 with a rhomboidal rather than rectangular court demarcated by taped

lines and a triangular net strung between two posts hammered into the ground at a distance of

twenty-one feet apart. His patent proposed the spread of the game throughout the British Isles,

and he purported that his new design took tennis outdoors for the first time and thus “placed

within the reach of all” a game that only Europe’s wealthiest had previously enjoyed. His patent

approved, Wingfield wrote the earliest tennis rulebook, where in that pamphlet’s second and

third editions, he changed the name of the game to “sphairistikè” before he finally settled on

calling it lawn tennis in the fourth edition. In addition to patenting, writing the first rules, and

titling the game, Wingfield produced the first pieces of tennis equipment for commercial

consumption. His kits came in a wooden box large enough to fit four racquets, a net, two net

posts, two tennis balls, and a rule book. Favorable press coverage helped Wingfield sell over a

thousand of his tennis sets in the first year.9 Britain’s colonial possessions meant the game, like

cricket, would spread quickly to most of the globe.10

Walter Clopton Wingfield, A Portable Tennis Court for Playing Tennis, British Patent No. 685 filed February 23,

1874, and provisionally issued February 24, 1874, Series 3, Subject Files, Oversize 6, Folder Patent: “A new and

Improved Portable Court for Plying the Ancient Game of Tennis,” William T. Fischer Collection, St. John’s

College, Queens Campus; Selden Cale, “A Short History of Tennis in America and England,” typescript, p. 1-2,

Works Progress Administration Collection, Box A125, Folder Illinois Sports, Library of Congress (LOC)

Manuscripts Division.

10 C.R.L. James, Beyond a Boundary (Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 153; “Lawn Tennis in the

Bahamas,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1 (April 15, 1908), 5.

The ways the game’s early players interacted with their racquets revealed the earlier roots

of lawn tennis and its subsequent spread after 1874. During the first few years of the sport, most

lawn tennis players held their racquets with a continental grip, which allowed for both forehand

and backhand strokes without moving the hand position of the index-finger knuckle-pad on the

second bevel of the racquet’s handle.11 The grip’s name reflects the antecedents to the British

lawn tennis found in the games of racquets and court tennis originating on the European

continent. Played mainly in France, these games required participants to execute strokes off a

wall or close to the ground, therefore necessitating a grip that positioned the racquet at such an

angle so as to not scrape the ground.12

Like the physical racquet, the early manufacture of tennis balls made plain the origins of

the global spread of tennis in British colonialism. The felt and stitching of the ball were all white.

The cost of the balls prohibited all but the ruling class from purchasing them. The balls even

carried names like the “Hard Court” ball that signified where a player should play and the

“Demon Ball” that signified what kind of player should hit with them. The manufacturers made

those linkages between British colonialism and British sports explicit in an advertisement for

Slazenger’s “Colonial Ball” made specifically for humid conditions in places such as “India,

Australasia, Africa, and South America, and indeed all Countries situated at a great distance

from where the Ball is made, and where extremes of temperature have to be contended with….Its

reputation, however, is world-wide, and it is an admitted fact that our Colonial Ball will retain its

11 The discussion of grips and the analysis of tennis mechanics, stroke production, play, and strategy comes from the

author’s dozen years of experience teaching tennis.

12 Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History, 34-38.

resiliency and wear longer than any other Ball produced.” 13 The players themselves hoped the

same could be said for their colonies.

The British Empire did not include the United States in the second half of the nineteenth

century, but during those decades cultural exchange remained strong. As the ranks of the middle

class swelled in Victorian America, a tension between a belief in personal industriousness and

the desire of members of the middle class to define their identities as separate from the growing

urban working class became more pronounced. Urban and rural recreation, restorative practices,

and leisure were major avenues in which people could promote their class distinctiveness. Prior

to the Civil War, most Americans never ventured much beyond their local county seat. The

improved transportation network and homestead legislation passed during the war stimulated

settlement west of the Mississippi River. More importantly, travelers west brought back fantastic

stories of the wonders of the frontier to share with people living in the Midwest and the East.

These stories in turn encouraged the growing middle class to travel on the developed rail-lines to

sites of natural beauty and a burgeoning network of camps and resorts in scenic locales. The

American vacation was born.14

In the cities, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were moments for the first massive

reorientation of the nation’s recreation space by newly trained planning experts. Frederick Law

Olmsted, the era’s foremost landscape architect, designed America’s most famous urban leisure

ground in New York City. Occupying 843 acres of Manhattan real estate, Central Park embodied

13 Advertisement for Slazengers Tennis Balls, Slazengers Catalogue (London: Slazengers Ltd., 1914), 19. Available

at http://jimstennis.com/contextRoot/html/bookMagCollection5/bookMag.html (accessed September 18, 2015).

14 Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,

1999), 9-10, 67.

the growing importance urban planners, municipal reformers, and city residents alike assigned to

restorative and open space in ever more crowded cities. Moreover, urban parks could mirror

class relationships found in neighborhoods, the workplace, and all walks of life. Central Park

itself featured no fewer than four separate entrances, each for a different rank of person entering

the park. In Chicago special promenading thoroughfares and private beaches were designated for

the city’s elites, while the city did not have a public swimming area along the lake until Lincoln

Park opened one in 1895. The city center of Denver, the boomtown of the mountains, featured

wide walking paths for the conspicuous walking of the city’s new money merchants. In the last

two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, cities

from Boston to Cleveland, and Kansas City to Los Angeles increased their park land by up to

600 percent, a massive reorientation of space catalyzed by a burgeoning middle class interested

in assuming some of the authority to plan and the pleasures to play previously enjoyed only by

elites.15 Within the cities themselves, parks simultaneously met the leisure needs of everyone and

also reminded everyone of their particular position in society.

In a far more discreet way, urban elites had long hidden themselves away in private

men’s clubs. In the first third of the nineteenth century, private men’s clubs usually took the form

of militia companies. Some exceptions, such as New York City’s Union Club, were more social

in nature. Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, cricket clubs sprouted along major thoroughfares

15 Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in

America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 59-60; Roy Rosenzweig, The Park and the People: New York’s

Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 196, 199; Perry Duis, Challenging Chicago: Coping with

Everyday Life, 1837-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15, 177; William Wilson, The City

Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 248-49, 252; Peter Schmitt, Back to

Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 4, 70.

and in wealthy pockets of cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In these cities and

secondary cities such as Chicago, baseball also grew in popularity, especially with the cadres of

clerks and manual laborers who formed clubs and leagues comprised wholly of white-collar

workers and mechanics.

16 Shooting and hunting clubs such as the New York Sporting

Association had origins in the antebellum years, but by the late nineteenth century, game was

increasingly scarce in all but the farthest afield areas of the country, leaving wealthy men with

little alternative but to seek other recreational outlets.17 These clubs shared a fondness for sport,

they helped to reinforce male solidarity, and they expressed the awareness of class boundaries

within urbanizing America. They also exposed the physical limits of recreation in the city.

Genteel resorts such as White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and Newport, Rhode

Island, recreated and even enhanced class solidarity among the wealthy and socially connected

when these people traveled away from home. Moreover, while most of the social clubs and

workplaces in Eastern cities practiced rigid gender segregation, resorts brought women and men

into daily contact on the croquet pitch, in the mineral spring, and on the dance floor. Starting

around the turn of the century and continuing through to the Great Depression, many members of

the urban working class increasingly looked to recreation outside the city in addition to the

amusements they enjoyed within. Recent immigrants and African Americans also considered

rural vacations viable, either by camping or renting a room in an inexpensive boarding house.

The oldest and most established resorts remained firmly in the hands of the upper and middle-

16 Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 207-8, 213-4.

17 Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865-1915 (New York: The

Viking Press, 1971), 319.

class elites, a grip that tightened when the Depression eliminated the little extra income most

Americans relied upon to visit an attraction.18

The same decades that witnessed the growth of scenic urban parks, secluded elite resorts,

and middle-class vacations also saw a remarkable upswing in betting and games of chance. The

Gilded Age gambler shot pool, rolled roulette, blew dice, and flipped cards, all the while

pursuing a pay-off through what historian Jackson Lears identified “providential arrangements of

rewards and punishments” not unlike the creed espoused by the era’s most notorious robber

barons.19 In growing cities, gambling dens catered to men of all classes. Blueblood resorts also

indulged this ethos by building casinos and race tracks that catered to the wealthy people’s

appetites for cash and chance. In the millionaire’s playground of Newport, Rhode Island, for

example, craftsmen laid the last shingle on the magnificent Newport Casino in the summer of

1880, with the gaming tables opening to immediate acclaim. There the country’s wealthiest men

and women threw money hand over fist decade after decade until the music finally slowed with

the onset of the Great Depression.20

At the same time that games of chance proliferated, a countervailing trend that

championed games of skill took shape. Mastery of mind and body through vigorous exercise had

origins in religious convictions such as the “muscular Christian” tradition that began in England

during the first decades of the nineteenth century before making it to America during the Civil

18 Aron, Working at Play, 91, 206-7, 221-3, 238-40.

19 Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Penguin, 2003), 156-8.

201880 Annual Report, Untitled Cart Box, Folder 1.1, Newport Casino Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island;

1929 Annual Report, Untitled Cart Box, Folder 1.1, Newport Casino Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

War and in the post-bellum years. No reformer espoused exercise for everyone more vigorously

than Diclesian Lewis, who, during the 1860s and 1870s, championed a “New Gymnastics” with

men and women alike stretching limbs, grasping rings, lifting wooden dumbbells, and swinging

Indian clubs. Exercise advocates suggested that team sports such as football instilled young

white-collar workers with industrious habits that led to a more productive workplace. Children

too were encouraged to participate in structured play so that they could learn what it meant to be

an American. Living in squalid tenements, recent immigrants and many in the working class felt

the ability for self-betterment through athletics even more strongly. For these young men,

individual accomplishment in team sports such as baseball and individual sports such as boxing

served as a way to earn respect in a highly localized ethnic community, and, in rare cases, a

means of financial improvement for the most talented athletes. Throughout American cities,

ethnic athletic clubs proliferated. The farthest reaching consequences of the trend for masculine

martialism came in the realm of foreign policy, where leaders of the United States believed

outdoor exercise connected to the expansion of an American Empire.21 Tennis stood within all of

these broader contexts of class, gentility, and leisure with one important exception. Women had

played the game of lawn tennis from the beginning, and they would continue to play as the game

grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

21 Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 182-

91; Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: AntiModernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 108-9; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern

America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 270; Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the

Great Migration that Made the American People (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973), 223-4; Elliott Gorn, The

Manly Art: Bareknuckle Prize Fighting in Urban America (New York: Cornell University Press, 2010), 108;

Thomas Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915 (New York: Harper Perennial,

1991), 220-1; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United

States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15.

The conventional story of the spread of lawn tennis to America credits a woman. In under

a year Major Walter Wingfield’s sphairistikè had gone out from his Welsh garden party to the

British Caribbean with British military officers and colonial officials. In April of 1874, Mary

Ewing Outerbridge left Bermuda to return to the United States with a lawn tennis kit that

included racquets, balls, net posts, and a net. Stateside, she introduced the game to her brother,

A. Emilius Outerbridge, who directed the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club and arranged

for the marking of a section of the club’s grounds for a lawn tennis court. Over the next two

decades, the club grew from a dozen or so founders to six hundred members, many of whom

competed in the yearly handicapped tennis tournament that compensated for differences in player

skills by gifting weaker players a score advantage at the beginning of every game against

stronger players. Much like getting strokes in match-play golf based on players’ eighteen-hole

handicap, handicapped tennis tournaments were the norm rather than the exception in the late

nineteenth century because grinding players’ ability to the lowest common denominator rather

than forcing players to play up to the skills of the best player in their group encouraged the

growth of the game during its infancy. Over those same years, America’s well-to-do continued to

bring back lawn tennis kits from their transatlantic travels and mark off courts on the grounds of

their sporting clubs like the Germantown Cricket Club of Philadelphia, while in other instances

they built private courts on their private estates.22

22 R. St. G. Walker, Annual Reports of the Staten Island Cricket and Base Ball Club for the Year 1982 (New York:

Michael & Strauss Printers, February 6, 1893), 1-3, in Series 3, Subject Files, Staten Island Cricket and Base Ball

Club, no folder, William T. Fischer Collection, St. John’s College, Queens Campus; United States Lawn Tennis

Association, Fifty Years of Lawn Tennis in the United States (Norwood, MA.: Plimpton Press, 1931), 13, 15.

By 1880 the popularity of the game with the leisure class had risen to a degree that

private courts and cricket clubs with a single lawn tennis court could no longer accommodate

demand. Tennis-specific clubs began to proliferate in American cities where a great density of

wealthy citizens with the disposable capital necessary to purchase and hold large swaths of real

estate in the quickly urbanizing United States could be found. This meant most lawn tennis clubs

concentrated along the Eastern seaboard of the Mid-Atlantic and New England. The West Side

Tennis Club was one of the first and most prominent clubs in the country. Founded in 1882, the

Club had expanded to two locations by 1904. The clubhouse was located in the Bronx at 238th

Street and Broadway where members could also play on several courts. Lady members had first

claim on the courts at 117th Street and Amsterdam Avenue on Morningside Heights. Men were

allowed to play there only through a formal petition to and with the approval from the clubs

governing board. Victorian women generally had more opportunities to play tennis than other

games offered by athletic clubs in America.23

The Club capped total membership at 550, with the only stated requirements that a

potential member be older than sixteen and that two or more current members vouch for her.

While not overtly stated, in practice this application process effectively barred African

Americans from joining the Club, as the all-white membership listed on the club’s membership

rolls perpetuated year after year until at least the eve of World War I. A similar class barrier was

also in place, albeit with a little more malleability as players who proved themselves talented in

the many sanctioned tournaments held under the auspices of the Eastern Lawn Tennis

Association and Metropolitan Association sometimes found their names listed on the

23 Ibid.; Ibid.

membership rolls regardless of their personal equity. The wrong color skin or the wrong family

kept someone out of the tennis club, but being a woman did not.24

Women members were in fact a draw to elite tennis clubs. In August of 1890, along with

benches full of male and female spectators, an elderly woman sat on a porch and watched four

ladies play a doubles match on the lawn tennis court. The venue was the Brighton Beach Hotel, a

popular spot with the Manhattan Park Avenue crowd. The woman grew frustrated with the

women’s poor play and divided attention. She believed the players were too interested in the

glances of the young beaus watching the game; however, her scorn centered less on the

“attention” they sought and more on the cumbersome outfits that hamstringed their tennis

strokes. Their Victorian outfits fit so inappropriately that the servers used underhanded strokes as

the tight-fitting sleeves restrained the extension and pronation of the arm necessary for an

overhand service. “Hampered by graceful, but far too heavy skirts, big knotted sash, jaunty

jacket, and a hat which will not sit just exactly straight if the head is moved violently,” she

wrote, how could these ladies play any better? Her observations revealed the competing

ideologies of style and success in the sport of tennis.25

Grace did not equal performance, but measures of both categories depended on whether

the players were women or men. F. A. Kellogg, a leading writer on recreation and editor of

24 Officers, Members, Constitution Rules and Reports of the West Side Tennis Club 1910 Organized 1882, Series 3,

Subject Files, Cabinet File, 9-1, Folder West Side Tennis Club 1903-1910, William T. Fischer Collection, St. John’s

College, Queens Campus; Schedule of Sanctioned Tournaments of the Lawn Tennis and Metropolitan Association

(New York: n.p., 1925) in Folder New York Lawn Tennis Association Metropolitan LTA, 1925, Series 3, Subject

Files, Cabinet File, 9-1, Folder West Side Tennis Club 1903-1910, William T. Fischer Collection, St. John’s

College, Queens Campus.

25 “Tennis—Playing for Admiration,” The Sporting Life, August 30, 1917, p. 16.

Outing Magazine, considered tennis an exceptional sport in three ways: first and foremost, tennis

was the “youngest of athletic” sports popularized by the British that had spread to much of the

world by the late nineteenth century; second, more than most sports, tennis espoused refinement

in the people who played the game and deserved to be played by the refined themselves—the

lawyer, the doctor, the university student, the clergyman, and the college professor; third and

most uniquely, the pioneers of tennis had from the beginning stressed the suitability of the game

for “the gentler sex” and had worked tirelessly to make sure women participated.26 Thus, from

the earliest days of the sport as a game for ladies, play, fashion, and gender fused, and the

evolution of this relationship revealed the increased sexualization of women in the American

public sphere during the decades that birthed mass culture. That 1920s sexualization did not

establish professional tennis in its present form, but it did nudge the sport in that direction. Forty

years later, a new group of women players would complete the professionalization of the game.

What mattered in the meantime to tennis followers was that the game had always welcomed

women at the same time that it shunned playing the game for money. A woman disrupted that

balance and thus brought the innocent infancy of the game to an end.

Tennis player Suzanne Lenglen became a worldwide sensation during the first half of the

twentieth century. Through her style of play, choices of fashion, and indelible charisma, the

French champion was the game’s first sex symbol. Other women athletes such as the Texan Babe

Didrikson Zaharias and the Czech Eliška Junková competed hard as athletes in the twenties:

26 N.A., Outdoors: A Book of Pleasure (Boston: MFG. Co, 1894), 4-10, Call# RBR TL435 P82a T.C., Collection of

Printed Books and Periodicals, The Winterthur Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

Didrikson in track and field and seemingly every other sport; Junková in Grand Prix racing.27

Yet neither held quite the charm and force of personality that Lenglen emanated to audiences.

Lenglen garnered a transnational following by winning five consecutive Wimbledon titles

between 1919 and 1924. Despite dominating the amateur game, Lenglen cared little for the allmale officials of the French Tennis Federation and International Lawn Tennis Federation,

headquartered in London, who dictated who could play and when, and even went so far as to

equate her newly realized freedom as a professional with “an escape from bondage and slavery.”

Her European reputation informed her 1926 American tour—the first professional tennis tour—

where fans and the press alike welcomed her as the most cosmopolitan of athletes. Such a high

profile leant special weight to Lenglen’s every word and deed. In an interview with the New York

Times, Lenglen stressed the importance of “control” if a young tennis player were to succeed in

the increasingly competitive game.28 Her intended emphasis was on a player’s shot selection;

however, her remarks implied a broader definition of the individual’s command of self

constitutive with the groundswell of social and cultural changes associated with the “new

woman.”29 As the first tennis player and the first woman to unashamedly make money off the

game in the most public of ways, Lenglen’s decision to turn professional symbolized the greater

role women assumed in the public sphere.

27 Susan Cayleff, “The ‘Texas Tomboy’: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias,” OAH Magazine of

History 7 (Summer 1992): 28-33. As yet, no scholarship on Junková’s remarkable career behind the wheel of her

Bugatti Type 30, and later behind the Iron Curtain, exists. The author has taken the first step in this direction by

assembling and editing a collection of Junková’s surviving letters.

28 “Suzanne Lenglen Feels Free as a Pro,” New York Times, August 11, 1926, p. 18; “Suzanne Lenglen Tells of

Kings and Queens She Meets,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1926, p. 12.

29 “Suzanne Lenglen Feels Free as a Pro,” p. 18; Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society

in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 98-144; Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style,

Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown Pub., 2006), 8-9, 135-45.

Lenglen was born on May 24, 1899, the only child of a cycling-crazed French father and

an un-athletic French mother. While accounts differ in designating her birthplace—Paris or

Compiègne, France—Lenglen’s real home was the French Riviera, where she lived for much of

her childhood and teenage years. Her family had money, but not the kind of money gambled

every evening at the fashionable Casino de Monte-Carlo, where the wealthiest of Europe’s

wealthy gathered every winter and early spring during the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century. Charles (Papa) Lenglen both doted on and drove his daughter to live an active lifestyle

with gymnastics, outdoor play, bicycling, and dance. Living in Nice, Lenglen drew crowds of

tourists and passers-by who watched her play the juggling game diablo along the Promenade des

Anglais—performances her father encouraged. She enrolled in the Institute Massena to study

classical languages and dance. In 1910 Papa gave his daughter a toy tennis racquet that she

batted about with in the family backyard. The father wanted to see great potential in his elevenyear-old, however, and he soon gave her a full-sized racquet that she swung with such great

fluidity that by her third month of playing she earned second prize the Chantilly Lady’s Singles

Championship.30

Most tournaments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a

tournament umpire who handicapped different players based on their records, experience, and a

quick observation of their play in order to facilitate greater competitiveness between two

unequally matched players. For example, in playing against women over twice her age, the

30 Charles Lenglen, “A Brief Biography of Suzanne Lenglen,” pp. 1-4, 11-13, Suzanne Lenglen: North American

Tour Souvenir Program, 1926, Folder Suzanne Lenglen North American Tour Souvenir Program, no box number,

William T Fischer Collection, St. John’s College Special Collections, Queens Campus; “A Brief Biography of

Suzanne Lenglen Written by Charles (Papa Lenglen) in 1926,” reprinted as “Appendix” in Ted Tinling, Tinling:

Sixty Years in Tennis (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983), 220-2.

young Lenglen might begin a match with a 30-Love advantage in every game against her more

seasoned opponent. Within two years, the handicapping swung in the opposite direction with the

now fourteen-year-old Lenglen beginning most of her matches down Love-30 each and every

game, after having assembled an impressive spate of wins that included the Picardy Regional

Championships and the Nice Lawn Tennis Championships. On the insistence of her father, the

Nice Lawn Tennis Club granted Lenglen an exception to the no-children rule, which then

allowed Lenglen to practice on courts frequented by many of the world’s best players who

wintered in the Riviera.31

All the top tennis players in the late nineteenth century played on the French Riviera

because all players of any standing at that time came from enough wealth to make the trip to

France’s Mediterranean Coast in order to live the lifestyle of the world’s elite. The French Rivera

ran from Cannes east to the Italian border and included Cannes, Nice, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and

Menton. Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco took the first step in making this area into

a gaming destination, and François Blanc, the man responsible for building Hamburg’s gambling

reputation, planned and built the Casino on the Monte Carlo plateau that opened June 1, 1866.

This spurred other Riviera cities such as Cannes and Nice to build their own casinos. Luxury

hotels sprang up with the casinos along the Riviera coastline, making the Riviera into the highest

concentration of exclusive accommodations and playgrounds for the wealthy in the world. Not

known as a gambler, Britain’s Queen Victoria also helped to popularize the French Rivera as a

destination with British elite and with royals across Europe. Those same English and Continental

31 Charles Lenglen, “A Brief Biography of Suzanne Lenglen,” pp. 1-4, 11-13; “A Brief Biography of Suzanne

Lenglen Written by Charles (Papa Lenglen) in 1926,”TinlingTinlingTinlingTinling 220-2.

Europeans of aristocratic backgrounds also enjoyed lawn tennis in the same years in the late

nineteenth century, but the strongly seasonal and wet weather in their home countries meant that

they could only play the game with any regularity for at most three months out of the year.32

English revelers built the first French lawn tennis courts in the South of France at the

Beau Site Hotel of Cannes in the mid-1880s. Within the decade the popular Renshaw brothers,

Ernest and William, who had done so much to popularize lawn tennis in the United Kingdom,

had traveled regularly to Southern France to show spectators there what the pinnacle of tennis

play looked like. Around 1890, those in the American monied class would travel to the French

Riviera to mingle with European aristocrats, and top American tennis talent, names such as the

Doherty brothers, would accompany this migration. Both the good and the bad played on

manicured courts baked year-round by the warm Mediterranean sun, situated in grows of trees

and flowers, and scented by the mistral winds that blew herbs and lavender across Provence.33

In 1912 many of those talented players took a train to Paris to compete in the first World

Hard Court Championships under the auspices of the embryonic International Lawn Tennis

Federation (ILTF). Representatives from twelve founding nations waited to meet at the Union

des Sociétés Françaises des Sports Athlétiques to officially form the first international governing

body of the sport of lawn tennis in March 1, 1913. The communication among different national

tennis societies and the exploratory committee for the first World Hard Court Championships in

1912 led directly to the formation of the ILTF. The French Championships had existed for men

since 1891 and for women since 1896, with matches played at either the Club Stade Français, the

32 Ted Tinling, Love and Faults: Personalities Who Have Changed the History of Tennis in my Lifetime (New York:

Crown, 1979), 2-5.

33 Ibid., 6-9.

Cercle des Sports de l’Ile de Puteaux, or the Racing Club. From the 1880s through the 1900s, the

All England Championships, the French Championships, and the United States Championships

were, as their titles implied, tournaments for the best players within a particular nation. While lax

enforcement of the rule barring competitors with outside citizenship may have allowed the

occasional foreign national to compete in a country’s championships, the 1912 World Hard

Court Championships—played, confusingly given the Hard (asphalt) Court title, on the red clay

courts of the Stade Français in Saint-Cloud, Paris—was the first grand tournament that

encouraged international competition among the best amateur players throughout the world. The

World Championship series took place on grass, clay, and covered (indoor) courts. Alternating

the location and the surface of the tournaments fostered a feeling of congenial competition and

internationalism among amateurs. The rotation continued until 1923, when, in a successful effort

to attract the United States Lawn Tennis Association to join their organization, the ITHF made

the U.S. Championships a “major” tennis tournament.34 With the acceptance of the Australasian

Championships as the fourth Major tournament in 1924, the ITHF had established the prime

amateur competitions in the sport—competitions whose specifics changed but whose

fundamentals did not until 1968.

From its first years, however, the World Hard Court Championships invited women to

compete against their peers from across the globe. At age fifteen, Lenglen entered the 1914

tournament and won handily over her twenty-seven-year-old countrywoman, Germaine Golding.

She seemed primed to rise, but the coming of the Great War halted tournament play in Western

Europe and put tennis far from most people’s minds. Top male amateurs entered military service,

34 Gillmeister, Tennis, 191-5, 211, 225

and top female amateurs assumed jobs that aided in their respective nations’ war efforts—though

Lenglen spent her War years practicing on the Riviera’s courts.35 Wimbledon, meanwhile, went

uncontested for five summers. Ironically, one of the few people with tennis on their mind in 1918

and 1919 was one of the people most responsible for the outcome of the war. Vice-Admiral Sir

David Beatty of the Grand Fleet and the second-in-command of the British ships in their defeat

of the German navy at the Battle of Jutland—the largest naval battle as measured by vessel

tonnage in world history—was a major tennis enthusiast who did not let time on the high seas or

war prevent him from practicing. With the fleet stationed at Scapa Flow and the Firth of the

Forth in Scotland, Beatty constructed lawn courts for himself. When American sailors joined the

Grand Fleet in 1918, Beatty sought out American shipmen with tennis talent, eschewing the

traditional boundaries between officers and enlistees. Ensign Francis Townshend Hunter, fresh

from a successful tennis career at Cornell University, thus found himself taking a water taxi from

his battleship to the admiral’s tennis court for daily doubles matches.36

For practically everyone besides the ensign and the admiral, play resumed after a fiveyear pause. In the first Wimbledon after the War, the defending Champion Dorthea Lambert

Chambers faced off against the young Lenglen, twenty-one years her junior. The two were a

study in contrasts. Chambers had won Wimbledon a handful of times; Lenglen was competing in

her first Championships. Chambers also held the Olympic gold medal, while Lenglen had never

played a match outside of France. Lambert was married with a family; Lenglen was essentially

still a teenager. These differences were not lost on fans and fellow competitors alike, but simply

35 Lenglen, “A Brief Biography of Suzanne Lenglen,” 15.

36 Francis Townshend Hunter Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF.

noting obvious differences belied the very real overlaps between the experienced Chambers and

the youthful Lenglen. 37 Chambers herself developed these linkages in her best-selling 1910 book

Lawn Tennis for Ladies, in which she skewered claims that young women should avoid athletics.

Chambers flatly dismissed the first argument—that women need pass on athletics as a health

precaution—as nonsense without merit. Addressing the claim that athletic participation made a

woman less of a woman, Chambers admitted that may be so if frailty constituted the essence of

“womanliness.” Citing a heroic example of the participation of women in battle, Chambers threw

out the simple gender binary of strong men and weak women in favor of a simpler

complementary relationship rooted not in fundamental difference but in what she saw as, at least,

a kernel of equality. With this belief in mind, Chambers brushed away the last major claim

against lawn tennis for women—that is, that athletics made women less sexually attractive. The

instant of a camera flash often caught both male and female athletes in a moment of unflattering

concentration, yet attendees in sporting events seemed to enjoy the play of women as much as

the play of men. Rather than shying away from competing hard, Chambers emphasized that

viewers might find “real pleasure” in watching women play not a dainty game but with “signs of

excitement,” lean “muscles,” and “her face set.”38

The riveting 1919 final match certainly gave spectators much to feel good about.

Chambers held two match points which the youthful Lenglen fought off, eventually overcoming

Chambers 8-10, 6-4, 7-9 in the longest Wimbledon title match in the tournament’s history. The

37 Kathleen McKane Godfree Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF.

38 Mrs. Lambert Chambers, Lawn Tennis for Ladies (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1910), 1-18,

quotations on 3, 18.

back and forth of the match was only part of the drama, however, as Lenglen’s bold fashion

departure turned heads and moved sports fashion in a bold new direction in line with that of the

new woman.39 For her part, Chambers bristled at primped outfits that restricted movement,

instead stressing modesty and functionality in dress. Lenglen, by contrast, preferred outfits that

accentuated the movement of her body on the court rather than cloaking it. The debut of her

“half-calf” dress at Wimbledon tolled the death knell of the traditional ankle-length tennis dress.

And like her career itself, the ability to push sartorial boundaries arose from the European-wide

reorientation of gender boundaries following World War I. With the major European nations

mustering between 15.4 percent and 22 percent of their male populations, millions of women

took up war industries work in factories. Such labor required that many women literally wear

pants for the first time. The trouser became a legacy of the war for women who entered the

postwar period with a new horizon for work, in no small part due to the roughly 9.3 million

soldiers killed during the War (or between 20 percent and 40 percent of the military-eligible

male population killed, leaving roughly a third of Western European women widows), and a new

fusion of form and functionality in their dress.40

Over the next seven years, Lenglen dominated tennis in Europe and carved a name for

herself as the first continental superstar in women’s sports. Spectators, the media, and fellow

competitors often likened her movement on the court to that of a ballerina. In so doing, they

projected their own assumptions of French national identity onto the Frenchwoman Lenglen.

39 H.B.L. Hart, “Winning the English Championships,” American Lawn Tennis (August 1, 1919): 252; Zeitz,

Flapper, 23-24, 135-45.

40 Chambers, Lawn Tennis for Ladies, 9, 60-69; John Morrow Jr., The Great War: An Imperial History (London:

Routledge, 2004), 284-5; Kathleen McKane Godfree Interview, ITHF.

