Tennis Maverick Joins Navratilova in Hall

He spotted inherent hypocrisy and broke from the establishment, denouncing the “crooked” operations in his beloved sport.

This could easily be about the present-day International Olympic Committee scandal. But it’s about another momentous shift, in tennis more than 30 years ago, as one of its mavericks was honored Tuesday in New York.

Robert J. Kelleher, a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles, former Davis Cup captain and former president of what is now the U.S. Tennis Assn., joined nine-time Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova and Australian Davis Cup star Malcolm Anderson as the three newest members of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. They will be inducted July 15 at Newport, R.I.

Kelleher learned of his expected election Dec. 24. In an interview Monday, he thanked several friends--Tony Trabert, Jack Kramer, Billie Jean King and TedSchroeder--for their support in the process.

Kelleher led the long and painful push into the world of open tennis, culminating in 1968. He joked that he and his counterpart in Britain were “co-conspirators” in bringing tennis into the modern era.

“I would just say then, cold turkey, that I am not about to become president of a crooked organization, and it’s crooked,” he said. “The difficulty they all faced is that they knew it. Everybody involved in the administration of tennis at the time knew it was true. . . .

“I had been around for a great long time and knew how tennis was operating, how the so-called amateurs were all paid under the table. Something should have been done about it long ago.

“It was a political coup to bring it about. The entrenched people who had been running tennis--nationally and internationally--liked it the way it was. It was good for them the way it was. They were organized well enough and had the political strength to defeat it several times before. It was a real uphill pull to succeed.”

A couple of years after that, Kelleher became a federal judge in Los Angeles, and has presided over many noteworthy cases, most prominently, one that was made into the book and movie, “The Falcon and the Snowman.” That 1977 case involved the sale of U.S. intelligence secrets to the Russians.

“The movie was absolutely terrible,” Kelleher said. “It painted them as semi-heroes, victims of society. I’m not in the movie at all, thank God.”

He’ll take the Hall of Fame over any movie appearances.

“It’s an exciting day,” Kelleher said. “I have to decide what I’m going to say because I realize I’m just a stuffed shirt. It [the hall of fame] is designed for champions and tennis players. I’m going to be standing alongside Martina, who, as you know, is a great champion.”