A Fine Vines : Some Call Him Best Tennis Player Ever, but He Was More

It is early on an cool and windy fall morning in Pasadena, and tiny La Pintoresca park is quiet. The swings are empty. No one is climbing the steps of the slide or arriving at the bottom in a whoosh.

La Pintoresca, on the northeast corner of Fair Oaks and Washington, is one of the oldest parks in Pasadena. This morning, it’s also one of the quietest.

The park’s tennis courts, which look as though they have been freshly resurfaced, are behind the Omowale Ujama school and only a few blocks south of Washington Junior High, where Jackie Robinson went to school. La Pintoresca’s tennis courts lie silent now, but if they could talk, what a story they could tell.

One day, 64 years ago, a 15-year-old boy, destined to become the greatest tennis player of his time, walked onto these same courts, carrying a $10 racket his mother bought him. A tall, skinny neighborhood kid, he also practiced on the public courts at Brookside Park near the Rose Bowl. This is where it all began, on these patches of concrete, and one must wonder what secrets he discovered there.

Nearly five decades later, British tennis legend Fred Perry could describe Ellsworth Vines only as “truly a meteoric flash across the sky of tennis.”

But at La Pintoresca park, the only meteoric-looking flashes are swirls of graffiti. The park is largely forgotten and the most famous product of its tennis courts is mostly forgotten, too.

It wasn’t always that way. Before Pete Sampras of Rancho Palos Verdes came out of the Los Angeles area to win the U.S. Open at 19, there was Ellsworth Vines, who did the same thing at the same age 59 years earlier. Vines followed his 1931 U.S. Nationals victory by winning both Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals again in 1932.

Using a powerful serve, a crackling forehand and a volley with more angles than a geometry lesson, Vines succeeded Bill Tilden as America’s greatest tennis player. Don Budge, who succeeded Vines, said he might have been the best of all time, anywhere.

“I’m a believer that things get better in time, but, today, I question whether the top player is as good as a Vines,” Budge said. “Elly was always an idol of mine. He was the best hitter of a tennis ball I’ve ever seen. He hit the ball harder and better and closer to the line than anybody. When he was on, no one could beat him.”

Vines distanced himself from tournament tennis in 1934. He turned pro, which meant he could no longer play any of the Grand Slam events because in those days they were for amateurs only. So Vines began touring the world, playing exhibitions against such players as Tilden, Budge and Perry. Vines became successful, owned the Beverly Hills Tennis Club with Perry, socialized with Hollywood’s nightclub society, then gave it all up.

In 1940, the gap between Vines and tennis became a chasm. Vines, 28, put down his racket and never hit another tennis ball in competition. He would play an occasional match for charity, but never to make money for himself.

Instead, Vines took up golf, played on the fledgling PGA tour and would have earned a name for himself as the first Bo Jackson, if anybody had known about Bo Jackson in the 1940s.

Although he never won an event on the pro tour, Vines had 47 top-10 finishes, placed second six times and third nine times. Between 1940 and 1957 he played in 100 events and finished in the top 20 in 87 of them. He reached the semifinals of the 1951 PGA Championship at Oakmont Country Club, when it was match play, and lost to Walter Burkemo, who was beaten the next day by Sam Snead.

A few months later, Vines was gone. He quit the tour, became a teaching pro and held full-time jobs at several country clubs.

Vines’ athletic career was one of the most schizophrenic in sports history. He was successful at amateur tennis and quit it. He was successful at pro tennis and quit it. He was successful at pro golf and quit it. But if Vines’ career was unusual, it was also largely neglected, which is seen by Budge as a tragedy.

“All the kids today don’t know the name Ellsworth Vines, which is a surprise to me,” said Budge, 75. “It’s amazing to me. Lots of times, I’ll say maybe the best player I ever saw was Ellsworth Vines, and people will say, ‘Who’s that?’ Apparently, he didn’t arrest the public.”

Of Vines, Jack Kramer, 69, said simply: “He’s been forgotten. But all of the people who were in the game before the Open era are sort of forgotten.”