Fellow players like Kathleen McKane Godfree, comparing her to other ladies on the tour, noted

Lenglen’s “nice figure” accentuated by her revealing mid-calf dresses. Her focused grey eyes

were said to haunt opponents and bedazzle fans close to the courts where she strode. She always

wore white dresses and tops, occasionally a cardigan sweater, and the vibrant blue, orange, or red

chiffon scarf which held back her hair and punctuated her otherwise white attire became her

fashion staple. Remarkably, her popularity and sex appeal existed in spite of her widely

discussed plainness in terms of facial features. What actually enhanced her charm was the

combination of her athletic movement and her confident personality. Technically, she could play

every shot in what decades later professionals came to call an all-court game. “You never knew

what’s coming next,” remarked one opponent, discussing a match against Lenglen. This variety

of shot-making enthralled spectators, who felt they were watching a graceful and new creation

every time Lenglen stepped on the court and moved to hit the ball. But that same thrill of the new

also cut in a different direction as American audiences were quick to accuse Lenglen of Frenchfickleness. In 1921 the French Tennis Federation pressured Lenglen to travel to the United States

to compete against Molla Mallory in the American Championships.41

Mallory, born Anna Margrethe Bjurstedt in Mosvik, Norway, on March 6, 1884, took up

tennis on the indoor but poorly lit courts of Christiania (Oslo). During her teenage years she

quickly established herself as the best player in Norway, woman or man, and Mallory played

regularly throughout Scandinavia including with the dignitary and tennis enthusiast Crown

Prince of Sweden Gustav Adolf. Like many women in the Nordic countries, Mallory trained “as

41 Kathleen McKane Godfree Interview, ITHF; Tinling, Love and Faults, 24.

a masseuse,” after which she went to London to give massages at private lawn tennis clubs and at

the same time work on her game. She also played tournaments in Germany before moving back

to Norway and competing as that country’s lone entry in the 1912 Olympics. In October of 1914

Mallory immigrated to the United States and worked as a masseuse. Living in New York City,

Mallory watched the players compete in the Men’s National Tennis Indoor Championships held

at the Seventh Regiment Armory and told herself that she belonged on the tennis court again.

She entered the 1915 Women’s National Tennis Championships, the most important women’s

tournament in the United States, hosted every year since the event’s inception in 1887 by the

Philadelphia Cricket Club. In the finals, Mallory defeated Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman—a threetime event champion, the most dominant American player up to that point, and an outspoken

advocate for the presence of women in competitive public sports. Mallory built on her national

title in the coming years by winning tournament after tournament across the United States.42

Since she had not played in Europe since 1914, though, questions remained on both sides of the

Atlantic who the best player in the world was following the end of World War I.

Having won Wimbledon in 1919, 1920, and 1921, and the Olympics held in Antwerp in

1920, Lenglen still had not answered that question to the satisfaction of American spectators

when she undertook her first trip to play tennis in the United States in the late summer of 1921.

Her visit caused more confusion for herself and for tennis enthusiasts than it clarified, because

the seemingly unbeatable champion in London, in Paris, and on the Riviera lost in the most

embarrassing of ways to Mallory. With 8,000 New Yorkers filling the West Side Tennis Club

stadium court beyond capacity on August 13, 1921, for the Frenchwoman’s second-round match

42 Molla Bjurstedt, Tennis for Women (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1916), 164-75.

against Mallory, Lenglen quit not long into the match as the disgusted crowd howled “cough and

quit” to the shocked champion. Lenglen’s refusal to play on fit with an American stereotype of

French athletes and by extension French people who surrendered to defeat when confronted with

the slightest challenge rather than persevere in the face of adversity. British audiences likewise

struggled to move past hackneyed opinions of the Frenchwoman Lenglen. In a particularly

galling case, a Wimbledon referee scheduled Lenglen to play a cakewalk singles match in the

1926 Championships immediately before a competitive doubles match. Lenglen messaged from

the locker room that she would play the doubles first and the singles after, or would need more

rest in between the matches. When she arrived early for her doubles match she found an irate

official, an angry crowd, and a disappointed monarch in Queen Mary, who had not received

Lenglen’s request for a postponement of her singles match. The hissing crowd forced Lenglen to

retreat to the locker room, where she broke down in tears and decided not to play Wimbledon

ever again.43 As an international amateur champion, Lenglen still answered to the nationalistic

perceptions people expected her fulfill.

Lenglen proved far more successful in challenging the prevailing parameters of the

female breadwinner in the West during the 1920s. Her 1926 American tour marked a turning

point in both professional tennis and the history of women in sports. The tour opened on

Saturday October 9, 1926, at 8:30 p.m. at New York City’s Madison Square Gardens—just three

short months after Lenglen had sworn off the grandest amateur tournament, Wimbledon. People

thought she was a beauty, aside from her buckteeth. Photographs of Lenglen had long found their

43 Tinling, Love and Faults, 24-26; Kathleen McKane Godfree Interview, ITHF.

way to America, to the delight of fans in the United States. Seeing her live, with her body in

motion, was even better. While Lenglen’s talent made sure people paid for a ticket, Charles C.

Pyle made sure that Lenglen and her five fellow players had a stadium to fill.44

Working in the entertainment business as a theatre proprietor in the teens and twenties in

Champaign, Illinois, Pyle used his connections at the University of Illinois to convince the

standout running-back Harold “Red” Grange of his earnings potential in professional football. In

1925 Pyle steered Grange into a lucrative contract with the Chicago Bears that earned the

“Galloping Ghost” and his manager Pyle $100,000 between the two of them in only four months

of professional football. At the same time Grange’s career took off, Pyle also experienced

financial troubles in founding the New York Yankees football team, his unsuccessful bid to bring

his franchise into the National Football League, and his subsequent founding of the American

Football League that floundered in its first and only season in 1926.45

Pyle’s move to professional tennis in the summer of 1926 was an attempt to regain

momentum after his football franchise failure. His tennis venture succeeded in that it secured his

public perception as a visionary sports promoter willing to take on and defeat conservative

elements in America’s athletic associations. As he had with his Red Grange California Tour,

Pyle relied on the Hollywood entertainment promoter William “Champ” Pickens to convince

44Charles C. Pyle, World’s Premiere: International Professional Tennis Matches, Official Program, p. 1, Folder [no

number] Suzanne Lenglen North American Tour Souvenir Program, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St.

John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; Lenglen photograph, American Lawn Tennis 18, no. 4 (July

1, 1924), 181; Stephen Wallis Merrihew, “Organized Professional Lawn Tennis Has Its Inaugural,” American Lawn

Tennis (October 15, 1926): 507-8; Joseph Claurice, “4,500 Baltimoreans Watch Professionals,” American Lawn

Tennis (October 15, 1926): 507.

45 “C.C. Pyle Dies; Ex-Manager of Red Grange,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 4, 1939, p. 17.

Lenglen to agree to tour the United States as a professional. Pickens met with Pyle in Chicago to

make clear that they better have at least $15,000— unheard of pay for a single athlete at the

time— to persuade Lenglen to turn professional, which Pyle readily accepted. Pickens apprised

officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association of his and Pyle’s plans, only to face a stiff

rebuke from secretary Edward Moss, who explained that the Association would do what they

could to undermine any efforts by anyone outside the USLTA for Lenglen to play tennis in

America. Threats only emboldened Pyle, Pickens, and the press with newspaper editorials

stoking excitement among the American and European public by suggesting that Pyle would pay

Lenglen a quarter of a million dollars for her tennis and Pickens would produce another

$100,000 for movie contracts. In France Pickens promised Lenglen Broadway roles, ghostwritten

newspaper columns, readings for her novel The Love Game, and his best efforts for a Hollywood

studio contract. The two settled on $200,000 for the United States tennis tour with any additional

money Lenglen earned from outside entertainments going directly to her. Then the back-andforth with Lenglen’s entourage began, and Pickens needed Pyle to finalize the arrangement.46

Pyle quickly regained his reputation for flair that he had lost during the failed American

Football League plan by pioneering the public contract signing of star athletes. He did this by

personally traveling to France in July 1926 where he dotted the agreement with Lenglen.

Newsreel crews and print journalists surrounded Lenglen and Pyle sitting in a Pourville, France,

garden as the athlete and her new promoter painstakingly read over the contract point by point.

For Pyle, the signing presented him to the world as the diligent manager more akin to a business

46 Jim Reisler, Cash and Carry: The Spectacular Rise and Hard Fall of C.C. Pyle, America’s First Sports Agent

(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2009), 111-15, 124-5.

executive than the less scrupulous entertainment promoters associated with prizefight gambling,

seedy theatre reviews, and jazz nightclubs. As a player forsaking the popular amateur

tournaments for an upstart professional circuit, Lenglen’s image did not come across as well

during the signing, foremost because many people thought that with her turn to the heretofore

unknown professional competition, they would not get to see her perform on the court. Pyle’s

outsider status as an American who planned for most of the tennis to take place in the United

States further stoked the anxieties of Europe’s tennis society. On an unspoken level, Lenglen’s

paragraph-by-paragraph study of her professional contract projected an image of her as a capable

breadwinner more than able to earn a living from her trade and look after her own finances rather

than relying on the patronage of wealthy tennis fans. By signing the contract, Lenglen announced

in the most public of ways her willingness to play tennis not on someone else’s terms but on her

own.47

Lenglen opined forcefully that financial remuneration primarily motivated her to forsake

amateur competition for Pyle’s professional tour. She complained that having dominated her

fellow opponents while at the same time having commanded the public’s attention when it came

to tennis for the last dozen years, she deserved some of the “millions of francs” that French

Tennis Federation, the International Tennis Federation, the British Lawn Tennis Association, and

the United States Lawn Tennis Association all collected off the sweat of her back. That labor

helped Wimbledon bring in $150,000 in gate receipts alone for the 1926 Championships while

the Riviera tournaments that Lenglen headlined leaned on her star appeal even more heavily to

47 British Pathé, “Suzanne Signs On 1926,” newsreel, digitized at http://www.britishpathe.com/video/suzanne-signson/query/lenglen (accessed June 1, 2016).

get people into the stands. She also paid fees to play tournaments for which she received no

prize-winning compensation. While she had certainly accepted more money by covert means

than the $5,000 lifetime earnings she admitted, Lenglen would undoubtedly have earned a great

deal more had amateurism not prohibited competitive tennis from meeting a player’s fiduciary

duty to themselves. Lenglen argued that tournament and association officials were the ones who

broke their responsibility to tennis by charging high ticket prices for tournaments in order to

subsidize their private clubs. She suggested they put the money back into growing the game for

everyone rather than for a select few who had the money or the connections to belong to those

clubs. With Pyle’s help, the Frenchwoman appealed to Americans’ deep-seated distrust of

inherited wealth, a shared heritage of democratic “revolution,” and a belief in the “equality” of

opportunity in order to justify professional tennis where it had previously not existed. Spurned

by the European tennis establishment at the 1926 Wimbledon Championships, Lenglen expected

America to reward her talent and industriousness as Europe had not.48

The reality of the professional tour quickly confronted her with the challenges of holding

a primary stake in a fledgling sports enterprise. As the headliner of the event, her performance

mattered more for the bottom line of the tour than that of her fellow professionals Mary Browne,

Vincent Richards, Paul Feret, Harvey Snodgrass, and Howard Kinsey—who rounded out the

tour. The match format varied slightly across the dozen cities the troupe barnstormed across, but

the general program pattern featured Richards versus Feret in an opening singles match, followed

48 Suzanne Lenglen, “Why I Became a Professional,” in Charles C. Pyle, World’s Premiere: International

Professional Tennis Matches, Official Program, pp. 14-5, Folder [no number] Suzanne Lenglen North American

Tour Souvenir Program, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections,

Queens Campus.

by Lenglen versus Browne in the main event singles match, next a men’s doubles of Richards

and Snodgrass vs. Kinsey and Feret, and a mixed doubles finale pairing Lenglen and Richards

vs. Browne and Kinsey. Such a schedule, if the matches went to a third set of play, could mean

more than four hours of tennis for spectators who paid between $2.00 and $5.50 to watch the

professionals compete in an indoor and rowdy environment far removed from the gentility of the

private clubs that hosted the U.S.L.T.A’s amateur lawn tennis tournaments. Association officials

would not countenance Pyle’s tour and did what they could to hamstring it by encouraging their

members not to attend and by forbidding their own chair umpires and linesmen from calling the

matches. Pyle solved the logistical problem of finding venues that allowed his group to play by

an inventive homemade transportable tennis court that workers could lay on the floor of any

municipal auditorium or city armory; nevertheless, he often had to scramble at the last minute to

find officials capable of keeping the tennis on track.49

Lenglen’s talent and temperament posed the bigger problem for the tour promoter Pyle.

Night after night she simply proved not just better than but much better than Mary Brown. With

steady and sensationalized coverage from the newspaper sportswriters, the professionals moved

from New York, to Toronto, back stateside to Baltimore, then to Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal,

Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Chicago, Denver, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle,

Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Havana, Miami,

49 Official Program unpaginated scorecard insert, Folder [no number] Suzanne Lenglen North American Tour

Souvenir Program, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens

Campus; “Organized Professional Lawn Tennis Has Its Inaugural,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 10 (October 14,

1926): 507-9; Joseph Claurice, “4,500 Baltimoreans Watch Professionals,” American Lawn Tennis, 20, no. 10

(October 14, 1926): 509; “Professionals and Reinstatement” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 10 (October 14, 1926):

515; “Professional Lawn Tennis,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 10 (October 14, 1926): 538; “The Pyle Troupe of

Professionals,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 558-9; “Amateurs Versus Professionals,”

American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 560-2.

Hartford, Newark, and New Haven, with the tour’s final engagement at Providence, Rhode

Island, on February 14, 1927. But that same coverage meant that as Lenglen won every single

match against Browne—thirty-eight in total by the end of the tour—and with notable exceptions,

such as Los Angeles, where around 7,000 fans crowded the Olympic Auditorium for the

December 28th match—Lenglen’s brutalizing of Browne contributed to the steady decline of

attendance and gate receipts as the tour progressed. As the tour began in the South and Florida,

Richards, the second draw-card for the tour, fell ill and began sitting out most of his matches,

while Lenglen followed suit as the barnstormers entered their final Mid-Atlantic and Northeast

leg. While past champions helped fill the seats in tournaments, a professional tour that paired the

same players against one another night after night meant less drama than the more wide-open

tournament draws. That fans continued to show up in the thousands even though the results of

the night’s matches had become a forgone conclusion exemplified that people agreed to pay not

to see competitive tennis but to be entertained by the bodies on what amounted to a stage. In

giving that sort of performance, Lenglen was truly unrivaled.50

50 “Suzanne Lenglen and Pyle’s Stars in Cincinnati,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 559;

“Mlle. Lenglen Sees Chicago,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 559; “Professionals are

Interested,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 578; “A Pro Championship for the U.S.?”

American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 591; “Dates for Mlle. Lenglen’s Tour,” American Lawn

Tennis, no. 11 (November 15, 1926): 591; “Professionals are Barred from U.S. Ranking,” American Lawn Tennis

20, no. 12 (December 15, 1926): 603; Leo J. Lunn, “Pyle Professionals in Chicago,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no.

12 (December 15, 1926): 606; Blanche K Ashbaugh, “Professionals in Northern California,” American Lawn Tennis

20, no. 12 (December 15, 1926): 607; “The Professionals in Denver,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 12 (December

15, 1926): 606; “50,000 for a Professional Tournament,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 12 (December 15, 1926):

611; “The Professionals in Montreal,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 12 (December 15, 1926): 613; John Tunis,

“The Professional Championship of France,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 13 (January 15, 1927): 655-7; “End of

the Pyle Exhibitions,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 14 (February 15, 1927): 710; “Professional Association

Forming,” American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 14 (February 15, 1927): 716; “Professionals’ Winter Engagements,”

American Lawn Tennis 20, no. 14 (February 15, 1927): 735; “The Pyle Delbers Disband,” American Lawn Tennis

20, no. 15 (March 15, 1927): 756; “An English Professional Tournament,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 1 (April

20, 1927): 59; “Professional Tournament for New York,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 7 (August 25, 1927): 366;

“New York is Scene of Professional Tournament,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 8 (September 5, 1927): 420;

Newsreels showed Lenglen moving like a dancer when she played on the tennis court. A

BBC newsreel put Lenglen’s accomplishments as a sportswoman and sports-growing impact in

society on a par with the work done by women reforming gender practices in work, healthcare,

education, and politics. One spectator at Lenglen’s matches also hinted that fans enjoyed seeing

Lenglen’s body in movement because her strides often produced unclothed views of her je ne

sais quoi, to the delight of those seated courtside. Having observed most of Lenglen’s matches,

Ted Tinling recalled that Lenglen’s breasts appeared outside her dress with such regularity that

male spectators had given them the nicknames of “Mary” and “Jane.”51

Lenglen’s cavalier approach to a predominantly conservative sport and her blasé attitude

toward conventional dress and codes of conduct on and off the court set an example few of her

contemporary competitors emulated. Far less flashy but a far better embodiment of the prevailing

notion of amateurism was the famed American Champion May Sutton Bundy, who won her first

“Professional Association is Formed,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 10 (October 20, 1927): 498; “How Pyle

Secured Mlle Lenglen,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 13 (January 20, 1928): 666-7; “Professional Market is

Active,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 14 (February 20, 1928): 710; “First Professional Championship of the

U.S.,” American Lawn Tennis 22, no. 10 (October 20, 1928): 523-5.

51 British Pathé, “Suzanne Lenglen Aka Mlle. Suzanne Lenglen 1926,” newsreel; British Pathé, “Suzanne Lenglen –

Tennis 1930-1939,” newsreel; British Pathé, “Sportshots No. 18 – Suzanne Lenglen 1933,” newsreel; British Pathé,

“How I Play tennis – by Mlle. Suzanne Lenglen (1925),” newsreel; British Pathé, “Fit As a Fiddle aka Fit as a

Fiddle (1925),” newsreel; British Pathé, “Suzanne Meets Helen (1926),” newsreel; British Pathé, “Suzanne Wins

Shorts Version on Sleeve as Celebrates the Advent (1926),” newsreel; British Pathé, “Suzanne Wins Long Version

on Sleeve as Celebrates the Advent (1926),” newsreel; British Pathé, “Where the Sun is Shining (1924),” newsreel;

British Pathé, “Suzanne Lenglen Breaks Wimbledon Record (1925),” newsreel; “Suzanne the Magnet,” newsreel;

“Out Takes / Cuts for Incomparable Suzanne In G 1302 (1926),” newsreel; “Tennis 1924,” newsreel; “Suzanne

Lenglen Beats Wimbledon Record (1925),” newsreel; “Suzanne the Magnet (1925),” newsreel; “Tennis (1924),”

newsreel; “World’s Tennis Rivals (1924),” newsreel; “Tennis (1921),” newsreel; “Incomparible Suzanne (1926),

newsreel; “Next Year – Joan” (1925), newsreel; “Suzanne Signs On” (1926), newsreel; “Incomparable Suzanne”

(1925), newsreel; “Versatile Susanne” (1925), newsreel; “Tennis Film” (1920-1929), newsreel; “On Suzanne’s Own

Ground Too!” (1927), newsreel; “Tennis ‘Greats’” (1900-1952), newsreel; “Junior Lawn Tennis Champs” (1921),

newsreel; “Wimbledon’s Jubilee” (1926), newsreel; British Pathé, “Five Reigns Reel 3” (1919-1929), newsreel;

British Pathé, “Peaceful Years Reel 3 1919-1938,” newsreel; British Pathé, “Here’s to Memory – Part 3 1920-1939,”

newsreel; British Pathé, “Emancipation of Women 1890-1930,” newsreel. All newsreels are digitized and archived

by British Pathé and available at http://www.britishpathe.com/search/query/lenglen (accessed August 16, 2016).

Alison Muscatine, “Tennis Dress, Anyone?” The Washington Post, September 5, 1989, p. C01.

Southern California Championship in 1900 at the age of fourteen. Twenty-eight years later at the

age of forty-two, Sutton won her last Southern California Championship. Over the course of her

three-decade-long career, she won the United States Championship in singles and doubles as

well as lifting the Wimbledon singles trophy twice. She never thought about turning

professional, and outside of a little teaching that she despised, Sutton never accepted any direct

money for her tennis skills. With financial support from her family, a career as an amateur

worked fine. Moreover, Sutton, as did all the very top American amateurs, accepted the

USLTA’s travel funding for competition in Wimbledon and on the Wightman and Davis Cup

teams. In the USLTA, experience meant as much as or more than compensation because it

offered cultural vistas otherwise closed to teenagers or players in their early twenties. Sutton

recalled, all with fondness, the ocean liner cabin for the Atlantic crossing, a hotel room for

several weeks in London, meals covered, and the possibility for additional European destinations

if the match schedule aligned—on balance, a real degree of encouragement for women athletes

not found in other sports at the time. In 1905, that seemed a pretty sweet deal for the teenager

from Southern California. In a related vein, Sutton agreed that the ankle-length dresses worn by

the ladies into the twenties seemed a bit silly but were not worth fussing over because they did

not affect her ability to move on the court. This more traditional approach to women in tennis

and tennis in general would encounter resistance from those that followed Lenglen’s example,

but would remain more or less intact for the next two decades.52

52 May Sutton Bundy Oral History, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island. For a brief overview of

the historical literature that argues that for the late nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth century

women sports were primarily associational and centered on physical education, see Linda J. Borish, “Women in

American Sport History,” in Steven Reiss ed., A Companion to American Sports History (New York: Wiley

Blackwell, 2014), 503-5.

Thanks to Lenglen, elements of the stodgy paternalism in the administration of the game

came under increasing fire in the early thirties while traditionalists tried with greater difficulty to

remain resolute. Women and on-court fashion again became one of the chief areas of contention

when reports came from across Europe in 1930 that Lenglen had designed what the newspapers

called “Suzanne Shorts” that sat about an inch higher than the kneecap.53 American National

Champion Helen Hull Jacobs abandoned the tennis dress and courted controversy when she

embraced these Bermuda shorts in the 1933 United States Championship at Forest Hills. Played

in close proximity to the 1933 Wightman Cup match contested in New York, the English team

captain Tim Horn refused to allow his players to wear shorts despite Jacobs’s insistence that

“they’re so comfortable” and eliminated the not-infrequent occurrence of skirts blown up headhigh on windy days. If modesty mattered, shorts proved the preferred sartorial statement. That

reasoning did not persuade the English Wightman Cup handlers, and the British ladies wore

dresses in 1933. A year later, though, this time playing in London, the English team wore shorts.

Needless to say, these shorts were far from the Lycra form-fitting styles popularized in the 1970s

and worn by female athletes the world over since then. What came later, however, in no way

diminishes the sex appeal of the Wightman Cup players’ Bermuda-style shorts to contemporary

audiences in the mid-thirties and forties. From then on, women players from across the world

often opted for comfortable shorts over the more restrictive dresses.54

53 Larry Engelmann, The Goddess and the American Girl: The Story of Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 426.

54 Helen Hull Jacobs Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, RI.

Pushing fashion boundaries was just one of the ways women players expressed their

solidarity across national and against the traditional paternalistic elements of the national tennis

establishments. Another important way were informal mentor and mentee relationships outside

of official tennis federation channels. Here as elsewhere, Lenglen set the trend. During her years

of competitive play, Lenglen pummeled players so mercilessly that her opponents bragged

among themselves about how many points rather than how many games, sets, or matches they

had won against the Frenchwoman. But after her retirement from professional tennis, Lenglen

proved far less self-absorbed and more nurturing of fellow tennis players than sportswriters and

spectators had given her credit for. Helen Hull Jacobs recalled with fondness hours after hours of

rallying in Paris with a retired Lenglen, who helped Jacobs reach top form. Even in practice,

Lenglen “was really an experience,” Jacobs said. In the minds of International Tennis Federation,

French Tennis Federation, and United States Lawn Tennis Association officials, once a

professional always a professional, meaning these practices flagrantly violated their rules

prohibiting the mixing of amateurs and professionals. For Lenglen and Jacobs, these practices

were nothing of the kind; rather, they were the sharing of wisdom from the revered retired

champion to the heir apparent—sisterhood and solidarity among sportswomen.55

Lenglen looked to share her tennis expertise with an even wider audience when she

partnered with the print division of the world’s leading sporting goods manufacture—A. G.

Spalding & Bros. In 1920, American Sports Publishing Company distributed Lawn Tennis for

Girls, featuring an inside cover photo of Lenglen dressed glamorously and provocatively with

55 Ibid.

her bandeau and wrapped in a fur cloak with jewelry and piercing eyes. The firm Albert

Goodwill Spalding was founded in Chicago in 1876 and continued to grow after his 1915 death

by extending their women’s athletic market share by converting sections of their flagship

department store on Fifth Avenue in New York City into lady’s athletics. They also built

“beautiful women’s sports specialty” stores on 211 South State Street in Chicago as well as

throughout the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, New England, and Pacific Coast. Lenglen became an

important poster child for Spalding’s push into women’s sports, although when it came to

athletic wear, the company recommended ladies dress more conservatively than what Lenglen

actually wore on the court. Women should follow her advice, though, on the game itself, urged

Spalding. In fact, the preface to the American edition of Lawn Tennis for Girls claimed that

Lenglen knew more about tennis than any man, praise supported by the convenient omission—

from the book’s introductory biography—of the male teaching pros Lenglen regularly trained

with on the Riviera courts. Her dad taught her a little tennis, and she taught herself the rest, the

personal history read. The remainder of the book described Lenglen’s playing philosophy, stroke

mechanics, and match strategy. All of that was orthodox for the time except for the particular

stress Lenglen placed on movement—a far more forward looking emphasis that future

champions took to heart.56

Lenglen also conveyed her accumulated tennis wisdom to men. The subordination of the

conventional male realm of athletics by a woman champion elucidated the femininity of tennis in

reciprocity to the genesis of most other organized sports. Widely considered the greatest student

56 Suzanne Lenglen, Lawn Tennis for Girls (New York: American Sports Publishing Co., 1920), frontispiece, 4-15,

17-96, 98-100, esp. 98.

of top players’ technique and tactics, the French champion René Lacoste warmly recollected that

he in fact benefited from the tutelage of Lenglen when it came to confronting challenging

opponents. Lacoste enjoyed a storied transatlantic rivalry with the American Bill Tilden

throughout the twenties in part because Lenglen herself had grown familiar with Tilden’s game

from her professional tour through the States in 1926. Afterwards she shared ways to exploit

Tilden’s weaknesses with her compatriot. Lacoste took her advice to heart and gained better

results against the American before the Musketeer retired from competitive play in 1930

following his French Championship victory. He went on to control a sportswear multinational

after having created the iconic alligator logo that adorned the ubiquitous polos bearing his

name.57

Male players even decided to forsake their own amateur careers in favor of professional

tennis because they believed that their own financial situations could benefit from Lenglen’s

appeal, which was raising the profile of professional tennis. Vincent Richards, Paul Feret,

Harvey Snodgrass, and Howard Kinsey all felt that way enough to tour with her, but in that

decision they failed to calculate what would happen to them when Lenglen decided she did not

want to travel across America anymore. From the beginning of the tour in October 1926, Pyle

had promised his players would travel across the Atlantic to bring professional tennis to

Europeans. By the start of 1927 that pledge had become impossible to fulfill because of mistrust

between Pyle and Lenglen. For her part, Lenglen was more than ready to return to Europe, but

not necessarily to play tennis for Pyle. For his part, Pyle had grown tired of Lenglen’s personal

57 René Lacoste Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, RI.

demands and the growing number of followers drawn into her inner circle, each with an opinion

on what was best for Lenglen. So on February 16, 1927, Pyle simply announced he would not

take his players for a European tour and that he would no longer promote professional tennis in

any capacity. Whether or not he had taken any concrete steps to make a European tour a reality

did not seem to matter to Lenglen, who took the $100,000 she had made on the tour and left for

France less than a week after the conclusion of the tour. Richards earned around $35,000,

Browne around $30,000, Snodgrass, and Kinsey likely much less—at least certainly when

compared to the $100,000 Pyle cleared for himself on the tour. The first professional tennis tour

in the world had grossed around $500,000, but that came at a big cost for all the players who

could never go back and play the amateur tournaments or compete for their country in the Davis

Cup. Lenglen’s departure left Vincent Richards to lead the few professionals into the early

1930s. He did what he could in founding an association of professional players in the fall of 1927

to organize the few tennis players unable to abide by the USLTA’s strict amateur code, and he

organized America’s first professional tennis tournament. Yet more or less by himself, Richards

did not have the ability to more than annoy the USLTA officials, who knew that without a

Lenglen, amateur tournaments would continue to attract more spectators than the upstart

professional events.58

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a New York City-based coffee company

published a series of trade cards that looked at the sporting traditions of fifty different nations.

58 Engelmann, The Goddess 282-3; Arthur Daley, “Vincent Richards, The First Boy Wonder,” reprinted in Allison

Danzig and Peter Schwed eds., The Fireside Book of Tennis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 187-9;

“Professional Association is Formed,” American Lawn Tennis 21, no. 10 (October 20, 1927): 498; “First

Professional Championship of the U.S.,” American Lawn Tennis 22, no. 10 (October 20, 1928): 523-5.

France received the credit on the cards for popularizing tennis, even though the story of the early

years of tennis was more complicated: French developed the progenitor of lawn tennis in court

tennis; the British transformed lawn tennis into a recognizable form that then spread across the

Crown’s colonial possessions; the first professional tennis tour of any consequence took place in

the United States with a Frenchwoman as the headliner. What the card got right was that the

sporting history of France, at least as the rest of the world viewed it, had an element of

“pleasure” constitutive of that broader French cultural characteristic.59 Lenglen appeared to take

pleasure in playing tennis, and the people that watched her took pleasure in her play. Her game,

her fashion, her personality, her willingness to perform in the most public of ways, Lenglen

masculinized the feminine sport of tennis in the twenties and set the stage for the development of

the modern sport in the next several decades. Tennis began as a sport that welcomed women, and

it was a woman who did more than anyone else to bring the unwelcome professionalism into the

sport.

59 Pictorial History of the and Pastimes of All Nations, trade cards made by Arbuckle Brothers of New York City,

1889-1893, Trade Card Collection 124, Winterthur Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

CHAPTER TWO

TENNIS AMATEUR ASSOCIATIONS ON AMERICAN SHORES

From the 1880s through the 1920s women played tennis in numbers that rivaled men and

surpassed female participation in any other spectator sport. Women headlined the most

publicized competitive matches in the world during the same decades, but men ran the private

clubs and tennis associations that controlled the game. In America the exercise of that control

formed what amounted to a tennis establishment guided by an absolute commitment to a precept

of amateurism in the game that prohibited money in any form from finding its way to the

players—be they women or, increasingly, men.1 These dyed-in-the-wool men of various genteel

tennis clubs could not separate their love of the game from their love of near total control over

the game. They were the principal foes of Suzanne Lenglen, C.C. Pyle, and Vincent Richards, all

of whom had and continued to push for professional tennis. These men outlasted those

challenges and kept firm control of the game through the 1930s. Maintenance of that control

came at the cost of willfully allowing more money into the amateur sport at the same time that

they attacked professionalism of the game in all its guises.

