The Los Angeles Tennis Club:
A Condensed History
Tom LeCompte
In 1920, Vine Street down from Hollywood Boulevard was little more than a passable roadway lined with pepper trees. Melrose Avenue was an unpaved "cowpath," according to the Los Angeles Tennis Club's official history. Nevertheless, by the time a group of tennis enthusiasts decided Los Angeles should have a club devoted to the sport they loved, Southern California had long been known for tennis. (Click Here for part 1 on the golden age of the club.)
There was May Sutton, a child phenom who as a 12-year-old in 1908, beat the 1899 U.S. women's singles champion. Then as a 16-year-old, May won the U.S. singles title. At 17 won shethe first of two Wimbledon singles titles. She and three of her four sisters - all formidable players - formed the core of a Southern Cal tennis dynasty that continuedwell into the new century.
May Sutton married Tom Bundy, the son of a Santa Monica real estate developer and himselfa Southern California men's singles champion. Their daughter, Dorothy "Dodo" Cheney, was a world ranked player in the 1940s, a Hall of Fame inductee, and competed well into her 80s, accumulating more than 300 national titles before dying in 2014 at the age of 98.
Together with a group of other tennis enthusiasts, Tom Bundy took an option on a 5 and a half acre plot covering the entire block that surrounds the present Los Angeles Tennis Club. The cost in 1920 was $11,000.
Organized as a non-profit organization, there were about 50 charter members of the original club. Bundy waspresident. Five courts were built. At first, there were no lockers or clubhouse.
The initial initiation fee was $150 (the equivalent of about $1900 today). Dues were $3 a month. By 1923 the Spanish-style clubhouse was completed at a cost of $50,000, with a tile roof and stucco walls outside and tile floors and wrought iron light fixtures inside. The living room lounge was a long rectangle with fireplaces at each end and hardwood floors.
From the beginning, the club's founders envisioned the L.A. Tennis Club being more than a place they could get together and play. They wanted a place where they could invite their international and Davis Cup friends to compete.
They enlarged the original clubhouse, increased the courts to a total of 17, and added a grandstand. The second floor of the clubhouse offered views of the action on the grandstand court, and long breezeway covered by a series of archesthat ranbehind a row of baselines.
By 1925, membership had grown to150. A swimming pool was added, the cost equal to that paid for the entire site five years earlier.
In 1926, a group of members that included "Big Bill" Tilden decided to host the first major tournament at the club, and the Pacific Southwest Championshipswas born. Tilden himself won the first singles title and also the first doubles championship, playing with Francis T. Hunter.
Being one of the first tennis clubs in the city, and with such a high pedigree of players helping found and promote it, it didn't take long for the club to become a mecca.
"This is where the great players wanted to play," said Gene Mako, alife long member and the longtime doubles partner of Don Budge.
"They knew they could just show up and find other great players." Budge, a native of the San Francisco area and would travel all the way to Los Angeles to train at the club.
As serious as the tennis was, however, the club was far from a modern boot campacademy. "This was always a fun club," Mako said.
In addition to great players, celebrities such as Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper, Charlie Chaplin, Ann Miller, Gilbert Roland, Howard Hawks, David Selznick and Joseph Cotton could often be found at the club - either playing, watching, or sometimes joining the great players themselves for exhibitions, charity events, or just plain fun.
For the juniors at the club, membership meant getting to learn the game first hand by playing the best. Club member and 1949 Wimbledon champion Ted Schroeder, explained to me that it was all done without coaches, without psychiatrists, without physical therapists or personal entourages.
Perry T. Jones, himself a former city champion, managed the club for more than a quarter century, from the mid-30s to early 1960s. He was also head of the Southern California Tennis Association, a two-time Davis Cup captain, and the director of the Pacific Southwest Championships held at the club, then the most important tournament in the United States behind the national championships at Forest Hills.
"The most successful junior development program in history was the one Perry Jones ran," says Schroeder. "One man."
A powerful figure in tennis, Jones had a knack for singling out promising juniors. Prissy and dictatorial, Jones ran his program with an iron fist.
"Just look, act and play like champions. If you didn't, you're out of there," Schroeder recalled. No on-court antics, no arguing line calls.
"That's the way it was," he said. Those willing to abide by Jones' rules, however, benefited from the club and the association - getting free equipment or expense money to travel to tournaments.
"He had a thing about white shoes," recalled Jack Kramer. "He wouldn't let you on the court with dirty shoes."
During his first trip to Los Angeles to play in a tournament, Oakland native Don Budge recalled being called over by Jones after a particularly impressive win. Expecting to be paid a compliment, Budge instead saw a frowning Jones.
"Budge, those are the dirtiest tennis shoes I ever saw in my life. Don't you ever - don't you ever - show up again on any court anywhere at any time wearing shoes like that."
Jones had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way. He not only expected players to dress and behave a certain way, they had to look and play with a particular style.He wanted his players to be tall and rangy, immaculately groomed, with powerful serves and flashy games - boys like Mako and Kramer, the archetypes of serve-and-volley tennis.
