Mercer Beasley

Newspaper cartoon of Mercer Beasley and his use of walkie-talkies to communicate with players

Charles Fenton Mercer Beasley (July 17 or 18, 1882-1965), although generally forgotten today, was by far the best-known American tennis coach of the first half of the 20th century. An innovator of many coaching techniques, Beasley also lent his name to a very successful line of tennis rackets that were widely sold for nearly three decades. Most articles about Beasley say that 17 of his pupils won 84 national titles between them, although apparently this was Beasley's own reckoning and remains to be confirmed. Among his numerous star pupils were two of the best tennis players of all time, Ellsworth Vines and Frank Parker. Another famous pupil was Bitsy Grant, a top player of the 1930s, and his name is also associated with other great players such as Helen Jacobs, Gardnar Mulloy, and Doris Hart, although to what precise degree is no longer clear. Marjorie "Midge" Gladman and Carolin Babcock, two nationally ranked players of the 1930s who are totally forgotten today, were also Beasley pupils as teenagers. A 1950's advertisement for Mercer Beasley tennis rackets cites both Hart and Pancho Segura as having been taught by Beasley, but no evidence exists to show that Beasley ever coached Segura. Beasley suffered from extremely poor eyesight all his life; although he participated as a youth in some school sports, it was impossible for him to play tennis at more than a rudimentary level. In this he was probably unique: most other well-known tennis coaches such as Segura and the Australian Harry Hopman had generally been great or near-great tennis players in their own right.

Early life

Beasley came from a family of prominent New Jersey jurists. His grandfather, an earlier Mercer Beasley (1815-1897), presided as Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1864 to 1897. His father, Chauncey H. Beasley, was a District Court Judge. An uncle, Mercer Beasley Jr., who committed suicide at age 47, was a longtime county Prosecutor of the Plea. A second uncle, William S. Gummere, was yet another Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, from 1901 to 1933. For many years there was a Mercer Beasley School of Law, which eventually merged into the New Jersey university system. His given names of "Charles Fenton Mercer" may also suggest a family connection with a well-known early 19th-century Virginia soldier, businessman, congressman, lawyer, and advocate of the establishment of Liberia for emancipated slaves, Charles Fenton Mercer, who, like most of the Beasleys, was also a graduate of Princeton University. Young Beasley attended one of America's leading prep schools, Lawrenceville School, also in New Jersey, then briefly and unsuccessfully went to Princeton in 1902, from which he was soon expelled:

A local paper referred to Beasley's "passing out" and being "ousted" in the span of four months, and reported, "for some reason or other the faculty did not agree with his [Beasley's] solution to academic problems."

Beasley then worked at a number of jobs for the next 17 years including being a court investigator for the New Jersey Public Railway Company and a pressman’s devil before becoming a full-time tennis coach in 1921.

Tennis background

Beasley first took up tennis at age 11 on his father's lawn, "dressed for the game in cricket flannels, blazer and Eton cap".

"I always loved tennis," says Beasley, "but I never could play it.".... 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."

At Lawrenceville, according to Time magazine, in spite of his inadequacies he did play tennis with a near-contemporary, Karl Behr, who went on to become the No. 3 American player in 1907.

Eventually, after being expelled from Princeton, and holding a succession of jobs, he became the assistant manager of the Notlek Amusement Company in Manhattan, which had a number of vacant lots on which they provided tennis courts in the summer and ice skating rinks in the winter. Among other tasks, Beasley was the maintenance man of their tennis courts and ran their pro shop. He knew about enough about tennis to begin giving informal lessons at the courts and such tennis luminaries as Vinnie Richards and Big Bill Tilden came by to encourage him in his endeavors. In 1921 Victor Elting, a scion of a socially prominent Chicago family of that name, was impressed by Beasley and invited him to become a teaching professional at the wealthy Indian Hill Club of Winnetka, Illinois. Nearly 40, Beasley had found the career that would make him "the best known teacher in the history of U.S. tennis," as Time magazine called him in 1932.