Kramer paused for a moment. Perhaps he was remembering, just for a second, how hard Vines could hit a serve. Or how fast Vines sent a forehand cross-court. Or the story that after Vines played a clay-court match, they had to put down new lines because Vines had erased them with his shots. Or the time the teen-age Kramer saw Vines play Tilden in an exhibition on a court constructed on the race track at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona.

At last, Kramer offered one more comment about Vines.

“He was the best.”

A CLOSE CALL

Ellsworth Vines, 79, is sitting in the office of his younger brother, Ed, 74, on the second floor of the golf clubhouse at La Quinta. Ed Vines is executive secretary of the U.S. National Senior Open Assn., which sponsors a series of golf tournaments for a group of 1,300 over-50 golfers. It is an organization Ellsworth Vines helped build.

The La Quinta clubhouse is about a three-minute drive from Vines’ house in a gated community with the Santa Rosa Mountains shimmering in the sunlight in the background. Inside the house, Vines and his wife, Verle, have arranged a small collection of old tennis trophies on two shelves high on the wall. Vines gave the rest to a children’s hospital. He filled two barrels.

Verle says Vines was never much for hanging onto keepsakes and never kept any of his old tennis clothes or rackets.

But Ed Vines has made a rare discovery. Digging around in his office closet, he has found a yellowed wooden racket, one formerly used by Ellsworth. Ed Vines hands it to his brother, who examines it closely.

“It’s warped all right,” Ellsworth says.

“But the strings still sing,” Ed Vines says. “What is that, a 4 1/2-inch grip?”

“Yep, no more. Gosh, this is from 1934-35, Ed.”

“Why don’t you take it home? As a matter of fact, you should go out and play with it.”

“Yeah, get some exercise.”

They both laugh at this inside joke because Ellsworth Vines is a long way from playing tennis these days. In fact, he’s just now getting used to hitting a few golf balls again.

In 1988, Vines suffered a heart attack and subsequently had kidney failure. For three hours each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he is hooked up to a dialysis machine, whose function is to cleanse the blood, which his kidneys can no longer do.

It’s not much fun, but Vines is well aware of how close he came to dying.

“I was darn near out,” he said.

Vines checked himself into the hospital because he wasn’t feeling well and moments later suffered a heart attack. He said he was lucky because his doctor was standing only a few feet away.

“They took me right up to the operating room,” Vines said. “What happened, there is a vein that goes to the heart and supplies the blood to your heart. They cleaned it out. To do that, they use a dye because they wanted to see where it was going. In one out of 10 or 15, the dye affects your kidneys. I happened to be one of those guys. The dye ruined my kidneys.

“I wanted to die. I had traveled all my life, played in sports and everything and I really didn’t care anymore. . . . I thought they should have let me go. Of course, they don’t believe in that. They have to keep you alive if they can.

“I have finally come to grips with it. You just lay there and let the machine do your work. Three hours later, it’s all over.”

Vines walks slowly and occasionally relies on a cane for support. Shelley Cooper, a physical therapist and wife of La Quinta tennis pro Jackie Cooper, has noticed a marked improvement in Vines’ condition after working with him for several months.

“At first, he was weak and down mentally and physically,” she said. “I really worked on his legs, because they were the weakest part. But he’s so much better. Now, he’s out and about. The idea is to keep his mood and his spirits up.

“We go out to the golf course and that’s wonderful therapy. He hits 10 balls and I hit a million. Everybody stops by to say hello or just to talk to him. He’s, like, bigger than life, really. He’s just a wonderful man. He’s so humble about all the things he’s done. He doesn’t really talk about it.”

THE WEAPON

I’ve often been asked whether there was any secret to the wrist snap which augmented the severity of my serve. . . . Imitate cracking a whip, simulate throwing the racket at the ball or act like you’re driving a nail with a hammer.

--”Tennis, Myth and Method,” by Ellsworth Vines and Gene Vier, 1978.

If there is any present-day player who serves in the manner Vines did, it is Sampras.

“When I saw Sampras serve in the U.S. Open final, I saw myself,” Vines said. “The same arm action. Same speed. Feet on the ground. Never jumped. Didn’t grunt. The same way I used to serve, absolutely. I got a great kick out of seeing him play.”

