He’s Always at Top of Game in Tennis

Jack Kramer’s shot at a gold medal in the Olympic 100 meters is gone. So is a top-10 finish in the Boston Marathon.

Right now, the priority is simpler: walking.

Right now, the person arguably most important in the development and evolution of tennis for more than half a century is flat on his back at home in Brentwood. His right ankle is broken in three places -- he was walking in his front yard and fell on the grass, his favorite playing surface -- and the order from the doctors who put all the pieces back together again is to stay off it for as long as a month.

But that doesn’t mean that Humpty Dumpty isn’t straining at the bit.

Kramer will turn 85 in August, and that’s a good target for his return to ambulatory status. On Aug. 19, the International Tennis Federation will throw a party in his honor at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel.

But if he were able to call the shots, which he has done all his life, the target would be tomorrow.

Kramer is a thinker, a doer, an activist. His body may have a flat tire -- another one -- but his mind still tries to win the pole.

Kramer’s old friend and longtime doubles partner, Ted Schroeder, who died May 26, had been taking note in recent years of Kramer’s physical deteriorations in the only way he knew how: biting sarcasm.

In the last eight years, Kramer has had three hip replacements, a broken femur in his right leg and suffered a serious knee injury when one of his grandsons dumped over a golf cart with Grandpa onboard.

As these incidents mounted, Schroeder, who always called Kramer “Jake,” had taken to telling friends, acquaintances, people at the grocery story, anybody who would listen, about outings he had had with Kramer. Trips to the racetrack, dinners out, walks to the mailbox. He would milk the details and then, with great delight, deliver the punch line:

“And, Jake didn’t even get hurt.”

Ironically, Kramer got his latest flat tire just days after Schroeder died, keeping Kramer from being there when his friend’s ashes were distributed over the ocean off La Jolla.

Kramer is down now, but nowhere near out. He longs to get back to the racetrack, where he can mingle with the $2 bettors and watch some of his horses that Herb Bacorn trains.

He also longs to be back out at Los Serranos, the golf course in Chino Hills that he owns with his five sons. They keep improving it, with an eye toward playing host to major public links tournaments.

But as much as he needs to be up and active, his sport needs that even more. Jack Kramer remains a beacon for tennis.

His vision and charisma in the late 1940s showed the world that performances of tennis players were actually worth more than trophies. He won at Wimbledon in 1947, then signed a pro contract that would start after he’d played Frankie Parker in the final of the U.S. Championships at Forest Hills.

Much of the success of his tour, a series of matches against Bobby Riggs, depended on his popularity and stature. Then he lost the first two sets of a best-of-five match to Parker.

“I remember telling myself,” Kramer recalls, “ ‘This is not a good thing.’ ”

But the tall, handsome Southern Californian with the big serve-and-volley game lost only four games the rest of the way and, in his pro debut several months later, in the midst of a blizzard in New York, 15,114 showed up at Madison Square Garden to watch.

Riggs won that match, but few others, as Kramer dominated him, and later Pancho Gonzalez, in the nationwide barnstorming tour.

When the rest of tennis decided it wanted to get paid, and the open era of the sport began in 1968, Kramer was among those who helped plan the grand prix format that built to a final event for the top eight players.

That was the forerunner of the ATP tour, which began in 1990.

When tennis had its best run as a recreation, a focal point was the Jack Kramer signature racket. Anybody now over 45 who played the game probably had one. About 30 million were sold by Wilson, and Kramer got 2.5% on most of them.

“Near the end,” he says, “Wilson came to me and changed the deal to a flat rate, so for 14 years, I got paid on a sliding scale. I understood it. I was making more money than the president of Wilson.”

Ironically, the famed Kramer racket was more a monument to marketing than to personalized design.

“When I turned pro in 1947, I played with a Don Budge model,” Kramer says. “I signed the deal to have my own racket, they sent me some, I played with it, hated it and couldn’t beat Riggs. I called Wilson up, told them to shove it, that I was going back to my Budge racket. And so they just changed the color of the lamination of the Budge racket, put my name on it and that became the Wilson Kramer.”

As recently as eight years ago, Kramer and some friends had an almost daily doubles game. He was well into his 70s then, but he says, “I was still decent. We still made some shots.”

That’s over, but there is plenty of Kramer left. The eyes twinkle when he talks about the game, the voice gets firm when he says that Andy Roddick had “better damn well learn” to follow that big serve to the net.

In about a month, Kramer will be back on his feet. Tennis ought to be too, with a standing ovation.

Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.