2022
NICK BOLLETTIERI
Nick Bollettieri is a renowned tennis coach whose influence on the sport over the last 40 years is undeniable and unparalleled. In 1978, the Pelham, N.Y. native established his own self-titled teaching academy in Bradenton, Fla.—the first tennis “boarding school”—and the facility would go on to produce a wealth of future world No. 1 players and Grand Slam champions. Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Jelena Jankovic, Mary Pierce, Marcelo Ríos, Monica Seles, Maria Sharapova and many others developed and refined their games with guidance from Bollettieri. Additionally, several future Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductees counted themselves among some of the first students at the academy, including Paul Annacone, Jimmy Arias, Pam Casale and Kathleen Horvath. For his lifetime of service to the sport, Bollettieri was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2014.
Although his name is now synonymous with the game, Bollettieri initially had no designs on shifting the tennis instruction paradigm. He grew up the child of Italian immigrants in Pelham, N.Y., just north of the city. Despite his proximity to the U.S. National Championships in Forest Hills, he never took much of an interest in tennis as a kid—opting to play high school football instead—and barely touched a racquet until his junior year at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. He spent time as a paratrooper in the military and was in the middle of earning a law degree from the University of Miami when he began giving lessons—initially as a side hustle to earn a little extra money while he was completing his studies.
Before long Bollettieri decided to drop out of school to focus exclusively on coaching tennis. He eventually obtained a position working as a tennis pro at the Dorado Beach resort in Puerto Rico. The hotel—owned by the famed Rockefeller family— attracted a ritzy clientele, and it was here that he gave beginner lessons to a 57-year-old Long Island-based businessman named Hy Zausner. The fateful meeting between the pair, it turns out, would completely alter the course of Eastern tennis history. Through Bollettieri’s instruction, Zausner fell in love with the sport. The Long Islander eventually endeavored to open a training facility close to his home that would introduce juniors to all the benefits the game had to offer. Bollettieri signed on to serve as the site’s first teaching pro and together the pair worked to whip the space into shape in advance of its opening. The training facility became the Port Washington Tennis Academy, and in the ensuing years, future tennis stars (and Eastern Tennis Hall of Famers) Mary Carillo, Peter Fleming, Vitas Gerulaitis, John McEnroe and many more passed through its vaunted halls.
Bollettieri left Port Washington after a year in hopes of developing an academy that bore his own name. His dream finally came to fruition in 1978, and as his reputation grew, a who’s who of junior players from across the country traveled down to Florida to train under his watch. Bollettieri fully immersed his students in the sport, which at the time felt revolutionary for tennis instruction. They lived, ate, slept and practiced all in one location, and on weekends, they competed in round robin tournaments against each other. Several Eastern standouts were among the very first to test out Bollettieri’s experiment and attend the academy, including Arias, a future US Open semifinalist and world No. 5; Horvath, a future two-time French Open quarterfinalist and world No. 10; Casale, a future world No. 14; and Annacone, a future Wimbledon quarterfinalist and eventual coach of both Pete Sampras and Roger Federer.
In addition to coaching hundreds upon hundreds of top juniors, Bollettieri has also helped introduce the game to thousands upon thousands of kids. In the mid-1980s he was sitting on a bench at the French Open when three-time Grand Slam champion (and 1988 Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductee) Arthur Ashe approached him and asked what they could do to get racquets in the hands of children who’d never played before. Together, with fellow 2022 inductee Bob Davis, they developed the Ashe/Bollettieri Cities Project. Later renamed the Arthur Ashe Safe Passage Foundation, the initiative aimed to use tennis as a means to improve the lives of kids in urban areas across the country. The project launched in Newark, N.J., and eventually expanded to 10 U.S. cities, including in New York, N.Y. and Albany, N.Y.; over time, 80,000 young people discovered the sport through these sites. Even as he continued to coach, Bollettieri proved instrumental in using his influence in the tennis community to raise funds and awareness for Safe Passage. The program lasted 13 years, but Bollettieri never stopped working with similar community-based initiatives, particularly through his own Nick Bollettieri Family Foundation.
