Segura Comes to the States
Caroline Seebohm
On July 29, 1940, Pancho Segura arrived in New York City. He wore a card with his name on it round his neck, like an immigrant just off the boat. Elwood Cooke (Click Here for his discovery of Pancho) and his tennis playing wife, Sarah, met him at the pier with a representative of Wilson Sporting Goods, and without any more ado, they put him on a train for Southampton, Long Island.
He was told he was going to the Meadow Club to play tennis. Perhaps it was a blessing that Pancho spoke no English. He had no idea that he was about to cross the threshold of one of the most exclusive private clubs in the United States. He had no idea that there were rules of clothing and deportment that the club members required.
The Meadow Club had never seen anything like him. \ Clutching his shabby tennis racket and a small bag of unsuitable clothes, he arrived in Southampton in time to play in the men's doubles (with his traveling companion, Juan Aguirre), in the Fifteenth Annual Tournament of the Meadow Club. It was a rout. They lost at once in straight sets, 6-1, 6-2. Friends put it down to the long journey, to nerves, to the alien environment. But the loss was more simply explained.
The match was played on grass, and Pancho had never played on grass in his life. "Grass? I thought it was something you smoked," he joked later. Experienced players know how to adjust their game from cement or clay to the much faster, quirky surface of grass. Segura and Aguirre had no idea what was happening to their games. Faced with low, fast, skidding balls, they could not adjust their footwork, they could not anticipate, they lost their timing.
Their tennis looked amateurish. Pancho also lost a singles match during that tournament. But the experience was not a total disaster. Although he lost his matches, audiences could not help noticing the five-foot-six, dynamo with his curly jet-black hair, crooked legs, and astonishing double-handed forehand.
"Nobody had ever seen anyone play with two hands," Pancho said. "They thought it was all wrong!" Right from the start, the odd-looking player, with his huge grin, had an exotic quality that people found intriguing. They sensed his speed, his energy, his gamesmanship.
One day, as Pancho was making his way back to town on foot from the Meadow Club, the player who won the Southampton singles championship that year drove by and, seeing the solitary figure with his odd gait walking along the road, stopped and gave him a ride.
The driver's name was Bobby Riggs. Riggs had no idea who the dark-skinned kid was and Pancho could not speak English, so not much was said on that occasion. But from that moment on, Segura and Riggs struck up a friendship that was to greatly enliven the history of American tennis. They became two of the most popular players on the tour and remained friendly. rivals and gambling companions throughout their lives.
A young teenager also paid particular attention to this unlikely new arrival. She was Rosalind Palmer, a young member of the club who had been appointed as Junior Hostess for the weekend, to act as escort for the visiting players. She had been assigned to the young South American while he played in the tournament.
He could not have had better luck. Rosalind Palmer was fifteen years old. Her father was chairman of the board of E. R. Squibb, and her mother was a poet and playwright, with a graduate degree from Columbia University, who had served as a nurse during World War I.
Mrs. Palmer was also a New Deal Democrat who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt and was extremely left-wing in her politics. With such an unconventional background, Rosalind was the product of a stimulating socialist childhood. Later, she got into Smith College, but America had entered the European war, and her mother decided she would do better doing war work. Rosalind got a job in an aircraft plant and gained immortality as a model for Rosie the Riveter.
Considering the type of Meadow Club member who might have been selected as Pancho's "greeter," Rosalind could hardly have been a more brilliant choice to welcome to America a colored cholo from a country riddled with class hierarchies and devastating poverty. Oblivious to the shock value of this dark-skinned imp mingling with the tall, stylish WASP members of the tennis establishment, she took to her assignment with enthusiasm.
"I watched him play," she remembered. ''And I saw his flashing smile. It didn't matter to me if he lost. He made a great impression." Rosalind Palmer was smitten. So she spoke no Spanish and he spoke no English. Who cared? She understood him perfectly. They got along right from the start. She accompanied him to the courts and to dinners for the players on Friday and Saturday night.
After she went home to her parents, Pancho slept in the locker room. He didn't mind. He was nineteen years old, he was in America, he was playing tennis, and he was being looked after by a lovely young girl.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, one of many that Segura, with his extraordinary talent for finding and keeping friends, found more and more precious over the years. The feeling was mutual. Decades later, Rosalind would express the same feeling of warmth and affection that she had experienced when she first met him at the Meadow Club so long ago.
The week after the Southampton tournament, Pancho was sent to East Orange, New Jersey, for the Eastern Clay Court ChampionshIps. On this occasion he felt more comfortable--clay, was a surface he knew well. "I loved clay," he explained, "because I had a good drop shot and drop shots are very effective on clay."
