Dick Savitt, who has died aged 95, was one of the most controversial tennis players of his era. Not for the manner in which he won Wimbledon in 1951 nor, indeed, the Australian Championships the same year, but for his fractious relationship with the US Lawn Tennis Association and the Davis Cup captain of the time, Frank Shields.
Savitt has been called the greatest Jewish tennis player of all time and, to date, no one has really challenged him on that score despite the emergence of such fine players as Brad Gilbert and Aaron Krickstein from the US and Amos Mansdorf from Israel. But, in the 50s, there was no escaping the fact that Savitt’s Jewishness worked against him.
Happily, prejudice can never interfere on court and Savitt unleashed the full force of his power and personality at Wimbledon in 1951, using his crushing backhand to blast his way past early-round opponents. These included Kurt Nielsen, the Dane who would go on to reach two Wimbledon finals in the following years. It took Savitt five long sets to subdue Nielsen but his dominance grew after that and two American compatriots, Art Larsen and Herbie Flam, were dispatched before he faced the Australian Ken McGregor in the final. McGregor, primarily known as a doubles player, was a surprise finalist and proved no match for Savitt, who raced through the match in three sets.
It is hard to be sure why he was excluded from the Davis Cup singles lineup when the US, under Shields’s captaincy, were about to play Australia in Sydney later that year. To a squad that already included Savitt, Vic Seixas and Tony Trabert, Shields added Ted Schroeder, a businessman who had won Wimbledon on his only appearance there in 1949, had been playing little top-class tennis and was not considered match-sharp. He then brought Jack Kramer on board as coach; and the strong-willed Kramer was Schroeder’s best friend.
Savitt became uneasy when Seixas and Schroeder were chosen as singles players for the semi-final against Sweden in Melbourne and duly won the tie 5-0. Shields then announced that the same pair would play singles in the final against Australia, with Seixas partnering Trabert in the doubles. Outraged, Savitt stormed out. He never spoke to Shields again and shunned all future offers to play for his country.
Australia duly won the final 3-2 and the Australian coach, Harry Hopman, was one of many who felt Savitt should have played. Then a wire service reporter picked up some gossip at the bar of the hotel and wrote a story about the “real” reason for Savitt’s omission; it was, he said, a question of Shields being antisemitic. Shields was devastated, pointing out that he had attended an all-Jewish school and that his oldest friend and business partner, Julius Seligson, was Jewish.
The story had no satisfactory ending. Savitt’s Davis Cup career was over and Shields’s insurance business suffered. The truth of why Shields chose Schroeder over Savitt has never been satisfactorily resolved, although the sociology professor E Digby Baltzell, in his 1995 book Sporting Gentleman wrote, “Although no one will ever know for sure whether antisemitism influenced Shields or Kramer in their overlooking Savitt, it must be said that the mores of the upper-class world in which Shields lived took blanket antisemitism for granted.”
Savitt continued to play tournament tennis for a while but lost his Wimbledon title in 1952 in a five-set semi-final to the Australian Mervyn Rose. As defending champion, one might have expected Savitt to have been seeded first in an era when rankings were the arbitrary opinion of tournament officials and Lance Tingay of the Daily Telegraph, who published an “official” Top 10 ranking every year. However, Savitt was seeded only fourth, behind Frank Sedgman, Seixas and Jaroslav Drobný. Another slight? No one would admit as much.
Savitt was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Kate (nee Hoberman) and Morris Savitt, a businessman, and taught himself to play tennis – he never took a lesson in his life. But the first sport he excelled at was basketball and when his family moved to Texas he was a star of his El Paso high school team. Enlisting in the US navy during the second world war, he also was an outstanding performer on services basketball teams and that led to his being offered a basketball scholarship to Cornell University. However, injuries cut short his career in that sport so he turned back to tennis and, within a year, had reached the semi-finals at Forest Hills.
Following his failed attempt to win more grand slam titles in 1952, Savitt retired from the game to work in the oil industry in Louisiana and it was only on his return to New York in 1956 that he started playing again. Known as a fierce competitor with a huge serve and powerful backcourt game, Savitt soon started dominating the local scene as a weekend player and won three successive US Indoor titles at the 7th Regiment Armoury courts in Manhattan.
By then he was working for the investment bank Salomon Brothers. He became a benefactor of many causes in the city, not least to Columbia University, where the tennis centre is named after him. But, to complete a career full of irony, he was unable to use the Dick Savitt Courts although he continued to play well into his 80s. They are hard courts and the state of Savitt’s knees could not withstand that unforgiving surface. So he played on clay at the public park courts at 96th Street.
In 1961 he travelled to Israel to compete in the Maccabiah Games, where he won both the singles and doubles titles. But he always insisted that his proudest moment on a tennis court came when he won the Fathers & Sons title at Forest Hills with his son Bobby in 1981. Savitt was inducted into the International Hall of Fame in 1976.
In the last decade of his life, Savitt enjoyed holding court in the players’ lounge at the US Open, full of stories and jokes. His willingness to help young players never faded. One year, when an injury forced him into a wheelchair, he was to be seen out on the practice court, shouting advice to some young hopeful. He was probably 90 at the time.
His second wife, Annelle Warwick Hayes, died in 2013. He is survived by Bobby, the son of his first marriage, to Louise Liberman, which ended in divorce, and three grandchildren.
• Richard Savitt, tennis player, born 4 March 1927; died 6 January 2023