Today, Bollettieri’s facility is known as the IMG Academy and sits on over 600 acres in Bradenton, Florida. 1300 students from all over the world are enrolled in its programming; Arias serves as its Director of Tennis.
WILBERT "BILLY" DAVIS
One day in 1940, Wilbert “Billy” Davis was wandering around his Harlem neighborhood when he passed by the Cosmopolitan Club, a local tennis facility built to serve Black players in an era of segregation. An individual came out of the building and stopped him on the street. A ball boy was needed for a match—would he be interested in helping out? Just 10 years old, Davis knew little about the sport and hadn’t to that point shown much interest in it. But he agreed.
“That was when his love of the game was launched,” says Davis’s younger brother, Bob.
Walking into the club, Billy was instantly enamored with everything happening around him—with the energy, with the clientele and especially with the sport itself. He desperately needed to be a part of this world. Before long, he began taking lessons at Cosmopolitan.
Billy would go on to attend Tennessee State University on a tennis scholarship, compete at both the U.S. National Championships and Wimbledon, and serve as a mentor for many of the Black athletes in his orbit, including both Grand Slam champions (and 1988 Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductees) Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson. Astoundingly, he captured 11 American Tennis Association (ATA) national titles over a 33-year period, beginning with the boys’ 16 national junior championship in 1945 (in both singles and doubles) all the way through the Men’s 45 national championship in 1978 (in singles). Over that timeframe, he also collected five men’s singles titles: in 1958, 1959, 1963, 1966 and 1967. With Bob—who was 14 years his junior—he captured the men’s doubles title in 1962.
“He had an incredible tennis IQ,” Bob says of what made his brother such a tough competitor. “He was always aware of where people were on the court. He did not have a big serve, but he was lethal off the ground in terms of picking his spots, putting the ball on a dime. And he was unbelievably focused and determined on winning. That made him difficult to beat.”
Billy refined that game style under the guidance of Sydney Llewellyn, a pro at Cosmopolitan who also coached Gibson as she captured her five Grand Slam singles titles. As training partners, Gibson and Billy shared a close yet competitive friendship, says Bob. When Gibson toured the country in the late 1950s (as an opening act for the Harlem Globetrotters) after all her success at the highest levels of the sport, Billy joined her as her road manager.
“They would compete at everything,” Bob recalls. “Even singing. They would get in the car and put on the radio, and he’d start singing a song. And she’d say, ‘Well, let me show you how it should be done.’ And then she’d start singing. Singing, chess, tennis. You name it, they would compete at it. And Billy could still beat her in tennis! Even when she was champion of the world, he could still junkball her to death.”
That was another component of Billy’s potent game: He could be ruthless on the court. He’d determine an opponent’s weakness and exploit it mercilessly. And he spared no one. Not Gibson. Not even his younger brother—in practice.
“When we practiced together, he would drop shot me,” Bob says. “And as I’d rush in to get the ball, he’d started laughing as he hit a lob volley to the baseline. He made it so personal by laughing. It made me want to beat him so badly and I just couldn’t.”
Perhaps in similar fashion, Billy also defeated a teenaged Ashe as the latter careened toward international stardom and three Grand Slam titles. (Even though there was a sizable age gap between the two when they faced off against each other, Bob believes it was one of his brother’s proudest moments in the sport.) Outside of competition, as he often did with so many younger players, Billy took Ashe under his wing, and the two remained lifelong friends.
“Off a tennis court, my brother was calm and thoughtful and generous,” Bob says. “You would never hear my brother—and I say this with all humility because I don’t have the same quality—say a bad word about anybody. I admire that quality, and I wish I possessed it. He was a kind, gentle, forgiving soul.”
He also understood the enrichments that tennis had provided him, and he wanted others in his community to receive the same gifts. As president of both the ATA and the Harlem Junior Tennis & Education Program later in life, he worked to help young players see the opportunities the sport could offer.