When Vines hit a serve, it was an act of fury few had seen before. In one powerful, swift move, Vines’ flat serve jumped off his racket. When Vines aced Henry (Bunny) Austin on match point in the 1932 Wimbledon final to complete a 6-4, 6-2, 6-0 rout, the ball was hit so hard that Austin didn’t know on which side of him it went.

“Nobody ever served better,” Kramer said.

Perry, who never beat Vines as an amateur, said Vines’ serve was one of the greatest weapons in the history of tennis.

“He had the greatest serve I have ever seen anywhere by anybody,” Perry said. “In one of our pro exhibitions, in 1937, I believe, he had one clocked 118 m.p.h. from hitting to the landing. Nowadays, they use the radar gun to tell you the speed when it leaves the racket. That’s preposterous. I don’t worry about the speed of the ball when it’s leaving the racket, only how fast it’s going after it bounces, when I have to hit it.

“I’ll tell you this, though,” Perry continued. “When you’re talking about Elly Vines, you’re talking about a very special person.”

Vines might not have seemed like much of a candidate for success early in his life in Pasadena. His father, also named Ellsworth Vines, traveled a lot in the advertising business. A sometime tennis player, the elder Vines used to take young Ellsworth along with him to the public courts while he played.

But when Vines was 7, his father abandoned the family. Vines eventually began going to the courts by himself. If there was an underlying reason for Vines’ drive to succeed, his father might have provided it by leaving him.

Vines saw his father again about a year before he died. The elder Vines had remarried and was living in Seattle.

“I was so young,” Vines said. “Looking back on it after all these years, I think I wanted to prove to him that I could play, that I had some worth.”

Vines, a natural athlete who was also interested in basketball, soon was good enough at tennis to star on the varsity at Pasadena High. In 1928, when he was 17, Vines won the California high school championships at Los Angeles High. This time, his mother didn’t have to buy him rackets--Spalding gave them to Vines.

About that time, Vines picked up a coach. His name was Mercer Beasley and he had a profound effect on the fledgling tennis star. Beasley, the tennis pro at the now-defunct Midwick Country Club in Alhambra, spotted Vines in a junior tournament at the club. Beasley was coaching another prodigy, Nelson Dodge, and when Vines beat Dodge, Beasley took Vines under his wing.

Beasley refined Vines’ game and influenced his all-out style of hitting the lines, going for broke, aiming for the corners. To teach accuracy, Beasley sometimes hung a canvas over the net with holes the size of a watermelon cut out at each side and in the middle. Beasley would tell Vines to hit one down the line or cross-court or down the middle.

“My job was to try to put it through those holes,” Vines said. “See, I had a very low trajectory of returning. My problem always from the start was trying to get it over the net as low as I could without hitting the tape and dropping back. So those holes were probably, I’d say, six inches over the top of the net.

“Another thing he used to do before I’d go into a tournament or a match, he would go and raise the height of the net about six inches, just pull it up as tight as he could,” Vines said. “That was helpful. I worked with Beasley about four years. He was really my mentor.”

By then, Vines’ serve was known throughout the junior ranks. Hard and flat, it came roaring over the net with little spin.

Vines entered USC on a tennis and basketball scholarship, but he stayed only his freshman year. Then, Perry T. Jones, the czar of junior tennis in Southern California, persuaded him to concentrate on tennis instead of school.

Jones had the right idea. By 1931, Vines had grown to 6-2 and weighed 160 pounds. He was the dominant player on the summer tour. He won 13 consecutive tournaments, including the National Clay Court Championships in St. Louis. That made Vines the top-seeded player in the U.S. Nationals, which evolved into the U.S. Open.

In the semifinals on the grass of Forest Hills, Vines came from two sets behind to wear down and defeat Perry, regarded as the best conditioned player in the game, 4-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3. Perry met Vines earlier that year, when he lost to Vines in a five-set final at Newport, R.I. They remain friends, 59 years later, and Perry remembers how their relationship began.

