Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer:
The Road to Extinction
Tom LeCompte
After his loss to Bobby Riggs on opening night of their 1947 tour in front of 15,000 fans in blizzard conditions in New York (Click here), Jack Kramer admitted he had been nervous.
He said also that he had trouble adjusting to the indoor conditions and the canvas court. "But that's no alibi," Kramer said. "I got jittery and missed the easy ones."
The next day, flush with victory and $20,000 in collected bets, Bobby demanded a meeting with Kramer and the promoter Jack Harris. As they sat on a train bound for Pittsburgh, the second stop on the tour, Bobby announced he wanted to renegotiate his contract.
The original deal signed by the two players called for Kramer to get 35 percent of the net profits and Bobby to get 17 and a half percent. Logic and fairness might dictate that Bobby, the reigning champion, receive more than the challenger, but tour economics dictated that the challenger get the big money because the amateurs retained all the power and publicity in tennis.
Bobby understood this. What he argued was that if he kept beating Kramer, or that if they played so close that interest in the tour allowed them to double back through New York and other major cities, then he rightfully deserved an extra share.
It was a typically shrewd argument for Bobby, whose talents as a negotiator were second only to his abilities as a tennis player. Reluctantly, Harris and Kramer agreed to give up two and a half percent of their share of the profits over $100,000.
For Kramer, having been beaten on opening night in New York in front of the big city press and now beaten out of two and a half percent of the profits, the stakes of the tour became immediately clear.
"I sat there thinking that I had better win this tour," he later wrote. "If I did not I was as useless in tennis as yesterday's newspaper. Wimbledon, Forest Hills, the Davis Cup-none of it would mean a damn.
"Budge lost one tour by a couple of matches and he is buried. There is no greater incentive than the threat of extinction."
A series of one-night stands took the tour across the Midwest, then back to the Northeast and down the Atlantic Coast to Florida. Gradually, Kramer made adjustments.
The Glamour
Playing an average of four to five matches a week, the tour moved from big city to big city, playing arenas, then to smaller cities and towns where they played in cramped auditoriums or high-school gymnasiums.
As was tradition, the tour took place over the winter months. At first, the players traveled mostly by train. Then, as the distances grew greater and the train schedules less convenient, promoter Harris found a couple of DeSoto station wagons.
If Bobby and Kramer bought the cars, Harris would kick in for the gas. This allowed the players to leave town separately at their convenience.
Often the ideal time to travel was right after the evening matches, when they were too keyed up to sleep anyway. This meant driving in the dead of night, often in bad weather. Occasionally, the players flew, but it would be a few years before the players could travel by air regularly.
A one-ton panel truck carried the canvas court, the net, the balls, and the souvenir programs. The court was split into two 800-pound sections that took six men to handle.
When they arrived at a new city, the court had to be rolled out. The halves were laced together at the net. It was then pulled tight by ropes fed through 22 eyes on each side of the court and anchored to the stands. More than once, a player chased a ball off the court only to trip on the ropes.
The truck driver was a regular member of the tour, paid a small salary plus a commission for each program he sold. The arenas hired six or so workers to help put down the court under the driver's supervision.
Players then checked the court as standard operating procedure. If the canvas was too loose, players might slide and be injured. At the end of the night, the court had to be rolled up precisely to fit back into the truck.
The players often had to play in dark, sometimes unheated, arenas. At a hockey rink in Canada, the court had to be laid over the ice, but the boards around the ice left nothing with which to anchor the court.
So Bert Brown, a former player hired as the driver, pounded large spikes into the ice to secure the ropes. "I didn't want to ruin their ice. But I did it anyway," Brown said.
The long hours, overnight drives, and often freezing winter weather made it a tough way to make a living. "It was backbreaking work," recalled Brown. It was also dangerous. One time, Brown said, he fell asleep at the wheel and woke up in a snowbank. "I told myself I gotta get out of this," Brown said.
He found someone to take his place, a kid he knew from the Los Angeles area, Bill Sullivan. Later, he learned Sullivan did the same thing--fell asleep at the wheel. Only Sullivan wasn't as lucky. He was killed.
In Little Rock, they had to play on the stage of a high-school auditorium. The space wasn't big enough for the canvas court, so they painted a facsimile of a tennis court on the stage floor. In Saratoga, New York, they played in an opera house with the back wall 18 inches from the baseline.
Near Springfield, Massachusetts, they played in a gymnasium in which the players had to run around basketball stanchions set two feet behind the baseline.
It was grueling: constant traveling, unpredictable conditions, the hassles and isolation of being on the road. Unlike amateurs, who got to hang around cushy country clubs for a week, it was a world of cheap hotels and all-night coffee shops.
And unlike tournament play, there were no easy early round matches. Every match was hard fought.
More difficult, perhaps, was convincing the fans that the matches were on the level. The head-to-head format drew inevitable suspicions that the matches could be fixed or that, at the very least, the players might not be motivated to play their very best every night.
"At each stop we had to convince everybody that we played for real, that we weren't some damn circus," Kramer said.