“He realized what tennis had done for him and me and for so many juniors,” Bob says. “Look at all the kids who have benefitted from tennis: People who went on to run their own academies, to own their own businesses, to go to college and just succeed. He wanted to impart that to children. This is going to change your life forever as it did for all of us.”
While Billy passed away in December 2021 at the age of 91, his incredible journey in tennis—from a child in Harlem to national champion to benevolent, kind emissary of the game—will live on through those who knew him, and no doubt, anyone who has heard his incredible story. “I miss him today,” Bob says. “He was a wonderful guy. And I don’t think you’ll find two people on this planet who would say anything different about that. [But] that’s the legacy he left for me. Try to aspire to be like Bill.”
ROBERT C. "BOB" DAVIS
Robert C. “Bob” Davis is a longtime tennis advocate and visionary. As the national program director for the Arthur Ashe Safe Passage Foundation from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the New York City native played a central role in introducing the sport to thousands upon thousands of children across the country. To Davis, the position was more than just a job. It was deeply personal work, and something, he says, that he was born to do.
“So many of the friends that I grew up with in Harlem ended up dead,” he explains. “I began to understand how blessed I was, and that all my blessings are a product of having been introduced to tennis at eight years old. I wanted to give kids the opportunities that I had.” Davis’s brother Billy—who was 14 years older and already making waves in the sport—facilitated that fateful introduction to the game, arranging for Bob to take lessons from his own coach (and 1993 Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductee) Sydney Llewellyn. Nicknamed “Mr. Tennis”, Llewellyn trained a host of American Tennis Association (ATA) champions—including Billy—and most notably also worked with Grand Slam champion Althea Gibson. As a teenager, Bob sometimes served as a hitting partner for Gibson in her practices at the Fred Johnson Courts on 151st Street, or, as they were known back then, “The Jungle”.
“She would torment me, make no mistake about it,” Bob says with a laugh. “Althea was a tough lady. If you came to the net, she’d try to knock you down.”
Being surrounded by greatness no doubt rubbed off on him. In 1961, when Bob was 17 years old, he captured the ATA National Junior Championship in dramatic fashion, coming back from two sets down in 100-degree heat to defeat top-seeded Charles Berry, a player who had beaten him the three previous times they’d faced off against each other.
“It was glorious,” Bob recalls. “After that match, Sydney started calling me ‘champ,’ which was our nickname for Althea. As a teenager, that made me feel wonderful.”
It would be the first of two national ATA titles in two years for Bob; in 1962, he stepped up from the juniors and partnered with his brother to win the championship in the men’s doubles event.
Although he never stopped competing—even capturing the USTA Mixed Doubles National Championship in 2006—Bob’s biggest achievements in the game in his adult life have no doubt occurred off the court, as he has focused on developing playing opportunities for young children.
In 1983, after reflecting on his own experiences with Llewellyn as a young kid, he opened an upstate New York-based tennis academy for juniors from underserved communities. A couple years later, Bob brought some of his students to the USTA National Tennis Center in Queens. There, he ran into two of the biggest names in the sport at the time: Grand Slam champion Arthur Ashe—a longtime acquaintance from his days on the ATA circuit—as well as famed coach (and fellow 2022 Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductee) Nick Bollettieri. Ashe and Bollettieri were in the process of developing what would eventually become Safe Passage, an organization that used tennis as a means to improve the lives of kids in urban areas across the country. The pair asked Bob to come on board and run the day-to-day operations, and it was an offer he simply couldn’t turn down.
In this role, Bob oversaw the implementation of Safe Passage’s tennis programming in 10 U.S. cities. He wrote the entire lesson plan and hired the staff at every location, while Ashe and Bollettieri used their celebrity to promote it. The program debuted in Newark, N.J. and was heralded as a resounding success right out of the gate.
“Newark had a lot of the social ills Arthur and Nick were looking to deal with,” Bob says. “It also had a mayor, Sharpe James, who was a tennis fanatic. We met with him and told him what we wanted to do, and he agreed to fund the program. He said ‘I want to see kids walking down the street with tennis racquets in their hands,’ and we gave that to him. We had 1500 kids in that city playing tennis, and that was just the beginning.”