“We started out by knocking the hell out of each other,” Perry said. “We just battled each other to death as amateurs.”

Vines lost the first set of the national final to George M. Lott Jr., but came back to win his first Grand Slam title, 7-9, 6-3, 9-7, 7-5. With only this one major victory behind him, Vines was already being hailed as the next Tilden.

Others were taking notice. In 1931, the United States Tennis Assn. overlooked Vines in choosing the Davis Cup team, but there was no way the USTA could leave its national champion off the team in 1932. Vines didn’t seem too surprised that he was excluded the previous year.

“The Davis Cup was strictly social and political here,” Vines said. “They didn’t know a damned thing about tennis. It was a social society and if you didn’t play or do the way they thought, you just weren’t on the team, period, no matter how good you played.”

Vines was 21 in 1932 when his tennis career reached its zenith. On his first trip to England, Vines stunned the tennis world by winning Wimbledon. The All England Championships belonged to him after his 42-minute demolition of Austin. Next for Vines was the Davis Cup final against France and its famous Musketeers--Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet and Rene Lacoste.

The slow red clay of Roland Garros Stadium wasn’t Vines’ best surface, which quickly became evident when Borotra beat him in the first singles match. France was up 2-1 on the final day, needing only a victory over American Wilmer L. Alison to wrap it up. Borotra clinched the Davis Cup for France, 3-1, by defeating Alison, meaning Vines’ final singles match with Cochet was meaningless.

But it turned out to be one of the most famous Davis Cup matches of all time. Vines played lackadaisically the first two sets and lost them both.

“The Cup had already been decided, you know,” Vines said. “So anyway, I lost the first two sets and it sure looked as if I’m going down the drain with the rest of the team. Then I decided, ‘Hell, I’m just going to keep him out here as long as I can.’ I kept lobbing him and lobbing him. Never hit a hard ball or anything. Absolutely against what I do.

“After three or four games of lobbing him, he started to miss overhead smashes. I just kept it up and finally he got worse and worse and worse. Then I started to play a little bit.”

And then?

“And then he was gone.”

Vines took the last three sets, handing Cochet his first Davis Cup loss in six years. Actually, it was the start of a trend. Vines never lost to Cochet in 12 matches.

Returning to Forest Hills to defend his U.S. National title, Vines was clearly at the top of his game. Vines recalls Cochet boasting “he was going to beat that little upstart.”

Cochet got his chance at revenge in the final, but Vines took him out in straight sets, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4, for his second consecutive U.S. championship and his third Grand Slam title in 14 months.

And, while the sporting public and publications hailed Vines as the top player in the world, promoters were busy trying to persuade him to turn pro and tour.

Vines listened but never got the deal he wanted, so he remained an amateur. And if the money wasn’t exactly pouring in, the adulation was. Actually, it still is.

Says Budge: “Take a composite player. OK, who had the best serve? Vines. The best forehand? Vines. The best net game? Vines. Who hit the ball harder than anyone? Vines. He had four pluses in his game. You take today’s player, they are lucky to have one plus.”

Kramer: “He had really a great forehand. Who has the best forehand today? (Ivan) Lendl? I think Elly’s forehand would make Lendl’s become average. Great control, depth, but Ellsworth could make more placements and make good approach shots.

“Budge and Vines were the best two players of their day, and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who could beat them: Gonzales, Laver, Rosewall, Hoad, Borg, Connors, McEnroe, Lendl, Becker, Edberg. I think Vines--and Budge--would have cleaned up on anybody.

“Just take it from me, if Elly Vines and his game were playing this circuit, he would win more money than anybody else.”

Vines had an off-year in 1933, but at least it was consistent with his style. Sometimes the shots went in and sometimes they didn’t. More often than not, they didn’t for Vines, who failed to defend either his U.S. National or Wimbledon titles.

At the All England Club, Vines lost to Australian Jack Crawford, 4-6, 11-9, 6-2, 2-6, 6-4, after blowing several break points in the final set.

“I was off,” Vines said.

He was also off at Forest Hills, losing to Bitsy Grant in the fourth round, 6-3, 6-3, 6-3.

