The Pros: The Forgotten Era of Tennis by Peter Underwood
Review by Jimmy Parker
April 2020
To most tennis players and fans today, names like Bill Tilden and Don Budge are lost in the haze of history. It’s difficult for those familiar only with the modern game to imagine that the best tennis pros in the world were barred from playing the major championships until 1968. But here in this book, eight of the greatest players of the barnstorming era come alive! In their struggle for recognition in a time when world-class tournaments were run by petty amateur associations, their greatness truly shines through.
Before the Open Era, tennis was primarily an amateur game. Officialdom thought that if you took money for playing a game, you were somehow sullied. But then how would one eat? So the way it worked was the very men who controlled the amateur bodies slipped the top players money under the table and then raked in the profits from the tournaments they ran. It thus became known as the era of “Shamateurism.” After a stellar amateur career, 1920s superstar Bill Tilden, always at odds with the game’s power brokers, was one of the first to break away by turning pro.
The author gives us many stories and much detail of what the old barnstorming tours were like. Imagine playing the same opponent night after night in city after city at home and abroad in converted gymnasiums! Underwood artfully takes us through the progression of great players who butt heads on the professional tour. From Vines to Perry to Budge, Riggs, Kramer, Gonzalez, Rosewall, and finally Laver, we work our way to the Open Era. Each player not only had to adapt to the style of his opponent on the tour, but in the process influenced the way the game is played at the top levels.
The pros of that era were literally playing for their tennis lives. When Kramer beat Gonzalez in their initial tour, Gonzalez (arguably the second-best player in the world at the time) went back to stringing rackets for a living. After Kramer retired, Pancho got a second chance, this time touring against Tony Trabert. He tells us “If I lost to Trabert, I was a bum again, unemployed and unwanted. If I beat him, he was a bum. One of us had to be a bum—I didn’t want it to be me.”
I found the book totally engaging, I’m sure partly because I actually saw half of them from the other side of the net. As a tennis junkie, I was familiar with all of the players of the era, and their personal stories are the stuff of legend. One gets a sense of what made them great—their personalities, coaching, individual flair, and what they had to overcome. And their relationships with each other.
We probably can’t expect many of the highly-paid players of today to fully appreciate what they’ve been given. In fairness, a few like Federer and Murray are historically knowledgeable. But without the efforts of the old players featured in this book, the game would not be what it is today. Peter Underwood’s entertaining and insightful stories about the players who laid the foundation for tennis in the 21st century should be required reading for tennis lovers everywhere, and especially the youngsters with professional tennis aspirations. Good on ya, mate!