Segura On the Pro Tour
Caroline Seebohm
It is almost impossible for people today to imagine the kind of life professional tennis players led in the years between 1947 when Pancho Segura signed on to Jack Harris's professional tour and 1968, the year tennis became open.
The opening event of Harris's newly formed tour took place at Madison Square Garden on December 26, 1947. There had been a snowstorm, and most transportation was cancelled.
But in spite of the weather, over fifteen thousand fans turned out to see Bobby Riggs and his newly minted professional teammates—Jack Kramer, Dinny Pails, and Segura--play on a wooden surface laid over the ice hockey rink—a typical ad hoc court for pro tennis at that time, regardless of how cold the players' feet might feel.
The Australian Pails beat Segura in the opening match, which had to be shortened to one epic length set. The score was 15-13 and Harris stopped the match there to make time for the headliners.
Then Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer came onto the court, and Riggs beat the new star in a tough 6-2, 10-8, 4-6, 6-4 struggle. Immediately afterward the four men took a train to Pittsburgh and played the whole thing over again, Pails and Riggs again edging out their rivals.
This was the format for the rest of the tour. Pails and Segura would play the warm-up match, then Riggs and Kramer played the headlined singles, Then the four men, usually Kramer and Segura versus Riggs and Pails, would play doubles.
Jack Kramer called the Segura and Pails match "the animal act." The two men were paid three hundred dollars a week. In contrast, on that opening night in Madison Square Garden alone, Jack Kramer made $8,800 and Bobby Riggs made $4,400.
"It was very unfair," Kramer admitted. "But if you wanted to play professionally, It was the only game in town."
The players traveled across the country as far as Florida and Arizona. Originally, they traveled by train, but as the distances grew and train schedules were less convenient, they switched to cars. Air travel was then only in its infancy.
Then Jack Harris found a good deal on two DeSoto station wagons. He threw in fifty dollars a week for gas and incidentals for Kramer and Riggs. "That helped the kids in the animal act," Kramer conceded, "since they could ride with us."
The players were all young, enthusiastic, and hungry. They were playing the game they loved. But the conditions were stressful, often exhausting.
They drove the two station wagons themselves, with a van behind carrying the equipment--two folding canvas panels for the court, a net, line markers, rackets, balls, and souvenir programs. In those struggling years, no company would even sponsor their tennis ball supply. Jack Harris would go ahead as advance man, to drum up local interest hoping to get a gate that would payoff financially.
They traveled constantly to new places, with new conditions. Mostly they played indoors. Since the events were one night stands, they could not take a chance on the weather. Only in Florida or California could they play outdoors.
They later expanded the tour to Europe, Asia, South America, even back to Pancho's home country, Ecuador. When promoter Jack Harris got sick, his four musketeers continued on without him, arranging their own tour of Australia and New Zealand, playing in countless towns in the two countries during the fall of 1948.
Early Economics
Jack Kramer, who right from the start was trying to work out how to make better money as a professional, described to tennis author and player Gene Scott the economics of the tour in those early days:
"Our cut was 55 percent of the gross, while the arena got to keep 45 percent. We made a few more bucks sometimes selling souvenir programs.
"When I first started touring, the government had a special 20 percent amusement tax, and so there was a strict accounting of all tickets sold.
"But once the tax went off, you were very vulnerable to the local promoters taking advantage of you. It was tedious work, but the only way to make sure that you were getting a fair shake was to get a manifest of all the tickets printed and then count by hand the tickets not sold.
As Kramer put it, the finances for the players were "cuckoo."
"In the U.S. and Canada, you had to play on average four and a half matches a week just to break even. "But that was still never enough once we paid for other people we needed on the tour. Worse, once you had played ten weeks, you had almost certainly hit all the major markets.
"You might try to double back into a large city twice but generally speaking the act only played once. So after the first ten weeks, you were doing it in high-school gyms in small towns."
They were booked into a new place every night, every week. Each venue was different--a school auditorium, an opera house, a hockey rink, a town hall, a gymnasium.
"The canvas surface indoors made for a fast game, like on grass," Kramer said. "We played the opera house in Saratoga, New York, once where the back wall was eighteen inches from the baseline."