All in all, a staggering 80,000 children have picked up racquets through Safe Passage programming. And while the foundation eventually dissolved a few years after Ashe’s death in 1993, one of the original 10 sites still exists today—as the 15-LOVE organization in Albany, N.Y.
Since his work with Safe Passage, Bob has continued to serve his community through tennis. In the 1990s, he established the Black Dynamics organization to help talented Black juniors further their athletic development. (Former Top 50 WTA athletes Jamea Jackson and Shenay Perry both received support from Black Dynamics as young players.) Bob also created the Panda Foundation in 2000, which aimed to recreate the triumphs of Safe Passage a decade earlier. And in 2008, he was named the first executive director of the Black Tennis Hall of Fame (BTHOF). It was a role for which he was uniquely suited, considering how much his own journey in the sport over the years has intersected with many of the legends the BTHOF has celebrated. To date the BTHOF has inducted nearly 100 tennis VIPs—including Bob himself in 2014. The honor was more than well-deserved, given the sheer breadth of his impact on children across the country through his many endeavors, particularly Safe Passage.
“We used tennis as a hook to bring kids into productive adulthood,” he says. “We developed some competitive players… maybe not world champions, but we got a lot of kids to stay in school and become productive adults. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
TED ROBINSON
Ted Robinson (pictured, above, with Martina Navratilova) is an acclaimed television broadcaster and commentator. Over the course of his esteemed, four decades-long career, the Queens native has contributed his talents to a wide variety of televised sporting events, including those in professional baseball, basketball and golf, college basketball and football, and 12 (and counting) Olympics. Since 1986, he has served as one of the preeminent voices in tennis, anchoring coverage of multiple Grand Slams and other tournaments across three different networks, often alongside fellow Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductees Mary Carillo and John McEnroe.
Robinson, who grew up in Rockville Centre, N.Y., honed in on broadcasting at an early age, after a football injury forced him to think about other ways he could stay involved in sports beyond competing himself. As a senior he called his high school’s football games—which were held at Hofstra University—over the P.A. system; he later chose to attend the University of Notre Dame in part for its vocational opportunities in sports and media. As sports director of the student radio station his final year of college, Robinson ended up calling an away game that would ultimately give birth to a football legend.
“That year, Notre Dame was 1-1 and played its third game of the season at Purdue,” Robinson says. “Notre Dame’s first two quarterbacks got hurt. Out of desperation, the coach had to go to the third string quarterback in the fourth quarter, and that quarterback happened to be named Joe Montana.”
Montana helped Notre Dame come from behind to win the game and then led the team to go undefeated for the rest of the season. That year, they defeated Texas in the Cotton Bowl to capture the national championship.
“To be there to call that Purdue game on student radio was phenomenal,” Robinson says. “It’s a game that has lived in Notre Dame lore forever.”
That Purdue game turned out to be a fairly good indicator of where future four-time Super Bowl champion Montana was headed. It also foreshadowed Robinson’s own eventual place in the zeitgeist, as the man on the call for some of the most memorable moments in sports.
Ted Robinson (pictured, above, with Martina Navratilova) is an acclaimed television broadcaster and commentator. Over the course of his esteemed, four decades-long career, the Queens native has contributed his talents to a wide variety of televised sporting events, including those in professional baseball, basketball and golf, college basketball and football, and 12 (and counting) Olympics. Since 1986, he has served as one of the preeminent voices in tennis, anchoring coverage of multiple Grand Slams and other tournaments across three different networks, often alongside fellow Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductees Mary Carillo and John McEnroe.
Robinson, who grew up in Rockville Centre, N.Y., honed in on broadcasting at an early age, after a football injury forced him to think about other ways he could stay involved in sports beyond competing himself. As a senior he called his high school’s football games—which were held at Hofstra University—over the P.A. system; he later chose to attend the University of Notre Dame in part for its vocational opportunities in sports and media. As sports director of the student radio station his final year of college, Robinson ended up calling an away game that would ultimately give birth to a football legend.
