Don Budge

Don Budge hitting a backhand as an amateur in 1935

John Donald ("Don") Budge (June 13, 1915 – January 26, 2000) was an American tennis champion who was the World No. 1 player for 6 consecutive years, first as an amateur and then as a professional. He is most famous as the first man to win in a single year the four tournaments that compose the Grand Slam of tennis. Budge was considered to have the best backhand in the history of tennis, at least until the emergence of Ken Rosewall in the 1950s and '60s.

Tennis great, and longtime promoter, Jack Kramer has written that Budge was, in the long run, the greatest player who ever lived although Ellsworth Vines topped him when at the height of his game. "Budge was the best of all," says Kramer. "He owned the most perfect set of mechanics and he was the most consistent.... Don was so good that when he toured with Sedgman, Gonzales, and Segura in 1954 at the age of thirty-eight, none of those guys could get to the net consistently off his serveâ€"and Sedgman, as quick a man who ever played the game, was in his absolute prime then. Don could keep them pinned to the baseline with his backhand too." In his 1979 autobiography Kramer considered the best player ever to have been either Don Budge (for consistent play) or Ellsworth Vines (at the height of his game). The next four best were, chronologically, Bill Tilden, Fred Perry, Bobby Riggs, and Pancho Gonzales. After these six came the "second echelon" of Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Gottfried von Cramm, Ted Schroeder, Jack Crawford, Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman, Tony Trabert, John Newcombe, Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, BjÃ¶rn Borg, and Jimmy Connors. He felt unable to rank Henri Cochet and RenÃ© Lacoste accurately but felt they were among the very best. Today, according to Tennis Magazine, he is ranked as one of the 20 greatest players of the 20th century.

Born in Oakland, California, Budge was the son of a Scottish immigrant and former soccer player. Growing up, he played a variety of sports before taking up tennis. He was tall and slim and his height helped provide what is still considered one of the most powerful serves of all time. He had a graceful, overpowering backhand that he hit with a slight amount of topspin and that, combined with his quickness and his serve, made him the best player of his time.

Budge running for backhand against Fred Perry

Budge studied at the University of California, Berkeley in late 1933 but left to play tennis with the U.S. Davis Cup auxiliary team. Accustomed to hard-court surfaces in his native California, he had difficulty playing on the grass surfaces in the east. However, a good instructor and hard work changed all that and in 1937 he swept the Wimbledon Championships, winning the singles, the men's doubles title with Gene Mako, and the mixed doubles crown with Alice Marble. He then went on to win the U. S. National singles and the mixed doubles with Sarah Palfrey Fabyan. But he gained the most fame for his match that year against Gottfried von Cramm in the Davis Cup inter-zone finals against Germany. Trailing 1-4 in the final set, he came back to win 8-6. His victory allowed the United States to advance and to then win the Davis Cup for the first time in 12 years. For his efforts, he was named Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year and he became the first tennis player to ever be voted the James E. Sullivan Award as America's top amateur athlete.

In 1938 Budge dominated amateur tennis, defeating John Bromwich in the Australian Open final, Roderick Menzel in the French Open, Henry "Bunny" Austin at the Wimbledon Championships, where he never lost a set, and Gene Mako in the U.S. Open, to become the first person ever to win the Grand Slam in tennis.

Budge turned professional after winning the Grand Slam and thereafter played mostly head-to-head matches. In 1939 he beat the two reigning kings of professional tennis, Ellsworth Vines and Fred Perry, 21 matches to 18 and 18 matches to 11. There was no professional tour in 1940 but in 1941 Budge beat the 48-year-old Bill Tilden, 51 matches to 7. He also won the French Pro Championship in 1939, as well as the United States Pro Championship tournaments in 1940 and 1942. He then joined the United States Army Air Force to serve in World War II. He spent most of his wartime duty playing exhibitions for the troops. Not long before the end of the war, he pulled his shoulder going over an obstacle course at an Officers Candidate School in Florida and this permanently hindered his playing abilities. He played the slightly younger Bobby Riggs in 5 matches in Army-Navy competitions in the Pacific Theater and after winning the first 2 lost the next 3, thereby giving Riggs an important psychological edge in their forthcoming peacetime tours. Tennis Is My Racket, by Bobby Riggs, New York, 1949, pages 166-167.

After the war Budge played on the tour for a few years, mostly against Riggs, and won the London Indoor Professional Championship at Wembley in 1947. Riggs, however, beat him in both the 1946 and 1947 tours, but by very narrow margins, 18 matches to 16 and 24 matches to 22. By these narrow margins, however, Riggs established himself as the World No. 1 for those two years. According to Kramer, "Bobby played to Budge's shoulder, lobbed him to death, won the first twelve matches, thirteen out of the first fourteen, and then hung on to beat Budge, twenty-four matches to twenty-two. At the age of thirty Don Budge was very nearly a has-been. That was the way pro tennis worked then." According to Riggs, however, Budge still had a very powerful, very deadly overhead and that rather than winning outright very many points with his lobbing, he actually achieved two other goals: his constant lobbing led Budge to play somewhat deeper at the net than he would have otherwise, thereby making it easier for Riggs to hit passing shots for winners; and the constant lobbing helped to wear Budge down by forcing him to run back to the backline time after time. Tennis Is My Racket, by Bobby Riggs, New York, 1949, pages 166-167.

After retiring from competition Budge coached and conducted tennis clinics for children. According to Riggs's 1949 autobiography, as of that writing Budge owned a laundry in New York with Sidney Wood as well as a bar in Oakland. A gentleman on and off the court, he was much in demand for speaking engagements and endorsed various lines of sporting goods. With the advent of the Open era in tennis, in 1968 he returned to play at Wimbledon in the Veteran's doubles. In 1973, at the age of 58, he and former champion Frank Sedgman teamed up to win the Veteran's doubles championship at Wimbledon before an appreciative crowd.

In December of 1999, Budge was injured in an automobile accident from which he never fully recovered. He died on January 26, 2000 at a nursing home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Budge was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island in 1964.