This play worked very effectively in one of the most important matches he played in the tournament. It was against Jack Kramer, who was to become a key figure in Pancho's career. Kramer, who was only nineteen, the same age as Pancho, had already won the National Boys' Championship, moved on to the Davis Cup and had beaten most of the top players in the country.
Later that year he won the U.S. Nationals in men's doubles. His experience far exceeded that of the Ecuadorian--he was already famous for his big serve, and it seemed it would be an easy match.
But as Kramer later recalled, "Pancho sort of knocked me off the court in the first set. I was trying to find his weaker shot, which was his backhand, a rather mediocre slice at that time. But it was very hard to get to that shot because Pancho was so quick and he anticipated so well that almost no matter where you hit the ball, he was able to get around it and hit his favorite shot, the two-hander." (For more on Pancho's playing style Click Here to read Allen Fox's article on playing Segura.)
Kramer went on to say that this was also Pancho's undoing in those days, since he wore himself out running extra steps all the time trying to get to his lethal forehand. "I think he beat me 6-love in the first set, and then I was able to slow him down a little and finally beat him."
In spite of increasing recognition of his talent by other players, Pancho was still coming up with losing scores. His next major assignment on grass after the embarrassing showing in Southampton was at Forest Hills, then the center of U.S. tennis.
He was slated to play Frank Parker in the first round on September 4, 1940. It was a tough draw. Frank Parker at this time had been playing Davis Cup since 1937, and was to go on to win two U.S. singles titles in 1944 and 1945, as well as being a finalist in 1942. He knew grass well and was a clever strategist.
It is to Pancho's great credit that even in those few short weeks, he had already begun to examine the question of playing on grass. He had little opportunity to practice, since he didn't know anybody and had no money, but when he faced Frank Parker he did not disgrace himself. The score was 6-3, 6-1,7-5 in favor of the more experiencedplayer, a very respectable performance.
The plucky last set in particular, when Pancho began to show off to best advantage his crushing two-handed forehand, his precision and irresistible tenacity, created a wave of interest amongst the spectators, who cheered him warmly at the end. In October 1940, he won his first grass-court match the United States. In a tournament organized by the Hispanic Tennis Club, he beat the Irish champion and Davis Cup player George Lyttleton 6-2, 6-4.
His tennis was improving, but his living conditions were not. Originally it had been arranged for Segura to stay with the Ecuadorian consul in New York. But because of his early losses, the government of Ecuador began getting cold feet about supporting their "special representative."
The allowance he had been promised mysteriously dried up. Winter was coming. There would be fewer and fewer opportunities to practice tennis, the one thing Pancho knew he must do if he was to make any headway in this new country. He was cold, lonely, and practically penniless. On one occasion he came back to a temporary apartment to find his clothes on the sidewalk, because he could not pay the rent. He later told a friend about these terrible days, describing them in his typically racy language, "They left me screwed in New York and I didn't even speak English!"
At this difficult time, he met a Spanish-speaking writer who covered tennis and he took pity on the unhappy Ecuadorian and introduced him to a Puerto Rican family in Spanish Harlem. The family took him in. Segura knew his first task was to learn English, so he found a school in the area. "I made a mistake," he laughed. "It turned out to be a Portuguese Jewish synagogue." He learned English anyway, picked up odd jobs working as a waiter, and often made desperate trips to the Ecuadorian consulate for money. At Christmas they gave him twenty dollars.
It was a miserable winter. He wrote pleading letters to the Ecuadorian government, begging for his stipend. He asked if he might be granted a scholarship to a college in California, where he knew he would be able to play tennis on a regular basis. The Ecuadorian authorities sent him small sums from time to time citing resolutions and conflicting commitments that prevented them from sending any more. The situation was dire. He felt like the lowest form of immigrant.
He would walk to forty blocks to get a cheap sandwich. He was desperately lonely. He had come from a large family, and he missed his sisters and brothers back in Guayaquil. He wrote to his mother once a week until he could no longer afford to do so. He couldn't go anywhere except on foot, because transportation cost too much. He managed once to get to Radio City Music Hall and saw the dancing girls. "Big excitement!" he recalled. He longed for female company, but couldn't afford a date.
Pancho was cold, lonely, and, most painful of all, he could not play tennis. It cost money to rent an indoor court and he had none. Not playing tennis was the one deprivation the hungry and frustrated Ecuadorian could not bear. It was the worst periods of his life.
His luck changed in the form of a benefactor whose generosity transported the desolate nineteen-year-old into an entirely new realm. His name was Arturo Cano and he was the Bolivian consul to the United States in New York. Cano was charming, witty, and rich. He also loved tennis. He remembered Pancho's triumph at the Bolivarian Games, he knew what the young tennis player was capable of, and he decided to take the skinny kid under his wing.