Lawn tennis competition at and between urban athletic clubs and suburban country clubs

was less well organized than cricket and baseball competitions because of the comparative

novelty of the game compared to those older sports. That changed on May 21, 1881, when

1 “Peggy Writes to Polly,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1 (April 15, 1908): 7; “Philadelphia Women Start InterClub Play, American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 2 (May 15, 1908): 28-29; “Metropolitan League Adopts Schedule,”

American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1, April 15, 1908, p. 6; “From District Association,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1

(April 15, 1908): 8.

representatives from prominent athletic and country clubs sat in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New

York City and charted the United States Lawn Tennis Association.2 The principal reason those

thirty-four East Coast and mid-Atlantic clubs agreed to meet in 1881 owed to a tennis match, or

rather lack of a match, the year before. After visiting the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club

for an interclub meet, Bostonians James Dwight and R.D. Sears refused to compete in singles

when they found the balls the New Yorkers proposed to play with were far short of what they

played with in New England. Other equipment differences concerned the nets, which varied in

height, and the shape of the court, which varied in size. Different clubs even counted score in

different ways. Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club secretary Outerbridge realized that

without a codification of rules and equipment, interclub matches would suffer, and without

2 Participating clubs and their representatives included: Staten Island Cricket and Base Ball Club represented by

George Scofield, Jr., William Donald, and E.H. Outerbridge; Athletic Department of Niantic Club represented by

Walter B. Lawrence and Ernest Mitchell; St. George’s Club; Merion Cricket Club; Beacon Park Athletic

Association represented by James Dwight; Mont Clair Athletic Club represented by Frederick Van Lenneys; Albany

Tennis Club represented by William Gould, Jr., H.C. Littlefield, and Robert Oliver; Jersey City Lawn Tennis Club

represented by George Miller and H.E. Hart; Powelton Lawn Tennis Club represented H. Stockbridge Ramsdell;

Philadelphia Cricket Club represented by Richard Clay; Yale University Tennis Club represented by W.H. Wood

and E. Thorn; Franklin Archery Club represented by W.H. Boardman and J. Fischer Satterthwaite; Elizabeth Lawn

Tennis Club represented by W. Hull Wickham, Edward Haines, and Edward Day; Short Hills Club represented by

Charles Henry and George Campbell, Jr.; Germantown Cricket Club represented by A.W. H. Powell and Alfred

Cope; Orange Lawn Tennis Club represented by Henry F. Hatch; Pioneer Tennis Club represented by Berkeley

Hostyn and Colles Johnston; Young America Cricket Club represented by E.E. Denniston, Clarence Clark, and E.M.

Wright, Jr.; Knickerbocker Base Ball Club represented H.P. Rogers and H.C. Bowers. The following clubs

participated in the meeting via proxy representation: Johnstown Croquet, Archery, and Tennis Club, the Nahant

Sporting Club, the Providence Lawn Tennis Club, the Athletic Association of the University of Pennsylvania, the

Hawthorne Archery and Lawn Tennis Club, the Myopia Club, the Longman Cricket Club, the Institute Lawn Tennis

Club, the Philadelphia Lawn Tennis Club, the Amateur Lawn Tennis Club, the Germantown Tennis “C” Club, the

Newark Cricket Club, the Harrisburg Out-door Club, the Pittsburgh Cricket Club, and the Belmont Cricket Club.

For participating clubs and proxy representation, see Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis Association,

typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s

University Special Collections, Queens Campus.

interclub matches, the game had little chance of growing as it had in England and throughout the

British Empire.3

Outerbridge actually found the garnering of support from different clubs easy. Their

boards of directors shared membership rolls that resembled one another’s in terms of wealth and

community standing. “I knew many of the members and some of the officers and directors of

most of the clubs where lawn tennis was then being played, as most of them were cricket clubs,

and I had been playing matches on their grounds as a member of the Staten Island Cricket Club,

which practically every year visited Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to play such matches,”

said Outerbridge. Urban elites along the Eastern Seaboard showed that shared leisure time

reinforced their social and commercial networks when they quickly replied that they would

attend Outerbridge’s Fifth Avenue Hotel meeting. Chaired by the Staten Island Cricket and

Baseball Club’s George Scofield, the attendees ratified the constitution that created the United

States Lawn Tennis Association in under half an hour. Most of the rest of the meeting then

addressed the standardization of equipment and rules: the ball would now weigh between 1.87

and 2 ounces and have a diameter between 2.5 inch and 2.56 inches; all clubs would use the rules

developed by the All-England Club at Wimbledon village that the USLTA would distribute in

pamphlet form; and the USLTA Executive Committee would decide further tournament policy as

the association grew. Fifteen additional clubs joined the association via proxy.4

3 Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development,

William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus.

4 Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development,

William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; Allison

Danzig, “Spahiristike, History of the United States Lawn Tennis Association,” in Allison Danzig and Peter Schwed

Four years later the Association had grown to include fifty-one member clubs who

competed in association-sanctioned tournaments and a yearend Championship. By 1893, 107

clubs belonged to the Association with each and every one of them subscribing to the amateur

ideal first discussed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel first annual meeting. At the same time the

Executive Committee made Music and Drama: A Journal Devoted to Sport, Music, the Drama,

and Other Things the official publication of the Association. While that publication never really

covered tennis, resulting in the Association quickly finding another publication to serve as the

USLTA’s official organ, such short-lived action nonetheless revealed the degree to which the

society types who ran the USLTA thought of tennis not so much as a competitive sport but as

just one other leisure activity on their social calendars.5

In May 1882, at their first annual meeting, association members concerned themselves

with the boundaries of amateurism and professionalism in the fledgling sport of lawn tennis.

“None but amateurs shall be allowed to enter for any match played by this Association,”

members voted emphatically. Such a ruling positioned who and who was not an amateur in the

early moments of the organization, both a symbolic and practical measure of the seriousness with

which USLTA officials meant to patrol the social boundaries of the sport. The top of the

organization, the Executive Committee of which Dr. James Dwight was elected president,

reserved for themselves the ability to rule on the issue of amateur status. Throughout the end of

eds., The Fireside Book of Tennis: A Complete History of the Game and Its Great Players and Matches (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1972 ), 15-16.

5 Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development,

William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; Allison

Danzig, “Spahiristike, History of the United States Lawn Tennis Association,” 15-16; “A Summer Transformation,”

Music and Drama 8, no. 205 (July 29, 1893): 4.

the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the most senior members in the association

would use their changing definition of amateurism as the gatekeeper that opened the sport of

tennis to some and kept it closed to others.6

In their first decade of existence, the USLTA laid out five basic provisions that if violated

forfeited a player’s amateur status and therefore removed the guilty member from the

association. First, the guidelines prohibited a member from accepting any money in exchange for

playing tennis for the enjoyment of others. Second, a member could not compete against a

professional in any sort of public match that involved any recognition of a winner and a loser

even without the involvement of money. Third, the teaching of tennis, or any other sport, fitness,

or health routine for that matter, was prohibited. Fourth, a player associated with a tennis club, as

all players were in the 1890s, could not remain a member of a club if the player’s association at

the respective club benefited the club or the player financially in any way. Fifth, a player could

not work for a sporting goods company because of his or her skills in tennis or any other sport.

Immediately members challenged the amateur requirements with questions such as whether or

not a sports writer, employed by a newspaper but participating as a player in an association

tournament, violated provisions against material “gain” from tennis, and in their replies,

Association leaders such as James Dwight set the precedent of a hard-line policy against money

in tennis with the flexibility on the Association’s part to enforce that prohibition selectively.7

6 Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, typescript, p. 10, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA

Development, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens

Campus.

7 F.D.T. to James Dwight, April 6, 1898, reprinted in “Questions and Answers,” American Lawn Tennis 1, no. 3

(March 10, 1898): 43-4.

Criticism of the USLTA’s draconian stance against any money in the sport grew as the

game grew. The most effective critique labeled the association as classist, a claim that prompted

defensiveness from Executive Committee members. In 1899, Valentine Hall, the USLTA

secretary, addressed that criticism on behalf of the Association, when he published Lawn Tennis

in America, whose central section not only defended the amateurism of the game but celebrated

the aristocratic “parentage” that lawn tennis in the United States enjoyed from European court

tennis. Hall went beyond royalty to draw connections between Greek and Roman Republican

virtues and the character of the USLTA player-leadership who had popularized the game in

America: Richard Sears, a Boston Brahmin and 1880 Newport Champion; Henry Warner

Slocum, Jr., son of a Union General of the same name and reigning national champion; Robert

Livingston, born into a dynasty of political leaders and financiers, himself an active member of

the New York Stock Exchange at the same time he served the USLTA; Dr. James Dwight, a

scion of the game both in America and during his lengthy holidays in England; Howard Taylor,

Harvard graduate and distinguished lawyer; and a dozen other players of tennis talent and

equally high social standing who ran the Association. Taylor’s legal background prompted Hall

to solicit a treatise on amateurism from the lawyer reprinted in full in the book. Taylor reminded

readers that tennis had grown as a sport with laws against professionalism on the books, and that

to loosen the amateur codes by obfuscation or by outright elimination would dilute the purity of

tennis to the level of some other sport in the eyes of the public both at home and abroad. If

people from his own privileged status faced the temptation of accepting free balls, racquets, or

hotel rooms, how then could people from middle-class or working-class backgrounds resist such

temptations? Keeping tennis reserved for “gentlemen,” Taylor suggested, would actually protect

“the growing hybrid class” from the corrupting nature of money in sports. The amateur rules, in

the eyes of the Executive Committee at least, expressed the benevolent paternalism USLTA

officials believed they exhibited. These men wished to extend the social and class positions they

learned and practiced in the business world to that of the tennis world.

8 But conflict was

inevitable; this was the Gilded Age, after all.

Conflict between the United States and Spain almost killed tennis in America before it

began. While the growing popularity of golf had taken some of the wind out of tennis’s sails in

the mid-1890s, the war fever that followed the sinking of the Maine on February 15, 1898, led

association membership to shrink from 106 clubs to 44 clubs. Just as internationalism in the form

of conflict negatively affected tennis in the United States, so too did internationalism in the form

of cooperation positively affect tennis at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first

internationalism in tennis came back in 1885 after the USLTA leadership approved allowing

foreign players to participate in the United States National tournament, yet the important moment

did not come until 1897 when the St. Louisan turned Harvard tennis player Dwight Davis first

voiced willingness to financially sponsor a visit from England’s top players to the United States

to compete against America’s best. That offer went unaccepted on the part of the British Lawn

Tennis Association, although three British players did travel to the United States on their own

after they received an offer to play not in a team match but in the United States Championship at

Newport, Rhode Island. The international players finished third, fourth, and fifth.9

8 Valentine Hall, Lawn Tennis in America (New York: D.W. Granbery & Co., 1889), vii, 1-8, 67-69.

9 Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development,

William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus.

The excitement that private visit caused convinced Davis to redouble his efforts to

inaugurate an international team competition between the British and American players. Davis

further realized that such private tours would continue by foreign players unabated; better for the

Association to sponsor them so that they could control the game and keep hold of what would

likely prove a revenue source for the USLTA. To accomplish that objective, in 1900 Davis

donated a silver trophy first called the “International Challenge Cup” but later named after its

bequest the Davis Cup. The hardware incentivized the British Lawn Tennis Association to send

Arthur Gore, Ernst Black, and Roper Barrett to play the one-time Harvard players Holcombe

Ward, Malcolm Whitman, and Davis for the Cup. Contested on the lawns of the Longwood

Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, the Americans swept the British. The real test

came not on the court but in the second match between the British Isles and the United States.

That tie took place in 1902 at the Crescent Athletic Club in Brooklyn, New York, with the

Americans again victorious. Attendance was excellent at both matches, and the second Challenge

could have gone either way. A rivalry blossomed, with the British winning their first Davis Cup

in 1903—a victory that solidified the longevity of the competition. The Cup single-handedly

enlarged the USLTA’s treasury from $271.04 in February of 1900 to $2,458.48 in 1904.

Association membership likewise climbed to eighty-three clubs and twelve sub-associations by

1900. Attendees at the USLTA’s 1901 Annual Meeting reached the consensus that the Davis

Cup “put lawn tennis on a higher plane and assured its permanency as a sport.”10

10 Ibid.

That elevated position seemed constantly under threat with no foe scarier than the

fledgling sporting goods industry. The explosive growth of the first truly national market for

consumer goods in the final two decades of the nineteenth century left the USLTA fearing that

“dealers” might get their “crack” players addicted to money in the game. From the colonial

period, up through the young republic, one made, shared, or bartered for recreational equipment.

In the 1850s, for the first time, cricket bats and hunting equipment went on sale in numbers

noticeable enough for historians to date the beginnings of a market for sporting goods. In the

1880s and piggybacking off of the growth in baseball after the founding of the National League

in 1876, major sporting goods firms such as Albert G. Spaulding’s company began to make and

market bats, gloves, and all sorts of equipment in quantities big enough to help make baseball a

$10 million business in 1890. The 1890s also marked the appearance of the nation’s first truly

mass manufactured good in the bicycle through its complete interchangeability of parts, that in

turn propelled a bicycle bonanza that lasted until about 1900 and netted the sporting goods

industry $100 million.11 Though never approaching the production levels and the payoff of

baseball or bicycling, the game of tennis required equipment of just the right size and the right

pricing-point for the fledgling sporting goods industry. All that was needed were contacts

familiar with this new and relatively unfamiliar game, but the USLTA took steps to prevent such

a partnership between its members and for-profit companies from becoming too strong. While

not banning players from working for a sporting goods company, the USLTA did cap a

11 Hall, Lawn Tennis in America, 69; Gorn and Goldstein. A Brief History 45, 68, 107, 109-10; David A. Hounshell,

From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the

United States (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 189-214; Evan Friss, The Cycling City:

Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 202-4.

member’s tennis goods sales at half or more of his total accounts. Likewise, tournaments could

receive no sponsorship from sporting goods firms.12

Such a strong-handed move into the livelihoods of association members, not to mention

the material growth of the game itself, was a bold attempt on the part of the USLTA to regain

control over the explosive growth of the game in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

For example, the USLTA stood alone among national tennis associations and apart from the

International Lawn Tennis Federation in its prohibitions against members working for sporting

goods firms. The effectiveness of such rules was another matter, however. In 1919, a full third of

the thirty highest ranked male players worked for sporting goods companies. Sporting goods

companies would, more often than not, grant employee-players long vacations with pay during

tournament times, while the amateur rules did little to dissuade sporting goods companies who

actively sought the best players to work for them.13

Ineffective rules prompted the USLTA to devise narrower restrictions. Players soon faced

an age restriction of thirty-five and a minimum employment period of ten years at a sporting

goods firm if they wanted to maintain USLTA tournament eligibility. A member could also lose

USLTA eligibility if he or she availed themselves of any article of sportswear, shoes, or tennis

gear outside of racquets and strings. Furthermore, racquets could only find their way into an

Association member’s hands if the member’s sectional association certified the racquets direct

12 William Henry Wright, “Making Tennis Play,” Outing 70 (April, 1917): 61-62, 64; Annals of the United States

Lawn Tennis Association, typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development, William M. Fisher Lawn

Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus.

13 “Vincent Richards is Suspended,” American Lawn Tennis 13, no. 2 (May 15, 1919): 43-4; Holcombe Ward to The

Executive Committee, January 23, 1948, Folder [no number] USTA Amateur Rule Committee 1948, Box 14, Baker

Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

from the manufacturer and restricted the amount of string the player received. The Association

certified a maximum number of only six racquets when these rules came into effect after World

War II, even though a top caliber player might go through a half-dozen racquets during a single

match. Instead of taking the view that the growth of the American sporting goods industry could

promote the growth of tennis by making sure the best American amateur players came outfitted

for every match with new equipment and clothes, USLTA officials prioritized their own control

over the marketing opportunities accruable by their sport’s biggest personalities.14

USLTA national officials, committed to amateurism in every aspect of tennis, also balked

at the rise of the sports press. The penny press papers of the antebellum and postbellum decades

made a point to cover contests such as boxing popular with the working classes, thus helping to

create spectator sports in the fastest growing cities of the North. The scale and the scope of

spectatorship grew dramatically in the 1880s with sporting male weeklies such as Richard Fox’s

National Police Gazette selling into the hundreds of thousands of copies for issues that covered

highly anticipated fights. On the other side of the class divide, magazines such as Lippincott’s

Monthly Magazine, Outing, and North American Review ran articles on sports that catered to

wealthy and middle-class men. For their part, city newspapers reported the latest schedules and

scores on special pages dedicated exclusively to sports.15 On the pages and behind the lines of

these newspapers and magazines, the most prominent American tennis player of the twenties,

William “Big Bill” Tilden, challenged the USLTA’s amateur by-laws that barred association

members from tennis journalism.

14 Ibid.; Ibid.

15 Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 68, 70, 109, 115, 120-1.

Tilden played a great game of tennis and wrote prose about the matches he played in the

pages of glossy magazines. In 1925 the USLA threatened to ban Tilden from tennis if he refused

to stop writing about his matches. The opposing sides reached an uneasy compromise not long

after, in which a player could receive some monetary compensation for an article so long as he or

she did not play in the tournament they planned to report on and did not promote their own tennis

skills in their journalism and media productions. Despite his apology letter kowtowing to the

Association, Tilden had no intention of giving up his syndicated columns in outlets such as the

San Francisco Chronicle and New York World.

16 The Executive Committee continued to warn

Tilden until his match reporting as player-captain of the 1928 Davis Cup Team embarrassed the

USLTA to the degree they felt they had no recourse but to suspend Tilden on July 19th, just days

before the upcoming semi-final tie against Italy “because of [Tilden] having exploited for

pecuniary gain his position as a tennis player, or because of having acted in a way detrimental to

the welfare of the game.” The USLTA Amateur Rule Committee and Executive Committee may

have congratulated themselves on the fairness of their ruling, but the fact they issued a six-page

press release that detailed the string of events leading up to Tilden’s Davis Cup suspension

revealed just how much they realized a significant number of American sports fans might find

the Association’s amateur principle absurd if its enforcement actually meant sidelining the

16 William Tilden to the Members of the Executive Committee of the United States Tennis Association, August 1,

1925, Folder [no number] Tilden Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University

Special Collections, Queens Campus; Tilden Articles Appeared in the N.Y. World on the Following Dates,

typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] Tilden Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s

University Special Collections, Queens Campus; Wireless Messages Between [unintelligible, but presumably

Holcombe] Ward, President Collom and Advisory Committee, July 9, 1928, Folder [no number] Tilden

Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens

Campus.

country’s top tennis talent from the most important international competition. The USLTA

viewed Tilden’s defiance as an internal membership issue. The outcry raised by sportswriters

made the issue much more public than the USLTA wanted.17

The rising popularity of tennis quickly escalated Tilden’s case from an internal issue to a

national and international brouhaha. After defeating Italy on July 22, 1928, the United States

Davis Cup team prepared to face off against the French champions in the Davis Cup Final

beginning on the 29th. The French Tennis Federation knew Tilden’s popularity and lobbied

Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. Ambassador to France, to confront the USLTA about Tilden’s ban.

Herrick agreed with the French Tennis Federation’s argument that the USLTA’s ban on players

as paid writers—a strict rule the ILTF had not adopted—amounted to a “selfish” position apart

from the thirty-two other nations that played in the Davis Cup. Herrick worked to convince

USLTA President Collom to permit Tilden to participate in the match against France. With such

controversy swirling, the United States lost pathetically to France, and the USLTA promptly resuspended Tilden from Association-sanctioned tournaments. Howls of protests from within

USLTA member clubs and from sports fans reached the Association’s national offices in the

form of letters supporting Tilden and urging the USLTA to reconsider their ban. For his part,

Tilden appealed his suspension while he served it, returned to amateur tennis in February of

17 Edward Moss to Samuel Collom, July 19,1928, Folder [no number] Tilden Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn

Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; Myrick Herrick to Joseph Wear, July

23, 1928, Folder [no number] Tilden Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University

Special Collections, Queens Campus; Myrick Herrick to Joseph Wear, July 28, 1928, Folder [no number] Tilden

Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus

United States Lawn Tennis Association, Press Release Tilden USLATA, dated August 24, 1928, Folder [no number]

Tilden Controversy, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens

Campus.

1929, and continued to write and spar with the USLTA before turning professional at the end of

1930. In a later irony indicative of the 1928 suspension and the sources of the support he did and

did not receive, Tilden continued to garner more support from the tennis federations of other

nations than from his own country’s association.18

The significance of the 1928 Tilden controversy was twofold. Concretely, the USLTA

wanted financial control over the tennis talent in America, but the 1928 Davis Cup ban also

highlighted another serious threat to amateur standards in a sport whose international footprint

had grown to the point that the best players spent much of their years not only playing tennis but

competing in other countries. USLTA officials could not regulate players representing the

Association abroad to the degree that they could in the United States, because in America all of

the clubs that hosted tournaments belonged to the USLTA. That belonging gave the Amateur

Rule Committee and the National Executive Committee eyes and ears at every match.

Understanding the impossibility of enforcing a ban against accepting money in other countries

governed by different tennis associations, the USLTA enacted an “eight tournament rule” in

which a player would have to pay their own way in all but eight tennis events a year. Given that

the United States tournament calendar alone totaled dozens of matches, that rule essentially

meant that any foreign tournament a player traveled to could not provide the player with travel,

lodging, or meal expenses because the player would have already exhausted his or her

tournament expense quota domestically. The Amateur Rule Committee and Executive

18 Edward Moss to Members of the Executive Committee, July 26, 1928, Folder [no number] Tilden Controversy,

William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; William

Tilden to Samuel Collum, August 17, 1928, Folder [no number] Tilden Reinstatement Correspondence, William M.

Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; George Lott, “William

Tatum Tilden,” World Tennis 13 (December 1956): 17.

Committee members congratulated themselves on another compromise between the pecuniary

temptations facing players and the necessity of maintaining the integrity of amateur sports.

USLTA officers suggested that the absence of specific penalties and the discretion the Executive

Committee could exercise in not punishing certain players from extending their season at certain

tournaments would stave off flagrant violations of the Amateur by-laws; but in reality, violations

proliferated with such selective enforcement. For example, in 1948 the United States’ best

doubles team of William “Billy” Talbert and Gardnar Mulloy asked the USLTA to grant special

permission for the payment of expenses related to the Rio Plata Tournament in Buenos Aires,

despite the fact that the tournament both took place outside the normal tournament calendar for

which the USLTA authorized expenses and exceeded the number of eight events for which

Talbert and Mulloy had already received expenses paid. Members of the Amateur Rule

Committee griped about Talbert and Mulloy “living off the game” but allowed the players to

take the money.19

One of the principal ways tournament players “lived off the game” was by instructing

less capable players. Teaching and coaching could keep a top player on the court in order to keep

their own game in shape while at the same time creating relationships with wealthy members of

private clubs all too eager to hit a few balls with the country’s best racketeers. The USLTA did

not allow members to earn income from teaching tennis—be it at a university, in a physical

education class, park district, or private club—until the 1950s. Officially, there were no paid

tennis teachers in America before 1910. Through the teens and mid-twenties, some players

19 Minutes of Amateur Rule Committee Meeting, February 16, 1948, Folder [no number] USTA Amateur Rule

Committee 1948, Box 14, Baker Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

accepted money, club dues, and travel expenses under the table in exchange for teaching wealthy

club members. That pay for instruction arrangement became official in 1927, when the

Professional Lawn Tennis Association (PLTA) formed after a meeting in New York.20 USLTA

officials so abhorred the idea that anyone should get paid to play tennis, even if payment was

made to members of a different organization whose sole purpose existed to promote the

livelihood of tennis instructors and thus grow the game, that the Association Executive

Committee banned any competition between USLTA amateurs and PLTA teaching

professionals. As with all of their “no money in the game” rules, the Amateur Rules Committee

enforced the disassociation between PLTA and USLTA members selectively so that when the

United States Military asked the Association President Lawrence Baker for his approval of interservice matches that involved both professionals and amateurs, the Amateur Rule Committee

gave the military the Association’s blessing.21

That lax enforcement had less to do with USLTA benevolence and more to do with the

reality of how tennis had worked in America from the very beginning. Many clubs essentially

sponsored top players whose association with the club brought prestige and potentially new

members. Since the turn of the century, many clubs had ignored a player’s class background so

long as he or she delivered on the courts. Local clubs preferred flexibility; the national

20 “An Interview with Colonel James H. Bishop,” World Tennis 3 (October, 1955): 16; Edward B. Dewhurst, The

Science of Lawn Tennis (Philadelphia: Innes and Sons, 1910), 4.; Charles M. Wood, “Professional Progress,” in

William P. Jacobs ed., Tennis: Builder of Citizenship (South Carolina: Jacobs Press, 1943), 200-204.

21 Maj. Thomas Cassady to Lawrence Baker, February 19, 1948, Folder [no number] USTA Amateur Rule

Committee 1948, Box 14, Baker Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island; Holcombe War to Maj.Thomas Cassady,

March 11, 1948, Folder [no number] USTA Amateur Rule Committee 1948, Box 14, Baker Collection, ITHF,

Newport, Rhode Island.

association preferred policy. As the profile of the game increased, clubs poured more resources

into the practice time and travel expenses of their top players while forgetting to mention this

support to the USLTA. These omissions flew in the face of USLTA rules that since the 1880s

had strived for a complete accounting of players’ tournament expenses. USLTA officials had

floated a ban against all player expenses without success, and thus found themselves constantly

checking in with private clubs about members’ expense accounts. Unreliable assistance in

enforcing player expense accounts exemplified the Executive Committee’s and the USLTA’s

Amateur Rule Committee’s heavy reliance upon private sports clubs enforcing rules that often

hurt the member clubs’ bottom lines despite the national office’s claims to the contrary.Counting

a famous player as a club member was more important to most club managers than keeping a

USLTA official in the national New York offices happy. The Association’s top amateur tennis

talent felt the game “owed them a living,” and all but the most genteel of club members were

prepared to provide them with that living, albeit with a nod and a wink, while simultaneously

espousing the “high ideals of sportsmanship and amateurism” the Association stood for, wrote

Holcombe Ward at the conclusion of his decade as USLTA President.22

The USLTA’s commitment to amateurism created more opportunities for tennis players

willing to play by the Association’s rules. By 1908 the USLTA sanctioned ninety tournaments in

the summer season alone. Leaders in the USLTA national office formed a committee that

strenuously advocated junior development by pressuring reluctant private clubs to host junior

tournaments and matches. The Association also advocated for the creation of an intercollegiate

22 Holcombe Ward to Tournament Committee Chairman, January 8, 1948, Folder [no number] USTA Amateur Rule

Committee 1948, Box 14, Baker Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

tennis league that many universities embraced. For instances, by 1908 Harvard claimed a fortycourt facility at Soldiers Field in Boston. A dozen years later, Charles S. Garland of Yale won

the first Intercollegiate Championship endorsed by the Association. The USLTA also encouraged

new players both abroad and at home. On May 1, 1908, the Mexico City Country Club hosted

the first Lawn Tennis Championship in Mexican history with a dozen or so of America’s best

players traveling south of the border for the tournament—thanks in large part to the USLTA’s

encouragement and financial assistance. Unlike opportunities found in many team sports, women

could find tennis matches and tournaments endorsed by the Association and covered by the

USLTA’s official publication. “These women can play tennis, tennis such as the novice would

marvel at, swift and accurate and, indeed, far superior to the game that the ordinary man who

thinks that he can play some, is capable of,” said one such report on a 1908 women’s indoor

tournament in New York City. Players in most parts of the country could also find a tournament

to test themselves from rural California to the Northeast.23

Such opportunities came with a cost for participants. Players needed to submit to the

Association’s desire for control over every aspect of tennis. Nowhere did that exercise of control

appear in starker terms than within the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association that dominated the

national course of amateur tennis from the start. While the ELTA officially formed in 1922,

23 “List of Tournaments,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1 (April 15, 1908): 19-20; F. Dean McClusky, “The

E.L.T.A. Junior Development Program,” typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] ELTA – History including

Constitution, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens

Campus; “Harvard and Princeton Interscholastic,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 2 (May 15, 1908): 30; Julian S.

Myrick to E. L. Lounsbery, June 6, 1941, Folder [no number] ELTA – History including Constitution, William M.

Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; “Home Players Win in

Mexico,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 2 (May 15, 1908): 36-39; Indoor Tournament Ends Brilliantly,” American

Lawn Tennis 2, no. 2 (May 15, 1908): 35; “Ojai Valley Tournament,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 2 (May 15,

1908) 40-41.

tennis officials from around New York City first organized themselves in the Metropolitan Lawn

Tennis League on March 15, 1904. That organization consisted of the West Side Tennis Club,

the New York Lawn Tennis Club, Kings County Tennis Club, Montclair Athletic Club, New

York Athletic Club, Crescent Athletic Club, and the Englewood Field, with the League

functioning until 1912 as an arbiter of tournaments and matches between the clubs’ teams and

players. A similar league appeared four years later in the Metropolitan Association that

organized a Round Robin Tournament among Metropolitan tennis clubs. In 1914, the West Side

Tennis Club found a “permanent home” in Forest Hills, New York, and that same year the Club

hosted the Davis Cup Challenge Round between the United States and Australia. The financial

success of that match prompted the relocation of the National Championships from the Newport

Casino to Forest Hills for the 1915 tournament.24

The money made at popular events seldom reached far beyond a narrow orbit of clubs

clustered along the Atlantic Seaboard. The few officers and permanent employees such as Field

Secretary Paul B. Williams originated from those parts of the country and preferred to funnel

dollars back to the clubs to which they belonged. At about the time of the 1915 Forest Hills

Championship, the ELTA began a junior development program for players within their section

funded by a combination of national and sectional monies. The advantage of hosting the big

tournaments and running the Association’s day-to-day business mattered a great deal when

combined with the Association’s refusal to grant proxy voters from clubs who—because of their

24 William M. Fischer, “History of the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association and Previous Metropolitan Organizations,”

typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] ELTA – History including Constitution, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis

Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; “Eastern Lawn Tennis Association,”

typescript, January 11, 1947, Folder [no number] ELTA – History including Constitution, William M. Fisher Lawn

Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus.

location far afield from New York City (the Midwest, for example)—could not send

representatives to Association meetings. A general pattern of setting agenda business at the

Annual meeting itself rather than informing member clubs ahead of time via the organization’s

official publication became commonplace. Those policies allowed New York City clubs to

exercise disproportional control over the national organization and ensured that the tournaments

that offered the highest rating points, and thus attracted the best players, who in turn brought in

the most paying spectators, stayed in the New York metropolitan area and kept the coffers of the

host clubs full when compared with clubs in other regions of the country.25

World War I disrupted that pattern. The Association’s “Patriotic Tournaments” earned

money that did not go directly to the host clubs but went to a general fund for the War

Department. Nonetheless, at the end of World War I, the USLTA Eastern Section regained more

than its former strength by meeting on March 12, 1921, where thirty-four clubs passed a

Constitution and By-Laws that chartered the New York Lawn Tennis Association. Less than a

year later, on February 4, 1922, the USLTA’s membership accepted that body into the national

association at the annual meeting. While not officially called the “Eastern” Lawn Tennis

Association until February 5, 1927, the New York clubs effectively controlled their sectional

association, the national association, and by extension the game of tennis for the entire nation

25 Julian S. Myrick to E. L. Lounsbery, June 6, 1941, Folder [no number] ELTA – History including Constitution,

William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus; Dean

McClusky, “The E.L.T.A. Junior Development Program,” typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] ELTA – History

including Constitution, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections,

Queens Campus.

through the 1920s.26 At the same time, the game was going in a different direction across the

country.

