Talk:Mercer Beasley

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If ever a man backed unwittingly into a distinguished career, it was Mercer Beasley, the famous old tennis coach whose methods and results have always been about equally astonishing. He took up tennis in 1893, when he was 11, and because of poor eyesight has played it rather badly ever since. He never coached tennis at all until he was 40, when some wealthy Chicago tennis players found his suggestions "helpful" and offered to pay him to keep on making them. Last week he celebrated his 75th birthday at Forest Hills, Long Island, still a coach and still busily involved in the life which began at 40. Under his guidance, 17 players won at least 84 different national titles.

He has coached at Tulane, Princeton, Lawrenceville School and the University of Miami. He taught tennis at private clubs in Milwaukee, Pasadena and Chicago. In California in 1925, when he was searching about for one more player for the Pasadena High School tennis team, someone sent him to a bakery shop, where he discovered a lanky 14-year-old named Ellsworth Vines working in the oven room. Six years later Vines was the 20-year-old national champion.

In Milwaukee, Frankie Parker was a skinny, 11-year-old ball boy working for 5 a set when his quickness and accuracy caught Beasley's eye. Beasley brought him up to win the boys', then the juniors', then the men's national championships, and to a career in which Parker was rated among the top 10 players in the country for 17 consecutive years. Altogether, Beasley figures, 17 players have won 84 different national titles under his coaching. He has been a consultant to the Spalding sporting goods company since 1935, and for years now has been holding tennis clinics for children in public parks up and down the country.

"I always loved tennis," says Beasley, "but I never could play it." He first tried on his father's lawn in New Jersey, dressed for the game in cricket flannels, blazer and Eton cap. As a student at Lawrenceville School he couldn't make the tennis team but did play on his house football squad, weighing a fierce but fragile 120 pounds. ("After I had made about seven tackles, it was time to call the infirmary and say, 'Get Beasley's room ready.' ")

The crowd of tennis notables who gathered to honor Beasley at luncheon last week at Forest Hills seemed chiefly in a mood for reminiscence, but he would have none of it. He was concerned only with the present: food, people and tennis. As erect and bull-voiced as ever, he made a convincing advertisement of the beneficial effects of the game. He showed an agile wit, too. When a pile of congratulatory telegrams was shoved at him, he deftly extracted the sentiment from the moment by leafing through them and then announcing firmly, "All sent collect."

from the Daily Princetonian http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2007/02/22/17422/

Great tennis coach neglected by history By BRITTANY URICK STAFF WRITER

Published: Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

No one epitomized this mantra better than Mercer Beasley, Princeton's tennis coach from 1933-37 and 1939-42. Plagued by poor eyesight, Beasley was never able to play the sport he loved. Instead, he educated himself in the fundamentals of the game and imparted the wisdom he gained to his students.

Despite developing 17 players who won a combined total of 84 national collegiate titles, Beasley and his influential role in the tennis world remain largely unrecognized.

A year before he began coaching at Princeton, having developed tennis greats including Ellsworth Vines, arguably the best competitor in the history of the sport, and child prodigy Frank Parker, Time magazine identified Beasley as the greatest tennis coach in American history.

This recognition raises a question: Why, after he impacted tennis at every level of the game, have the record books and archives continued to neglect Beasley? In 2001, he was inducted into the NCAA Tennis Hall of Fame, but he is still noticeably absent from the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I.

This question has been particularly perplexing for Brook Zelcer, a former tennis professional and current English teacher at Old Tappan High School in Westwood, N.J. Zelcer discovered the story of Mercer Beasley by chance at a tennis tournament during his coaching days.

"Once I took some students of mine to a tournament, and a man was throwing away old tennis magazines," Zelcer said. "One of the magazines had a reference to Mercer Beasley, naming him as the greatest American tennis coach. So I started checking out his story, and much to my surprise, I found out he was the best tennis coach in American history, no doubt about it."

