He sat in a corner of the President’s Box at Arthur Ashe Stadium in the middle of the afternoon and watched Roger Federer play tennis, and Bud Collins kept smiling as he watched Federer cover the court with grace and speed that seems to make a lie of his age, and show off what is still the most beautiful game of tennis ever played. This was on the day before the media center at the Open will be officially named in Bud’s honor.
At one point there was a long point, during which Federer had showed off all the spin and power in his game, before he finally put away his opponent, Philipp Kohlschreiber, with a backhand volley that reminded everybody at Ashe just who it was they were watching.
And Bud turned to me and said, “Where else would you want to be right now?”
FOLLOW THE DAILY NEWS SPORTS ON FACEBOOK. “LIKE” US HERE
In that moment, of course, there was nowhere else I wanted to be except watching one more match at the Open with Bud Collins, who helped give me a life in tennis and newspapers, from the time I was first taking dictation from him working nights at the Boston Globe. Suddenly on this day at Ashe, it was all the days I ever spent watching tennis with him, at the Open and Wimbledon and Longwood Cricket Club, and a lot of other points on the tennis map always made brighter by his talent and wit and kindness. And friendship.
Suddenly it was 1973 and it was my first Open, in the old Stadium at West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, and he was sitting me down and telling me we were going to watch Pancho Gonzales, his old friend, 45 years old that year, play Tom Okker in the first round.
“I just want you to see the guy I’d pick if I had to pick somebody to play for my life,” Bud said.
He came along when Gonzales was young, and he celebrated Billie Jean King’s first Wimbledon title, in doubles, when Billie Jean was a kid, by taking her out to dinner, because that is who he always was and who he still is. He was the best friend tennis ever had in this country, as a writer and as a broadcaster. In England, they call television hosts “presenters.” Bud Collins was the best tennis presenter in this world, and on Sunday his immense contribution to the sport that he has loved all the way back to Berea, Ohio will be recognized by the United States Tennis Association.
He was nice to me when I was a kid. That didn’t make me remotely special or unusual. He was unfailingly nice to everybody. But he told me I ought to write about tennis, because it was the closest thing we had to another of his favorite sports, boxing, just without the blood. Pretty soon I was making my first money in this business writing about tennis, and trailing him around the world, seeing that as much as he loved tennis he loved newspapering even more.
He called himself a hacker on television, but that was a lie, he even won a national title in tennis, the National Indoor Mixed Doubles title of 1961. After a while, he even took me on as an occasional partner, always in the ad court — “We need to win the first point, kid,” he informed me – and that was just another way to be in his wonderful orbit, in his world.
At Wimbledon in the old days, we’d join a grass-court club across the street from the All-England Club so we could play on grass each morning before the real tennis would start. One day we were playing a couple of dream opponents, for us, a couple of women who each looked older than the Queen Mum.
And there was a moment in the match when Bud came up on a short ball, and took a big swing with his backhand, and buried the ball into the bottom of the net. At which point he dropped his racket and cursed, something I’d never heard him do, because tennis to him, whether writing about it or broadcasting it or playing it, was always pure fun.
“Bud,” I said, “what’s the matter?”
He shook his head. “Partner,” he said, “I came up on that ball and was all ready to hit a topspin backhand. And then at the last second I remembered something: I don’t HAVE a topspin backhand.”
Then we could go across the street and cover Wimbledon. He would write every day and do television for NBC on weekends. And then at the very end, Bud would be the one on television waiting for the players to come off the court after the finals. Winners and losers. But you knew it would be all right for the loser, at least briefly, because of the humanity of Bud Collins.
I have written about this before. He has had a terrible season of pain and hospitals and rehab facilities, because of a fall he took a few years ago at the Open that ravaged a quad muscle in his leg. But he made it to New York City with his wife Anita on Friday and he was at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Saturday. On Sunday morning they will make it official that his name has been attached to the media center there forever.