Since the 1880s, wealth and youth had moved into California. Tennis grew alongside this

migration of people with capital. The game first came to Southern California around 1880 when

the Canadian William H. Young settled in Santa Monica after having attended Oxford

University. Young befriended the Allen family who—on their own holiday travels—returned to

their home with one of Major Walter Wingfield’s lawn tennis kits. Two years after Young and

the Allen’s first match, tennis enthusiasts started the San Gabriel Lawn Tennis Club, the earliest

effort to organize California tennis along the lines of the East Coast Cricket Clubs. Mainly

women, the club sponsored their first tournament in June of 1882. Over the next five years,

several other clubs sprouted, including the Boyle Heights Club, the first tennis facility in urban

Los Angeles. The three most important of clubs in the area, Casa Blanca Club of Riverside, the

San Gabriel Club, and the Pasadena Club, chartered the Southern California Tennis Association

in March of 1887. The following year, the California Lawn Tennis Club of San Francisco put on

the Pacific Coast Championship tournament on the grounds of the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey,

California, marking the first time local tennis clubs hosted a tournament sanctioned by the

USLTA. The California Clubs mirrored their East Coast contemporaries by hosting more small

26 “Eastern Lawn Tennis Association,” typescript, January 11, 1947, Folder [no number] ELTA – History including

Constitution, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection, St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens

Campus; Clarence Hobart to Stephen Wallis Merrihew, “The Basis of Representation,” American Lawn Tennis 2,

no. 1 (April 15, 1908): 18.

tournaments and standardizing play on their uniquely year round courts. In the words of the

Association’s annals, “tennis had officially crossed the continent.”27

One of the earliest organizations for lawn tennis on the West Coast began July 3, 1890,

when a group of Bay Area tennis clubs formed the Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association

(PSLTA). Much like on the East Coast, the PSLTA formed with a primary purpose of

standardizing the rules of the game among different member clubs, but the PSLTA differed in

the geographic scope in which it sought to standardize the game. “Any Lawn Tennis Club in the

States of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, the Territories of Utah and Arizona and

British Columbia, shall be considered eligible to membership,” read the PLSTA’s Constitution.

The Association’s treasurer collected $5 in dues for clubs whose membership fell below fifty

players and an additional $5 in dues for each additional fifty members of a club’s membership.

Monies collected supplemented the various clubs’ hosting of tournaments and interclub matches

like on the East Coast.28

The PSLTA’s by-laws detailed essentially the same definition of amateurism in force on the

other side of the country. A player could not compete in a PSLTA-sponsored event unless he or

27 Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983),

150; “California Tennis,” American Lawn Tennis (January 12, 1889): 46; H. Archie Richardson, “California Tennis

Dates Back to 1870’s,” Christian Science Monitor, April 28, 1948, un-paginated; “Championship of the Pacific

Coast,” Lawn Tennis Tournament Entry Form, July 4, 1888, scrapbook, LA Tennis Club Archive; C.R. Yates,

“Lawn Tennis on the Pacific Coast,” Outing (July 1890): 271-9; Annals of the United States Lawn Tennis

Association, typescript, n.d., Folder [no number] USLTA Development, William M. Fisher Lawn Tennis Collection,

St. John’s University Special Collections, Queens Campus.

28 Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association, Constitution and Bylaws (San Francisco: F.M.L. Peters & Co, 1890),

Folder Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association, Box Pacific S-Pan, San Francisco Ephemera Collection, California

Historical Society, San Francisco, California. PSLTA founding clubs included: the California Lawn Tennis Club of

San Francisco, the Lakeside Lawn Tennis Club of Oakland, the East Oakland Lawn Tennis of East Oakland, the

University Lawn Tennis Club of Berkeley, the Sausalito Lawn Tennis Club of Sausalito, the Belle Vue Lawn Tennis

Club of Alameda, the Versailles Lawn Tennis Club of Alameda, the Alameda Lawn Tennis Club of Alameda, the

San Rafael Lawn Tennis Club of San Rafael, and the San Jose Lawn Tennis Club of San Jose.

she belonged to a PSLTA Club, and he or she could not belong to a PSLTA Club if the player

had ever “taught any sport as one of his ordinary means of livelihood.” Following much the same

rules as clubs on the East Coast did not stop clubs in the American West from expressing pride in

their region in other ways. They held an annual championship attended by hundreds who paid

50 cents for day pass admittance. PSLTA member clubs partnered with local sporting good firms

such as F.M.L. Peters & Co. of San Francisco to manufacture racquets “expressly for the Pacific

Coast trade.” Racquets with names such as the “Pacific” featured “Oriental Gut” strings touted as

the best string for both playability and the economy of Pacific Rim Trade. Taken as a whole,

throughout the first two decades of the game, California tennis associations exercised a far

greater tolerance of money in tennis in their game than did the associations on the other coast,

even going so far as to allow some competition between teaching professionals and amateur

champions, such as when professional Joe Daily defeated Summer Hardy 7-5, 8-6 on the courts

of San Francisco’s California Club. Growth of the game of tennis on the West Coast went hand

in hand with the economic growth of places like the Bay Area.29

The westward migration of the sport of tennis gained further momentum around 1900 and

reflected larger social migrations of people to places such as Southern California. During the first

decade of the twentieth century, Los Angeles’ population tripled from 102,479 to just over

29 Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association, Constitution and Bylaws (San Francisco: F.M.L. Peters & Co, 1890),

Folder Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association, Box Pacific S-Pan, San Francisco Ephemera Collection, California

Historical Society, San Francisco, California; Stephen S.B. to G S. Smith, postcard, Folder Tennis 1, Box73, C.S.

Recreation – Tennis Collection, California Historical Society, San Francisco, California; John James Smith postal

card, Folder Pastime Tennis Club, Box San Diego Co., California Ephemera Collection, California Historical

Society, San Francisco, California; Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association Championship Men’s Doubles ticket,

Folder 200, Box 275, California Ephemera Collection, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California Los

Angeles, California; “California Tennis,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1 (January 12, 1899): 14.

300,000. The beautiful climate, an agriculturally productive landscape, and a budding urban

economy provided city boosters with plenty of enticements to dangle in front of potential

settlers.30 The physical environment in particular impacted the materiality of the tennis courts in

the West, where a Mediterranean climate made smooth lawns of green grass scarce. After the

first games on dirt lots, private clubs and later municipalities built courts with a concrete surface

because year-round warm weather prohibited lawn courts.31 Beyond the steeper upfront cost,

hard-courts were a better investment because they required less maintenance, lasted longer, and

could be built on ground unsuitable for grass-courts. The materiality of the concrete courts

produced a higher bounce of the ball, allowing players to adopt a different style of play than

what worked on the lawns of the East Coast. Rather than the popular under-spin shots common

on grass, hard-court players favored flat or topspin shots—that is, shots that either moved the

ball across the net relatively parallel to the ground or lifted the ball high over the net before the

spin brought it quickly down on the opponent’s side of the court. To best accomplish the desired

ball-flight, players shifted their grip over to the fourth, fifth, or even sixth racquet bevel. The

revolutionary hand placement became so popular with the hard-court players of Southern

California that champions and tennis writers such as Bill Tilden came to call it the “western

grip.” A Philadelphia native, Tilden advocated the Eastern grip because of his own success in

winning the East Coast lawn court tournaments with a grip better suited to low skidding shots

30 Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the

City of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 49-50, 74; Kevin Starr, Material Dreams:

Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 133.

31 Richardson, “California Tennis Dates Back”; Yates, “Lawn Tennis on the Pacific Coast,” 271-9; “A Program of

Recreation the Whole Year Through,” Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1928, p. C18.

common on grass courts.32 In short, the material conditions of the court established the styles of

players hailing from different regions of the country.

What Tilden failed to note was that Eastern USLTA sections tried to hold on to their

control over the game through the surface of their courts. Through a stranglehold on the grasscourt summer tournament schedule where players earned the most ranking points, the USLTA

leadership kept themselves relevant long after the rise of California tennis as the world’s

epicenter of competitive players, thanks primarily to the year-round competition afforded by the

weather.33

California also held an abundance of open space for the construction of parks and tennis

courts when compared with the more densely populated Eastern Seaboard. While San Francisco

likely suffered the same parsimoniousness on some public improvements and wastefulness on

others that characterized the budgets of cities in Progressive Era America, the Bay Area

nonetheless got big parks built for their citizenry that afforded recreation for everyone who

visited. In the late nineteenth century the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department

operated a dozen or more courts in Golden Gate Park alone that allowed players of any income

level to hit a tennis ball. By the 1910s, tennis courts even appeared 4,213 feet up the side of

Mount Hamilton near San Jose in Santa Clara County, where astronomers played the sport when

not gazing at the stars through their telescopes at the Lick Observatory. Far from widespread

when compared to the tennis court building boom of the late 1930s, the comparative abundance

32 William T. Tilden, The Art of Lawn Tennis (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1921), 29-30.

33 “Tournament Schedule,” American Lawn Tennis (May 1950): 25, 27-28; “Tennis Factory: Perry Jones is

Champion Producer of Champions,” Life Magazine, August 7, 1950, pp. 98-102, 105.

of California courts prior to the Great Depression nonetheless set the West Coast apart from the

East Coast and the Midwest in the first few decades of the game of tennis in America.34

Similar to the evolution of the game on the East Coast, private universities played a role

in growing tennis in Southern California. One such institution was the University of Southern

California in Los Angeles, whose most famous early twentieth-century tennis star was Ellsworth

Vines. Vines was born in Los Angeles in September of 1911 to tennis parents who enjoyed both

the readily available courts in Southern California and the blissful weather as compared to the

East Coast. Between 1877, the first year the U.S. Weather Bureau measured annual temperature

and seasonal rainfall, and 1930, the average daily temperature in Los Angeles hovered between

sixty and sixty-five degrees. In the same fifty-year period, rainfall exceeded twenty inches of rain

only five times. This remarkable weather made Southern California a veritable Eden for outdoor

activity, of which the Vineses and thousands of others took full advantage. Ellsworth’s father

gave the boy his first racquet at the age of five. Over the next dozen years Vines played in many

of the local tournaments for students in Southland. His success in high school tennis secured him

an offer to play for the Trojans, where he excelled during his freshmen and sophomore seasons.

Toward the end of his second year, Vines had played so dominantly that he attracted the backing

of the Southern California Tennis Association Director, Perry T. Jones, who endorsed Vines for

34 Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 83, 175, 205, 304; Terrence McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal

Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1986), 47-48, 138, 146, 174-75, 178-9, 208, 216, 219, 221; “Lawn Tennis at G.G. Park,” postcard,

Folder Golden Gate Park, Box SC, San Francisco Photo Collection, California Historical Society, San Francisco,

California; “Playing Tennis in Winter Time,” postcard, Folder Golden Gate Park, Box SC, San Francisco Photo

Collection, California Historical Society, San Francisco, California; “2085 – Tennis Court,” postcard, Folder Golden

Gate Park, Box SC, San Francisco Photo Collection, California Historical Society, San Francisco, California; Mary

Lea Heger Shane Interview, July 18, 1968, Oral History Collection, Special Collections University of California

Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.

a spot on the roster of the 1932 Davis Cup team. Vines accepted. He left the collegiate tennis that

had helped make him match-tough in order to begin international competition.35

Another important institution that developed tennis players in California was Occidental

College, which produced later California singles champion and millionaire Bel Air East Los

Angeles real estate mogul Alphonzo E. Bell.36 While exceptional male champions like Bell

existed and went out East to play in the major grass court events, most Californians and

Americans still considered tennis “a woman’s game” before the turn of the century.37 The

gendering of the sport began to change with cross-continental competition between Eastern Ivy

League men and their hosts on the Pacific Coast. Dwight F. Davis, one the Harvard University

players who made the California trip, was particularly impressed with the stimulating

competition between players from different sectionals. Returning East during the middle of the

America’s Cup sailing races, Davis realized the potential for starting a transnational tennis

competition along the same lines as the sectional matches in which he had participated. Back in

Boston, he met with USLTA President Dr. James Dwight. His interest piqued, Dwight contacted

his British counterpart. A year later in 1900, an American and English team played one another

for the claim to a sterling silver cup Davis had commissioned for the match. The personal and

national pride of the male-dominated USLTA executive board soon elevated the Davis Cup to

35 Ellsworth Vines Oral History, Oral History Collection, ITHF; Dr. Ford A. Carpenter, Consulting Meteorologist

for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, “Temperature and Rainfall at Los Angeles, California,” (Wolfer Prg.,

Co., Inc., Los Angeles), n.p., reprinted in Program to the 1932 Olympic Games titled Olympic Games, July 30 to

August 14, 1932, Los Angeles County, California, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento,

call #cF868.L804.

36 John O. Pohlmann, “Alphonzo E. Bell: A Biography: Part I,” Southern California Quarterly 46, no. 3 (September

1964): 198. Bell was also one of the half-dozen founders of the Los Angeles Tennis Club two decades later.

37 James. F. J. Archibald, “Lawn Tennis in California,” The Overland Monthly (October 1892): 363-76.

the pedestal of primary focus for the organization’s competitive player development efforts.

More than two decades passed before the dominant ladies champion, Hazel Hotchkiss Whitman,

convinced the USLTA and British Lawn Tennis Association (BLTA) leadership of the need for

an International match for women. In 1923, British and American players competed for bragging

rights and Wightman’s sterling vase.38 While the Wightman Cup resembled the Davis Cup in

almost every way, the twenty-three years separating the start of the two competitions shifted the

USLTA’s earliest focus away from growing tennis as a leisurely game equally enjoyed by

women and men toward a new and more masculine sport defined by increasingly structured

competition.

Competition often took the form of city versus city in events such as the inter-city Church

Cup. Victories on the tennis court for teams made up of hometown champions were a way for

local business elites—who supported the teams financially, often captained the teams, and

sometimes played on the squads—to mimic victories in the capital markets. First founded in

1918, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston fielded teams that competed for the Church Cup in a

multiday contest. Teams traveled with substantial entourages, and the contests became

opportunities for visitors to the host club to critique and measure the local hospitality and, by

extension, the economic growth of the host city. While the courts on which the matches took

place were privately owned by the members of the host club, the all-hometown composition of

the squads and the fact that they were amateur players not beholden to play for whatever side

38 “Lawn Tennis in the Bahamas,” American Lawn Tennis 2, no. 1 (April 15, 1908): 12-13; Dwight F. Davis, “The

Establishment of an International Trophy: A Step Toward Placing Tennis Competition on a Universal Basis,” in

Fifty Years of Lawn Tennis in the United States (New York: USLTA, 1931), 22; Biographical entry for inductee

Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, Biographical Files Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

paid them the most money gave these matches higher status than many professional contests

during the twenties—more on par with university football during this halcyon decade of amateur

athletics.39

Nowhere was intercity and intra-regional rivalry more explicit than in fights over Davis

Cup hosting rights. As the oldest section with the greatest percentage of wealthy members, the

USLTA’s East Coast section controlled American tennis before 1941. Officials from the

Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic wanted tennis’s largest international competition played at clubs

to which they belonged for reasons of both pride and the publicity their clubs garnered by

playing host to such a high profile sporting event. Club members looked forward to the inquiries

made by potential new members after they saw, heard, or read about the Davis Cup matches.

Many of the USLTA’s East Coast Sections most senior members belonged to the West Side

Tennis Club, making it no coincidence that those courts traditionally hosted the Davis Cup

Challenge Round when the matches took place in the United States. These same officials

staunchly opposed letting another club host the tie (match) even when that club made a

significantly better financial offer to the Association for the rights to hold the competition on

their courts. Onetime USLTA President, Slew Hester, then a USLTA delegate from the Southern

Section, remembered casting the tiebreaking vote to accept a $100,000 offer from a Cleveland

Tennis Club to host the Davis Cup—$25,000 more than the best deal the Westside Club offered.

Eastern USLTA delegates and Westside Tennis Club members did not forget Hester’s vote.

“You have pulled the ivy off of Westside walls,” they remarked, not long before they informed

39 “Fourth Annual Church Cup Contest: New York Overwhelms both Boston and Philadelphia—Kumagae Beats

Williams and Wallace Johnson Downs Kumagae,” American Lawn Tennis (June 15, 1921): 106-7; Francis

Townshend Hunter Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, RI.

Hester that he was not welcome to make use of their locker room facilities during a

tournament.40

By the second decade of the twentieth century, California made a strong claim as the

producer of the greatest number of talented tennis players in the country. Whereas in the late

1880s through the mid-1890s, tennis in the American West had suffered from geography that

placed lawn tennis clubs too far apart for the best players from different cities to compete against

one another on a regular basis, by 1900 improvement in transportation infrastructure allowed for

not just greater competition among players in the West but yearly trips between “Pacific Coast

stars” and their peers along the Atlantic Coast. By 1908, the USLTA national office and Eastern

Sections sent their best players to compete in the Pacific Championship only to lose in the early

rounds to middling players by California’s standards. Lady players from California fared even

better overall than their male counterparts. In 1899 Marion Jones won the National

Championship and retained her singles title in 1902. After having won all the major tournaments

in the United States, in 1905 May Sutton, who had learned tennis on a court built by her father

on their Pasadena Ranch, traveled to England and became the first American to win

Wimbledon—man or woman. California women dominated the next decade of American tennis

with Hazel Hotchkiss of San Francisco, Florence Sutton of Pasadena, and Mary Browne of Los

Angeles beating all comers. Champions certainly came from other USLTA sections, but by the

40 Slew Hester Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, RI.

early 1920s the most competitive tennis matches in America often involved players from

Southern California versus players from the Bay Area.41

Those players both benefited from the organization of the California Tennis Associations

and improved the ability of those associations to function by enhancing the prestige of the clubs

that made up those associations. The most important of these associations in terms of money,

players, and power was the Southern California Tennis Association (SCTA). A weak version of

the SCTA had existed in an unincorporated form since 1887, but the SCTA came into its own as

an influential tennis body on May 14, 1919, when tennis enthusiasts from Los Angeles, San

Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, Imperial, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Kern, and Ventura

Counties met to elect directors for their newly incorporated nonprofit. These men had found

relying on numerous tennis clubs and local groups unwieldy in scheduling tournaments and

matches; avoiding “conflicting dates” thus proved a primary impetus in the formation of the

SCTA. 42

A more important reason soon became apparent with the shifting character of social clubs

in America. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, private groups such as the

Pacific Coast Sportsman’s Club featured a full spectrum of athletics, games, and hobbies to

attract members of high social standing regardless of their personal interests. By the early 1910s,

and even more so thanks to antebellum economic prosperity, there existed a class of nouveau

41 Growth of Lawn Tennis in California (San Francisco: Wright & Dixon, 1918), no pagination; “Stage Finals in

Tennis Tourney,” Los Angeles Herald, July 30, 1921, p. A14; “Another California Prodigy,” American Lawn Tennis

18, no. 3 (June 15, 1924): 14.

42 Articles of Incorporation of the Southern California Tennis Association, GC1145 #22140, Seaver Center for

Western History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California.

riche without the same degree of deference to genteel tradition associated with older sports

clubs. Clubs no longer operated simply as a place for the leisured to meet and develop solidarity

among their class because, just like in the economy as a whole, competition had grown fierce

between different clubs competing for members and their money. Newer clubs thus tended to

offer a more limited range of athletics and activities—albeit in a more specialized and focused

way so as to attract people passionate about one certain activity. That focus meant tennis-specific

clubs—rather than sporting clubs that happened to offer tennis—sprouted all over the country.

For example, tennis clubs formed from Azusa to Balboa to Santa Monica in Southern California.

Even with clubs that primarily focused on offering tennis to their members, a degree of diversity

of purpose existed. Whereas the Azusa Tennis Association helped members organize social

tennis matches, the Santa Monica Club Company tried to operate as a for-profit real estate

development corporation whose subscribers wanted to see the game of tennis grow in Southern

California for the mixed reasons of pecuniary gain and the pleasures found in playing the game.

In either case, older clubs such as the Pacific Sportsmen’s Club that did not adapt to the new

needs of newer potential members closed their doors by the mid-1920s.43

43 Articles of Incorporation of Pacific Coast Sportsmen’s Club, GC1145.1 #31970, Seaver Center for Western

History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California; Warren Susman, Culture

as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 2003), 78, 112; Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the

American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 130-1, 238-9, 247, 299;

Articles of Incorporation of the Azusa Tennis Association, GC1145 #10896, Seaver Center for Western History

Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California; Articles of Incorporation of the

Santa Monica Tennis Club Company, GC1145 #16140, Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles

County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California; Articles of Incorporation of the Balboa Palisades Club,

GC11415.1 #31981, Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum,

Los Angeles, California; Application for Dissolution of Pacific Coast Sportsmen’s Club, , GC1145.1 #31970, Seaver

Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California.

The Southern California Tennis Association succeeded in growing their memberships

where many other sporting and tennis clubs failed because of the overlap in that organization and

the Los Angeles Tennis Club (LATC) founded by some of the leaders of the SCTA. A.C. Way,

who helped start the Los Angeles Tennis Club, chaired the meeting that formed the Southern

California Tennis Association. Roland Reinke likewise served as a founding director of both

organizations, and the rest of the SCTA’s nine founding directors all frequented the LATC’s

courts. The Los Angeles Tennis Club got its start in October of 1920 when, with eyes toward

attracting the Davis Cup tie to Southern California, a half dozen community leaders and past

tennis champions purchased five and a half square acres of unsurveyed land just south of what

would become Santa Monica Boulevard. The Club’s first directors—Thomas Bundy, Nat

Browne, Trowbridge Hendrick, Chester Lyday, Roland Reinke, Simpson Sinsabaugh, and

Claude Wayne—were moneyed men of great influence in the national tennis scene. Bundy, for

example, had made the finals of the United States Singles Championship in 1910, won the

United States National Doubles Title in 1912, 1913, and 1914, competed in the Davis Cup, and

married May Sutton—the most successful player of her cohort. Nat Browne, himself a fine

player, and Mary Browne, America’s first real professional player who lost to Suzanne Lenglen

in the first professional tennis tour in 1926 and 1927, were siblings. As the president of the

SCTA in 1920, Browne saw the necessity for a grand tennis club rather than several smaller

ones, so he coaxed his six fellow investors into paying $11,000 for the land out of which they,

three years later, sold a third for $70,000. With those earnings the group built two courts along

Melrose and invited roughly forty local players in chartering the Club in 1925. From the

beginning, members envisioned the Los Angeles Tennis Club as a place where the game’s best

would compete. Before they built a clubhouse, locker rooms, or more courts, the Club

constructed bleachers capable of seating 530 people along Melrose Avenue. That was the

intention of the Club’s founding directors, who all thought of the LATC as both a place for

themselves and their friends to play tennis but also as a place to enhance their social reputation

and conduct business deals.44

Mixing pleasure, work, and profitable entertainment created the problem of money and

taxes, which explained why the LATC affiliated with the SCTA. In 1926 the LATC lost an

average of more than $500 a month in addition to carrying a $30,000 mortgage, a $3,100 bank

note, and $1,500 in renovation costs. The Club opened itself to new members to address these

financial liabilities, and the increased revenue that came from 96 new members in 1927 stopped

the Club from losing money—although the large debt remained. Hosting tennis tournaments was

one strategy the LATC board took to service that debt, and in 1927 the Club’s seven-court

expansion, donated lighting system, improved heating and plumbing systems, Panatrope radio

system, expanded locker room, and wood-fenced perimeter all helped to hold tennis tournaments

that made rather than lost money. The LATC directors had incorporated their club as a nonprofit, but in beginning to operate very popular tennis and social events they in fact began to turn

a “pecuniary profit.” The money that they collected that went beyond what they could use for

improving their property could thus move into the SCTA’s coffers. That organization kept some

44 Articles of Incorporation of the Southern California Tennis Association, GC1145 #22140, Seaver Center for

Western History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California; Articles of

Incorporation of the Los Angeles Tennis Club, GC1145 #23321, Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los

Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California; “Nat Browne a President,” American Lawn

Tennis 14, no. 3 (June 15, 1920): 127; A.C.B. Gray, “Highlights of the Los Angeles Tennis Club,” Pacific Southwest

Program, 1930, Los Angeles Tennis Club Archive.

and filtered the rest back into the LATC bearing the more secure not-for-profit imprimatur of the

SCTA whose charter explicitly championed the growth of tennis in Southern California

independent of the movement of money into the game in that part of the country. That

arrangement gave the leaders of tennis in Southern California secure finances and a great degree

of flexibility in moving money around to do the maximum amount of good for the game in their

territory. The LATC could stay a “social club” and avoid California franchise tax, while the

SCTA had a sugar-tree to shake any time their funds ran low.45

SCTA directors did not personally profit from money in the game of tennis, but they did

want their tournaments to turn profits at the same time they railed against the touring

professionals Suzanne Lenglen, Vincent Richards, Bill Tilden, and later Donald Budge. In a

quorum held at the California Club in Los Angeles, board members explicitly reaffirmed their

commitment to amateur tennis by way of controlling the sport in ten Southern California

counties. That amendment only expanded their official influence over tennis by one county from

their initial chartering fifteen years earlier; however, the effect would prove far greater, because,

with the forthcoming construction of so many courts in Southern California, the supervision they

asserted essentially amounted to “control of the game of tennis” not just up the West Coast but to

a growing degree the county as a whole. SCTA Directors reinforced their regulatory capacity by

lobbying the USLTA national office for not only district but sectional status by which the SCTA

45 Board of Directors to Los Angeles Tennis Club Members, February 1, 1928, Folder 7, Box 17, Collection 662,

Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California;

Articles of Incorporation, Los Angeles Tennis Club, Folder 93306, State of California Business Incorporation

Records Collection, California State Archives, Sacramento, California; John Campbell to Los Angeles Tennis Club,

May 27, 1952, Los Angeles Tennis Club, Folder 93306, State of California Business Incorporation Records

Collection, California State Archives, Sacramento, California.

could exercise greater autonomy throughout the year and marshal more votes for the national

Association’s annual meeting. By the mid-1930s the SCTA had grown into the most robust

tennis corporation—either for profit or non-profit—in the country short of the national office of

the USLTA.46

That growth did not mean that everyone was welcome. Patricia Henry Yeoman, a

longtime LATC and SCTA member, noted that G. Allan Hancock, Thomas Bundy, Alphonzo

Bell, Harold Braly, William Garland, and Simpson Sinsabaugh—all important early members of

the LATC and SCTA—developed some of the most important real estate throughout Los

Angeles County, places like the “Miracle Mile” and Bel-Air Estates. These men thus well

understood that exclusivity and status made money in both real estate and in social club

memberships. They made sure only the right kind of people played on the LATC’s courts.

Members barred Jews from joining and ostracized Jewish players who occasionally competed in

SCTA tournaments hosted by the Club. The courts and especially the reputation of the Club’s

prestigious tournaments—which attracted important players, officials, and promoters from the

East Coast—could not be sullied by people from outside the proper sort, maintained the 260

voting members in 1929 who were all wealthy, white, male, and Protestants or Catholic.47

Members and Club policies across the country discriminated against African Americans

in even more explicit ways. A case garnering international press coverage came in 1929 when

46 Articles of Incorporation of the Southern California Tennis Association, GC1145 #22140, Seaver Center for

Western History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California; Members’

Resolution Approved Directors’ Resolution for Amendment of Articles of Incorporation, Southern California Tennis

Association, Folder 90460, State of California Business Incorporation Records Collection, California State

Archives, Sacramento, California.

47 Patricia Yeomans, History and Heritage of the Los Angeles Tennis Club 1920-1995 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles

Tennis Club, 1995), 3, 12; Tinling, Love and Faults, 161-3; Gonzales, Man with a Racket, 47.

USLTA officials barred Gerald L. Norman, Jr. and the African American junior champion

Reginald Weir from participating in the National Junior Indoor Championships held at the New

York City Seventh Armory. Under pressure from Arthur E. Francis of the New York Tennis

Association, the USLTA revealed they excluded the two players because of race, citing a need

for separate tournaments administered by the USLTA for white players and the American Tennis

Association for African American competitors. At first, the response left NAACP directors

confused as both Weir and Norman had competed in USLTA-sanctioned matches before. What

they quickly realized was that the December tournament the players tried to enter had national

visibility at a time when the USLTA looked to increase the popularity of the game in the South.

“Jim Crow Tournaments are not National,” the NAACP stated in a press release that essentially

called the USLTA un-American, class snobs, and scared that an African American player might

win the tournament. In spite of the protests, the USLTA continued to rely upon their by-laws

only allowing players belonging to designated clubs to enter the national tournaments. The local

enforcement of race and class kept African Americans out of the biggest tournaments during the

twenties, thirties, and forties at the very same time that women continued to participate fully as

tennis players if not as the directors of the amateur associations and private clubs.48

48 Robert W. Bagnall, NAACP to Edward B. Moss, Executive Sec. USLTA, Dec. 24, 1929, NAACP Administrative

Files, Reel 1, Frame 455; Arthur E. Francis Edward B. Mose, Dec. 26, 1929, Frame 459; “U.S. Lawn Tennis

Association Admits Color Discrimination,” Dec. 27 Press Release, Frame 467; Albert E. Mac Dowell, Assistant

Executive Secretary, American Tennis Association, to Robert W. Bagnall, NAACP Dir. of Branches, Dec. 28, 1929,

Frame 473; Arthur E. Francis to Bagnall, Dec. 28, 1929, Frame 475; Dir. of Branches, NAACP to Arthur E. Francis,

Dec. 31, 1929, Frame 481; “National Negro Aid Body Answers Lawn Tennis Association,” Dec. 30 Press Release,

Frame 477; Holcombe Ward to Lloyd W. Brooke, August 3, 1943, Box 8, Folder 4.14.1, Baker Collection, ITHF,

Newport, Rhode Island; “Memorandum for us at Conference with Alastair B. Martin,” Box 8, Folder 4.14.1, Baker

Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island; Yeomans, History and Heritage, 13.