Coaching career at schools

As well as holding positions at various clubs throughout the United States and Caribbean over the next three decades, Beasley was the coach at numerous schools and colleges, including Tulane, Lawrenceville, Princeton, and the University of Miami. He spent five years at Tulane University in New Orleans, from 1929 through 1933, where his most successful pupil was Cliff Sutter, the NCAA singles champion in both 1930 and 1932, and who was ranked in the U.S. Top 10 for five consecutive years in the early 1930s. At the same time that he was coaching Tulane he was also an instructor at the Detroit Tennis Club.

In 1933 Beasley returned to his alma mater, Princeton, and, except for a year away in 1938, coached its tennis team through 1942, compiling a dual-match mark of 71-12-1 and a total record of 89-20-1 with back-to-back Eastern Intercollegiate Tennis Association (EITA) championships in 1941 and 1942.

Beasley's 1946 stint at the University of Miami, however, was brief and comparatively less successful, with an overall record of 4-2-1. By contrast, his predecessor (and successor), the great amateur player Gardnar Mulloy, compiled an almost unbelievable record of 725-2. For at least one year, 1943, Malloy had benefitted from the presence on the team of three-time NCAA singles champion Pancho Segura, who went on to become one of the all-time greats of tennis. By the time Beasley took over the reins of the team, however, Segura had graduated. Although a later advertisement for Mercer Beasley tennis rackets says flatly that he had coached Segura, there is no actual evidence of this, and a recent biography of Segura makes no mention at all of Beasley in its extensive index.

Many years after his death in 1965 Beasley was inducted into the National Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame at the University of Georgia in 2001.

Ellsworth Vines

Of the 20-year-old Ellsworth Vines who was just on the cusp of becoming one of the greatest players in the history of the game, Beasley said in 1932 that he had discovered him as a 14-year-old:

"I found Ellsworth working in Kay's Bakery Shop in Pasadena.... He had a Western grip and a roundhouse swing, was about six feet tall and his feet wouldn't be friends with each other. But he had the heart and the willingness.... He was determined to hit hard.... while I fretted over errors."

The New York Times obituary of Vines many years later gives a slightly different age: Vines was a 15-year-old high-school student at Pasadena High when he was spotted by Beasley, then 44 and with only four years of coaching experience, and who had not yet become the most famous tennis coach in America. Vines himself, many years later in a 1983 interview with Stan Hart, makes no mention of Beasley. In a 1933 book published under Vine's byline, however, he says that when he was 14 "Mercer Beasley, the famous professional coach who developed Cliff Sutter and Frankie Parker saw me play. He was very kind. He encouraged me, told me I would some day be a champion."

"I was just fortunate in meeting Mr. Beasley...a few years later, after I had mastered his instructions, I defeated several stars, much to my amazement. Then I remembered Mr. Beasley's saying I would be a champion."

According to the Times obituary, however:

Beasley...flattened his serve and forehand into the rifle shots they became and used ingenuity in developing his fabled accuracy. A narrow strip of canvas with cutouts would be stretched across the top of the net, and Vines would spend hours drilling balls through the holes.

The youthful Vines went on to become one of the dominant players in the world throughout the 1930s and has been called by many competent observers such as Jack Kramer and Don Budge the greatest player of all time when his somewhat erratic game was at its best.

Frank Parker

Frank Parker was a long-time American champion of the 1930s and '40s. Beasley, according to Time magazine:

picked up a likely-looking, $2-per-week [11-year-old] 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.

It was widely written throughout the 1930s that Parker was the "foster" child of Beasley and his wife, or that they had "adopted" the boy, or even "legally adopted" him. Parker himself denied this many years later.

Of the 16-year-old Parker, who in 1932 had already beaten the No. 2 American, George Lott, four times, Beasley said in 1932:

"It was in 1927 that Frankie Parker came into my life. Little shaver, thin, puny, but quiet and attentive.... He had the best eye for a moving ball I've ever seen.... It took four years of the hardest work to get the boy's title.... Last year the wonder boy never lost a set.... He is to be the best of the pack."

