Dick Savitt never took a tennis lesson in his life. His first love was basketball, and as co-captain of his El Paso, Texas high school basketball team he was an all-Texas player in 1944. A year later, Savitt entered the Navy and played on an outstanding service basketball team. When he completed his tour of duty in 1946, Cornell University offered Savitt a basketball scholarship. When two injuries cut short Savitt�s basketball career, he decided to resume playing tennis, which he had taught himself as a 14-year old boy. Without benefit of coaching, in 1950 Savitt reached the semifinals of the U. S. Championship at Forest Hills. Then, in 1951, he became the only Jewish player ever to win the All-England championship at Wimbledon, the most prestigious of all tennis tournaments.

A year later, ,at the top of his game, after being snubbed by the United States Davis Cup team, Savitt retired from competitive tennis, a decision which remains shrouded in controversy.

Born in 1927, Richard Savitt was the grandson of Isaac Hoberman, one of the first Jewish leaders of Bayonne, New Jersey. While his first loves were baseball and basketball, the self-taught Savitt played tennis well enough to make the finals of the New Jersey Boys Championship and, for two years afterwards, the National Boys Tennis Tournaments before moving up to the junior ranks. After his family moved to El Paso in 1944, Savitt continued to dabble in tennis while pursuing his first love, basketball. When Savitt joined the Navy in 1945, despite considering tennis his �second� sport after basketball, he was the ranked eighth nationally among junior tennis players and the seventeenth ranked amateur overall.

By 1951, Savitt had burst onto the international tennis scene. His meteoric rise was based on several factors: clearly, he was a gifted natural athlete; 6�3� and 185 pounds, his height and strength gave him the leverage to hit a booming serve which his opponents found difficult to return. Savitt was also enormously competitive; his contemporaries described him as almost driven, a man who hated to lose. Once he gave up basketball and concentrated on tennis, he quickly became a world-class player, and in 1951 was ranked as the #2 American player and #3 in the world

After winning Wimbldon that year, Savitt was favored to win the U. S. Championship at Forest Hills. An infected insect bite on his leg limited Savitt�s mobility and he lost in the semifinals. The infection healed in time for the Davis Cup championship round against arch rival Australia. American Davis Cup coach Frank Shields, when asked which players he would take to Melbourne, replied, �All I know for certain is that Dick Savitt will play singles.� Allison Danzig, dean of American tennis writers, described Savitt as America�s best hope for conquering the powerful Australians, who