Just as Suzanne Lenglen pioneered professional tennis, so too was a woman behind the

first true commercial tennis tournament. Elizabeth “Bunny” Ryan grew up in Anaheim,

California, but spent most of her playing career living in England, where she partnered with

Suzanne Lenglen for five Wimbledon doubles titles between 1919 and 1925. Visiting her

Southern California home in 1925, Ryan met with Los Angeles Express publisher Edward

Dickson about organizing a tennis tournament in the area to rival that of the major

championships in Europe and the east coast of the United States. Dickson thought the idea could

boost the reputation of Los Angeles both in America and abroad if he convinced top international

talent to attend. A dozen men agreed with him. Thus was born the Tennis Patrons Association of

Southern California, whose purpose was “to bring Southern California national recognition as a

tennis center.” The Association’s directors explicitly saw the running of a highly profitable

tennis tournament with international caliber players as the means to achieve that end. The money

such an event earned would then go entirely back into Southern California tennis rather than get

spread around to other parts of the country, and that focusing of funds on junior development in

and around Los Angeles would repay the initial investment of their own money and their own

time by increasing the number of talented players in the area and thus give the Southern

California Tennis Association more pull at the national level. With the help of the top player in

the country and the bane of existence for the USLTA National Office, Bill Tilden, who attended

the Tennis Patrons Association’s first formal meeting at the Los Angeles Tennis Club in late

1926, the directors planned the first Pacific-Southwest Tournament.49

49 “The Pacific Southwest Story,” loose Pacific Southwest Tournament Program page, no date, Folder 7, Box 17,

Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los

In designing their stadium, the LATC had one model example. In August 1923, the West

Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, completed their horseshoe-shaped stadium court

designed to host the United States National Singles Championship. That event had moved from

its first venue at the Newport Hotel and Casino to the West Side Tennis Club in 1915. Even with

World War I, the thousands who attended the tournament far outstripped available seating and

required the construction of temporary bleachers for every year’s event. By 1920 the event had

proven successful enough to require either a change of venue or an expansion. Club directors and

USLTA officials chose the latter course of action and temporarily moved the national

championships while construction of the 14,000-seat stadium and renovation of the West Side

Tennis grounds took place until completed in 1924. The Club sold five- to ten-year subscriptions

priced at $110 per seat with a goal of filling 1,500 of the stadium’s box seats on a pre-sale basis.

The USLTA and the West Side Tennis Club entered into an agreement that designated the Club

as the host for the Men’s National Singles Championship, the Men’s National Doubles

Championships, and the Davis Cup Final Matches. That contract facilitated the West Side Tennis

Club’s successful capital campaign to raise $150,000 for improving their facility’s amenities.

Angeles, California; Isaac Jones to Chester Johnson, May 24, 1948, Folder 7, Box 17, Collection 662, Edward D.

Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; Minutes of the

Organization Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Tennis Patrons Association of Southern California, March 2,

1928, Folder 7, Box 17, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of

California at Los Angeles, California; Articles of Association of the Tennis Patrons Association of Southern

California, September 4, 1927, Folder 7, Box 17, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred Young

Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; William Erie Fowler, “Tennis Patrons

Association of Southern California,” typescript, Folder 7, Box 17, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers,

Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California.

West Side became the first tennis club in the United States to earn a profit from a two-week

tournament alone rather than an auditorium filled with activities the rest of the year.50

The same directors in the Southern California Tennis Association served as officers in the

Tennis Patrons Association of Southern California in addition to belonging to the Los Angeles

Tennis Club. Those intersecting relationships meant that the Pacific-Southwest Championship

got both the royal treatment from the host venue but also remained insulated from the direction

of the USLTA national office, which looked to secure a sizable portion of the tournament

revenue for themselves. Autonomy came with the cost of less financial support from other parts

of the country when raising capital to get the tournament off the ground, but the LATC members

and their partners solved that problem by selling box seats as the West Side Tennis Club had

done. Given that the incentive for people to buy tickets in advance at Forest Hills existed because

patrons knew they were guaranteed to see the top events on the tennis calendar there, what could

the Pacific-Southwest offer that no other tournament could? LATC President William Henry

decided that people would buy expensive tournament boxes if he attracted the top players in the

world. He suspected correctly that a combination of Southern California’s beautiful weather and

beautiful people could convince the international stars to travel if they received free travel.

Henry personally visited France to gain assurance from the French Tennis Federation that three

of the famous “four musketeers”—Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet, Jean Borotra, and Rene

Lacoste—would play the Pacific-Southwest. The LATC president also brought top international

players from England, Italy, and Australia in addition to America’s best. To lure all these

50 Robert Minton, Forest Hills: An Illustrated History (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1975), 81, 105, 108-9; “In

a Short Time it Will be Too Late,” American Lawn Tennis 18, no. 6 (July 15, 1924): 321; “Refreshment Charges at

Forest Hills,” American Lawn Tennis 18, no. 8 (September 1, 1924): 410.

players, the Tennis Patrons Association agreed to spare no expense during the players’ stay in

Los Angeles. Members housed some players in their own homes, they hired cars to drive players

around Hollywood, they bestowed lavish banquets and dances, and they put some players and

their families up in fine accommodations such as the Ambassador Hotel. The hospitality

blatantly violated the USLTA’s amateur by-laws and stance against money in the game.51

Keeping top players happy helped fill the stands, however. More importantly, it made for

a successful tournament. The pricey Championship Court renovation that expanded the

Grandstand to “800 seats with backs” came off well thanks to the pre-sale of the courtside boxes.

Standard bleacher seats sold out at $2.20 for weekdays and $3.30 for the weekend matches. The

Club’s proximity to Hollywood Studios added a further element of glamour because the Tennis

Patrons Association went above and beyond to make sure top movie talent attended. What better

place to put the stars than in the dozen or so private boxes LATC directors shared courtside. In

the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s anyone who came to the grounds of the Los Angeles

Tennis Club during the last week in September would find the best tennis players in the world

watched by the biggest movie stars in the world. British champion Fred Perry fondly recalled

51 Sydney Wailes to Edward Dickson, August 4, 1928, Folder 18, Box 5, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson

Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; E. Avery McCarthy to

David Blankenhorn, September 18, 1928, Folder 18, Box 5, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred

Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; E. Avery McCarthy to Edward

Dickinson, September 19, 1928, Folder 18, Box 5, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred Young

Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; E. Avery McCarthy to Edward Dickinson,

September 20, 1928, Folder 18, Box 5, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library,

University of California at Los Angeles, California.

watching actors and actresses show up in the stands at the Beverley Hills located courts wearing

set makeup before returning to the nearby studios to shoot a new scene.52

The movie and sports entertainment worlds blended further when film stars reciprocated

the favor. They often brought tennis players to backstage sets and glamorous post-production

parties. Top players such as Perry played social matches with top actors such as Ben Lyon,

Charlie Farrell, Fredric March, and Robert Montgomery. On occasion Hollywood talent such as

Theodore Von Eltz even entered the Pacific-Southwest Championships. All of that intermingling

of entertainment talent further enhanced the regional, national, and international reputation of the

West Coast’s great tennis venue.53

Tennis fun in the California sun made a lot of money for the Los Angeles Tennis Club,

the Tennis Patron’s Association of Southern California, and the Southern California Tennis

Association. Perry Jones and Edward Dickinson, variously the treasurers and secretaries of all

three of those organizations at different times, kept meticulous notes on the interaction between

these organizations. Some of the records that survive are a complete accounting of the Tennis

Patrons Association and the Pacific-Southwest Tournament interspersed with partial records for

both the Southern California Tennis Association and the Los Angeles Tennis Club between

52 New Seating Diagram for the Los Angeles Tennis Club, 1928., Folder 18, Box 5, Collection 662, Edward D.

Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; PacificSouthwest Championships Ticket Order Form, 1928, Folder 18, Box 5, Collection 662, Edward D. Dickson Papers,

Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California; Fred Perry, My Story (London:

Hutchinson & Co., 1934), 208-11. Kay Francis, Gloria Swanson, Joan Bennett, Lilian Tashman, Bette Davis, Helen

Twelvetrees, Lupe Velez, Norma Shearer, Concstance Bennett, Carole Lombard, Madge Evans, Mary Pickford,

Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, William Powell, Ben Lyon, Charlie Farrell, Edmund Lowe, Theodore Von Eltz, the

Marx Brothers, Frederic March, Walter Huston, Robert Montgomery, Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, and

Ralph Graves all made the tournament memorable to American and international players and fans alike.

53 Perry, My Story, 208-11.

January 19, 1931, to December 21, 1937: disbursements routinely found their way to top players

such as Don Budge and Gene Mako; accounts receivable revealed the tens of thousands of

dollars in profit the Pacific-Southwest made even during the Great Depression; and audits

proportioned half of those profits to the Southern California Tennis Association, a quarter to the

Tennis Patrons of Southern California, and a quarter to the Los Angeles Tennis Club with

nothing left over for the USLTA national office. Just as if not more important than the total

amount of money raised by the Pacific-Southwest Tournament was the amount of that money

that remained in Southern California to develop tennis players there. The coordination among

these different organizations shielded most of that money from finding its way back to the

USLTA in the form of assessments the national office required of district and sectional

associations. Tennis in Southern California during the thirties thus undercut the authority of the

USLTA national office in terms of making amateur policy and functioning as the central banker

of tennis in the United States.54

Without access to the USLTA national office financial records, the exact amount of those

actions is hard to measure. But suffice to say for poorer district and sectional associations,

particularly in the South, Midwest, and West, the money sent to New York every year was not

insignificant. Pointing that out is not to suggest that the USLTA national office squandered all

the money they received from district and sectional associations; however, a close look at the

historical record, at least in the case of Southern California, produced dollar for dollar better

54 Minutes and Financial Statements of the Tennis Patrons Association of Southern California and Pacific Southwest

Sectional Tennis Championships, bound in large red volume, no folder number, Box 35, Collection 662, Edward D.

Dickson Papers, Alfred Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles, California.

results in terms of the total number of new players to the game and the total number of top

performing tournament players than a more centralized pooling of resources.55

The success of the Southern California Tennis Association and the Southern California

Tennis Patrons Association sparked imitators across the state and the nation. In addition to the

names of the directors, the Incorporation Records of the Tennis Patrons Association of San

Diego and the Tennis Patrons Association of Santa Monica shared the same desire to “promote

tennis” and much of the same language with the SCTA’s, TPASCTA, and LATC’s articles.

What these other organizations lacked was the coordination between the amateur association and

a host club, and that separation initially cost the Tennis Patrons Association of San Diego the

California tax exempt status they wanted. The State of California based their tax policy rulings in

part on the Federal Tax Code that differentiated between “activities more recreational than

educational” when a corporation sought non-profit status as an educational institution. More

specifically, a prior tax law case had ruled against the West Side Tennis Club of Forest Hills,

New York, who sought tax exemption without success because in hosting the U.S. National

Championship, the Club made a great deal more income from non-members than from

assessments and monthly dues from members. With a few changes in language and accounting

but without any substantive changes to their incorporation records, the State of California’s Tax

55 As a fifteen-year member of the United States Tennis Association (formerly the USLTA), I made an appointment

to view these and other historic records—Executive Committee meeting minutes, for example—of the USLTA

currently held at the USTA national headquarters in White Plains, New York. A lawyer turned me away in the

parking lot without seeing any of these records, despite asking the archivist for an appointment. At the time of this

writing, one scholar has seen these records as part of writing an internal history of the USTA for an Association

anniversary. Half a century ago, one other scholar writing a dissertation in physical education was granted a few

days access to some USTA committee meeting minutes—though seemingly not association finances. See Joanna

Davenport, “The History and Interpretation of Amateurism in the United States Lawn Tennis Association,” PhD

Diss., Ohio State University, 1966.

100

Board reversed their earlier decision and classed the Tennis Patrons Association of San Diego

“exclusively as a recreational club” and thus qualified for tax exemptions. The willingness of the

State of California to forego taxing tennis clubs compared to States such as New York who did,

created a climate for tennis in Southern California better than the sunny weather. Tennis clubs

that did not have a special tax arrangement faced a far greater chance of financial ruin than those

that did.56

Previous work examining the amateur and professional tennis in the first half of the

twentieth century celebrated the “Code of Honor” that led these men under the direction of their

national association to create a “Golden Age” for lawn tennis.57 In reality, competition among

rather than harmony between the USLTA sections and regional associations attracted large sums

of money into the game at the same time these same groups claimed loyalty to amateurism.

Opening that spigot watered seeds that later sprouted into a robust crop of professional players

who tipped the balance away from amateurism and toward professionalism. Tennis officials and

tennis amateur associations from California stimulated that process in that they presented the

strongest challenge to the Northeast and mid-Atlantic tennis establishment. By synergizing the

nonprofit organizations of the Southern California Tennis Association, the Southern California

56 Articles of Incorporation, Tennis Patrons of Santa Monica, Folder 237442, State of California Business

Incorporation Records Collection, California State Archives, Sacramento, California; Articles of Incorporation,

Tennis Patrons Association of San Diego, Folder 281433, State of California Business Incorporation Records

Collection, California State Archives, Sacramento, California; John Campbell to Tennis Patrons Association of San

Diego, August 4, 1953, Tennis Patrons Association of San Diego, Folder 281433, State of California Business

Incorporation Records Collection, California State Archives, Sacramento, California; John Campbell to Tennis

Patrons Association of San Diego, December 23, 1953, Tennis Patrons Association of San Diego, Folder 281433,

State of California Business Incorporation Records Collection, California State Archives, Sacramento, California;

Donald Pond to Bondholders, March 15, 1947, Folder 4, Box 34, MSS-30, Daniel Cowan Jackling Papers, Stanford

University Library and Special Collections, Palo Alto.

57 E. Digby Baltzell, Sporting Gentlemen, 34-35, 139, 152, 166, 221, 311, 392.

101

Tennis Patrons Association, and the Los Angeles Tennis Club, men such as Perry Jones laid the

groundwork for what would became the most important place for tennis excellence in the world

by 1940. Ironically, to make that happen, men who preached amateurism through and through

practiced professionalism in their tennis dealings when they effectively paid top players to attend

the Pacific-Southwest Tournament. The big crowds those players drew made that event into a

highly profitable venture whose funds Jones, in his positions as the treasurer-secretarytournament-director of the SCTA, SCTPA, and LATC, disbursed throughout the interlocked

organizations. Southern California thus developed the most robust player development program

in the world, thanks in no small part to monetizing the amateur game.

An even larger movement of largess into the amateur game of tennis came at about the

same time when the federal government built thousands of public tennis courts across the

country as one part of a broad initiative to develop the nation’s recreational infrastructure. Again,

Southern California was the epicenter.

102

CHAPTER THREE

THE RECREATIONAL REVOLUTION

Historians have written more on the New Deal than on any other subject in the history of

the twentieth-century United States. Their scholarship has generally addressed one of the three

Rs: relief, recovery, or reform.1 Those formulations go far to explain Franklin Delano

Roosevelt’s (FDR) ambitious programs to revive and reshape the nation faced with

unprecedented economic and social challenges; but in some ways and with some projects,

revolution is the R that more accurately analyzes what New Deal money and work actually did.

Nowhere did that appear in starker terms than in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), where a

congressionally created corporation electrified and industrialized an entire region and brought

millions of Americans out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The scale, the

creativity, and the longevity of the TVA has prompted historians to consider the public and

private cooperation that electrified much of Appalachia and the upper-South the best and the

boldest of what the New Deal did in America. The same grandness and uniqueness, however,

also makes the TVA a suspect revolution in that similar public and private ventures did not

spread widely across the country, and where such joint ventures did take place, their scales did

not approach that of the TVA.2

1 Alan Brinkley, “Prosperity, Depression, and War, 1920-1945,” in Eric Foner ed., The New American History

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 143; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.

(New York: Vintage, 1955), 308.

2 David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2005), 148-9.

103

Revolutions that stick tend more often to take place in quieter ways and in subtler places.

Contemporary scholars understand in great detail the policies of New Deal agency leaders and

the big projects those agencies produced, but the processes of smaller projects remain

comparatively unexamined. One largely ignored project addressed athletics and sports in cities

rather than in the better understood state parks, national monuments, rural recreation, or cultural

leisure initiatives historians have noted.3

During the thirties city dwellers in the United States exercised their voting strength over

the rest of the nation for really the first time.4 One of the forms that political power took was that

of play. In cities across the country, a recreational revolution swept the nation between 1933 and

1941. The athletic fields, courts, pools, and playgrounds built in American cities permanently

altered the sporting opportunities of tens of millions of underprivileged youths and working class

adults. Unlike rural areas with relatively weak governments and comparatively few active

reformers, cities already housed dozens of reform activists, civic organizations, municipal

departments, county officials, and state agencies working to build new athletic infrastructures

and launch new sports initiatives before federal money and federal labor began flowing into

recreational projects in substantive quantities.5 That movement of dollars and workers created

conflict among different players in the field of recreation, but more lastingly, it democratized

3 Phoebe Cutler, The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 10-12; Douglas

Brinkley, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 217,

222-3, 589-626, 628.

4 Samuel P. Hays, “From the History of the City to the History of Urbanized Society,” Journal of Urban History 19,

no. 4 (August 1993): 3-24.

5 Susan Currell, The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in the Great Depression

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 15, 50-51.

104

sports to people who previously had been shut out. In the sport of tennis that democratization

undermined the authority that United States Lawn Tennis Officials and private lawn tennis club

members exercised over the game by allowing both more people to adopt the sport and more

competitors from diverse backgrounds to play tennis than during the previous half-century of the

game’s existence. Those new players in turn spurred the further erosion of amateurism in the

sport.

The recreational revolution took place nationwide and built new or repurposed old

facilities for every major sport in America. Each game mattered to the participants of each

particular pastime, but the sport of tennis was the most transformed. No other game so

exemplified how the recreational revolution opened a sport to individuals so clearly interdicted

from it before. Furthermore, the sheer scale of this revolution means analysis of the nation as a

whole and an accounting of every sport would necessitate a focus on the policy of agency

leadership rather than the actual projects and the everyday people those projects impacted.

Nowhere did the recreational revolution appear more conspicuous than in Los Angeles.6 That

acuteness in the minds of recreational reformers owed to Southern California’s burgeoning

population that led up to and extended through World War II, along with the great diversity of

those new to the Los Angeles County, and, most importantly, the high number of unsupervised

youth who needed positive and controlled recreational outlets for their delinquent and potentially

dangerous energies.

6 The only city by which comparison is really possible is New York City: first, because that was the only city whose

Federal and State sponsored funding matched (and actually exceeded) Los Angeles; second, because New York City

is the only other city for which a work of detailed scholarship exists, facilitating comparison. See Robert Caro, The

Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 453, 455-6, 508-9, 512-3, 828-

105

The revolution in recreation was one of the ways in which New Dealers looked to

channel the energy of frustrated youths and young adults away from unrest and violence.

Whether philosophers and social scientists today can agree to disagree about the catharsis of

sports did not matter to policy makers in the 1930s because they believed—a view that stretched

to some degree all the way back to colonial Anglo-North America—that athletics and fun

functioned as a safety valve for societal conflict.7 In presidential politics, however, the

recreational revolution FDR initiated saw first iteration in Roosevelt’s cousin, the former

President Theodore Roosevelt (TR), whose signage of the Antiquities Act of 1906 capped a

career of devotion to the conservation of American land, albeit primarily rural land, for

recreational purposes. His son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., inherited his father’s commitment and

put that into practice by chairing the Joint Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands

(JCRS), presenting ongoing findings at the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation that first

met in 1924.8

Under President Calvin Coolidge, the JCRS recruited organizations such as the Amateur

Athletic Association to membership in order to coordinate the nation’s recreation activities.

JCRS also mailed surveys, collected research, and issued reports on the extent of government

land ownership and the public’s use of that land for recreation. In 1926 that land amounted to

7 David Vanderwerken and Spencer Wertz eds., Sport Inside Out: Readings in Literature and Philosophy (Fort

Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 6; Nancy Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor

in Early Anglo-America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 16, 31.

8 Meeting Program 1924, Folder, Project Programs, Statement of Objectives, Etc., Box1, General Files of the

Executive Secretary, 1924-29, Records of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220

Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, National Archives and Records Administration,

College Park, Maryland (NARA-II).

106

183 million acres in the public domain, of which National Forests constituted 160 million acres,

National Parks ten million acres, with the remainder game preserves and Indian reservations.

Committee members channeled the spirit of Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1832 and the Forest

Reserve Act of 1891 that the threat of private interests required that the “Government should be a

permanent lawn owner for public benefit.” They reported that by 1925 California saw the

greatest number of people by state using public recreation land—six million a year.9

Throughout its lifespan the JCRS prioritized recreation in the countryside over recreation

in the city. Committee members saw city parks and playgrounds as a municipal matter rather

than a federal one. Likewise, bigger parks and forest preserves needed county and state efforts so

that the Federal land ownership and development efforts could concentrate on “the remaining

wilderness of America.” In 1924 more than twelve million Americans had visited their country’s

federally protected wilderness land. Conference attendees recognized that number was a pittance

compared to the tens of millions more urban dwellers who needed recreation lands within and

close to their cities. But the fractured nature of city governance, political machinery, and

competing private interests frustrated the Municipal Committee, which could issue no concrete

policies for urban recreation compared to committees such as that addressing Federal Land

Policy, which put together a set of clear guidelines for the safekeeping of land for public

9 AAU Application, Folder, Questionnaires Executed by Member Organizations, Box 2, General Files of the

Executive Secretary, 1924-29, Records of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220,

Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, NARA-II; Minutes of the Meeting of the Joint

Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Land, April 28, 1926, no folder number, Box 38, Records of the

National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions,

and Boards, NARA-II; The Recreational Resources of the Federal Lands (draft Report) by the Joint Committee

Representing the American Forestry Association and the National Parks Association at the Request of the National

Conference on Outdoor Recreation…, p. 139, No Folder Number, Box 39, Records of the National Conference on

Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, NARA-II.

107

recreation. In the mid-twenties Federal government coordination of urban recreation proved so

unworkable that, unlike other efforts undertaken by recreational reformers, JCRS members felt

they had no choice but to discharge their efforts at recreational expansion within cities by

delegating future coordination to the Playground and Recreation Association of the National

Recreation Congress.10

On May 8, 1929, the Executive Committee of the National Conference on Outdoor

Recreation held their twenty-fourth meeting and dissolved the agency. Members congratulated

themselves on the ten major recreational and land use studies they had undertaken, but they

noted that four years of work had proven that top-down coordination of recreational planning

proved unworkable given the strong influence private associations such as the Playground and

Recreation Association exercised on local policies, where reports actually became recreational

facilities. The inventorying of the nation’s recreational infrastructure had found both deficiencies

in that infrastructure and no way to proceed with actual reform on the ground.11

10 Recreation Use (typescript), p. 195, No Folder Number, Box 39, Records of the National Conference on Outdoor

Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, NARA-II; Field

Secretary Philip R. Hough to Arthur C. Ringland, November 4, 1925, Folder, Act of June 14, 1926, Federal Land

Folders, Box 23, Records of the Joint Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands, 1924-26, Records of the

National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions,

and Boards, NARA-II; “National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, Report of the Committee on Federal Land

Policy, May 1924,” Folder, First Conference Committee Report on Federal Land Policy, Folder, Act of June 14,

1926, Federal Land Folders, Box 23, Records of the Joint Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands,

1924-26, Records of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary

Committees, Commissions, and Boards, NARA-II; Memorandum for the Committee on the Organization of the

National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, Unlabeled Folder [fifth in box], Box 10, Records of the Joint

Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands, 1924-26, Records of the National Conference on Outdoor

Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, NARA-II.

11 Extract from the Minutes of the Twenty-fourth Meeting of the Executive Committee, May 8, 1929, unlabeled

folder [fifth in box], Box 10, Records of the Joint Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands, 1924-26,

Records of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, 1924-1929, RG220, Records of Temporary

Committees, Commissions, and Boards, NARA-II .

108

The nationwide pattern of studying recreation without actually building new facilities for

urban recreation continued under President Herbert Hoover, whose administration further

bureaucratized the study of recreation spearheaded by the JCRS. Hoover is seldom remembered

as a proponent of national infrastructure when compared to the achievements of either his

Roosevelt predecessor or his Roosevelt successor, but that comparison overshadows the reality

that Hoover helped build major projects such as the Boulder Dam and the Los Angeles

Aqueduct. His even more obscure recreational reform legacy owes to the fact that he did little to

actually act on the recreational studies he commissioned when economic collapse forced his

hand to more pressing priorities. That said, mere weeks before the market plummeted on Black

Tuesday, top social policy researchers from across the country met under Hoover’s direction to

sketch out the findings they would publish four years later titled Recent Social Trends in the

United States.

In the report’s second volume, J. F. Steiner authored an influential essay titled

“Recreation and Leisure Time Activities.” Steiner opened with a frank acknowledgement that the

public’s burgeoning interest in “competitive sport” previously enjoyed by only the leisured class

posed a particular challenge from a recreational planning point of view because there simply

were not enough facilities near population centers to meet that need. Where there were facilities

for sports in cities, coordination among private associations, civic organizations, public schools,

municipal government departments, state bureaucracies, and ultimately the federal government

12 White House Remarks at Boulder Dam, November 12, 1932, Press Release 719, Box 1186, Presidential Papers

Press Relations Series, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa; Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert

Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1992), 214; Report of the President’s Research

Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 1 (York, PA: The Maple Press, 1933),

109

lacked optimal cooperation. Imperfect coordination certainly seemed unavoidable because of the

change in belief among urban planners and landscape architects from the “horticultural” woods

and promenades of the nineteenth-century city parks to the “recreational” or “parks as public

playgrounds” of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Put into practice, that change in

mindset created a huge upswing in playground and recreational park construction across the

country with towns whose population exceeded 30,000 people raising their park land from

76,566 acres in 1907 by nearly two-and-a-half times to 258,697 acres in 1930. That rise outpaced

nationwide urbanization during the same years by roughly 65 percent, but the construction of

parks and playgrounds between 1900 and the 1930 still underserved the recreational needs of the

county’s urban dwellers in large part because those needs had long gone unmet before 1900 and

by the twenties, demand had simply spilled over. By the start of the Great Depression, three out

of four cities in America did not claim a single playground. When averaged across the country’s

population, those findings meant there were three thousand city children per playground.

The paucity of adequate recreation space across the nation’s cities owed first and

foremost to a host of specific political and commercial complications similar in character but

unique in kind to each municipality and not to the lack of ideas from recreational reformers. The

most important group of these reformers had first organized in April of 1906 in Washington D.C

to lobby President Theodore Roosevelt and Congress to give them space to build safe and

supervised playgrounds for children in order to keep the kids off the capital’s streets. Their

success in those efforts led to the formation of the organization most responsible for public

13 Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 2

(York, PA: The Maple Press, 1933), 912-7.

110

athletics and leisure activities in cities across America prior to the WPA—the Playground and

Recreation Association of America. 14 The association’s officers included Progressive Era

reformers Luther Gulick of New York City, Henry B. F. MacFarland of Washington, D.C., Jane

Addams of Chicago, and Joseph Lee of Boston, along with honorary members Theodore

Roosevelt, Jacob Riis, and Baron E. Von Schenkendorff from Germany. With the nation’s major

cities represented and connections to both the White House—President Roosevelt wrote an

introduction to the group’s inaugural issue—and across the Atlantic, the Playground Association

enjoyed an auspicious beginning. From the start the Association argued that playgrounds forced

children to learn “self-government” and therefore sustained democracy from generation to

generation. To create citizens, reformers such as Joseph Lee believed in a high degree of

paternalism where on the playgrounds, at-risk youths could learn from and imitate adults of the

highest moral caliber. The organization’s early actions focused on the “study” of and advocacy

for urban recreation rather than actually politicking to create new recreational spaces in cities. A

consultancy capacity therefore let the association solicit donations with a modest budget of

$20,000 a year in mind.15 That budget rose steadily over the coming years, totaling $380,358 in

1928. New initiatives such as the National Recreation School, opened in 1927, secured sizable

portions of the budget, but the primary functions of the organization remained fundamentally

14 Playground Association of America Executive Committee, The Playground 1, no. 1 (April 1907): 5. For more on

the transatlantic exchange of recreational ideas and actions as part broader progressive era reform networks, see

Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1998), 135, 137, 206, 274, 369, 380, 383, 455, 506.

15 Playground Association of America Executive Committee, 5-10.

111

unchanged after two decades; research, publishing, advocacy, and consulting were where the

association spent its resources.16

Research gave recreational reformers across the country a very clear view of what

municipal recreation systems should resemble. First and foremost, gone was the City Beautiful

Movement dichotomy of “passive recreation” versus “active recreation,” because parks were

places for any form of recreation so long as supervision existed. Second, every citywide

recreation system needed three essential ingredients: playgrounds for young children close to

schools; parks with athletic fields for communities throughout the city; larger landscaped

preserves linked together across the metropolis by parkways. Third, population density

determined the recreational needs of a community down to the square foot. For example, blocks

of bungalows needed 3 percent of land area devoted to playgrounds, while rows of duplexes

required 5 percent of land area for playgrounds. Every one-mile neighborhood also needed

athletic fields of between twenty and thirty acres. Zooming from the neighborhood to the city

level, such plans equated to one acre of park and playground space for every one hundred

residential acres. Except for Minneapolis, major population centers did not meet those standards.

The densest neighborhoods also tended to have the fewest park and playgrounds acres per

person; yet, as reformers pointed out, land in those neighborhoods also tended to cost too much

to secure enough for a playground, let alone a park.17

16 Playground and Recreation Association of America, Incorporated Comparative Statement – General Budget and

Expenditures, Folder [no number] Playground and Recreation Association, Box 6, John Winant Papers, Franklin D.

Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

17 J. B. Williams, “Recreation and City Planning,” [reprint] Southern City, December, 1931, [no page numbers],

Folder no number] National Recreation Association, Box 51, John G. Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt

Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

112

Reformers thus wanted to focus on partnering with real estate developers to bring parks

and playgrounds, either through the donation of land outright or for a no-cost rental arrangement

that allowed for play supervision by a third party on land owned by the developer, to the

explosion of new low-density subdivisions on the edges of cities. The National Playground and

Recreation Association and like-minded groups wrote off entire older urban core neighborhoods

whose density—by the reformers’ own standards—demanded more recreation space, in favor of

advocating for playgrounds and parks in new low-density places. They reached that decision

because they believed private developers would deliver on promises to build scores of parks and

playgrounds in places with few spaces dedicated to recreation. The results were modest: 134

recreational spaces donated by developers to municipal governments; 72 recreational spaces

owned by developers on which third-party recreation programs could take place; and eight

recreation spaces kept in trust for the public’s use. Recreational reformers had proven themselves

fully capable of identifying a lack of recreational spaces and advocating for new parks and

playgrounds, but during the first three decades of the twentieth century, studies went only so far

in moving city governments to action.18

The stock market crash of 1929 further undermined the effectiveness of advocacy for

recreational reform—at least until the end of the Hoover administration. President Hoover

struggled to fully grasp the degree of the country’s economic downturn, not to mention the bold

strokes of policy needed to slow the collapse. His best attempt came with legislative action in

1932, which created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) that, among other purposes,

18 Ibid.

113

tried to bolster the building of public works. In what would turn out to be the last months of his

office, President Hoover’s RFC built few of the public works promised. Under his successor,

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the RFC became a giant piggybank for loans taken out by public worksminded New Deal agencies such as the Federal Public Works Administration.19

Roosevelt won the presidency on November 8, 1932. Democrats controlled both Houses

of Congress. Together they wasted no time resuscitating the nation. While the president did not

put recreation near the top of his priorities during his famed “first hundred days,” six months into

his first term he had initiated and ushered through the legislature some of the law that laid the

foundation for the recreational revolution: Congress passed the act that created the Civilian

Conservation Corps on March 31; on May 12 the Federal Emergency Relief Act passed; and on

June 16 the Public Works Administration and the National Recovery Administration became

realities with the passage of the National Industry Recovery Act. Most of these agencies as

Roosevelt’s advisers and Congressional staffers conceived them afforded little in the way of

recreation because the concern centered on the employment generated by large infrastructure

projects such as dams and bridges. 20 That began to change first in 1933 and 1934 with the shortlived Civil Works Administration and more thoroughly beginning in 1935, when the Works

Progress Administration came into existence. Together these two agencies claimed credit for the

construction of 30,000 parks, playgrounds, sports fields, and swimming pools.21

19 Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1952), 98, 107, 154, 162, 467.

