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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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YOUNG MAN OF TENNIS  BUD COLLINS ...wearing one of his regular conservative ensembles |
Young/Old Bud Collins:
Redoubtable Tennis Guy
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
The scene has been repeated many times. At Wimbledon, at the U.S. Open, at dozens of tennis tournaments.
A reporter new to tennis, not sure of him/herself, is told that if he/she has any questions or needs help, to go over to Bud Collins. The reporter approaches Collins hesitantly, apologizes for bothering him, and asks for information. Collins, no matter what he is doing, turns and gives the reporter full attention.
He answers questions. He tells an amusing anecdote and makes the newcomer feel like one of the gang. And the new scribe walks away rich for the experience and delighted to have been accepted as a peer by Bud Collins, the Authority.
Collins has been around tennis as reporter, broadcaster and book writer since the early 1950s. He is 80, a walking encyclopedia of the sport who could be called the “Grand old man of tennis” except that he is too youthful, too garrulous, and too outrageous in his dress to be thought of as any kind of solemn sage.
He isn’t the public presence these days that he was when he was the play-by-play man on tennis for NBC. I think he has been something of a victim of ageism as he had his role reduced at NBC and now works as a sometime voice on the tennis channel and ESPN’s mid-week coverage of the tourney. He still files copy for The Boston Globe and writes sprightly stuff on his blog,
My column goes online the second Monday of this two-week U.S. Open, so I thought it a good idea to touch base anew with Collins during the first week.
We first took care of the matter of the greatest male tennis player of all time. Too many people with kindergarten memories hail Roger Federer as the No. 1 player of all time. Dave Anderson of The New York Times recently reminded people about Rod Laver, and Collins didn’t disagree with that.
He said on the phone from Flushing Meadow, “I feel that all you can do is be the best of your era, and Laver had those two grand slams.” Collins may not have wanted to push the argument for Laver because he has just written a book with him entitled, “The Education of a Tennis Player.”
Laver is the only player to have won two grand slams, meaning he twice won the Australian, French, Wimbledon and U.S. Open the same year. Don Budge won one grand slam. Federer, Fred Perry and Andre Agassi also won all four tournaments but not in the same year.
Federer set a record by winning 15 majors this year. What has too often been lost in the blather on TV by John McEnroe and others about Pete Sampras (who never won the French Open) and Federer is that Laver, who won 11 majors, lost six years of grand slam play. That was from 1963 to 1968 when he was ineligible to compete because he had turned professional.
It wasn’t until 1969 that the pros came back to the majors. So Laver, who had won the grand slam in 1962 before ineligibility, came back to win the grand slam again in 1969. He could have won as many as 20 more major titles.
Collins has an opinion about the most underrated player of all time: Ken Rosewall. “Ken returned service well, was good on ground strokes, a good volleyer. He won his last tournament at 43. He is like Federer in making moves that are balletic.”
Rosewall was a no-fuss guy. Collins recalled when “he showed up at a tournament with his little bag. He looked over at his opponent, Jimmy Connors, arriving with two big bags and two coaches, one a fitness guy.”
The game has its critics these days. There are too many instances of players hammering balls from the baseline, not coming in to the net. “It’s the equipment,” Collins said. “The rackets make it easier to hit passing shots. We can’t go back to wood, but we need a disarmament conference to get back to a racket of 17 inches in length and nine inches in width. You might remember when we used two rackets to measure the height of the net when we started a match.”
Collins has a suggestion to cut down on the power of big servers. He would have the server start from a service line about a foot or so behind the baseline. The suggestion was picked up just once by Jimmy van Alen, who used it in a grass tournament he ran at Newport, RI. Van Alen is, of course, the man who was ridiculed when he first instituted tiebreaks.
Collins started with The Boston Globe, then did commentary on public television. “The first tournament I covered was the 1955 doubles championship in Boston. It was hit by Hurricane Diane. The first year they gave names to hurricanes. It took two weeks for the court to dry out and by that time players like Tony Trabert and Lew Hoad had left. The final was won by two Japanese, Kosei Camo and Asushi Miyati."
Only Collins would know those names, just as he knows more than just about anybody else about tennis, which is why colleagues in the press box frequently seek him out. One day during this Open the ESPN announcers stumbled on how many U.S. championships Bill Tilden had won. Collins could have told them he had won six straight and a record 43 matches in a row.
Collins unabashedly hangs nicknames on players. He came up with, among others, The Bucharest Buffoon (Ilie Nastase); The Leaning Tower of Pasadena (Stan Smith); Sisters Sledgehammer (the Williams sisters); and Count Dracula (Ion Tirac). He went overboard with The Psychodelic Strokeswoman (Francoise Durr). Betty Stove put a stop to Collins calling her “Big Bad Betty” by grabbing his hand and flipping him over her shoulder.
His blog (budcollinstennis.com) comes up with choice tidbits. He reviewed the career of Roscoe Tanner, who extended Bjorn Borg to five sets at Wimbledon in 1979. “Roscoe, who looked like Buster Brown,” Collins said. “went to jail for bad checks, ducking alimony payments, then broke parole. I think he’s out of jail teaching tennis in Florida now.”
When we spoke early in the first week, his picks to win the tournament were second-seeded Andy Murray (“he beat Federer in some tournaments”) and fourth-seeded Elena Dementiera (“just to be different I suppose”). She lost in the second round.
Collins admits he picked Bobby Riggs over Billie Jean King, but basks in the glory of a winning Wimbledon bet with British bookies. He bet a pound at 33-1 odds on a parlay of the lovebirds of the time, Jimmy Connors and Christine Evert, winning the 1974 singles titles.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Aug. 31, 2009.
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