At least Bobby and Kramer had the gratification of being paid well. Pancho Segura and Dinny Pails, who played a preliminary match, received just $300 per week apiece, and they had to pay their own expenses.
The $8,800 Kramer collected on opening night in New York was more than those two together earned for the entire tour. No, it wasn't fair, admitted Kramer, "but if you wanted to play professionally, it was the only game in town."
For a while, Segura lost more money playing cards than he was earning playing tennis after Bobby taught him to play poker. "Bobby stole my money," Segura complained.
Banned from the card games until he was solvent again, Segura recalled occasionally having to sleep in the car because he couldn't afford a motel room. Considering the players were more or less quarantined with the same guys who were trying to beat them out of a job, they all got along remarkably well.
"After the matches we would relax with each other, have a few beers, play cards, because often as not we were somewhere alone and all we had for company was each other," Kramer said.
After a month and a half, Bobby and Kramer had played to a virtual dead heat. By the time the tour reached Los Angeles in the middle of February, Kramer held a 15-13 lead. The matches were tough, closely fought contests.
"His strategy was to smother me," Kramer recalled. "That sounds ridiculous, given my larger size and greater power, but Bobby had the confidence, the speed and the agility.
"When we first started touring, he came in on his first serve, on his second serve, and on my second serve. He could come to the net on his second serve by lofting a high bouncer into the far corner of my backhand service box. I couldn't generate any real power, and with the high bounce, he also had time to get into the net."
"Unless I was getting an unusually high percentage of good first serves in, I was vulnerable to service breaks. It forced me to learn to hit a high kicking serve down the middle to his backhand in the deuce court.
"It forced me to think attack constantly. It was kill or be killed. So the style I am famous for was not consciously planned; it was created out of the necessity of dealing with Bobby Riggs."
At the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, the site of Bobby's first big win over Budge, courtside seats for the players' two matches sold for $12.50 apiece, a small fortune in 1948. Before big hometown crowds, they each won a match.
But then the tide turned dramatically. Kramer went 10-1 in matches from California across the West and into Texas. At first, Bobby tried to respond by hitting big service returns, a gamble that gave him little margin for error. Over time he found he could win only when he played his very best.
As Kramer's lead grew, Bobby became demoralized and gave up trying. "I hated it and fell apart," Bobby later explained. "I'm not a grind out man. That first Madison Square Garden match was a clutch match, a natural for me. "I'm only really good when we play for all the marbles. Who's got the nerve? That's my game. I can't play a grind out."
Bobby could not understand why Kramer, even after he wrapped up the tour by stretching his winning streak to the point Bobby had no chance of coming back, "just poured it on harder and harder."
In Fort Worth, Bobby hit bottom. According to Bobby, he had the flu. According to others, he was out all night playing poker. In any case, he was in no shape to play tennis.
Before their match he approached Kramer in the locker room: "Look, you gotta give me a break. Carry me a bit. Make it look it competitive. Your winning streak is killing interest in the tour, not to mention costing us a lot of money. If for no other reason, do it for the fans, who paid good money to see us."
Kramer listened silently and then went out on court and handed Bobby his most humiliating loss of the entire tour--and possibly his career--finishing him off in less than an hour, 6-0, 6-0.
More than half the audience got up and left at the intermission. Those who stayed did a good deal of heckling and booing. Afterwards, Kramer went up to Bobby and sternly said, "Don't ever ask me to do something like that again."
After Los Angeles, Kramer's winning run was 54-7, so that he finished the tour 69-20. As his lead lengthened, interest in the tour diminished and the crowds thinned.
But overall, the tour was a huge success, attracting 332,977 fans and grossing $503,047--the most yet for a professional tennis tour. After deducting expenses, Kramer's 35 percent share came to $89,000.
Bobby's was $45,387. It was the payoff of a lifetime for a lifetime devoted to the game. Appearances in South American and Europe subsequently earned another $135,000.
But Bobby now faced the prospect of becoming an instant has been. His only hope was to win the U.S. Professional Championships at Forest Hills that July, the only American professional tournament of any consequence.
If he could beat Kramer there, he still could claim to be a valid contender and perhaps prolong his career. It didn't happen. Kramer was too good.
On the manicured turf at the West Side Tennis Club, Kramer first took out Budge in an epic semifinal, coming back from two sets to one and two service breaks down in the fourth set to win, 6-4, 8-10, 3-6, 6-4, 6-0.
Against Bobby in the final he won in four, 14-12, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5. Bobby had chances. He missed an easy put away volley at set point in the first. Years later, he remembered that shot.
Now, suddenly, like Budge the year before, Bobby faced forced retirement. From the pinnacle of tennis success, his ascendance to world champion, and his top billing in the most successful professional tour ever - Bobby was out of a job.
The harsh reality was a new challenger had to be found. Angry and frustrated, Bobby quit training, gave up trying on court, and let himself go. He hated losing, hated being next to best, and saw his future crashing around him. Bobby had to deal with a predicament that eventually faces any career athlete - the grim inevitability of life without sport.
The rest of Bobby's life - the gambling, the stunts, and eventually the match with Billie Jean - all that followed and is detailed in the remainder of my book. Here's hoping you have enjoyed the series!