Suddenly, Pancho's fortunes changed radically. Cano lived in a large apartment on Riverside Drive and he invited Pancho to stay with hirn. "People thought I had money because I lived there," Pancho laughed. Cano took him around town, showed him fine restaurants and nightclubs, such as the Copacabana, the Latin Quarter, and the Diamond Horseshoe.
Cano's influence was enormous. Through him, Pancho met rich people for the first time and saw how they entertained themselves and how he should behave with them. Cano taught him social skills that were invaluable lessons for the boy from the Guayaquil barrio, and they remained with him for life. Pancho was a quick student and knew the value of his good fortune. "He was my patron. I got lucky. He kept me in food and clothes. He was my buddy."
Cano was joined by another South American, Alfonso Rojas, an Ecuadorian newspaper mogul, who also began supporting Pancho, taking care of his correspondence and finances. With these guardians, Pancho now began to experience New York in a completely new way. As well as going to nightclubs and shows with Arturo Cano, he used to see Rosalind Palmer and her parents, who would invite him to dinner and the theater.
Rosalind remembered how Pancho would study the posters in the foyer and program notes with a fierce intensity, memorizing the names and faces of actors and actresses. How could he have known that one day he might meet some of them and become their friends?
But tennis came first, and his main desire was to play, wherever and whenever he could. Arturo Cano sensed that his protégé had drawing power on the tennis court, and during the spring and summer of 1941 he entered him in tournaments up and down the East coast.
Pancho began playing very good tennis. On May 19, 1941, he won his first major tournament, the Brooklyn Tennis Championship. He beat the Czech player Ladislav Hecht in five grueling sets after losing the first two.
The highly regarded tennis writer for the New York Times Allison Danzig covered the match. Clearly bowled over by the extraordinary tennis he had witnessed, he wrote, "No one would have given very much for the chances of the nineteen-year-old South American as the play went into the third set." But as it progressed, "he never flagged in his concentration and fight." In the fourth set, "Segura, in full control, and gaining in confidence, was too strong from the back of the court, and passed Hecht as the latter came in on unworthy approach shots." Toward the end of the fifth set, "Segura, playing brilliantly and scoring with his two-hand drive and passing shots, ran four games in a row to end the match."
Danzig added that the Ecuadorian received an ovation from his friends in the big crowd. Arturo Cano had called it correctly. Pancho Segura, the Inca Warrior, was becoming a major tennis draw. That was the beginning of a great summer for Pancho.
He played at all the elite clubs of the Northeastern circuit—Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline, Massachusetts; Seabright Lawn Tennis and Country Club, New Jersey; again at the Meadow Club in Southampton; the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York; the Newport Casino, Rhode Island; and finishing at the West Side Country Club in Forest Hills, New York. These were lawn tennis clubs with notorious membership exclusivity. In the face of every kind of odds, he was finding his feet on the most exclusive lawn tennis courts in the world.
At Forest Hills he was again drawn against Frank Parker, and again he lost. But in his last tournament of that year, in the Dade County Championship in Miami, he beat one of the best players in the country, Gardnar Mulloy, in an upset that astounded the tennis world. The score was 4-6, 6-1, 6-4, 8-6. The match was widely reported by the international press, who were dazzled by the speed and tenacity of the South American marvel, who had seemingly come out of nowhere to defeat Mulloy, the seven time champion.
Mulloy first saw Pancho play in Guayaquil before the war, when Mulloy was visiting Ecuador with the State Department. "When we visited these clubs we would be asked to play with the juniors, and in Guayaquil they dragged out this bandy-legged little kid. I hit with him and he was good. When you hit with a junior you can usually tell within five minutes if he's going to be any good or not. I said to the members of the Guayaquil Tennis Club that this kid had to get to the United States and if he ever came I'd be glad to help him."
In 1940, Mulloy was playing in the Eastern Grass Court Championships in Rye, New York, with his doubles partner Bill Talbert. They were in their hotel room and late at night there was a knock on the door. "I opened the door and in the dim corridor light was Segura, standing there with a little straw bag. 'I am Francisco Segura,” he said in his almost impenetrable English. 'You say come to America, and here I am.'" Mulloy looked at him for a moment and then said, "Come on in, you can sleep on the floor."
Segura had once again been dealt a lucky hand. Gardnar Mulloy was one of the finest all-around players in the world. (Click Here for Mulloy's incredible article series.) But he held another title that was far more important to Pancho at that time. Gardnar Mulloy was coach of the University of Miami tennis team.