Bobby Riggs - short, brash and unkempt - rarely came inside the service line, preferring to hang behind the baseline and return the ball until his opponent made a mistake.
"Riggs is too short," opined Jones. "He doesn't hit the ball hard enough, isn't tall enough to develop a powerful serve and will never have the reach to play a good net game." The kid, Jones concluded, would amount to nothing.
Undaunted by Jones' assessment and lack of support, Riggs went on to win at Wimbledon, twice at the U.S. championships and rose to become the world's top-ranked player. Not only was Riggs a master defensive player and tactician, according to Schroeder, but he also became "a very, very effective net rusher and a marvelous volleyer."
Two decades later, Jones was still in charge when another young player drew his ire. Still a stickler for neatness and etiquette, Jones refused to allow an 11-year-old Billie Jean Moffitt to stand for a photograph with the other junior girls because she was wearing a blouse and a pair of tennis shorts made by her mother rather than a tennis skirt.
Years later, having taken on her better-known surname King following her marriage to Larry King in 1965, Billie Jean King said it was at that moment that she decided that if she ever had a chance, she would work to eliminate all the petty formality and snobbishness that permeated the game.
Largely fulfilling that pledge, King went on to be the protagonist of the biggest, most-watched spectacle in tennis history: the much-ballyhooed "Battle of the Sexes" in 1973, with 37,000 inside the Houston Astrodome and another 90 million people watching on television worldwide.
And her opponent?The diminutive Riggs, playing the role of motor-mouthed male chauvinist to King's feminist firebrand. More a social phenomenon than an athletic contest, King won handily, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, a victory that went down as a landmark event in the battle for gender parity in sports - and perhaps a fitting tribute to both players' beginnings and their run-ins with Perry Jones.
Whether Jones was a tennis genius or merely the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time could be argued. Whatever the case, the club and its atmosphere were unique.
Each year, the club hosted one the oldest and most prestigious tournaments in the world, the Pacific Southwest Championships, whose tally of singles champions includes Henri Cochet, Ellsworth Vines, Fred Perry, Don Budge, Bobby Riggs, Frank Parker, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Arthur Ashe, Rod Laver, Stan Smith, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe.
Among the women champions were Alice Marble, Pauline Betz, Louise Brough, Maureen Connolly, Althea Gibson, Maria Bueno and Billie Jean King.
In the 1935 final, Don Budge met the great Czech player Roderick Menzel. In the first set, Menzel ran wild and appeared on the way to winning, but Budge dug in. After taking the long second set, Budge went on to win the third set, 6-3.
Menzel, thinking the match was over, picked up his racquets and headed off the court. At this, tournament director Jones rushed onto the court to remind Menzel that it was a three-out-of-five set match. Menzel looked at Jones and replied, "Who do you think is the better player?" Jones answered, "Right now, I pick Mr. Budge." Menzel said, "I do, too," and walked off the court.
Budge went on to win the title three years in a row, his 1938 victory culminating a year in which he was the first man to win the Grand Slam, the four major championships of Australia, France, Wimbledon and Forest Hills.
During another match, Ted Schroeder and Bob Falkenburg played Pancho Gonzales and Hugh Stewart in an exhausting final in 1949 with the score of 36-34,3-6,4,6,6-4,19-17. The first set alone took two and half hours to complete, going a record 70 games.
Between the start at 3:45 p.m. until its conclusion at 8:30 that evening, a total of 135 games were played, far and away the longest match in history of the club.
The tournament also made tennis history of another sort in 1970, when Billie Jean King led a boycott of the tournament to protest the disparity in prize money between the men and women. With the help of publisher Gladys Heldman and Philip Morris chairman and tennis fan Joseph Cullman, King and eight other players started a rival tour, the Virginia Slims circuit, which paved the way for today's tour, the Women's Tennis Association.
The following year, in one of the more bizarre incidents in club history, King and opponent Rosemary Casals staged a "double default" after the second point in the first-set tiebreaker, walking off the court in an apparent dispute over a line call. They were both fined over their protest.
Open tennis was a boon to sport, but its arrival in 1968 was the beginning of the end for L.A. Tennis Club's place as the center of the tennis universe. Big money gave players the ability of players to hire private coaches, financial consultants and personal managers.
Top players began travelling with private entourages, keeping to themselves. Television and larger audiences also demanded larger and more specialized arenas to host tournaments.
The last year the club hosted the Pacific Southwest was 1974, when Jimmy Connors won the men's title. The following year, the tournament moved to the larger confines of the UCLA tennis center and by 1984 the name Pacific Southwest was dumped for tournament sponsor Volvo, then Mercedes Benz. In 2012, the tournament was purchased and moved to Columbia, leaving Los Angeles with no major tennis event to host.
The loss of the only tournament with a trophy Jack Kramer kept on the mantle of his Los Angeles home signaled the beginning of the transition of the Los Angeles Tennis Club to another less magical era, a successful transition, but one that is part of another story.