“That year, Notre Dame was 1-1 and played its third game of the season at Purdue,” Robinson says. “Notre Dame’s first two quarterbacks got hurt. Out of desperation, the coach had to go to the third string quarterback in the fourth quarter, and that quarterback happened to be named Joe Montana.”
Montana helped Notre Dame come from behind to win the game and then led the team to go undefeated for the rest of the season. That year, they defeated Texas in the Cotton Bowl to capture the national championship.
“To be there to call that Purdue game on student radio was phenomenal,” Robinson says. “It’s a game that has lived in Notre Dame lore forever.”
That Purdue game turned out to be a fairly good indicator of where future four-time Super Bowl champion Montana was headed. It also foreshadowed Robinson’s own eventual place in the zeitgeist, as the man on the call for some of the most memorable moments in sports.
CAROLINE STOLL
Caroline Stoll is a former professional player on the WTA circuit who was ranked as high as 15th in the world. Although she only competed on the tour for three years—opting to retire in 1980—she reached seven tournament finals in that time, ultimately winning five of them. Throughout the course of her short career, she collected victories over 1977 French Open champion Virginia Ruzici, three-time Grand Slam finalist Wendy Turnbull and Australian Open finalist Dianne Fromholtz. She reached the third round of the US Open twice.
Some of Stoll’s success can be attributed to her style of play, which was considered quite unorthodox for the time. On her forehand, Stoll possessed an extreme Western grip—“all the way in the Pacific,” she says with a laugh—which produced an extraordinary amount of topspin. The balls off her racquet could fly up and over her opponents’ heads, a height to which not many of her competitors were accustomed, especially in an era characterized by the flatter hitting of players like Tracy Austin and Chris Evert. Stoll also relied on a slice backhand that she deployed with a lot of sidespin, as well as a high fitness level and a mentality to chase down every shot. Naturally, she loved the clay and won three of her titles on the surface.
“I wasn’t very popular, let’s put it that way,” Stoll says. “I know my opponents would just go, ‘Ugh!’ Especially if you drew me on clay. You had to be prepared, you had to bring a snack, because you knew you were going to be out there with me for a long time.”
Interestingly, Stoll developed the style largely on her own. She grew up in Livingston, N.J., and primarily taught herself how to play the game at the age of eight, mostly hitting a ball against a wall in a nearby park, sometimes for upwards of six hours a day. She gripped the racquet the way she did not because she saw Bjorn Borg playing that way on television, but simply because that was the way she always held it.
Even as she entered Eastern tournaments and attained the No. 2 ranking in the 12-and-under age division in the East, she never attended a tennis academy or worked extensively with a paid coach. Stoll’s mother drove her to indoor clubs that would offer free court time and instruction from a teaching pro so the clubs could advertise that a top player trained there. Her one constant was her uncle, who, over the course of her entire playing career, would feed her tennis balls so she could practice on her hometown courts and generally “had the patience of a saint with me,” she says.
Still, what she lacked in resources, she more than made up for in grit and competitive spirit.
“All I wanted to do was play tennis,” she says. “Within a year [of playing junior tournaments], I said ‘I’m going to be a pro!’ My parents just looked at me and said, ‘Okay. Well, if you practice hard, you can be a pro. You can be anything you want to be.’ They were unbelievably supportive, not pushy at all. I mean, they wanted me to back off.”
Backing off, however, was not in Stoll’s DNA. In 1976, she captured the girls’ singles title in the 16-and-under age division at the Easter Bowl, a renowned tournament for high-level juniors. A year later, she returned and repeated the feat in the 18-and-under category. To date, she is one of just eight players to lift trophies in both age groups at the event.
Stoll in particular looks back fondly on her 1977 victory, specifically because in the quarterfinals she defeated Austin—who, at 14 years old, had already claimed her first professional title and just weeks earlier had made national headlines when she upset Fromholtz at a pro tournament in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
“She had received so much press, and she was destined to be the best junior,” Stoll recalls. “So that’s probably the win that said to me, ‘Okay, you can be right up there too.’”
