Tilden's Predecessor

Court tennis, the sport of kings, is almost as old as sport itself, but the game of tennis as played today is so young that one man's lifetime spans its entire history. Last week that man, prim old Bostonian Richard Dudley Sears, who helped establish the modern game of lawn tennis and was its first U.S. champion, died in Boston at 81. To Boston and Newport porch-sitters and nostalgic tennists everywhere, Dick Sears's death represented the end of an era of ruffles and parasols, roped-off lawns and sunny afternoons, lopsided tennis bats and the genteel pat of ball against languid strings.

One day in 1875 two Harvardmen, James Dwight and Fred Sears (Dick's brother),* slung a net across a lawn in Nahant, Mass, and batted a rubber ball at each other. They had each won a game when it began to rain. The absorbed young players thereupon donned rubber boots and raincoats, played out the rubber game. It was not the first lawn tennis match played in the U.S. (a Staten Islander named Mary Outerbridge had beaten the boys to it) but it was historic. Enthusiasts Dwight and Sears soon got their friends to lay out courts on the fashionable lawns of Nahant and Newport, and 13-year-old Dick Sears, fascinated by the game, began to improve on it.

Lawn tennis, invented in England only two years before by a Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, was then played on an hourglass-shaped court with a sagging net and thick-framed rackets of almost as many shapes and sizes as there were players. Players served underhand, sedately lobbed the ball back & forth. In England, it was considered unsporting to hit a ball beyond an opponent's reach. But Dick Sears developed what he called "a mild form of volleying," took delight in tapping the ball "first to one side and then to the other, running my opponent all over the court." He also introduced to U.S. tennis the "Lawford stroke," a forehand topspin drive he copied from a British player who had defeated him.

Never a slugger, court strategist Dick Sears pit-patted his way to seven U.S. championships (a record since equaled by Larned and Tilden but never broken). He also won the national doubles six times (five of them with James Dwight). At Wimbledon he played only once, was soundly beaten in an early round. Injuries he suffered in a collision with a doubles partner ended Dick Sears's lawn tennis career at his prime (25). Thereupon he took up its less strenuous ancestor, court tennis, and became the first U.S. champion at that. Despite a scarcity of opponents, Dick Sears became so good at this game that he revolutionized it with a new stroke of his own called the "American twist" service, which Jay Gould later used to win the world championship.

But lawn tennis remained Dick Sears's favorite game. Still spry and fierce-eyed, he turned up against his doctor's orders at the 1931 Golden Jubilee of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association. Said he: "They only hold these things every 50 years and I may not be here for the next one."

*Another famed Sears athlete is Fred's hearty daughter Eleonora, former women's squash rackets champion, hiker (Providence to Boston in 9 hr. 53 min.), polo player, horse-show jumper, six times co-winner of the Women's National Doubles championship.

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