Under Beasley's tutelage, Parker became the first of only two players to ever win the national championships for boys (those through the age of 15), juniors (through 18), and men, the other being Joe Hunt a few years later. Beginning at the age of 17, in 1933, Parker was ranked among the Top 10 American players for 17 consecutive years, through 1949, a record for male players that stood until being surpassed by Jimmy Connors in 1988. Six months younger than the great Don Budge, he consistently ranked higher than Budge until the latter turned 20.

Parker and Beasley's forehand

According to Jack Kramer, another great near-contemporary of Parker's, and many other observers, the youthful Parker, an emotionless, robot-like tennis-stroking machine, had originally had "a wonderful slightly overspin forehand drive. Clean and hard." Then, according to Kramer,

for some reason Beasley decided to change this stroke into a chop. It was obscene; it was like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.... Beasley got it into his head that Parker should hit with a forehand like Leo Durocher threw the ball from shortstop to first base. That was what Beasley patterned Parker's new forehand after.

Parker's revamped forehand was not a success; writing about the 22-year-old Parker in 1938, Time magazine said that he had "learned Beasley accuracy and strategy, developed several trick strokes—notably "the shovel"—but never perfected a strong forehand." In a 1935 controversy after the 19-year-old Parker had been defeated in an early round by Fred Perry in the United States championships, Parker declared that he was quitting to school to work on his forehand with Beasley in Bermuda. Beasley himself then announced that, "Frankie's got a swelled head. I tried to make him use the circle swingback but he wouldn't listen to me...." For years after breaking from Beasley, Parker attempted to reconstruct his original stroke but never entirely recovered it and, according to Kramer, never quite achieved the ultimate heights that he might have otherwise.

Parker and Beasley's wife

As a strange sidelight to Parker's longtime relationship with Beasley, the youthful player and Beasley's wife, Audrey, who was at least 20 years Parker's senior and had been his surrogate mother during all his teen years, fell in love, hiding the fact from Mercer for at least two years. In 1938, however, when Parker was 22, the Beasleys divorced and Audrey and Parker quickly married. The marriage was, apparently, an extremely happy one for 43 years until Audrey died in 1971.

As Time magazine described the events in 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.... Parker, whom Beasley characterized as "thin, puny, but quiet and attentive".... 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."

As with most divorces, there were elements known only to the two primary parties. Nearly 50 years later Parker said to Stan Hart that

had Audrey Beasley wanted to sue for alimony, there would have been a scandal second only to that which attended the life and times of Wallis Simpson. Instead she asked for nothing and remarried the young Frank Parker and became his coach and manager.

Whatever potential "scandal" to which Parker refers never became known. The new Mrs. Parker worked with her husband to rebuild the original forehand that her earlier husband had so systematically and disastrously changed, but without complete success.

Coaching techniques

Traditional methods

Beasley's 1933 "How to Play Tennis" was a highly influential book that emphasized accuracy and consistent play. "He preached the virtue of percentage play, calling good tennis the 'avoidance of making errors,' and emphasizing that 'a point won on an error counts just as much as a point scored on an ace.' " In spite of using an up-to-date nomenclature to describe his goals, Beasley's so-called "Little Game", which he taught to beginners was basically a traditional approach to stroke-making:

"The Little Game," whose object was to develop ball control by shrinking the size of the court to its service boxes. Once they advanced to baseline play, Beasley's players were trained to see the court as a traffic light: when at or behind the baseline (red) the ball must be played safely; when in no-man’s land (yellow) a forcing but never reckless ball is played; while the frontcourt (green) is the area denoting more decisive shot making.

As much for tactical reasons as for a belief in etiquette, Beasley was also a strong advocate of gentlemanly on-court comportment and impassiveness:

"What you do on a tennis court during a tournament match is watched by every spectator in the gallery as well as by your opponent. Therefore, you should be perfectly natural in every way. Avoid making any gestures or audible sounds that might cause comment. There should be nothing to encourage or discourage your opponent. Not an action of yours should show elation or dejection. Nothing he does, whether it is to score an ace or to make an error, should change your expression."