Shortly after, she’d get a chance to prove that to everybody else as well. As a result of her Easter Bowl run that year, Stoll received a wild card into a pro tournament in Port Washington, N.Y. She’d ultimately reach her first WTA final at the event, defeating Renee Richards in the semis to face No. 1 seed Billie Jean King. The 12-time Grand Slam singles champion had become a bit of a hero to her young opponent, although Stoll recalls telling a reporter before the final that she planned to “take King’s poster off her bedroom wall” as preparation. In the end, hiding the artwork didn’t matter. King won the match easily, 6-1, 6-1.
“I was just intimidated,” Stoll says. “That was one time where my dedication, my drive, and everything else that had got me that far just went on vacation. But [Billie Jean] was so nice and encouraging. She said ‘Wow, you’re really up-and-coming. Keep going.’”
Stoll took the advice. Over the next two years she’d go on to capture five titles: In Ogden, Utah, where “the altitude helped my topspin and the balls were bouncing halfway to the moon”; in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; in Montreal, Canada; in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and finally, in Berlin. Perhaps her most impressive run-of-form on tour occurred in May 1979, when she reached a final in Vienna (ultimately losing to Evert) and then a week later defeated top-seeded Turnbull as well as No. 3 seed Ruzici en route to lifting the trophy in Berlin.
Astoundingly, she achieved the great results all while dealing with some personal turmoil— during the tournament in Vienna, someone stole her purse from the player’s locker room. She lost her passport, plane tickets, family photos and more in the robbery and had to visit the American consulate in Austria just to be able to fly to Germany. “I remember sitting there going, ‘I don’t even have my Chapstick!’” she says. “But yeah, that was my most memorable time. The German Open was by far my biggest title, and it was strung together quite nicely.”
Injuries and homesickness would ultimately get the better of Stoll, and, in 1980, the then 20-year-old decided to retire from the sport and attend Rutgers University. Although she only briefly competed on tour, during that time she flew as high as the tennis balls that routinely upended and dismantled so many of her opponents, amassing an enviable record that some of her more formally-trained counterparts would not achieve.
“A lot of people were given financial help, they received coaches,” she notes. “I was just given a good, solid backbone, a good heart, and unconditional support from my family. I took it on myself. I’m proud of the guts I had against the odds.”
VIRGINIA WADE
Virginia Wade is a former professional player and seven-time major champion who has lived in the greater New York City area since the 1970s. Notably, the British native captured all three of the Grand Slam women’s singles finals that she contested: the 1968 US Open (where she defeated home favorite Billie Jean King), the 1972 Australian Open (where she defeated home favorite Evonne Goolagong) and the 1977 Wimbledon Championships (where, as the home favorite, she rallied from a set down to defeat Betty Stove). From 1967 until 1979, she was consistently ranked among the world’s Top 10 players, attaining a career-high ranking of world No. 2 in 1975. By the time she retired in 1986, Wade had procured an astonishing 55 singles titles and competed in a record 26 Wimbledon Championships. For all her many, many milestones in the sport, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1989.
Of all these achievements and accolades, Wade’s 1977 victory on the grass at the All England Club stands out for both its significance and its majesty—quite literally, in fact, as Queen Elizabeth II made a special appearance in the royal box on Centre Court during the championship match. “When I found out the queen was going to be [at the final], I thought, ‘Well that’s unbelievable, because she hadn’t been [at Wimbledon] since 1962 or something,’” Wade recalls. “I said, ‘If the queen’s going to be there, I’d better be there. And if I’m there, I better win.’”
Wade had come close in her 15 previous attempts at lifting the Venus Rosewater dish, reaching the quarterfinals of the tournament four times and the semifinals twice. In 1975 she thought she had been playing particularly well—even good enough to capture the title—but Goolagong came up with a couple great shots in important moments during their quarterfinal bout to win 9-7 in the third set and advance.