Since that time, Zelcer has made it his personal mission to see that a proper legacy is given to this all-but-forgotten tennis icon.

"If you look at the players that he worked with," Zelcer said, "they constitute the history of American tennis. He taught these great champions from the 1920s all the way up until the 1950s, so how he could be absent from the tennis canon is beyond me. I think he remains one of the last great undiscovered American sports legends."

Beasley began his career at Manhattan's Notlek Novelty and Amusement, where he worked as a maintenance man around the tennis courts. After watching hours of tennis, he quickly uncovered the secrets of the game and began offering informal instruction to the regulars. When Victor Elting got wind of this tennis guru, he invited Beasley to work as a teaching professional at the Indian Hill Club of Winnetka, Ill. It was here that Beasley's career skyrocketed, when he succeeded in emancipating tennis from the confines of country club walls and made it available to the American public.

Beasley contributed greatly to the advancement of the game. In his 1933 book, "How to Play Tennis," Beasley delivers his formula for championship tennis, which involved consistent play, accuracy and proper court etiquette. He developed a precursor program to modern-day cross-training in which he encouraged his students to develop all aspects of their games by having them emulate movements found in other sports, including boxing, ballroom dancing, gymnastics, basketball and track.

The technology of tennis also improved due to his efforts. Beasley pioneered synthetic string, composite racquets, and ultralight footwear. He even created a "Mercer Beasley" tennis racquet for Spalding that became a popular choice in that era.

Princeton benefited greatly from Beasley's tennis genius. Beasley actually experienced Old Nassau as a student for a brief four-month stint in the fall of 1903 but was asked to leave because the faculty questioned his academic integrity and disapproved of his social behavior. Despite this setback, Beasley's return to Princeton was triumphant. During his career as the Tiger tennis coach, he compiled an overall record of 89-20-1 and led the team to back-to-back Eastern Intercollegiate Tennis Association (EITA) championships in 1941 and 1942.

Though unable to play the game to which he dedicated his life, Beasley revolutionized tennis and was one of the game's most influential teachers. Zelcer recently nominated Beasley for the professional Hall of Fame but will have to wait until the spring for this year's inductees to be announced. Justice will be served on the tennis courts of history if Beasley finally earns his well-deserved place among the esteemed greats of his sport.

From Time magazine, "Sport:Love Set", march 29, 1938

Few minutes after Katherine Audrey Browne Beasley received a Nevada divorce decree last week from famed Tennis Coach Mercer Beasley, she applied for a license to marry her 22-year-old foster son, Franciszek Andzej Pajkowski, better known to followers of lawn tennis as Frankie Parker. When the license bureau asked Mrs. Beasley her age, she said "over 21"—a statement which she was able to back up by the fact that she has a 21-year-old daughter Katherine, as well as a son Jimmy, 14. By the marriage which followed, Frankie Parker became stepfather as well as foster brother to Katherine and Jimmy. "It was in 1927 that Frankie Parker came into my life," Mercer Beasley once said. He was referring then to his professional, not his private life. In that year he picked up a likely-looking, $2-per-week ball boy in a Milwaukee tennis club, put a racket in his hand, coached him in caution and style so thoroughly that the Polish-American tennist now stands No. 3 in U. S. rankings. Further, Coach Beasley took Frankie away from Widow Anna Pajkowski, who was busy supporting five children, adopted him, sent him to Lawrenceville, kept him well stocked with Mercer Beasley rackets and white flannel pants. Parker, whom Beasley characterized as "thin, puny, but quiet and attentive," learned Beasley accuracy and strategy, developed several trick strokes—notably "the shovel"—but never perfected a strong forehand or learned to force his opponent. Two months ago, Mercer Beasley, on his way to become coach of the Bermuda Lawn Tennis Club, learned that the wife he had married a year before this puny boy's birth was about to divorce him and marry the boy. Said he: "If I've lost a love set—well, chin up."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759372,00.html#ixzz0cEUJA2SY