20 Anthony Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), ix-x, xvii, 84-85.

21 Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: The Free Press, 2011), 164, 421.

114

A look through Roosevelt’s personal files shows that while in office Roosevelt preferred

to delegate recreational reform to trusted subordinates so that he could focus on more pressing

economic issues affecting the country. Nevertheless, the flood of letters and cables the President

received asking him to attend athletic events that ranged from National Indoor Junior Track and

Field Championships to Dixie League Softball, as well as inquiries for the President to name his

favorite sports and answer various recreation queries, all showed Roosevelt just how much a

nation gripped in depression still cared about sports.22 For major international contests with

national pride at stake, such as the U.S. Davis Cup tie against Great Britain’s squad in July 1933,

the President might telegraph the team a message of encouragement, but on the whole Roosevelt

did not attend or personally respond to messages from sporting associations or private citizens

regarding athletics, despite his secretary’s assuring the interlocutors of both the President’s

longstanding passion for athletics and his belief that sportsmanship in international competitions

such as the Olympics was an essential ingredient of “American character.”23 Nevertheless, the

National Recreation Association and other such national organizations interested in the

22 Robert Dallas to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, February 5, 1936, Folder 468 Sports and Recreation, Files 460-470,

President’s Personal File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York; Glen W. Leyde to

President Roosevelt, April 26, 1939, Folder 468 Sports and Recreation, Files 460-470, President’s Personal File,

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York; John Vosbrugh to Stephen Early, April 14, 1937,

Folder 468 Sports and Recreation, Files 460-470, President’s Personal File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential

Library, Hyde Park, New York.

23 Franklin D. Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., July 17, 1933, Folder 468 Sports and Recreation, Files 460-

470, President’s Personal File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York; Franklin D.

Roosevelt to Avery Brundage, September 25, 1933, Folder 468 Sports and Recreation, Files 460-470, President’s

Personal File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

115

furthering of the nation’s playgrounds and parks did have the ear of key Roosevelt subordinates

who passed on the recreational reforms wanted by those associations to the White House.24

Republican politician-turned-New Dealer John Gilbert Winant provided a crucial link

between recreational reformers and President Roosevelt. Throughout his two terms (1927-1935)

as the Governor of New Hampshire, Winant remained an active officer in the National

Recreation Association at the same time that he supported the various social policy programs the

Roosevelt administration put forward. Winant kept abreast of the latest scholarly literature on

parks and recreation and how best to use leisure time during the 1930s. With titles such as

“Character Last?,” “Recreation and Civic Progress,” “Playground and Child Life,” and “Don’t

Quit Recreation,” the essays Winant read connected a healthy citizenry to robust recreation in the

nation’s cities.25

The economic challenges confronting every level of municipal spending called the

robustness of that recreation into question. To a nationwide audience reached by the NBC radio

network on August 15, 1933, three recreational reformers spoke of a rise in mental illness and

crime when an underemployed population did not have wholesome recreational activities in

which to spend their increasing free time. Even before the Depression set in, the parks and

recreation department budgets of many cities were comparatively small when compared with the

24 Howard Bracher to Stephen Early, May 25, 1938, Folder 2919 National Recreation Association, Files 2912-2936,

Sports and Recreation, President’s Personal File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

25 A Brief Bibliography for the Recreation Worker, Folder [no number] Recreation General, Part 2, Box 130, John

Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. Typescripts or facsimiles of the

articles that follow are all found in Folder [no number] National Recreation Association, Box 51, John G. Winant

Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York: Robert Kelso, “Character Last?” (2) J. B.

Williams, “Recreation and Civic Progress” (3) J. Paul Elliott “Shall the Municipal Recreation Department by

Abolished?” (4) J. B. Williams, ‘Recreation and City Planning” (5) “Playground and Child Life” typescript (6)

“Don’t Quit Recreation” (7) “Can We Afford Recreation Now?”

116

entirety of the city budget. New York City, for example, spent around 1 percent of its entire

budget on public recreation during the early 1930s. Percentages of city budgets spent on public

recreation dropped as the Depression worsened. A thousand of the nation’s largest cities spent a

total of $38.5 million on recreation in 1930, and that number fell 28 percent to $28 million by

1932. Cash-strapped cities saw parks and recreation departments as one of the first budgets for

the chopping block, but at the same time they moved incrementally to do so: salary reductions of

5 to 20 percent; the halt of capital projects; layoffs of specialized personnel; sporting goods

inventory reductions; a reliance on hard-to-come-by volunteers. More specifically, between 1930

and 1932 the number of playgrounds across the nation fell from 7,685 to 6,990; sports fields fell

from 1,834 to 1,629; and baseball diamonds fell from 4,396 to 4,151. Even the hours of indoor

recreation facilities dropped, especially in the evening. These reductions took place at the same

time that the public’s attendance at recreational facilities grew: 159 million attendances of

playgrounds in 1929 compared to 236 million attendances in 1932; a 41 percent increase in the

number of visits people made to indoor recreation facilities over the same three-year period.

Between 1931 and 1932, people swimming in city pools doubled.

26 What the numbers told

politicians such as Governor Winant was that cities simply could not put their recreational

houses in order without a major infusion of money from outside the city limits.

Winant also found that recreational planning for the improvement of citizenship was not

a top priority many other seated governors shared in the early 1930s. But the New Hampshire

26 John Finley, H. Edmund Bullis, and Roy Smith Wallace, “Constructive Economy in Government: Reducing the

Recreation Budget,” The National Municipal Review [preprint], Series V., Lecture No. 9, August 15, 1933, pp. 1-7,

in Folder [no number] Recreation (General), Part I, Box 130, John Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt

Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

117

governor’s unique access to top Roosevelt subordinates, along with his seat on the board of

directors of the National Recreation and Playground Association allowed him to leverage the

federal government to pay for swimming and recreational facilities within the Granite State in

1933 and 1934—before the WPA came into existence the following year.27 Outside of New

Hampshire itself, he should not get too much credit for recreational reform that New Deal

agencies headed by more familiar names such as Harry L. Hopkins actually ran; nonetheless,

Winant served as a conduit between private recreation association reformers and the directors of

federal agencies who had the money to make the reformers’ dreams for recreational reform a

reality.

Prior to 1935 the federal government’s partnerships with municipal governments in

improving the recreational infrastructure of cities consisted of stop-gap work and disorganized

efforts. All told, twenty-one temporary and permanent federal agencies had discretion to spend

part of their budgets under the broad rubric of recreation during the New Deal. At least eighty

nationally prominent non-governmental associations also exercised prerogatives over

recreational planning across the nation.28 Throughout the Great Depression, competition and

27 Herbert Carleton Mayer to John Winant, February 11, 1933, Folder [no number] Recreation (General), Pt. II, Box

130, John Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York; Recreational Program,

Concord, N.H. Swimming Facilities, Memorandum, October 24, 1933, Folder [no number] Recreation Projects, Box

131, John Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

28 Emergency Agencies to be Interviewed Concerning Recreation, n.d., Folder A.1, Alpha Numeric Subject Files,

Box 1, Works Projects Administration Recreation Division, RG69, Records of the Work Projects Administration,

NARA-II; Organizations Giving Leisure Time Activities, n.d., Folder A.1, Alpha Numeric Subject Files, Box 1,

Works Projects Administration Recreation Division, RG69, Records of the Work Projects Administration, NARAII. The Board of Surveys and Maps of the Federal Government, the National Park and Planning Commission, the

Commission of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and even the

U.S. Government Printing Office were independent offices that claimed part of their activities facilitated public

recreation. The same was true of a host of Emergency Agencies the New Deal created to manage the Depression: the

Emergency Conservation Work division of the Civilian Conservation Corp overseen by the Department of

118

confusion between different governmental entities, let alone private associations, remained to a

not inconsiderable degree, yet the creation of and the powers the WPA would exercise made for

a revolution in recreation all the same.29

Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act on April 8, 1935. That

legislation paved the way for the revolution in recreation because even if only a small portion of

the $4.88 billion dollars Congress authorized found its way into recreation, that number would

still amount to more money for actually building parks and playgrounds than the country had

heretofore mustered for those purposes.30 Envisioning the wide powers the WPA would yield

under the Emergency Relief Act, Roosevelt reassigned one of his most trusted subordinates,

Harry Hopkins, from the now defunct Civilian Works Administration—which had actually built

a significant number of schools and playgrounds during the late 1933 through early 1934 months

of the temporary agency’s existence—to lead the WPA.31 Historians tend to look back fondly at

the Federal Writers’, Drama, Music, Arts, and Education Projects of the WPA, not least because

such comparative support today lags so far behind a time when the economy could not have been

Agriculture, the Department of Interior, and the War Department; the Federal Emergency Administration of Public

Works (PWA), tasked by the Department of the Interior with conserving forests and building recreational facilities

and housing mostly in rural areas; the Federal Housing Administration for developing residential neighborhoods; the

National Resources Committee under the Department of Interior for researching and acquiring land for the

government; the Resettlement Administration for improving homesteads; and the Tennessee Valley Authority for

surveying and plotting land for recreation.

29 Relationships Between State Divisions of Recreation of the Works Progress Administration and State Planning

Boards, typescript dated January 10, 1939, Folder A.3. State Planning Boards, Box 3, Works Projects

Administration Recreation Division, RG69, Records of the Work Projects Administration, NARA-II.

30 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Letter on Allocation of Work Relief Funds,” August 26, 1935. Online by Gerhard Peters

and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14926.

31 William Bremer, “Along the ‘American Way’: The New Deal's Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed,”

Journal of American History 62, no. 3 (Dec., 1975): 636-52.

119

worse.32 They tend to not even recognize that the impact of the supervised play and recreation

component of the WPA’s Service division actually mattered more to people living in the

Depression because of the sheer numbers that division employed for recreational purposes and

the number of people those employed served.

The WPA was first and foremost a program to put unemployed people to work. Thus,

Hopkins tapped Eduard C. Lindeman to direct the WPA’s early efforts in recreation in the form

of a grand “demonstration program” that employed many people and put them in contact with

many others to gin-up support for the agency. Called the Community Organization for Leisure

Program, WPA recreation department personnel approached local governments with the offer to

train the unemployed or underemployed in recreational supervision and building trades. More

than 75,800 men and women availed themselves of this training during the first years of its

offering—though those actually working for the WPA as recreation workers probably hovered

closer to a third of that total for any given time. Nine out of ten of those recreational workers had

at least a high-school education, while a little under half had attended college. Many had some

worked in recreation before the Depression forced cities to lay off employees. Thirty-eight

percent of WPA recreational workers were women—two percent of whom had played

professional sports. Together, these recreation workers and the young people and adults they

served spent 16,394,300 hours per week by August of 1937 in recreation; 70 percent of those

hours were spent on games and sports, with the rest of hours evenly divided between social and

cultural projects. From the WPA’s point of view, an initial recreation jobs program created good

32 Sharon Ann Musher, Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2015), 2, 213-6.

120

will between the agency and local community associations and elected officials. Cooperation

could lead to public works projects built for and paid by partnerships between the WPA and local

project sponsors like community Recreation Councils. Nonetheless, the agency’s initial foray

into municipal public recreation acted as a stopgap to strained city budgets rather than a

wholesale revolution in urban recreation. An emphasis on jobs rather than public works was the

reason for that.33

At first glance the statistical portrait of the nation’s recreational infrastructure, reported

by the National Recreation Association at the same time the United States’ economy dipped with

the recession of 1937, might have suggested to WPA policymakers that the nation had plenty of

places for youth sports and activities. In 1937, 1,280 American cities owned supervised play

facilities of some kind. In the same year, 1,204 new places for play opened, which brought the

nation’s total recreational spaces to 17,745. A staff of 10,878 volunteers, 37,346 seasonal or parttime workers, and 3,067 fulltime employees worked at those recreational facilities with

$47,933,781.21 in annual nationwide public recreational expenditures.34 The numbers alone,

however, belied the unequal distribution of those recreational facilities and those recreational

workers. Nowhere in the country did those inequalities appear in sharper relief than in

33 Harry Hopkins, Planning for Leisure, typescript, distributed to State Works Progress Administrators, June 1, 1938,

Folder [no number] WPA Recreation Programs, Box 23, Presidential Interdepartmental Committee to Coordinate

Health and Welfare Activities, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

34 “The Service of the National Recreation Movement in 1937,” Folder [no number] National Recreation

Association 1935, Box 162, John G. Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New

York. Administrators classed the recreational facilities as follows: 9,618 outdoor playgrounds; 1,380 recreation

buildings; 3,845 indoor recreation centers; 413 play streets; 326 archery ranges; 1,445 athletic fields; 3,923 baseball

diamonds; 569 bathing beaches; 165 bowling greens; 377 golf courses; 1,600 handball courts; 8,482 horseshoe

courts; 2,535 ice skating rinks; 2,808 picnic areas; 1,541 shuffleboard courts; 122 ski jumps; 8,384 softball

diamonds; 191 stadiums; 88 day camps; 1,163 swimming pools; 11,031 tennis courts; 235 toboggan slides; and

1,402 wading pools.

121

Los Angeles, and WPA administrator Harry Hopkins thus chose to hold Southern California up

as an archetype for the rest of the country to see the impact the WPA could make on a city.35

In the 1920s two million Americans left their home regions and moved to California.

Three out of four of those migrants made Southern California their new home; 1.2 million of

them lived in the Los Angeles County, and half of them settled in the city itself.36 The Great

Depression further spurred migrations en masse to California as a whole and Southern California

in particular—though in the eyes of government officials and boosters, they were migrations of a

totally different character. From 1930 to 1934, more than 300,000 people, most of whom were

displaced central plains farm families, drove their Ford Model Ts to California. Roughly the

same number of “Okies” followed to California over the next five years. The families of the

famous Dust Bowl migration alarmed those already settled in California a great deal, but not to

the degree of those who came unattached. Between 1,000 and 4,000 jobless and single men per

month moved into Los Angeles during the mid-1930s, along with between 200 and 400 boys per

month who might, reformers feared, turn into delinquents. After a ten-week attempt in early

1936 to ban unemployed young men from entering Los Angeles County failed, government

officials soon resigned themselves to the reality that with the infeasibility of keeping people out,

resources would need to be devoted to improving life for those already there and those on their

way there. In total, about 1.2 million migrants entered California between 1930 and 1940, with

the majority settling in Los Angeles County. As the Republican-controlled statehouse battled

35 Harry L. Hopkins, Speech given at the WPA National Conference of Education and Recreation Divisions,

November 17, 1938, typescript, in Folder A.1 WPA; Recreation Program, Box 1, Works Projects Administration

Recreation Division, RG69, Records of the Work Projects Administration, NARA-II.

36 Starr, Material Dreams, 69.

122

New Deal-inspired reformers on fronts such as the Ham and Eggs Pension Plan, many everyday

Californians themselves held New Deal initiatives at arm’s length. But the demographic change

in the state simply could not go unaddressed by officials at every level of government. Public

works projects administered by the PWA and WPA but with local sponsorship thus made

California as a whole and Southern California in particular a focal point of New Deal

infrastructure improvement and employment initiatives.37

Workers finished the WPA’s first building project in Los Angeles County on October 5,

1935. Two months later, the agency employed 37,000 people in construction work. The number

of Los Angeles County residents who worked for the WPA dipped and grew depending on the

number of plans for shovel-ready projects local sponsors had locked and loaded for federal

approval. That turned out to be so many that Los Angeles County-based officials took over

unified command and control over planning for most of Southern California—Santa Barbara

County, Ventura County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County, Imperial County, Orange

County, and San Diego County.38 Whereas New York City received the largest single portion of

WPA money (one out of every seven agency dollars), by incorporating the entirety of the fastest

growing region of in the country into their planning purview, Los Angeles-based planners and

sponsoring committees assumed control of more projects (1,406 building initiatives between

October 5, 1935 and December 31, 1938), spent more WPA dollars ($75,496,456 federal, added

37 Kevin Starr, Endangered Dream: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press,

1996), 155, 176-7, 205-6, 222-4, 239-40, 243, 309, 319-20, 339.

38 Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations Division: Works Progress

Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher, or date of publication

listed), p. 2, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los Angeles Public Library Local

History Collection, Los Angeles, California.

123

together with an additional 18.2 percent of matching state and local funds between October 5,

1935 and December 31, 1938), and employed more people (1,001,692 man-months of work

between October 5, 1935 and December 31, 1938) than anywhere else in the country.39 That

money mattered a great deal, because among the cities who reported their recreational spending

to the federal government during the late 1930s, none could claim their municipal expenditures

rivaled what the WPA was willing to spend on each city throughout the nine regions into which

the agency had divided the country.40 All a municipality needed was a local sponsor, a state-level

39 Caro, The Power Broker, 453; Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations

Division: Works Progress Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher,

or date of publication listed), pp. 2-3, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los

Angeles Public Library Local History Collection, Los Angeles, California.

40 This point along with the comparison made in the preceding sentence is supported by a selection of the surviving

nine region and state by state WPA recreation division reports. While these reports vary to a degree in substance, in

date, and by creator, taken together they evidence the arguments advanced.. The differing nature of the style of the

reports have necessitated the temporary suspension of citation style consistency in favor of accurately directing an

interested researcher to these reports, all of which are found in RG69, Records of the Work Projects Administration,

Recreation Division, NARA-II: The Recreation Program in Region I, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies,

Box 1; The Recreation Program in Region II, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; The Recreation

Program in Region III, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; The Recreation Program in Region IV,

typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; The Recreation Program in Region V, typescript n.d., Folder

A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; The Recreation Program in Region VI, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional

Agencies, Box 1; The Recreation Program in Region VII, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; The

Recreation Program in Region VIII, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; The Recreation Program

in Region IX, typescript n.d., Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; Victor Cutter, Recreation in New England

(Boston: National Resource Committee, September ,1938), 1-20, Folder A.2 Regional Agencies, Box 1; “A Manual

of Recreation: Prepared by Division of Education and Recreation of the Works Progress Administration of

Arkansas, November, 1936, Folder A.3. Arkansas, Box 1; Accomplishments: Works Progress Administration

Northern California, 1936-1938, Folder A.3. California, Box 2; Directory and Annual Report: Communities Served

and Agencies Assisted, Works Progress Administration Colorado, 1939-1940, Folder A.3. Colorado, Box 2; WPA

Recreation in Florida, May 5, 1938, typescript, Folder A.3. Florida, Box 2; State of Indiana Governor’s Commission

on Unemployment Relief: Federal Emergency Education Division: Recreation Manual and Suggestions for

Recreation Programs, n.d., Folder A.3. Indiana, Box 2; Folder A.3. The WPA Recreation Program in Iowa, May,

1939, Folder A.3. Iowa, Box 2; Works Progress Administration, Topeka, Kansas: Manual for Recreation

Supervisors, October 15, 1939, Folder A.3. Kansas, Box 2; Harry Hopkins, Leisure-Time Leadership WPA

Recreation Projects (Washington, D.C.: Works Progress Administration, March, 1938), 1-23, Folder A.3.

Minnesota, Box 2; Works Progress Administration, Community Recreation Programs: A Study of WPA Recreation

Projects (Washington, D.C.: Federal Works Agency, February, 1940), 5-46, Folder A.3. Minnesota, Box 2; A.3.

Montana Works Progress Administration: Education – Recreation, State-Wide Semi-Annual Report, July 1-Dec. 31,

1938, Folder A.3., Montana, Box 2; Report on Recreation Program 1938-1939 of Nebraska Works Progress

Administration, Folder A.3., Nebraska, Box 3; Recreation: WPA Nevada, n.d., Folder A.3. Nevada, Box 3;

124

partner, and the approval of the WPA regional administrator for federal money to move into the

city limits for recreational services and broader public works projects. In Southern California,

that approval came time and again.

Los Angeles was through and through a Western city in that the management of water

trumped all other planning priorities. Whereas environmental activist scholarship might

characterize government-directed hydraulic policy in the West as “creative vandalism,” the

builders of public works in Southern California saw $92 million in money in under three years as

a means to hold back the river.41 They spent about 30 percent of that money on flood control

measures and storm drains and another 20 percent on sewers and water supply. They also put

Los Angeles on the path to the auto-metropolis it became by spending more than $15 million on

parkways and arterial highways linking different neighborhoods and cities. After water and

highways, recreation comprised the third largest category of WPA project expenditures in

Southern California—just under $14 million and 15 percent of total costs.42

Los Angeles became the test case for the nation in terms of measuring the impact federal

intervention could make on urban recreational reform for reasons that counted more than dollars

Recreation Manual: Works Projects Administration North Dakota, October, 1941. Folder A.3. North Dakota, Box 3;

1941 Report of the Oklahoma City Park and Recreation Department, Folder A.3., Box 3; Summary Report on the

Emergency Recreation Program in Oregon, 1935, Folder A.3. Oregon, Box 3; Recreation Program of Works

Projects Administration in South Carolina, Folder A.3. South Carolina, Box 3; Folder A.3. Work Pays: South

Dakota WPA, ca. 1939, Folder A.3. South Dakota, Box 3; State of Wyoming: Report of Accomplishments of State

Recreation Council, January 31, 1935, Folder A.3. Wyoming, Box 3.

41 Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking Press, 1986),

501.

42 Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations Division: Works Progress

Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher, or date of publication

listed), pp. 5-6, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los Angeles Public Library

Local History Collection, Los Angeles, California; Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate

Highways, Transforming American Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 38, 71, 73, 184.

125

spent. Unlike most cities that had a short history of and small commitment of municipal

resources to parks and recreation, Los Angeles actually had a rich tradition of and strong

commitment of municipal resources to parks and recreation. Especially robust recreational

heritage was the exception that proved the rule of the recreational revolution.

Los Angeles’ 1889 City Charter established the city’s first Park Commission, and over

the next decade that commission added parks such as Hollenbeck, Eastlake, Westlake, Echo, and

Exposition in what historian Kevin Starr has called “an excellent network of open spaces” very

much in the Progressive tradition of that time.43 In 1904 the city took public recreation a step

further than any other municipality in the country when the City Council created a Playground

and Recreation Department separate from the Los Angeles Parks Department. The Parks

Department’s mandate allowed for the stewardship of park landscapes, while the Playground and

Recreation Department fulfilled its task of directing all athletic, educational, and cultural

activities on the schools parks and playgrounds. The 1925 Charter of the City of Los Angeles

reaffirmed the independence of those two departments, and between 1925 and 1932 the

Playground and Recreation department grew into the largest organizer of urban recreational

spaces in the world. By 1925 that department controlled nine playgrounds, four swimming pools,

four city mountain camps, and a budget of $5 million, whereas in 1932 those numbers rose to

forty-eight playgrounds, sixteen swimming pools, six mountain camps, and $23 million spent on

the 23,000 people who made use of the city’s parks every day.44

43Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press,

1985), 65.

44 Playground and Recreation Commission, “Annual Report of the Department of Playground and Recreation of the

City of Los Angeles for Year Ending June 30, 1926,” pp. 5-9, no Folder, Box A-2060, LA City Archives and

126

Beaches opened to the public proliferated to a degree and were enjoyed by more people

than anywhere else in the United States. Traveling South along the Coast, a traveler would

encounter beaches at Malibu, Santa Monica, Ocean Park, Venice, Playa del Rey, El Segundo

Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo, Palos Verdes, San Pedro-Wilmington, Long Beach, and the

southernmost Seal Beach. The recreational wonderland of Catalina Island could be reached by a

twenty-three-mile steamer line by the Channel Islands.

Parks proliferated but varied a great deal in size, convenience, and recreational focus. Big

Pine Recreational Camp was the largest in the area at 5,557 acres nestled up against the

San Bernadino Mountains. The 3,751 acres of Griffith Park sat in Northwest Los Angeles—a

popular place for tennis, golf, and swimming for the Hollywood crowd. Rowers and anglers

enjoyed Los Angeles’ largest lake in Echo Park. Picnickers, hikers, and motorists found plenty of

fun along 548 acres of trails in Elysian Park. The home park for most Angelinos from the east

side of the city was Hollenback, which gave residents opportunities for tennis and boating.

Lincoln Park, Luna Park, Lookout Mountain, and the Japanese Gardens were all popular places

for reflection and communing with nature in botanic conservatories, mountain trails, and “one of

the largest privately owned animal collections in the world.” The Los Angeles Park Board called

Records Center, Los Angeles, California; John C. Porter, “Annual Message of the Mayor,” pp. 32-33, Mayor –1930

Annual Messages Folder [no number], Box A-2060, LA City Archives and Records Center, Los Angeles, California;

Department of Playground and Recreation City of Los Angeles, “1930-1942 Report,” pp. 6-7, 9, 11 [no pagination],

no Folder, Box A-2060, LA City Archives and Records Center, Los Angeles, California; J. Paul Elliot, “Shall The

Municipal Recreation Department be Abolished?,” unsourced essay in Folder [no number] National Recreation

Association, Box 51, John G. Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

45 Program to the 1932 Olympic Games titled Olympic Games, July 30 to August 14, 1932, Los Angeles County,

California, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento, call #cF868.L804, p. 14; Lawrence

Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2010), 83-138; Program to the 1932 Olympic Games titled Olympic Games, July 30 to August 14,

1932, Los Angeles County, California, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento, call

#cF868.L804, pp. 14-15.

127

Westlake Park in the Wilshire district home, and newcomers to Los Angeles liked to congregate

on the twenty-acre lawn of Sycamore Grove Park. Further afield, Pasadena’s Brookside Park

featured a popular bathing pool open to the public. Long Beach’s Bixby Park routinely hosted

the meetings of various civic and social associations. A drive or an electric rail trip brought a

traveler to Eagle Rock Park, known for a stone formation of the nation’s symbol. The crown

jewel of the Los Angeles County park system, however, was Exposition Park. Comparatively

small at 130 acres, Exposition Park’s central location nonetheless made it an easy choice for

headquarters of the 1932 Olympics. Olympic officials repurposed structures such as the

Los Angeles County Museum and the National Guard armory, and enough undeveloped land

existed for the construction of the Coliseum, where the opening and closing ceremonies of the

games would be held. Most importantly, electric train lines, bus routes, and major auto avenues

all fed to the park.46

The Los Angeles Coliseum was built by the post-World War I city boosters at the

Community Development Association (CDA). Those men defied the public’s unwillingness to

pay for the stadium—opposition voiced by the Municipal League—by getting the city to agree to

lease a sizable acreage of Exposition Park to the CDA, who would then build the Coliseum by

charging $500,000 worth of rents back to the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County to use

parts of Exposition Park. That scheme, along with no-interest loans, meant the CDA had the

Los Angeles Coliseum built in 1932, only three years after Southern California voters had said

no thanks to the stadium. That construction showed the ability of Los Angeles Chamber of

46 Program to the 1932 Olympic Games titled Olympic Games, July 30 to August 14, 1932, Los Angeles County,

California, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento, call #cF868.L804, pp. 14-16.

128

Commerce members to make big projects happen in spite of opposition, a crucial demonstration

of power that helped Los Angeles secure the 1932 Olympics from the International Olympic

Committee (IOC). California state bonds totaling nearly $2 million dollars and issued in 1928

made sure the Coliseum measured up to international standards by 1932.47

The ultimate sports spectacle was the way Los Angeles distinguished its economic

ascendance at a time when other municipalities were slashing their recreation budgets. In 1932

Los Angeles announced to the world that it had arrived as a global city when it hosted the Xth

Olympiad. Begun by the Greeks in 776 B.C.E., ancients conceived of the games as a means for

fostering mutual respect between competing polises and people. Having conquered the Greeks,

the Romans continued the Olympic tradition until the Western Empire’s rapid decline in the

fourth century stopped what had become a only a husk of the Greek games from before the

Common Era. Eastern and Western Europeans revived the Games in the mid-nineteenth century

with the first Games sanctioned by the IOC taking place in Athens in 1896. St. Louis became the

first city in the United States to host the games in 1904, and seven Olympiads later, Los Angeles

became the second. The significance of St. Louis as the “Gateway to the West” and Los Angeles’

status as the “Entertainment Capital of the World” were not lost on the city boosters who lobbied

the IOC for the chance to host the games.48

The 1932 Olympics also marked a remarkable moment for gender in world sports history.

For the first time in the ancient or the modern games, a substantial number of women competed

47 James T. Bennett, They Play, You Pay: Why Taxpayers Build Ballparks, Stadiums, and Arenas for Billionaire

Owners and Millionaire Players (New York: Copernicus Books, 2012), 68-69.

48John Gold and Margaret Gold, Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning and the World’s Games, 1896-2016 (New

York: Routledge, 2011), 19-33.

129

in the games. While outnumbered by their male equals ten to one, the presence of dozens of

women competitors posed a challenge for Olympic planners, given the paternalistic attitudes of

the men who planned the Games at each and every level. The International Olympic Committee

was made up of sixty-four men from forty-three separate countries. Fifty-two countries from

around the world had National Olympic Committees, and every single named member on these

committees was male. So too were the officers of the fourteen International Athletic Foundations

responsible for the rules and regulations of individual sports at the games. The thirty-nine

countries who sent attachés to the Olympics chose men for all of their attaché positions. In the

United States, the honorary members of the 1932 National Olympic Committee included such

dignified men as President of the United States Herbert Hoover, Vice-President Charles Curtis,

Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes, Speaker of the United

States House of Representatives John Garner, Governor of California James Rolph, Chairman of

the Board of Supervisors for the County of Los Angeles Henry Wright, and the one nonAmerican as Life Honorary President, the Founder of the modern Olympic games Baron Pierre

de Coubertin.49

The twenty-nine men most responsible for the details and execution of the 1932

Olympics, members of the Organizing Committee of the Xth Olympic Games, were mostly

leaders in industry, law, and real estate throughout the greater Southern California area. A quick

glance at the official portraits included in the self-congratulatory materials related to the Games

reveals just how traditional most of these men were. Dressed in their country’s stodgiest formal

49The Official Report of the Xth Olympiad, Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Wolfer Printing Co., 1933), 16-29.