It is worth saying again today that no media figure every meant more to any sport than Bud Collins has to tennis. He entertained and he educated. He told you why Arthur Ashe mattered. He made everybody sense the thrill we all felt at that Breakfast at Wimbledon in 1980 when Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe played the most famous tennis match that had ever been played anywhere. And he wrote Rod Laver’s book. And when people were hectoring Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon about her sexuality, he stood up and told them to leave her alone.
I kept watching him on Saturday afternoon, as the shadows came into Arthur Ashe because of the new retractable roof being built on top of the place, watched him keep smiling until the Federer match was over, about an hour and a half after it began.
When it was he said in a quiet voice, “This was a good day, kid.”
As usual, better for me than for him. I was exactly where I wanted to be, where I came in.
There’s still an air of mystery, Goodell from hell & Nadal’s fade ….
— I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade up there at Gillette Stadium, but I still do sort of have one question:
How DID the air come out of those footballs?
Tennis commentators, even ones I like, need to stop acting as if sitting in seats at the top of Arthur Ashe Stadium is cool.
It’s not. It’s like watching tennis from outer space.
— Listen, fans get it in sports, they do:
In the end, commissioners work for the owners.
They are hired by the owners and they can get fired by them, even though that is no small thing, because it usually requires a lot of owners to do that.
But once they get the job, and even knowing the facts of their situation, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t supposed to be the commissioner of everybody, the owners and the players and even the fans.
People don’t believe Roger Goodell is doing that, or ever did that.
And the challenge for him right now, if he is going to continue to be a viable leader for the NFL, is to convince people that he is doing nothing more than what hardline owners tell him to do.
It is, in fact, a lot bigger challenge for Goodell than overturning Judge Berman’s ruling on Deflategate.
Wait a darn second!
Wasn’t Deflategate supposed to be over, game and set and match, after the league told us that Tom Brady had “destroyed” his cell phone?
For the last time, and if Goodell does want to look like a real commissioner, he and his owners need to reopen their collective bargaining agreement, and rewrite the rules on how the league deals with player misconduct.
Or Goodell and his lawyers are going to get perp-walked into courtrooms from coast to coast forever.
That Brooklyn science teacher whose drone flew into Louis Armstrong Stadium the other day?
He should get to find out if he can successfully fly one in a jail cell for a few days.
— Boy, just when Alex Rodriguez has a real bad cycle like he did in August, here he comes with a much better one in September.
Because I’m a glass-half-full guy, I’d just like to point out that the Giants haven’t looked any worse in this preseason than they did in the last one.
Only the dim-bulb Mike Huckabees of the world could try to turn that Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples into Rosa Parks.
Okay, who’s going to struggle more to score touchdowns this season, Jim Harbaugh’s old team in San Francisco or his new one in Ann Arbor?
And while we’re on the subject of that Harbaugh family:
Do you sometimes get the idea that brother John thinks he turned into the second coming of Lombardi because he won one Super Bowl?
— Jimmy Connors once told me, and famously, that Rafael Nadal “plays like he’s broke.”
Only now Nadal is the one who looks like he’s broken, at far too young an age.
Or at least looks like he’s breaking down in front of our eyes, like some aging baseball player.
Once, nearly 25 years ago, in the first week of the Open, Connors at the age of 39 came from two sets down to Patrick McEnroe before finally beating Patrick in five sets, at 1:30 in the morning.
It was the opposite for Nadal Saturday morning at the National Tennis Center, when he was the one who blew a two-set lead, and finally lost to Fabio Fognini in five.
Only Nadal wasn’t 39 on Friday night and into Saturday morning.
He was 29.
— I think Joe Girardi has done a terrific job this year handling both his starters and relievers, but what in the world was he doing pitching both Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller in that 13-8 victory over the Red Sox the other day at old Fenway?
When Kanye West announced that he plans to run for President in 2020, I couldn’t help but start thinking about what the annual Easter egg hunt will look like someday with him and the missus on the White House lawn.
I’m hoping First Lady Kim will keep her clothes on.