“[By 1977] I felt that I had never really fulfilled my potential at Wimbledon,” Wade says. “It was a little bit harder to concentrate at home because there was so much attention on you. I’d always felt I got unnecessarily nervous, and I just hadn’t performed terribly well. But I was 31, I was getting to the end of my career in a way. And the last couple of years, I started to feel that I was finally ready, that I was professional enough [to win].”
Over the course of the fortnight, she embraced all the experience she’d earned through her time in the sport. She marked the date of the final down in her schedule as an end goal and crossed off each match as she moved through the draw. Jerry Teegarden, her coach at the event, proved remarkably adept at dispelling the typical negative thoughts that in the past had creeped up at her home slam—“He’d say things like, ‘There’s nothing wrong with your forehand, stop fretting about it,” Wade recalls—as well as providing astute tactical advice for each competitor she faced.
It all seemed to be the right mix for success. Against defending champion Chris Evert in the semifinals, Wade held her nerve, patiently waited for her opportunities to come forward and made 78% of her first serves in the third set to upset the top-seeded American, 6-2, 4-6, 6-1. (After their match, an ecstatic British press swarmed the court and surrounded the players to take photos.) She then came back from a set down in front of a raucous crowd and a royal audience to defeat serve-and-volleyer Stove in the final. The queen presented Wade with the championship hardware.
“It was such satisfaction that you’d set out to do something, and finally, you’d done it,” Wade says. “Wimbledon, for an English player, is just so important. And because it was later in my career, it was probably even more satisfying.”
Of course, Wade enjoyed more than a few satisfying wins earlier in her career as well. Nine years prior, as a 23-year-old upstart, she dropped just one set and took out No. 3 seed Judy Tegart, No. 2 seed Ann Jones and No. 1 seed King en route to lifting the title at the US Open. As 1968 marked the start of the “Open era” in tennis, it was the first time the tournament offered prize money to champions; Wade collected a $6000 check for her efforts.
In 1972, she captured her second Grand Slam singles title at the Australian Open. Back then, international players didn’t readily travel to this event, and so Wade faced five Australian players to lift the championship trophy—including the top-seeded Goolagong in the final. (In case you haven’t been keeping track, this means Wade defeated the top seed in all three of her major title runs.)
“Evonne was a great new player [then] and tough to play,” Wade says. “She was so natural, you never knew what was going to come from her. What I remember is that she would hit these low returns, so I would take a step back and make an approach shot out of it, and it worked well.” She also notes a more unconventional tactic may have aided her victory. “I remember the night before [the match] was New Year’s Eve, and there was quite the celebration,” she says with a laugh. “I think I had probably a little too much champagne. So I had a slight hangover [during the final], and that made me concentrate harder because I felt guilty about that!”
During her career, Wade also participated in World TeamTennis—the sports league created by King that allowed men and women to contribute equally to their team’s eventual result. Wade competed for the New York Sets, and in the mid-1970s she decided to create a home base in her team’s city. Even as she traveled around the world commentating post-retirement, she always kept a place in the greater New York City area, and over time she’s become entrenched in the local tennis community. For many years she was an active volunteer with the City Parks Foundation, an organization that provides free lessons in the sports to kids in parks in all five boroughs. (City Parks is supported by the Junior Tennis Foundation and is run by Mike Silverman, a 2014 inductee into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame.)
“Their program is just sensational,” Wade says.
It makes sense that Wade would be drawn to an endeavor like City Parks; she knows firsthand the importance of introducing young people to tennis. After all, her own discovery of the sport at age nine led to a life she could have never imagined.
“It’s a wonderful game,” she says. “I loved my time on the court, and I loved playing matches, and I found it extremely satisfying hitting a tennis ball. People would say, ‘Don’t you have to make so many sacrifices?’. And I’d say, ‘It’s not a sacrifice if that’s what you enjoy doing.’ I’m proud to have been part of it. And I’m lucky. I’m so lucky to have been part of it.”