130

wear to the man, many carried noble titles and preferred to don armed service uniforms if their

military rank warranted such a sartorial choice. The only women to be found were the athletes

from one of the forty countries who sent competitors to the Games, along with the members of

Women’s Clubs who served as the games the “Hostesses of the Olympic Games.50

Nowhere did the traditional city boosters exercise their authority more strictly than in the

building of athletic facilities for the 1932 Games. A list of those venues included: the Olympic

auditorium was a new construction that sat 12,000 people (about six blocks Northeast of the

Olympic Coliseum); along Grand Avenue was where boxers bouted, wrestlers grappled, and

weightlifters cleaned; polo and other equestrian sports took place at the Riviera Country Club by

Santa Monica, roughly a half an hour away from the Coliseum; fencers crossed swords at a

pavilion next to the Olympic Stadium in the Northeast corner of Exposition Park; a Fine Arts

Building exhibited old masters and the best contemporary art in the Palatial Los Angeles County

Museum of Arts and Sciences right next to the Olympic Coliseum; farther South, Los Angeles

County’s harbor entrance played host to the yachting course; aquatic events took place in the

10,000-seat Swimming Stadium next to the Olympic Coliseum; Long Beach, California, hosted

the rowing events with special electric rail lines and five new boulevards built to bring the trip

from the Olympic stadium to the rowing course down to under three-quarters of an hour; the

Rose Bowl Stadium, a little further afield in Pasadena, also hosted events and up to 80,000

spectators, and connected to the downtown Los Angeles by trolley and bus lines.51

50 Ibid., 213, 216. 51 Program to the 1932 Olympic Games titled Olympic Games, July 30 to August 14, 1932, Los Angeles County,

California, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento, call #cF868.L804, pp. 2-7, 12-13.

131

Organizers prepared for 1.3 million spectators. Planners revamped the city’s Agricultural

Park into the centerpiece Exposition Park, where both major ceremonies and signature field

events were held. Noting the lack of public transportation compared to other cities the size of

Los Angeles, the one million cars driven within a one-hundred-mile radius of the city, and the

expected increased traffic burden the Olympiad would place on the city’s already stressed

boulevards, Olympic organizers planned to move large crowds swiftly to and from the Olympic

Park grounds. With easy access via streetcar lines built to funnel spectators to the competitions,

Los Angeles residents took advantage of newfound mobility to the improved recreational

facilities long after the Games left town.52

An ideology of social control over Los Angeles’ booming population underlay the

physical reorientation of city space. Local boosters—charged by the Olympic Committee with

drumming up Los Angeles residents’ support for the games—emphasized the amateur ideal of

“international goodwill,” “sportsmanship,” and most emphatically, “clean living and proper

training of youth.”53 The day of the Opening Ceremony, July 28, 1932, the President of the

International Olympic Committee addressed a gathering at City Hall and made the connection

between unwholesome play and productive youth quite clear: “It is also liable to give him a false

standard of values…In the great majority of instances the net result is that the young man, on the

very threshold of life, gets a wrong start and is led to adopt false standards which permanently

52 The Official Report of the Xth Olympiad, 60, 64, 78-9,106, 149, 777. Tennis players first competed for medals in

the 1896 Athens Olympics and in each subsequent Games until the 1924 Paris Games. The 1988 Games in Seoul

marked the return of tennis to the Olympics. For a list of medalists in each Olympiad, see Bud Collins, History of

Tennis, 520-7.

53 The Official Report of the Xth Olympiad, 217.

132

interfere with his own fundamental interests in later life.” At the start of international

competition, the top Olympic official wanted to reassure a local government that what the Games

brought to Los Angeles was the exact opposite of the scenario he just described. Instead, a

zeitgeist of amateurism shot through the game, extending down to the youth of the city.

According to officials, the spirit of Olympic competition infused young men with the awareness

of “natural and wholesome” amateur recreation capable of lasting a “lifetime.”54

The very system of recreational facilities built by Los Angeles city boosters was

supposed to provide that recreation for city residents when, after the competition of the Games

on August 14, 1932, the Commissioners of the Los Angeles Board of Playgrounds and

Recreation assumed authority over the Coliseum and most of the athletic venues built for the

games.55 Ironically, that very action put the rich tradition of recreation in Los Angeles in

jeopardy. In September of that year, budget-hawk civic leaders pushed for a voter referendum

and City Charter amendment to dissolve the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation as

a separate entity. The City Council defeated those efforts, and the City’s Park Department

absorbed the separate Playground and Recreation Department, but the message of austerity rang

loud and clear. The percentage of the city’s budget spent on public recreation now fell to only

.04 percent, essentially to zero, in late 1932—and at the very moment when double the number

of people had availed themselves of the city’s parks and playgrounds over the previous year. The

partnerships the Playground and Recreation Department maintained with recreationally minded

organizations such as the YMCA, the YWCA., the Boy Scouts, the Friendly Indians, the

54 Ibid.,321-3.

55 James T. Bennett, They Play, You Pay, 68-69.

133

Campfire Girls, the Industrial Recreation Groups, and various Parent-Teacher Associations were

not enough to salvage the city’s recreation agenda. Likewise, hosting both the International

Recreation Congress and the Summer Olympics in 1932 obscured the reality of the city’s budget

shortfall for recreation with spectacles of world-class athletics. Study and spectacle aside,

without an infusion of money from outside the city, Los Angeles’ proud past of urban public

recreation would suffer during the first years of the Depression.56

Despite the budget shortfall, Los Angeles County Recreation and Social Workers tried to

maintain spaces for organized play. Only a fourth of the County’s 268 playgrounds operated at

capacity just prior to July of 1933. A month later, all old facilities increased the number of youth

served while the recreation commission opened 85 new centers with roughly 50,000 people using

the facilities every week. A promotional campaign and four hundred new staff members reached

out to young people over the next months, raising the average weekly attendance to 240,000.

These staffers worked so diligently because of the widespread belief that supervised recreation

could curb the youth delinquency crisis affecting the nation as a whole and Southern California

in particular. The Juvenile Court of Los Angeles processed more than six thousand delinquents a

year in the early 1930s, with two out of three of those youths remaining supervised wards. The

number of those cases that actually came up for hearings before the Juvenile Court fell from

5,371 in 1929 to 3,546 in 1932—a total decrease of two-thirds of cases in only a four-year

56 J. Paul Elliot, “Shall The Municipal Recreation Department be Abolished?,” unsourced essay in Folder [no

number] National Recreation Association, Box 51, John G. Winant Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential

Library, Hyde Park, New York; Department of Playground and Recreation of the City of Los Angeles, 1930-1932

Report, LA City Archives and Records Center, Los Angeles, California.

134

period. Nevertheless, Los Angeles County recreation workers remained steadfast in their belief

that supervised “Playgrounds Prevent Delinquency.”57

Fortunately for the cash-strapped City and County of Los Angeles, the federal

government agreed that youth delinquency was a disease curable by the expansion of supervised

recreation. At the end of 1932, the Chief of the Washington D.C.-based Children’s Bureau,

Grace Abbott, sounded the alarm when she shared that across the eighteen U.S. cities that

reported back to her agency, the number of children who had to look outside their household for

food, clothing, and shelter had risen by 25 percent since May of that same year. In the same

article, the Child Welfare League reported that the number of youths they now provided for had

spiked by almost 50 percent in under half a year. A continuation of the trend of family

breakdown seemed unthinkable, in part because there was not much reformers could do to

change that.58

Improving conditions community-wide made more sense. At the same time as these fire

bells in the night clanged, the Coordinating Council of Los Angeles—which was essentially a

fusion organization made up of leaders of law enforcement agencies such as city police

departments, County Sheriff’s Departments, and County Probation Departments; legal entities

such as the Juvenile Court of Los Angeles County; educational bodies such as the Board of

Education; and various other groups that ranged from the Safety Department of the Automobile

57 “A Brief History of the Delinquency Prevention and Recreation Project in Los Angeles County,” typescript report,

p. 5, 8, 11-12, 19, 22, 35, January 1932 to June 1934, Fol. A Brief History, Box C6, Works Progress Administration

Collection, LOC; Kenyon J. Scudder and Kenneth S. Beam, Why Have Delinquents? (Los Angeles: Rotary Club of

Los Angeles, 1933), 8-9, 39; Departments of Playgrounds and Recreation of Los Angeles, “Today’s Leisure,” parks

report for 1938, p. 16, no Folder, Box A-2060, LA City Archives and Records Center, Los Angeles, California.

58 Scudder and Beam, Why Have Delinquents? 31, 34, 46.

135

Club of California, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and the Council of Social

Agencies—all in collaboration with the Rotary Club of Los Angeles—issued an optimistic

assessment of Los Angeles County’s early efforts and future initiatives to combat the threat the

Depression posed to young men in particular. The report opened with former president Hoover’s

“Children’s Charter” which, among other claims, argued that individual communities needed to

look after “every child regardless of race or color or wherever he may live” and that “provides

him with safe and wholesome places for play and recreation.” In his foreword to Why Have

Delinquents?, presiding Los Angeles Juvenile Court Judge Samuel R. Blake riffed off of

Hoover’s manifesto and argued the fault of a delinquent youth lay not with the individual but

with the neighborhoods and cities that failed to provide for the young man’s energies. The voices

of the youths themselves, though filtered through the reformers’ report, said, “there’s no other

place to go and nothing else to do in our neighborhood” other than the “pool hall” and “street

corner” for young men and the dance halls for young women.59 By 1935 the Federal government

was prepared to make sure the youths in America’s cities had their choice of places to go play.

The WPA revived Los Angeles’ recreational heritage by building 183 separate parks and

recreation projects in and around the city. Prior to the WPA, the city’s poorest neighborhoods

had little in the way of publicly accessible athletic parks and fieldhouses because the private

money and civic association volunteerism needed to bring those facilities into existence put their

resources into places where their leisure class members lived. That began to change in late 1935

and continued to the end of 1938, during which time the WPA secured and improved 3,000 acres

of land in Southern California on which WPA workers poured 37,000 cubic yards of concrete for

59 Ibid., 2-3.

136

recreational structures. Some of that concrete went into Arcadia Regional Park, which before

1940 was the sole recreational space for the quarter of a million residents of the Arcadia

community just east of Pasadena. Having completed their work on a state-of-the-art tennis

complex, Olympic length swimming pool for international competitions, and a 135-acre, 18-hole

links, WPA administrators could not contain the pride they took in their project, calling Arcadia

“one of the most beautiful and modern [parks] in the country,” well worth the million-dollar

taxpayer price tag.60

If a driver today left San Marino’s Huntington Library and Gardens and drove four miles

east along Huntington Drive, his route would bisect one legatee of the recreational revolution in

Southland. In between Huntington Drive East and Huntington Drive West sits Civic Center

Athletic Field and Recreation Area right next to the municipal building and City Hall of

Arcadia—an affluent commuter town fifteen miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Running

diagonally along the west side of Huntington Drive sits the Santa Anita Park racetrack, where

more than 60,000 spectators wagered on thoroughbred racing under the backdrop of the

San Gabriel Mountains. For those more interested in flora than fauna, the Los Angeles County

Arboretum and Botanic Garden abuts the track. Along the east side of Huntington Drive and just

north of Campus Drive, directly north of Arcadia High School sits the Arcadia Community

Center, the eighteen-hole championship Santa Anita Golf Course, the sixteen-court Arcadia

Tennis Center, the Arcadia aquatics center, and a lawn bowling club, all in the wooded Arcadia

60 Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations Division: Works Progress

Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher, or date of publication

listed), pp. 196-198, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los Angeles Public

Library Local History Collection, Los Angeles, California.

137

Park.61 More than three-quarters of a century after it was built, the park’s recreational facilities

remain fundamentally unchanged in serving the residents of Arcadia.

Some parks kept much of the same character they had before WPA money modernized

them. The difference the New Deal made was great in degree but small in kind. At over 4,000

acres in size, Griffith Park had stood since City Beautiful proponent and local booster Griffith J.

Griffith gave around five square miles of land to the city just before the start of the twentieth

century. The mitigation of class and ethnic conflict through scenic reflection motivated Griffith’s

decision to donate the land, but Griffith also saw in the park the potential for educating the public

in the dramatic arts through the construction of an amphitheater, in the planetary sciences

through the construction of a celestial observatory, and in aviation through the construction of

the Griffith Park Aerodrome. With the exception of the planes, Griffith realized none of his

dreams for the park before his death in 1919; however, over the period of a decade and a half, the

city of Los Angeles funded construction of the Greek Theatre and Griffith Observatory

completed the same year the WPA came into existence. Five years earlier, in 1930, the venerable

landscape design firms of Olmsted Brothers and Harland Bartholomew completed a report for

the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce that argued when compared to other cities, Los

Angeles’ Progressive Era parks under-delivered on both the means for the city’s booming

population to get to the few number of parks that existed. Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for

the Los Angeles Region presented the firms as the ones to plan for the recreational future of the

metropolis, but the City’s Chamber of Commerce ultimately decided otherwise by not offering

their support, without which the plan arrived stillborn. In 1931, Los Angeles residents did vote

61 These are firsthand observations made by the author during his time in the area.

138

for $172 million worth of bonds to acquire and improve city land, but that proved not nearly

enough for a city’s population that had doubled to 2.2 million people between 1920 and 1930

and was expected to double again over the next two decades. Two of the best historians who

have studied city planning in Los Angeles call what followed in the decade after the Parks,

Playgrounds, and Beaches report failed to become policy a “time of limited growth.” Actually,

what the WPA did suggested a path through the competing interests that had hamstrung attempts

at recreational redevelopment found in purportedly comprehensive plans like that of Olmsted and

Bartholomew.

Rather than counting on coordination among different civic associations, municipal

government departments, and private interests, the WPA took the more straightforward action of

looking for one local partner in improvement projects. In the case of Griffith Park, the city itself

sponsored a “comprehensive plan for the development of this park,” while the WPA provided

$3,556,190 of the $3,847,570 that went into overhauling the park. Administrators spent a good

deal of that money on manpower and material to turn the park’s scenic spaces into places for

leisure games—principally golf. By 1939, Griffith Park spotlighted three courses complete with

clubhouses and timed sprinkler systems for fairways and greens. Workers built ballfields and

tennis courts too, but the park’s biggest improvement was a free zoo erected on the former

grounds of the runways from which World War I aviators had practiced their takeoffs and

landings. The hilly topography and sheer size of Griffith Park led the City of Los Angeles and

WPA to agree to keep the park focused mainly on outdoor hiking rather than team sports. This

62 Greg Hise and William Deverell, eds., Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles

Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), vii, 8, 16-18, 29, 42-45.

139

made the most sense, given the logistical challenges faced by the many people who lived below

the park’s perch atop the east side of the Santa Monica Mountains in actually getting to the

park.63 From the park’s western edge marked by the conspicuous Hollywood sign to the

Los Angeles Zoo at the Park’s northeast corner, Griffith Park remains California’s second largest

urban park and one of the biggest city parks in the country at more than five times the size of

New York City’s Central Park.64

Griffith Park’s size, hillside location, and transportation challenges made it an exception

to the more common pattern of WPA parks and recreation projects in cities, emphasizing more

active recreation in individual and team sports over older preferences for leisure recreation in the

form of strolls and promenades. On occasion, those efforts manifested in major improvements to

existing sport venues, as was the case between 1936 and 1938, when hundreds of thousands of

federal dollars poured into the City of Pasadena’s Rose Bowl as part of a larger effort to improve

Brookside Park. Despite the silence on that topic in institutional histories and among

contemporary historians alike, such arrangements amounted to the first nationwide subsidizing of

stadium improvements in United States history. From the WPA’s beginning to end in 1941, it

improved 2,500 substantial sports venues across the country.65

63 Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations Division: Works Progress

Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher, or date of publication

listed), pp. 198-199, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los Angeles Public

Library Local History Collection, Los Angeles, California.

64 Center for City Park Excellence, “The 150 Largest City Parks,” The Public Trust for Public Land, December 10,

2010, pdf pp. 1-4, at <www.tpl.org/ccpe> (accessed August 2, 2016).

65 Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations Division: Works Progress

Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher, or date of publication

listed), p. 201, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los Angeles Public Library

Local History Collection, Los Angeles, California; Marc Dellins, “The Rose Bowl,” in UCLA Football Media Guide

140

Watching sports, even in grand venues, still qualified as passive recreation. Far more

federal money and man-hours for a far greater number of projects prioritized active recreation in

the form of the public’s participation in athletics. As people began moving into the San Fernando

Valley in greater numbers during the late 1920s and 1930s, they put heavy strains on the

undeveloped recreational infrastructures of towns such as Glendale, which in turn reached out to

the WPA to help build municipal recreation centers. In Glendale’s case, city residents received

$650,732 in Federal money for 560,000 cubic feet for an indoor entertainment complex and

Olympic-length natatorium. In the Gateway Cities such as Downy and Norwalk, encountered

traveling south by rail from Glendale along the banks of the Los Angeles river, the WPA built

basketball courts and horseshoe courts for suburbs with then comparatively dense populations.

Not already having the land in hand did not necessarily forestall the WPA’s willingness to work

on a project. In 1935, for example, all of West Hollywood—an area including such famous

thoroughfares as Sunset Blvd., Melrose Ave., and Santa Monica Blvd.—had no parks or

playgrounds despite the area’s wealthy and influential residents in the entertainment business.

Los Angeles County demolished twenty-three building to make room for Plummer Park’s seven

tennis courts, various athletic fields, and the 10,000-square-foot Great Hall built by the WPA for

indoor athletics and social gatherings. A line-by-line accounting by the WPA of their recreation

projects in Southern California revealed that the agency thought parks, playgrounds, and pools

the best use of federal dollars in fulfilling the desires of local project sponsors.66

(Los Angeles: UCLA Sports Information Office, 1989), 254; Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-43

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 131.

66 Donald Connolly and G.I. Farman, Report of Accomplishments of the Operations Division: Works Progress

Administration Southern California, January 1, 1939 (no place of publication , publisher, or date of publication

141

From both the local sponsor’s point of view and the federal government’s point of view,

Progressive Era places for scenic reflection were undesirable during a time of mass

unemployment. People needed an environment adapted to the crisis of expanded leisure time the

Great Depression had created. Supervised sports were the key to that.67 In making supervised

sports paramount to national recovery and reform, the recreational revolution catalyzed change

in the most traditional of sports. In no popular sport did those changes arrive with so much

intensity as in the sport of tennis. In no place were those changes focused in sharper relief than in

Southern California.

The conventional wisdom held that Southern California produced the highest proportion

of tennis players because of year-round warm temperatures and sunny weather. Favorable

climate was a necessary precondition for topflight tennis, but the more unique factor that

mattered in Southern California producing so much top tennis talent was the concentration of

premiere tennis facilities that allowed more people to take up the game. Most cities across

America counted a single grouping of public park courts along with one to two private tennis

clubs. By contrast, Los Angeles had twenty first-class tennis facilities with a dozen or so more

scattered throughout Southern California. Moreover, the focus of the New Deal’s recreational

revolution in Southland gave Los Angeles the highest concentration of municipal tennis courts in

the country. Talented junior players eventually found their way to private clubs thanks to

listed), pp. 201-205, 207, 219, Call# R6205.U59002, Department of Science, Technology & Patents, Los Angeles

Public Library Local History Collection, Los Angeles, California.

67 County of Los Angeles: Department of Recreation Annual Report, 1940-194, Folder A.4. County Agencies, Box

5, RG69, Records of the Work Projects Administration, NARA-II.

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subsidies given by the Southern California Tennis Patrons Association, but the vast majority of

players first learned the game on public park courts.68

Nationally ranked players such as Bob Rogers, Mike Franks, Noel Brown, Dick Skeen,

and Carl Earn all trained and taught on the storied La Cienega courts, whose bucolic setting and

locker room facilities rivaled that of any private club. Ellsworth Vines and Les Stoefen learned

their tennis at Griffith Park. Thanks to Pancho Gonzales’s fame, the former black sheep of

Los Angeles’ tennis parks, Exposition Park, became the citywide focal point for municipal

players with Willis Anderson, Jimmy McDaniels, Gilbert Shea, Herb Flam, Hugh Stewart, and

Jacque Virgil forming a regular training group on those courts. A reputation as a fine player was

enough to lead to invitations to play at private clubs throughout Southern California, whereas in

other parts of the country, particularly the East Coast, a focus on enforcing club regulations on

members and their guests acted as an impenetrable class barrier that never existed to the same

degree in Southern California. Players generally expected invitations to play at the North

Hollywood courts, the West Side Club, the Poinsettia’s courts, the Beverley Wilshire, 25th and

Santi Monica, the Hillcrest Club, the Altadena Club, and, the most important of them all, the

Los Angeles Tennis Club. Ted Schroeder, Jack Kramer, Don Budge, Beverley Baker Fleitz, and

68 “Park Courts in 1907,” American Lawn Tennis 29, no. 8 (September 5, 1935): 27; “Public Parks Paly in Greater

New York,” American Lawn Tennis 28, no. 5 (July 20, 1934): 36; “Public Parks Play in Springfield,” American

Lawn Tennis 28, no. 10 (October 20, 1934): 25; “Public Parks’ Rating,” American Lawn Tennis 28, no. 14 (February

20, 1935): 34-5; “Philadelphia’s Public Park Courts,” American Lawn Tennis 29, no. 2 (May 20, 1935): 47; Davison

Obear, “Public Parks Play in St Louis,” American Lawn Tennis 30, no. 8 (September 5, 1936): 26-7; “Margaret

Osborne, “Golden Gate Park Tennis Courts,” American Lawn Tennis 31, no. 11 (November 20, 1937): 9; Ned

Wheldon, “Public Parks Championship,” American Lawn Tennis 32, no. 8 (September 5, 1938): 16-17; “Florida

Public Courts Tournament,” American Lawn Tennis 32, no. 13 (January 20, 1939) 21; Californians in the East,”

American Lawn Tennis 29, no. 5 (July 20, 1935): 46; Jeane Hoffman, “Bouncing Around,” The Racquet, 46, no. 5

(September 1952); 24-25; Alice Marble, “The State of the Tennis Union,” The Racquet, 46, no. 11 (March 1953):

13, 32; Jeane Hoffman, “Bouncing Around,” The Racquet, 47, no. 4 (August, 1953): 28-29.

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scores of other topflight talent all played at the clubs in addition to occasional park play. Playersturned-administrators such as Perry Jones ran leagues such as the Perry Jones All-Stars, which

pitted top junior talent against university players at the UCLA and USC tennis courts. During the

year, Southern California held tournaments that amounted to fifty-two weeks of the calendar,

including the famed Winter Tennis League that kept players competing when the rest of the

country took the season off. Climate did allow for that league, but, again, without the players and

the organization, Southern California would have had a lot of tennis players, not a lot of world

class tennis players. The recreational revolution was the key to all of that.69

One further development completed the recreational revolution in the United States and

gave professional tennis a gentle push from the touch-and-go tours of the prewar years to the

more profitable tours of the postwar period. As the nation prepared for World War II, Southern

California became the epicenter of wartime production for the massive Pacific theatre.70 The

scores of war industries workers and soldiers needed places to recreate when they were not in the

factory or drilling for combat. With the U.S. Congress’s formal declaration of war on Japan

issued December 8, 1941, army camps in Southern California literally sprang “into being

overnight,” in the words of an exasperated WPA recreation administrator. In the final year and a

half of its existence, the WPA public works building projects tapered as men joined the armed

forces and unemployment numbers fell. Yet in areas of the country where populations increased,

69 Bob Perry, “Tennis in Southern California,” World Tennis 1, no. 11 (April, 1954): 15; Jeane Hoffman, “Bouncing

Around,” The Racquet 46, no.5 (September, 1952): 24-25.

70 Roger Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 7, 9-11.

144

the WPA ratcheted up recreational commitments. The most dramatic increase occurred in the

counties of Southern California.71

The degree to which the recreational revolution took place in different cities did not cause

the population upswings in certain states any more than the population upswings in certain states

caused the building of recreational spaces in the cities within those states. But in the middle of

economic troubles and war, the coordination of local organizations along with municipal, county,

state, and federal officials fundamentally redeveloped the recreational landscapes of the nation in

a way that established the mass participation of any American who wanted to play individual or

team sports. The population centers that desperately needed and received new recreational spaces

became the epicenters for athletic excellence that increasingly took the form of professionalism

over amateurism. American entry into World War II hastened that trend as amateur tennis

players who grew up playing on recreational revolution public tennis courts turned professional

to travel throughout the country to entertain troops and a war-burdened population hungry for the

distraction offered by popular entertainment.

Modern tennis and modern sport began in Britain. By the 1930s, however, modern tennis

and modern sport were made in America thanks to the federal government. With the New Deal,

cities such as Chicago presented public parks and many small playgrounds with one if not

multiple tennis courts. In 1935, estimates were that 115,000 people swung a racquet on the city’s

public courts, a roughly equal number competing at private clubs, and a substantial but

undetermined number playing pickup matches on empty lots. Eager to spread the game, Park

71 Activities Being Promoted by the Certified Recreation Project, typescript, n.d., Folder A.3. California, Box 2;

Recreation Program, Works Projects Administration Recreation Division, RG69, Records of the Work Projects

Administration, NARA-II.

145

District officials and educators pitched tennis to the masses as “one of the most valuable sports in

improving body and mind.”72

72 Harry Tilton, “How Chicago Creates Tennis Interests,” typescript, Box A125, Chicago Sports & Recreation—

Tennis Folder, Works Progress Administration Collection, LOC; Daniel Abrahamson, “The Humboldt Park Tennis

Club,” typescript, Box A125, Chicago Sports & Recreation—Tennis Folder, Works Progress Administration

Collection, LOC.

146

CHAPTER FOUR

TENNIS MOBILIZES FOR WAR

Tennis mobilized for war in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, first within

itself and then as part of the great military and political conflict of the mid-twentieth century.

Spurred by the recreational revolution of the New Deal but in different degrees in different

locales, the USLTA regional and sectional associations competed among one another for control

of the Association’s national policies and treasuries. Hard economic times incentivized top

amateur players who previously would likely have remained amateurs to look to tennis for a

source of livelihood. That meant an increased number of professionals compared to the previous

decade and heightened competition among these touring players for the limited dollars

Depression-weary consumers had to spend on entertainments. Just at the time when the

professionals had the numbers and prestige to further challenge the authority of the USLTA to

bar money in the game, the professionals splintered apart rather than forming a solid front to

advance their interests for open competition between themselves and amateurs at the

Association’s member clubs. World War II effectively ended international competition in Europe

and throughout the British Commonwealth. The game fared better in the United States, as the

most popular amateur and professional players found opportunities to play their sport as the

fulfillment of their military duty. Despite the elimination of the formal professional tour, tennis

amateur and professional champions spread the game widely from 1941 to 1945. In so doing, the

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war years created public interest necessary for the popular barnstorming professional tours that

followed in the late forties and fifties.

Before the recreational revolution, access to courts served as the primary barrier limiting

who could and who could not succeed in tennis competition. Money allowed but did not

guarantee access. Individual and largely idiosyncratic interest in tennis mattered a great deal too.

Francis “Frank” Townsend Hunter, the 1924 Olympic Champion and one of the most

accomplished players during the sporting heyday of the 1920s, spoke of how his father built and

maintained the only private court in affluent Westchester County, New York—and one of only a

handful of personal tennis courts in all of the country at the turn of the century. Most weekends

and holidays Frank’s father hosted work associates and friends from New York City at his New

Rochelle home, where the men played matches and discussed business decisions. Young Frank

watched the men play and sprang onto the court to practice with friends the moment the adults

vacated the premises. The fact young Frank often did not get on the court for days at a time when

the men played made little difference on his training, because even a court with limited

availability proved far better for developing a game than the commonplace situation of no court

at all.1

Gardnar Mulloy, a future number-one U.S. men’s player during the 1940s, also learned to

play tennis on a homemade court constructed by his father. Robert Barnum Mulloy, remembered

as a “Miami pioneer,” built the court for him and his friends to play on; however, like in

Townshend Hunter’s case, the eleven-year-old Gardnar often found himself playing the second

half of a doubles team. Playing with the men put Gardnar on the fast track. Starting to play in

1 Francis Townshend Hunter Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

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1924, Mulloy beat the best junior players in Dade County and in the Florida State

Championships over the next few years. Such a quick rise to the top of junior tennis in the warm

weather state of Florida was not testament to Mulloy’s innate ability; rather, it was the reality

that with few tennis courts around, those who had access to a private court held a big and rare

advantage over their potential competition. Such advantages evaporated quickly for Mulloy,

however, as the collapse of the Florida housing boom in 1926 served as a harbinger for the later

and greater economic busts to come in the next several years. Robin Barnum Mulloy’s Miami

Lumber Company went belly-up when contractors’ orders for Dade County pine trees ceased.

Like other business owning families, the Mulloys lost much of their position and privileges,

limping through the Depression and relying more heavily than ever before on federal

government intervention in their everyday lives.2

Doris Hart, the number one ranked player in the world in 1951, had that very experience

as a child. Born in St. Louis on June 20, 1925, Hart and her family moved to Miami in 1929. Six

years later Hart underwent surgery at a Miami hospital where her doctor prescribed tennis at the

newly built public courts next to the hospital as the key activity to recuperate her. Hart’s parents

bought her a $2.98 racquet, and she went with one of her older brothers to play every day on the

courts that were free and open to everyone which just a short time earlier had not existed. They

rode the bus to the courts after school, trained until suppertime, and sometimes went back after

dinner to play as a mixed doubles team in evening league competition on Miami’s municipal

courts. On weekends they played for six hours per day. Doris Hart developed further by traveling

2 Gardnar Mulloy Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island; Garnar Mulloy, As It Was:

Reminiscences from a Man for All Seasons (New York: Flexigroup, 2009), 21.

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throughout the Southern states and competing on both private and public courts that held a few

tournaments for juniors and frequent tournaments for adults in what competitors called the

“Southern Circuit.” As a seventeen-year-old, she won the 1942 Junior National Championship in

Philadelphia at the Longview Cricket Club. She defended her title the next year in her last match

of junior competition. A career Grand Slam in singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles followed for

Hart in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She received accolades from civic societies from Coral

Gables to Los Angeles and honors from publications such as the Woman’s Home Companion and

the Los Angeles Times. She earned her tennis titles at the grandest private clubs that hosted the

biggest tournaments, but for Hart and other players of her generation, their tennis all started on

democratic courts built with taxpayer funds. 3

The United States Lawn Tennis Association echoed the Chicagoans’, the Floridians’, and

the New Yorkers’ excitement with the growth of the game in the city. “The overwhelming

majority of millions of players in this country first played the game on a public court,” opined

USLTA official Howard Burser in 1950. A survey of municipal courts, however, found that six

of the eight cities lagged far behind Chicago or Los Angeles’ 160 courts in playgrounds alone.

Crucial to the upkeep and growth of the sport was “a constant stream of new players,” and the

primary responsibility of introducing the country’s urban youth fell to local park districts and

recreation commissions. The survey identified seven challenges most cities failed to meet: first,

making courts accessible; second, charging reasonable court fees; third, providing instruction;

fourth, opening locker rooms and showers for players; five, maintaining playable courts; six,

3 Doris Hart Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island; Doris Hart, Tennis with Hart (New

York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1955), 191-2.