It must be said, however, that aside from the occasional tempestuous outburst by the imperial Pancho Gonzales and crowd-pleasing showmanship by the equally imperial Big Bill Tilden, two of the greatest prima donnas as well as tennis players in the history of the game, tennis throughout Beasley's lengthy career was still essentially a country-club sport played by well-mannered ladies and gentlemen in immaculate whites who were expected to always observe the highest levels of politeness and good sportsmanship.

Cross-training

In spite of his inherently conservative approach to shot-making and comportment, however, Beasley was the first coach to see the value of so-called cross-training, in which he had his pupils develop different aspects of their game by emulating the movements from other sports such as gymnastics, basketball, track, boxing, and ballroom dancing. Beasley apparently developed his unorthodox techniques early in his career. He is said to have arrived every day at his first full-time teaching position at the Indian Hills Club in Winnetka, Illinois, in the early 1920s:

...dressed in a white jockey cap, long flannel pants and a pinstriped blazer. In his arms were instruments such as boxing gloves, hammers, baseball bats and bicycle tires, anything to help teach his system of the game. And it worked. Five years later his students Louise McFarland and Marjorie Gladman bagged a junior national title each.

Beasley's cross-training rationale was both eclectic and original:

Boxing taught players to attack short balls in the front court. "Foot up to it on your forehand side and shoot a right jab at it," Beasley would say. Basketball helped teach defensive play and alertness. Ballroom dance and gymnastics were studied. He discovered learning tools everywhere. He even used a marching band for players to rally to while practicing footwork.

Thirty years later, a 1957 article in Sports Illustrated further detailed some of Beasley's methods:

"I rarely change natural grips.... We find that if the pivot comes in, direction will follow if the racket follows in a line to where the ball is sent.... We try to have the footwork done ahead of time and then at the moment of hitting, perfect control, no falling over sideways, no off balance.... There is no lack of decision. The training calls for audible calling of where the ball is to be sent. We have used semaphores placed back of the player receiving the ball, the other fellow would follow the signals.... I do not allow more than 13 errors for any one set.... At Tulane we advocate and play basketball, we hit tennis balls with a golf stick from a cocoa mat on the tennis courts, we have the boxing instructor come down to the courts with boxing gloves and show the boys how to foot. We have the head football coach.... we get the band out... we dance, keep moving and make every one of our varsity players work on one of our six practice boards.... There is a circle about one foot round they have to serve in.... My players must never grandstand a play, never make the kill when a soft accurate shot will suffice. Energy must be saved. No false steps, no excess movements. No jerks, no wild swinging and no brute strength. Just the cool calculating mind working the system, analytical, severe, fast, cruel and deadly...."

Years later, one of his pupils recalled some lessons given him by Beasley at a resort in Nassau:

"Mr. Beasley would put towels at various spots on the court and he had them numbered....He would stand at the net and yell out a number, and that meant for me to hit the ball to that spot. He would do it in rapid fire succession and it was a good coaching gimmick."

It is ironic, perhaps, that Beasley is quoted as saying, "I rarely change natural grips." Perhaps his greatest professional success came from altering Ellsworth Vine's original Western grip to his all-conquering Eastern grip, while perhaps his great error in judgment lay in altering the youthful Frankie Parker's "overspin forehand drive" to the emulation of Leo Durocher's throw to first base.

Contrarian views

Beasley was not without his detractors.

Commercial success

Advertisement for the Mercer Beasley tennis racket

Beasley became a consultant to the Spalding Sporting Goods company in 1935, and for many years held tennis clinics for children in public parks across the country. His book How to Play Tennis, first published in 1933, went through numerous printings and eventually he became so well known that Spalding released its own Mercer Beasley racket. For many years it was sold in stores next to those endorsed by Don Budge and Jack Kramer and it is said that both Pancho Gonzales and Ted Schroeder, the two finalists in a famous match for the 1949 U.S. Championship at Forest Hills, were playing with his racket. Finally, Beasley was constantly seeking technological improvements. It is said that he was a pioneer in promoting synthetic strings, composite rackets, and ultralight footwear as well as being one of the first coaches to design and use the now-ubiquitous tennis ball machine.