“That Bitsy,” Vines said. “I beat him every other time. We played on the first court next to the clubhouse. He played the same game. He had no speed, nothing, but he got everything back. I had to beat him, but I was missing the lines and so on and I just couldn’t do it. It was probably the worst match I ever played in my amateur days. Not very enjoyable.”

That match summed up the only weakness that Vines had. He always aimed for the lines and tried to make the best shot. If he was off only a little bit, Vines was in trouble. That was no secret to Vines or anyone else.

“Everyone knew I was an in-and-out player,” he said. “If I was on, hell, I could beat anyone. But if I was off, anyone could beat me.”

Budge said Vines never varied his style.

“Elly would have his moments when he would miss the line by a couple of inches, and he wouldn’t change his game, play safe for a while until he got it back,” Budge said. “He just kept hitting the ball and if he didn’t hit the ball, he got dumped by somebody.

“But God help you if he was on his game. There wasn’t any safety in his game. It was all offense and that was the whole story.”

THE PRO GAME

In 1934, the story changed completely for Vines. He decided to play a series of cross-country exhibitions against Tilden. Vines was 22, Tilden 41.

Vines accepted a percentage of the gate each night and collected $52,000 from a gross income of $243,000 after matches in 73 cities. He won 47 of the 73 matches, although Tilden won the first. Before 15,000 in Madison Square Garden in New York, Tilden defeated Vines, 8-6, 6-3, 6-2.

For 3 1/2 years, Vines and Tilden crisscrossed the globe, playing an estimated 125 matches.

In 1938, Vines toured with Perry and in 1939 with Budge. Perry, who won Wimbledon three years in succession from 1934-36, turned pro Nov. 6, 1936, in New York. He immediately tried to telephone Vines to arrange a tour. Perry found Vines in Japan and called him.

“I remember I told him it was Fred,” Perry said. “He said ‘Are you crazy? It’s 4 a.m.’ and I said, ‘Do you want to make some money?’ And Elly said ‘Well, that’s different.’ ”

That same year, Vines and Perry became business partners and bought the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, which quickly became a haven for such tennis-playing Hollywood stars as Gilbert Roland, Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin. Perry fondly remembers his business relationship with Vines.

“We were in business together for 20 years and we never had a contract,” Perry said. “We never had an argument. I would trust Elly with my life.”

Vines and Perry, and later Budge, usually played their exhibition matches on canvas stretched over a portable wooden court. After each match, the court would be broken down and hauled out to a truck for the trip to the next city.

Vines played one match against Tilden in Asbury Park, N.J., when the canvas court was stretched over a marble dance floor. The court was so fast and the ball bounced so low, Vines remembers, that he played about 20 feet behind the baseline.

Vines endorsed Wilson rackets and tennis balls for a fee. He provided his own clothes and Spalding gave him shoes, which was good advertising for them. Vines’ only other endorsement was the $1,000 he received from Camel cigarettes, even though he didn’t smoke.

Perry said he beat Vines in one exhibition they played in El Paso after Perry persuaded workmen to move the service line in about six inches without Vines’ knowledge. “He served about 10,000 double faults and I won, 6-0, 6-1, in 20 minutes,” Perry said. “In 1977, he came to the house for dinner and I confessed. Elly said ‘Dammit, Perry, I knew there was something wrong with my serve.’ He was right. It just took me 40 years to tell him.”

For five years, from 1934-38, Vines reigned as the top professional in the world, a field that included, besides Tilden and Perry, Cochet, Lott, Vinnie Richards, Hans Nusslein, Mark Kozeluh, Bruce Barnes, Dan Maskell, Dick Skeen and Lester Stofen. Budge came along at the end of 1938, the same year he won the Grand Slam, and began a pro series with Vines.

It must have been strange for both players: Tilden’s successor meeting his own. Vines easily won the series, 37-22, but he was bothered by a pulled stomach muscle and won only five of the last 20 matches.

“I thought I could beat Budge, and I think I would have,” Vines said. “I had to serve side-armed and he was just knocking the ball down my throat.”