"The floor that went over the ice at the Montreal Forum was the one I remember the most because it was the worst of any big building," Kramer added. "The court fit together all wrong. The sockets were worn. We'd aim for the holes."
The players were like a traveling band of actors, putting on a one-night theater performance, then striking it, loading it, and driving on to the next place, maybe hundreds of miles away.
They would stay in cheap rooms. Segura remembered occasionally having to sleep in the car. They would sleep at odd hours, physically exhausted but pumped with adrenaline from the constant challenge of the competition.
Would Anyone Show?
They hoped maybe the next place would bring in keen tennis fans who had actually heard of the great champions about to play for them. But in some of the more out of the way spots, there was little or no gate.
Pancho remembered a time they traveled to Scotland. The event was to take place in Paisley, near Glasgow--a working-class district. The promoter Jack Harris was full of optimism about this particular venue.
"He said, I'm of Scottish ancestry, we're going to draw big,'" Segura related. "So we went there and there were only about a hundred people and we had to give the money back!"
At the beginning Segura could not drive, so the others had to do it. "We decided to teach Pancho to drive," Kramer said, "and at the motels we stayed at, every morning we would take him to one of our cars and make him sit in the driver's seat and learn to drive right there in the parking lot.
"It got quite dangerous after we let him on the road, he'd be leaning out of the window to make sure he was seeing right. He was scared to death in the early days-and so were we!"
It wasn't like amateur tennis. No ambassadors came to meet them or invite them to their grand houses or dine with them in expensive restaurants.
Transformed
Pancho was transformed as a person and as a player by his years on the tour. For Pancho, the travel was stimulating, thrilling. It widened his horizons.
"I was always interested in each town we went to finding out about the people, how they lived, how they earned their money.
"I was happy because I was doing something I loved," he said.
"In England, for instance, I studied all the places we went to. My biggest thrill was meeting Clement Attlee, the first postwar prime minister after Winston Churchill, who came to Wembley to see us play in 1949."
Surprisingly, Pancho knew exactly who Attlee was. He had started taking an interest in politics when he was still a student at Miami and read newspapers and newsweeklies voraciously.
"I was in Coral Gables practicing my tennis when Roosevelt made the speech about Pearl Harbor in 1944," he recalled. "I was very big on current events even then. It was one of my biggest assets."
Pancho read in the car, in the bus, in the train, learning about the places where he was going to play tennis.
So when he was in England: he knew all sorts of things about British politics and why it was significant to play tennis for Clement Attlee. He knew about Benjamin Disraeli, Anthony Eden, and especially Neville Chamberlain, "the appeaser," who tried to avoid World War II.
Segura raised his tennis to another level during those first years of the tour. "The guy who won got more money than the one who lost, so that was an incentive," he said later. "We played to win."
Each time they arrived in a new place, they immediately practiced, because the conditions were always terrible. If they were in some school gymnasium or town hall, Pancho would sneak out by himself and start lobbing the ball up into the rafters to see how easy It would be to see in the lights.
Jack Kramer saw the intensity in the Ecuadorian. "No matter whom Pancho was playing, he just couldn't stand the idea of losing, and that's why his consistency was so damn good."
The Drive to Improve
The financial lure was certainly a major factor in the desire to win but for Pancho there was another incentive. He wanted to improve his game. That was always in his mind, to improve.
"You improved because you had to. I played against the wall to practice volleys. Practice first from a standing position then on the run. In a game, nobody is going to hit the ball back to you. So you must master balls coming from corner to corner." Pancho's speed was legendary. As Jack Kramer had learned from playing him before the war, Pancho could wear down anybody.
"My backhand was my weakness, compared to my forehand, and the other guys knew it, so it improved because they played it all the time. It had to improve."
JackKramer taught him to build on his serve by going to the net. Kramer's huge serve and volley, the "big game" as it was called, had transformed tennis. Rushing the net behind serve had to be part of the repertoire of every competitive player, especially on canvas.