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operating a junior development program; seven, running tournaments so juniors could experience

competition. Without providing specific assistance to any city, the USLTA nonetheless

recommended local organizations address each of the seven issues.4

The fact the USLTA identified issues to address at all was a testament to how robust the

recreational revolution in America was when compared to other nations that did not experience a

similar building boom. In spite of obvious differences in population distribution, as well as

political, economic, and social history, Australia and the United States had enough in common in

the middle decades of the twentieth century to make comparisons in their production of worldclass tennis talent instructive rather than inchoate. Shared and decades-long traditions in British

sports, a public passionate about these sports, locations with year-round sunshine and warm

weather, topflight coaching from former champions, and numerous private clubs for moneyed

elites and their guests, all meant that both Australia and the United States produced a more or

less equal number of world class players before the Open Era in 1968. Minor distinctions aside,

the real difference between the two countries in terms of their tennis came not so much in the

why or how but in the when. Collapsing the categories of tennis professionals and the top

amateurs—an analytical move necessary for comparison but that gives short-shrift to very real

differences between these two levels of play in the minds of historical actors—shows that on the

whole America saw a bump in top tennis talent in the late 1930s, 1940s, and the first half of the

4 Howard E. Burser, “The Public Parks Survey—More Must be Done!” American Lawn Tennis (March 1950): 6;

Jeane Hoffman, “West Coast Along,” American Lawn Tennis (March 1950): 14.

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1950s, compared to Australia before the Australians effectively closed the gap by the

mid-1950s.5

That the United States peaked earlier owed to the pioneering junior development program

of the USLTA sectional associations such as the SCTA and to the recreational revolution that

built so many accessible courts when compared to Australia of the pre-war years. When tennis

came to the U.S. from Britain, it had been a game for the wealthy, but thanks to the recreational

revolution, by the late 1930s it had become a game for the middle class and the most promising

talent from the working class. The Australian amateur champion Fred Stolle noted that by

contrast, Australian tennis did not boom until later into the 1940s and 1950s when enough courts

became available. Unlike America, which by that time had a quarter-century of junior

development programs run by administrators trained in urban recreation, tennis in Australia

5 I have drawn year-end ITF rankings from the complete run of American Lawn Tennis held by the ITHF in

Newport, Rhode Island. I have supplemented these rankings with the rankings given in Bud Collins, The Bud

Collins History of Tennis: An Authoritative Encyclopedia and Record Book (New York: New Chapter Press, 2nd

ed., n.d.), 357-61, 386-9, 414-21, 454-61, 715-26, 752-5. It needs clarification that this comparison is far from

analytically ideal. Most importantly, there are several different metrics for measuring international tennis talent. The

most traditional method looks at the Davis Cup victories across different nations for a given time period, with the

most years a particular nation held the Cup being the yardstick for success. The problem with this criterion for

evaluation is that the United States offered a large enough market for the best players to turn professional and

therefore forgo their eligibility for Davis Cup play. Turning professional also eliminated the player from

participating in the major tournaments (until 1968), which functions as the second most common way to measure the

playing strength of a particular nation. With that in mind, a workable way to evaluate comparative playing strength

must take both professionals and amateurs into account and necessitates the collapsing of the two categories into

one, which I name rather arbitrarily top tennis talent. While valid points about assigning an exponentially higher

value for the number one ranked amateur player versus the number five ranked amateur player can be raised, my

purpose is simply to show a basic measurement of an effect tied to its more structurally significant cause. With that

goal in mind, simply counting the top ten internationally ranked amateur players gives a measure suitable to show

the real impact more courts available to more people had on developing top tennis talent within particular places and

nations. After 1968, the money incentives in the game changed this picture to a degree that is beyond the scope of

this project. Needless to say, however, individuals from countries with comparatively small populations and

comparatively small numbers of courts thought it worthwhile to pursue tennis fulltime. Switzerland’s 2014 Davis

Cup victory and the number two and number four world rankings of their two top players is just one example of how

the post-1968 tennis world scarcely resembles that of the pre-Open Era.

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during the country’s first push to real international prominence began because of the game’s

popularity as a “local and family-oriented pastime” enjoyed “with your dad on some distant

courts.”6

The great Australian Champion Margaret Smith Court played tennis with family and

friends about 1952 as a ten-year-old. That timing meant that young Court could take advantage

of the postwar economic boom in Australia which saw the upswing in recreational building

similar to what America had begun to experience almost two decades earlier. From a poor family

in a small town named Aubrey that straddled Victoria and New South Wales, Court nonetheless

had access to twenty-four grass courts, which effectively guaranteed she could play anytime she

wanted to. Constant competition against teenage boys and men honed Court’s skills to a point

that she attracted the attention of tennis champion Frank Sedgman, who offered Court access to

his gym and training facilities in Melbourne. Then fifteen years old, Margaret accepted and

moved to Australia’s sporting capital, where she lived and worked at a boarding school when she

was not training. Two years later she won the Australian National Championships as a minor

where she beat the world’s number-one ranked player, Maria Bueno, in the finals in 1959. That

victory launched Margaret into international orbit, where she stayed, spanning the globe’s

tournaments for the next decade.7

The career of a second and even more internationally visible Australian Champion also

exemplified the transnational impact the 1930s American recreational revolution had on world

sports after 1940. Frank Sedgman, a future finalist in or winner of all four Major Singles

6 Fred Stolle and Kenneth Wydro, Tennis Down Under (Bethesda, MD: National Press Inc., 1985), 9.

7 Margaret Smith Court Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

153

Championships in addition to a topflight professional whose career began in 1953 and extended

through the fifties, was born on October 27, 1937, in the Melbourne suburb of Mont Albert in

Victoria, Australia. Sedgman candidly recalled that the world-class Americans who played Davis

Cup in the 1940s personally “inspired” him and his entire generation of Australian players who

then took it upon themselves to improve their own games to challenge the United States. For

their part, the Australians competed well, winning the Davis Cup in 1950. Sedgman himself also

enjoyed tremendous success in America but not without initial difficulty. “I found the Americans

to be very tough on their home courts,” he said. By that Sedgman meant both the quality of

competition, particularly in the big East Coast grass-court tournaments held at Orange, New

Jersey, Newport, Rhode Island, West Chester, Forest Hills, New York, and Boston,

Massachusetts, as well as the actual kind of courts he played on in the California tournaments.

Unlike the older and mostly private grass courts of the East Coast, America’s West Coast

featured cement courts built with public money during the thirties. Before coming to play in

California in 1948, Sedgman had never played on hard courts. Along with several tournament

titles, Sedgman brought back with him to Australia the positive impact that government

spending, equality of opportunity, and concrete could have on a nation’s athletic achievements.8

Coaching was also a key ingredient to the development of topflight tennis talent. Here, as

elsewhere, Australia followed the example of the United States, even improving upon it when the

famous coach and Davis Cup captain Harry Hopman won the 1950 Davis Cup and successfully

defended that title fifteen times over the next twenty years. But that consistent success came

8 Frank Sedgman Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

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later, after coaches and teaching professionals in the United States had set the example. Dick

Skeen was one of these early coaches. He grew up in Winnsboro, a little hamlet in East Texas, in

the second decade of the twentieth century. His father was very prosperous by small town

standards—owning a large share in the county bank, a small five-and-dime store, and various

tenant farms. After Skeen’s mother’s death, his father remarried a woman who despised the

young Skeen and physically abused him. Skeen spent his summers away from his stepmother’s

beatings working on one of his father’s farms with little in the way of recreational sports

prospects. Tennis certainly was too “sissy” of a sport for a Texas boy to take up. In 1918,

however, Skeen’s father moved the family to Southern California, bought a large house and lot

for $14,500, and by 1919 had flipped the house for a $100,000 profit. Skeen began school at the

Selma Avenue Grammar School and failed miserably at physical education. Down the street

from his school along Hollywood Boulevard sat the Hollywood Hotel where, before Beverly

Hills grew into the home for the nation’s screen actors, the biggest names in silent film lived.

Skeen bummed around the court behind the hotel more to catch sight of the stars than for the

tennis. He would also collect tennis balls hit over the fence, and on one occasion was given a

racquet by Bert Lytell after the comedian cracked the wood frame during play. Skeen liked

swinging his broken racquet, and when he earned enough money from his Los Angeles Times

paper route, he bought a new racquet and tennis shoes.9

Skeen had a difficult time finding a place to play, though. In the early 1920s, all of

Los Angeles had only four courts open to anyone, and the town of Hollywood had only three.

9 Dick Skeen, Tennis Champions are Made, Not Born (Redwood City, CA: Cal-Pacific Color, 1976), 63-66.

155

Fortunately for Skeen, Hollywood High School, where he began attending made two of those

courts available. Before school and during his lunch hour, Skeen hit on the school’s court, hardly

noticing the decrepit condition of the concrete he treaded over. What Skeen had noticed,

however, was that next to no one in burgeoning Los Angeles County taught tennis for money. So

in 1931 Skeen convinced the parents of thirteen pre-teen and teenagers to let him try teaching

their children tennis lessons on the weekend. Skeen’s success with those kids led him to a $10-

per-month salary as a tennis professional, instructing the five members of the Pasadena Tennis

Club. While he helped grow the club’s membership to fifty in short order, Skeen still faced the

difficult reality that the metropolitan area had relatively few public or semi-public courts. He

therefore spent most of his time teaching juniors at Bart Wade’s private court and instructing

Beverly Hills and Santa Monica resident movie stars—including Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper,

Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Joseph Cotton, Johnny Weismuller, Merle Oberon, Norma Shearer,

Dolores del Rio, Hugh O’Brian, and Cornel Wilde—on the movie stars’ private courts.10

By the late 1930s, with the proliferation of public tennis courts across the country, the

popularity of the game had risen to the point that Skeen joined a tennis professional exhibition

tour in 1939 across the United States and Canada. During the war years he taught for a time in

Palm Beach, Florida, and with the conclusion of the fighting he went to France and Italy to teach,

instructing the Mexican Davis Cup team in 1946 through 1948. He returned to teaching in

10 Ibid.

156

Southern California that same year, and over the next two decades taught at and managed a

variety of clubs up and down the Golden State.11

Mercer Beasley was an even more influential American tennis coach because of his

ability to locate and develop juniors capable of promising professional careers. Beasley first

played tennis in 1893 on a grasscourt built by his father at the family’s New Jersey home. He

struggled because his poor distance vision made spotting the ball difficult, but he seemed to

grasp the technicalities of proper stroke production. Over the next few decades Beasley honed

communicating the best way to hit the ball to college players at Princeton, Tulane, and the

University of Miami. His real talent was spotting potential in young players that no one else saw,

as was the case of the eleven-year-old Frank “Frankie” Parker, whom Beasley first noticed at

Milwaukee Town Club in 1925 and, who, under Beasley’s instruction, went on to win top junior

tournaments, two major men’s single titles, and join the professional tour in 1949. In 1925

Beasley happened across an even more promising talent in Southern California. Having assumed

the coaching position at Pasadena High School, Beasley needed one more player to complete his

squad. Someone mentioned he should go by the local bakery, where he found a long and limber

teenager named Ellsworth Vines.12

Born in Los Angeles in 1911 meant that when Vines began playing tennis in the mid1920s, courts were in far shorter supply than they would be a decade later. Fortunately for Vines,

Beasley had some pull at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, which offered talented junior players like

11 Ibid.

12 No author named, “Mercer Beasley,” Sports Illustrated, July 29, 1957, p. 64. In the interview for this article,

Beasley counted having coached seventeen players who together combined for eighty-four National Championships.

157

Vines discounted junior or association memberships at $2 or $3 per month, sometimes without a

$25 joining fee. Such a subsidy put the Club’s sixteen courts within reach for youngsters like

Vines, who now had access to the best practice partners in the city along with the biggest

tournaments in Southern California that the LATC routinely held. After only a few years of

routine instruction from Beasley, weekly practice on the Club’s courts, and periodic competition

in smaller tournaments, Vines established himself as one of the top Southern California players.

The USLTA national office even took notice in 1930 when Vines became the number-one player

in Southern California and climbed into the top ten in the Association’s national rankings. Over

the next two years, Vines continued to dominate both Southern California tennis and tennis

throughout the United States, winning all the big tournaments in his home state as well as the

United States Nationals at Forest Hills in 1931 and 1932. After traveling to play tennis overseas

for the first time in 1933, where he reached the quarter-finals of the Australian Championship

and won the title at Wimbledon, Vines felt no one in the amateur ranks could rival him, so he

accepted an offer to compete against Bill Tilden on the professional tour.13

Tilden remained a consummate entertainer who continued to draw fans to the tour’s

matches even though his game had declined since his 1931 World Professional Championship

and his 1932 tour victory over the German professional Hans Nusslein and the New Yorker

Vincent Richards. Nusslein defeated Tilden in the short 1933 tour, and Vines soundly beat

Tilden 47 matches to 26 matches in their more robust 1934 encounter. Vines was simply

younger, and thanks to the discipline he received from Beasley and Perry T. Jones in the junior

13 Yeomans, History and Heritage, 11, 13-14; Ellsworth Vines Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport,

Rhode Island.

158

development program in Southern California, he came to the professional tour with a great

degree of personal discipline that had never existed in Tilden and certainly had faded a quarter of

a century into Tilden’s playing career. Vines did not drink or smoke, he socialized but did not

chase the girls at the parties put on for the professional players, and he saved his money; while

Tilden always seemed short on cash despite the adequacy of their gate receipts when divided

among only four professionals. “I can remember traveling in the spring and the summer of 1934

when we played sixteen nights out of seventeen days, and must have covered two or three

thousand miles,” said Vines.14

Entering his prime, Vines was prepared for such a grueling schedule but the over-fortyyear-old Tilden was not; nonetheless, Tilden both promoted the tour, along with his business

partner Bill O’Brien, and helped draw the fans into the stands based on his historic reputation as

an entertaining player. At the end of 1934 they modified the format into a national doubles

exhibition with Tilden and Vines beating the Frenchmen Henri Cochet and Martin Plaa along

with Lester Stoefen and Bruce Barnes. Without the return of the Frenchmen the following year,

Tilden modified the tour into a more decentralized format that resembled short exhibition tours

and round robin play. Separating Vines from Tilden made business sense for “Big Bill,” who

could pair himself with a capable but less strong player like George Lott. Vines toured separately

14 “Tilden Pro Champion of the World,” American Lawn Tennis 25, no. 2 (May 20, 1931): 4-7; “Tilden Keeps

World Professional Title,” American Lawn Tennis 25, no. 15 (March 20, 1932): 8-9; “Kozeluh is Pro Champion,”

American Lawn Tennis 26, no. 7 (August 20, 1932): 36-39; “Martin Plaa Wins Professional Title,” American Lawn

Tennis 26, no. 10 (October 20, 1932): 11-12; “Tilden Beats Vines in their First Meeting,” American Lawn Tennis 27,

no. 13 (January 20, 1934): 4-5; “Vines Wins in Washington,” American Lawn Tennis 27, no. 13 (January 20, 1934):

10-12; “Tilden is Pro Indoor Champion,” American Lawn Tennis 27, no. 13 (January 20, 1934): 17-18; “American

Pros Gain Sweep Against French,” American Lawn Tennis 27, no. 14 (February 20, 1934) 4-7; “Vines and Tilden in

Corn Belt,” American Lawn Tennis 28, no. 2 (May 20, 1934): 32; “Pro Facts and Figures,” American Lawn Tennis

28, no. 3 (June 20, 1934): 40-44; Ellsworth Vines Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

159

against Lester Stoefen and a few other professionals, and then the tour exhibitions would meet

for a round robin event. Tilden won both of his individual tours in 1935 and 1936, as did Vines,

the latter of whom won the final round robins for both those years. Clearly the better player,

Vines relied on Tilden’s promotional abilities until a player came along who could challenge the

Californian on a competitive tour. At that point they would not need Tilden’s organizational

skills, reputation for theatrics, and pedigree as a past champion, but could draw a crowd on the

quality of the tennis alone.15

The challenger that came along was Fred Perry, who remarked that “like most players” in

England before 1935, he had grown up playing tennis in the private clubs with the “white

company of tennis stars.” Perry attended Ealing County School, where the boys played cricket

and soccer but no tennis because the game did not arrive in British schools until around 1933.

But Perry found an old racquet at around fourteen years of age that he took to play at the

Brentham Garden Suburb Club, the Middlesex Championships contested at Herga Club at

Harrow, and the United Kingdom’s top junior tournament at Queen’s Club. His big break came

when the Herga Club began subsidizing their most promising youngsters. This assistance was far

less formal than the better organized amateur sectional associations and patrons organizations

like the Southern California Tennis and Association and Southern California Tennis Patrons

Association in the United States. Perry in particular benefited from the help of Mr. A.R. “Pops”

15 “Helen Jacobs Not Even Considering Pro Offer,” St. Petersburg Independent, January 4, 1935, p. 10. “When the

Pros Were Amateurs,” American Lawn Tennis 28, no. 11 (November 20, 1934): 35; “Pros at Loggerheads,”

American Lawn Tennis 28, no. 14 (February 20, 1935): 34; “Some Highlights on Tilden Troupers,” American Lawn

Tennis 28, no. 15 (March 20, 1935): 21; “Peace Among the Pros,” American Lawn Tennis 29, no. 2 (May 20, 1935):

45; “Famous Tours of Tennis History,” typescript, no date or author listed, Greg Gonzales private archive, Phoenix,

Arizona; Ellsworth Vines Interview, Oral History Collection, ITHF, Newport, Rhode Island.

160

Summers, who helped the junior work his way into the Chiswick Park Club starting in 1928.

There he played many of the best adults in England, and the quality of his game rose swiftly. The

following year he qualified for Wimbledon—the draw still dominated by English club players—

where he lost in the early rounds. He fared far better in his 1930 season, with late tournament

finishes in both Wimbledon and the British Hard Court Championships played at Bournemouth,

securing him the backing of the British Lawn Tennis Association, who sponsored him on a tour

of the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.16

Perry excelled in this international competition and began a lifelong love affair with the

United States. He traveled with fellow players Leslie Godfree, John Olliff, Harold Lee,

Ermyntrude Harvey, and Phoebe Holcroft Watson on a coed team remarkable for its gender

progressiveness when compared to tours other sports took in the 1930s. The players traveled

aboard the finest ocean liners, stayed at some of the United States’ finest homes such as the

Beacon House owned by Commodore Arthur Curtiss James of Newport, Rhode Island, and

yachted with some of the wealthiest men and women in the Americas. In terms of tennis, the

English ladies outclassed their American competition, while the American men did better than

Englishmen with Perry, the best of the British bunch, making only the fourth round of the

national singles at Forest Hills. The British men had a round of excuses such as the “poor thin

quality” of the grass growing on the American courts when compared to English lawns, but Perry

put it more accurately that by the mid-thirties the “standards of American lawn tennis is the

highest in the world.” Britain and France could field a fine Davis Cup squad of four to six

16 Perry, My Story, 11, 18-21.

161

players, but only America could put dozens of topflight competitors in a draw. That competition

and the British Lawn Tennis Association’s money pushed Perry to return to play the American

amateur circuit year after year.17

By the 1933 to 1934 season Perry realized that the best players in the world were not the

amateurs like himself playing for the Davis Cup but the “Tilden Troupe” of Bill Tilden,

Ellsworth Vines, Henri Cochet, Vincent Richards, Hans Nusslein, and Karel Kozeluh. Perry not

only respected the game of these men but also their grit in that they subsisted on their own ability

rather than on the “underground sources” of money and “shamateur” practices amateur players

and amateur associations routinely practiced. At that time he defended that practice not only

because he took that money himself on which to live, but also because he believed subsidizing

players from outside of “the moneyed and leisured” was the only way to reach “world preeminence in the game.” Of his contemporaries ranked in the top twenty in the world, only the

Frenchmen Jean Borotra had made a business career for himself outside of family inheritance

and amateur association allowances, whose own businesslike approach to collecting cash from

their member clubs meant more than enough money to distribute to a half-dozen of their

country’s top competitors. Perhaps because “Open Tennis” seemed a real possibility at that time,

widely discussed in the press, Perry decided to remain an amateur, thinking the International

Lawn Tennis Federation would resolve his dilemma for him. When that governing body’s

17 Ibid., 23-29, 53, 67.

162

members decided to continue the prohibition between amateur and professional competition,

Perry decided the time was not right to turn professional despite his observations.18

Two years later was the right time for Perry. He decided to turn professional because he

felt he had nothing left to prove in the amateur ranks and had never received the respect he

deserved from the British Lawn Tennis Authorities. Where one came from mattered in England

like it did in America, and even though Perry’s family had some money, his roots were “the

North Country rather than the old-school-tie country” of Sir Samuel Hoare and the other leaders

of the British Lawn Tennis Association. He gave those men four Davis Cup titles and British

Singles Champion of Wimbledon three times by 1936, and they never batted an eye at the

personal and psychological toll managing such high national expectations for his country had

had on the North Country lad. Turning professional was a way for Perry to make tennis personal

again—and get paid for doing that.19

On November 6, 1936, at Wall Street offices of the firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton &

Lombard, he accepted Bill Tilden’s $100,000 guarantee to play tennis against Ellsworth Vines in

a twenty-two week tour. That agreement took Vines by surprise because he had traveled to Japan

for a series of international tennis exhibitions. The professional champion Vines and the amateur

champion challenger Perry finally connected over the phone with Perry making the pitch to

Vines: “Listen, Ellie, would you like to make some money?” They both did, as did Tilden and

the other professional players, but so too did the group of investors Tilden put together to front

18 Ibid., 67, 87-89, 148-150, 176. A quick perusal of the “1930 in sports” wiki showed no other sporting tours that

involved both men and women—an anomaly attributable to the feminized origins of tennis discussed in chapter one

of this study. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_in_sports (accessed 1-2-2017).

19 Fred Perry, An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 108-13.

163

the cash to guarantee Perry the $100,000 necessary to lure him from the amateur ranks. Given

the peripateticism of the professional tennis tour during the thirties, these backers did not expect

a return on their investment. “If we make any money out of this I’ll give you a horse’s ass in

diamonds,” said one. But Perry brought with him not only a top reputation as a player but also

international connections to well established lines of credit in London. In particular, he secured

coverage from the famous insurance syndicate Lloyd’s of London to mitigate the risk of match

cancellations from the exacting toll the grueling schedule placed on the players’ bodies.20

Over the next two years Perry and Vines played each other approximately 350 times and

forged a friendship that lasted a lifetime: They reinvested sizable sums of their individual

incomes in their tour, where Vines managed the finances in America and Perry managed their

accounts overseas; they mutually owned and ran the Beverly Hills Tennis Club in Southern

California; they entered into various other joint ventures, all without a contract when it came to

each other. All the while they competed hard against one another on the court. Their 1937 tour

opened at Madison Square Garden on January 7 to the unfurling of the Union Jack for Perry and

Old Glory for Vines as dueling musicians struck up “God Save the King” and “The StarSpangled Banner” to the 18,000 fans in attendance. They made $52,000 that opening night and

the nationalism narrative played well with the spectators who came out in droves night after

night.21

That public interest, along with the money that came with it, kept the professionals to

their vagabond schedule. Each evening’s play featured a warm-up match between two undercard

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

164

professionals, a two-out-of-three or three-out-of-five (depending on the size of the city) main

event between Perry and Vines, and a two-out-of-three doubles rubber to conclude the evening.

The players then rushed to catch a midnight train, still wearing their sweats, and rode the four or

five hundred miles they usually traveled between matches. The morning schedule consisted of

breakfast, press conferences, and local promotional duties before the players finally took some

solid hours of sleep at their hotel before waking up in the late afternoon, eating again, pitching

the match one more time, usually over radio, and then heading for the arena or gymnasium to

warm up for the primetime match. Sometimes the matches went late and the players drove

themselves through the night to the next tour stop—often on the brink of exhaustion. On one

occasion, Vines and Perry got pulled over on the Illinois and Wisconsin border when the former

ran a stop sign traveling 85 miles an hour. A search of the car produced dozens of tennis racquets

and balls that secured the players’ release with a small cash gift to the local policemen’s

benevolence fund. Traveling through the Southwest, Tilden once flipped his car and decided to

leave it, hitching a ride with Perry and Vines so he would not miss the start of their match that

evening. Itinerancy bred solidarity among the players, all of whom also shared ownership stakes

and some logistical duties in the tour. The onus in 1937 fell hardest on Perry, because as the

challenger to the champion Vines, people came primarily to watch those two gentlemen play,

having been unable to see their rivalry since late 1933 when Vines transitioned into the

professional ranks. Vines’s periodic ailments and injuries meant that Perry sometimes found

himself playing ten nights without a rest.22

22 Ibid., 113-6.

165

As a foreigner, Perry also shouldered additional challenges that Vines, Tilden, and the

other American players avoided. Chief among those problems was that of taxes. Players from the

United States who kept a permanent residence there simply reported their income and filed their

returns as any other worker would, but Perry needed constant monitoring for fear he would flee

the United States without paying taxes on his earnings. Given that the 1937 and 1938

professional tours flitted across the Canadian and Mexican borders several times, stopped off at a

number of Caribbean countries, and ended with an extended tour of Europe, little wonder that the

Bureau of Infernal Revenue assigned an agent to accompany Perry on his different tour stops,

where, after the distribution of that night’s gate receipts among the players, in the locker room

the auditor would report Perry’s income for each match.23

The European leg of the tour also gave Perry a headache. The tension there came not

from taxes but from the logistical challenges he faced as the organizer of the group’s schedule

overseas. While the British Lawn Tennis Association had lionized their champion while he won

Wimbledon titles and Davis Cup crowns, his turn to professional tennis caused them to revoke

all his privileges that had included membership at whatever private sporting club he sought to

play at in the United Kingdom. That move essentially closed most venues to the professional

troupe in England—a country with far fewer armories and municipal arenas that the United

States. The players frequently played in town halls or on soccer pitches such as the Liverpool

Club’s Anfield ground, although they also received invitations to play at grand venues such as

the newly constructed Empire Pool Wembley Arena in Wembley Park. That stadium and the

27,000 fans who watched them play over a three-night stay rivaled if not bettered any experience

23 Ibid., 108-9, 111, 117-20.

166

the professionals had had in the United States. The canvas travel court the players put down for

most matches allowed them to play on almost any surface; because ice rinks, wooden basketball

courts, and dance hall floors were all commonplace, they did this often. When they competed

outdoors, they sometimes struggled to find anchor points to tie down their court, or they

competed on two different surfaces, as was the case when they marked out a tennis court in

Yankee Stadium between the outfield and along the infield diamond.24

Perry, Vines, and all the professionals touring in the thirties remained out in the cold

because of the more adversarial relationship players and sports promoters had maintained with

the amateur stewards of the game. Those stewards organized in the United States Lawn Tennis

Association monopolized most of the tennis venues suitable for hosting a large enough crowd to

earn a hefty return on the matches. For example, the 1937 professional tour between Perry and

Vines consisted of close to sixty matches between the two professionals in the United States,

virtually none of which took place on courts run by clubs that belonged to the USLTA.25 When

24 Ibid.

25 The 1937 tour consisted of the following: January 6 match at Madison Square Garden in New York City; January

8 match at unknown stadium in Cleveland; January 9 at the Chicago Stadium in Chicago; January 15 in Duquesne

Gardens in Pittsburgh; January 16 at an unknown stadium in Detroit; January 18 at Boston Garden in Boston;

January 20 in Broadway Auditorium in Buffalo; January 22 at unknown stadium in Philadelphia; January 23 at

unknown stadium in Baltimore; January 25 at unknown stadium in College Park; January 26 at unknown stadium in

Richmond; January 27 at unknown stadium in Charlotte; January 31 at unnamed outdoor courts in Miami Beach;

February 1 on the Everglades Club courts in Palm Beach; February 5 on unknown courts in Birmingham; February 7

on unknown courts in New Orleans; February 10 on unknown courts in Houston; February 12 on unknown courts in

Dallas; February 16 at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles; February 17 on unknown courts in Pasadena;

February 20 at the Dreamland Auditorium in San Francisco; February 21 on unknown courts in Oakland; February

21 in unknown stadium in Vancouver; February 26 in unknown stadium in Seattle; February 28 in Portland Ice

Coliseum in Portland; March 2 in unknown gymnasium in Salt Lake City; March 6 at City Auditorium in Denver;

March 8 in unknown stadium in Kansas City; March 10 in Butler Field House in Indianapolis; March 12 on

unknown courts in St. Louis; March 15 at unknown stadium in St. Paul; March 16 at unknown stadium in

Minneapolis; March 17 at Music Hall in Cleveland; March 18 at unknown stadium in Memphis; March 19 at

Nashville Hippodrome in Nashville; March 20 at unknown courts in Chattanooga; March 25 on unknown courts in

Columbus; March 29 in unknown stadium in Milwaukee; April 2 at unknown stadium in Albany; April 3 at

167

combined with a European tour leg and additional matches against other top professionals in

substitute matches, both seemed to have done well financially, with Vines purported to have

earned $34,000 while Perry received $90,000. The large financial discrepancy owed to Perry’s

position as the recently turned professional challenger to Vines, who was defending the

professional title he had won against Bill Tilden in 1934 as well as in 1935 and 1936, when he

beat Lester Stoefen. The financial success of their barnstorming from the players’ perspective

also owed to how close the players’ ability levels stayed throughout the entirety of the tour, with

Vines narrowly edging Perry to retain the professional title. That success, however, came at the

high cost to the players in energy and time as they spent a full six months out of their year

competing night after night at different venues across the country because appropriate

tournament venues were closed to them due to their professionalism.26

unknown stadium in Springfield, MA; April 7 at unknown stadium in New Haven; April 13 at Cornell’s Drill Hall in

Ithaca; April 15 at White Plains Country Center in White Plains; April 16 at unknown courts in Orange; April 17 at

unknown stadium in Atlantic City; April 18 at Regiment Armory in Brooklyn; April 20 at Montreal Forum in

Montreal; April 21 at State Armory in Syracuse; April 23 at unknown stadium in Toronto; April 25 at unknown

stadium in Providence; April 28 on unknown courts in College Park; April 30 at unknown stadium in Lynchburg;

May 1 on Cavalier Hotel courts in Virginia Beach; May 3 at Madison Square Garden in New York City; May 5 at

Chicago Stadium in Chicago; May 6 at unknown stadium in Louisville; May 8 at Trenton Country Club in Trenton;

May 9 at Hartford Golf Club in Hartford; May 10 on unknown courts in Plainfield; Ma

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ナレンドラダモダルダスモディ नरेन्द्र दामोदरदास मोदी Narendra Damodardas Modi 太陽系は約46億年前、銀河系 18代インド首相　前グジャラート州首相

太陽系は約46億年前、銀河系（天の川銀河）の中心から約26,000光年離れた、オリオン腕の中に位置。

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太陽系は約46億年前、銀河系（天の川銀河）の中心から約26,000光年離れた、オリオン腕の中に位置。