Then, in January of 1940, in New York City, playing Tilden in a benefit for Finnish relief, Vines put down his racket for good. He had already been tinkering with golf, and even Budge knew it was becoming more and more important to Vines.

“He was crazy about golf,” Budge said. “He told me would play pro tennis until somebody beat him. Then he would play golf. I knew he wanted to beat me because I lost an awful lot of weight chasing his shots down.”

Vines insists he was not chased out of tennis because of Budge’s rise to power.

“I just had no desire to play tennis anymore,” he said. “But I had the idea I could be a pretty good golfer. And I did get pretty good at it. I got a great kick out of beating guys at their own game.”

Kramer said Vines left tennis at least partly because of Budge.

“When Budge came along and turned professional, Elly had lost his desire,” Kramer said. “He didn’t think tennis was going anywhere, so he turned to golf. He had been playing it for some time anyway. He just didn’t have his heart and soul in tennis anymore.”

So at 29, Vines began a new career. Although he never won a major golf championship, he finished No. 11 on the PGA money list in 1947, earning $10,391, well behind Jimmy Demaret’s leading $24,500.

Jerry Barber, 74, who still plays on the Senior PGA Tour, remembers that Vines turned himself into a good player and was respected by his golfing peers.

“He had one little problem,” Barber said. “He shanked the ball. He hit the ball pretty long. He was one good all-around player. If he had started a little sooner, I definitely think he would have won his share of tournaments. When he should have been hitting golf balls, he was hitting tennis balls instead.”

Vines’ one shot at winning a major golf tournament was at the 1951 PGA at Oakmont, near Pittsburgh. Vines led Burkemo in match play by two holes with two to play in the semifinals, but Burkemo caught up with a birdie on No. 17 and par on No. 18, coming out of the rough on both holes. When Burkemo birdied the extra hole, Vines was just the way he described Cochet in the 1932 Davis Cup--gone.

Vines and Verle adopted two children and Vines wanted to spend more time with his family, so he dropped off the pro golf tour. He was golf pro at Midwick Country Club, back where he had begun his amateur tennis career. He also worked at the Denver Country Club, Wilshire Country Club and Tamarisk in Rancho Mirage.

Along the way, Vines picked up some notable golf partners. He played with President Eisenhower at Eldorado in Indian Wells and remembers Eisenhower stacking the foursomes so he could win. Vines said Eisenhower preferred to be called General, not Mr. President.

Another regular was Bing Crosby, with whom Vines played at Lakewood Country Club in Toluca Lake.

“But he wasn’t much fun to play with,” Vines said. “Well, if you won $5 from him, he always wanted to go out and play a whiskey round until he got even. You know, he never wanted to pay off. We never played for much anyway, but he was real chintzy that way.”

Vines does not like to look back and second-guess his golf career. He had a family, after all, and he considered it important that the father stay home, as his own father had not been able to do.

But, still . . .

“I think if I had kept on playing another year or two, I would have been pretty successful.”

THE GOLDEN YEARS

The quietest room in Vines’ house is the den. Two recliners face a TV set on one wall, a window wall behind them. On the two other walls are black and white pictures: Vines with Tilden. Vines with Perry. Vines with Kramer. Vines with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Vines with Bob Hope.

The only color photograph in the room is an aerial shot of No. 18 at Pebble Beach. There is also a needlepoint pillow in the room with lettering that says: “Screw the Golden Years.”

It is only about a three-hour drive from La Pintoresca, but it seems so much farther away. Not long ago, Perry came to visit his longtime friend.

“We were miles apart in younger life, but we hit it off together as friends,” Perry said. “That’s all you’ve got when you get older. You keep your friends and the things you did together.”

What Vines did is legendary, even if memory of it is dulled by the years that have passed since players wore flannel, tennis balls were white and rackets were wooden.

“I never sought notoriety,” Vines said. “I mean, it was nice to walk into a place and they would say, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re Elly Vines, here’s a nice table for you,’ or something like that. But I never threw any weight around or anything. I was always at the back of the bus.

“No, I never sought fame. It just came with my tennis victories, you know. I was never enamored by it at all. Actually, I didn’t really give a damn.”