"We played indoors," Pancho said, "which is very fast, so the guy with the big serve has a big advantage. With no fresh air, the ball doesn't get heavy. I had to compensate for that."
Kramer's rival, Bobby Riggs, also helped Pancho learn how to improve. Bobby was short like Pancho, and both were bantam light compared to Kramer or Don Budge. Riggs won his matches with a combination of anticipation, speed, and strategy.
"I learned a lot from Bobby," Pancho said. "Not about hustling--though there was never a better hustler than Bobby--but about playing to win."
"Bobby had every shot in the book and nerves of steel. He could beat you from the back because he was so quick. He was a baseline player, but playing Kramer he decided he had to come to the net. He used his head. He was a little guy playing a big guy--just like I was."
"Bobby and I only weighed 140 pounds. Kramer and the other guys weighed175 or more, and they had the advantage of height when they served.
"But we had the advantage when we were on the move, running around the court. We were the roadrunners of the tennis world."
At some point, Pancho changed his backhand grip. He studied Kramer and copied the master's stronger grip. "I oversliced the ball, I would cut it, so that it would go high, and the other guy would rush to the net and volley it away from me. By changing the grip I kept the ball lower so he could not put it away so easily.
"I had to do this since we all played the net and my oId backhand was no good for that kind of play."
For Pancho there was never any question that he had to change. "If you hold your racket badly, you can play the rest of your life and never improve." His dedication paid off, and his backhand became much stronger.
Not that it was ever as good as his forehand. Jack Kramer often said that he thought Segura's two-handed forehand was the best shot in tennis.
During these years of hard, intensive play and constant self-improvement, Pancho became fit, hard, and firm, "like iron." In 1949 he began playing Kramer on even terms. Fans also began to come specifically to see "Segoo," as friends in the game called him, for his extraordinary personality on the court. The eager, lopsided walk. the wiry frame, the laser like strokes, the sense of humor, the twinkling eyes and flashing smile.
Segura would urge himself on actually calling out during points, "Ahara, Pancho, ahara! Vamos!" ("Now, Pancho, now! Let's go!") Then he would charge the net or hit a disguised drop shot.
Today shouts and grunts are commonplace, but in those days Pancho's utterances were unheard of.
"Tennis was so quiet always," Pancho said, laughing. But it was not only talking to himself that endeared him to the fans. After a particularly brilliant shot, he would turn to the applauding crowds and tap the side of his head, grinning hugely.
"I'd tell my opponent I'm a showman," Pancho said. "In South America I'd clown and clap in front of the Indian group in the stands. They loved it. They loved me being the little guy against the big gringo."
The big gringo himself, Jack Kramer, was quick to appreciate the moneymaking power of his teammate: "The fans would come out to see the new challenger face the old champion," he said, "but they would leave talking about the bandy-legged son of a bitch who gave them such pleasure playing the first match and the doubles. The next time the tour came to town the fans would come back to see Segoo."
Harris Cut Out
In 1949 Bobby Riggs suggested to Kramer that they cut Harris out entirely and manage the tour on their own. Kramer agreed. Segura and Pails also signed on, for only marginally better money.
The newly formed group set off on an arduous schedule of appearances, beginning with a European tour of England, Scotland, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Denmark. Segura's results constantly improved. At Wembley, in March, he beat Pails decisively, winning three matches to none.
Two months later, at the London Indoor Pro Championship, Segura beat Kramer in a semifinal that went to five sets, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.
In December, 1949, Segura showed his new level by defeating the newest pro on the tour, Frank Parker. Parker had just won the French singles and doubles and the Wimbledon doubles championships.
Segura was unimpressed. By the end of the 1950 tour, he had beaten Parker fifty-seven straight times.
He reached a pinnacle in the Paris Pro Indoors, with a victory over Jack Kramer in two sets, 6-3, 6-2. This triumph heralded the beginning of Segura's greatest years on the professional tour.
It also coincided with the appearance of another player who would later dominate the game throughout the world. He was tall, dark, Hollywood.handsome, and a dazzling performer, a Mexican-American whose moods became as famous as his serve. His name was Richard Gonzales, and he was to play a dramatic role in Segura's life for the next ten years.
