Click here to go Part One of Stan Smith article
Smith hit both forehand and backhand groundstrokes hard and with light topspin. They were not pretty, often being hit off-center, and lacking finesse or clever placement. But they were effective. Stan hit them as hard as he could and simplistically aimed for anywhere in the court that you didn't happen to be. If you managed to run the ball down Stan simply whacked it again into the opposite side. This strategy was particularly disconcerting to me, since I was a touch player and liked to maneuver with my opponent I was very good at guessing where my opponents were going to hit the ball, and I loved it when they tried to trick me and hit behind me. I almost always got the best of players that attempted to be clever. Unfortunately for me, Stan rarely tried to be clever. He hit for the opening and it was only a question of whether you could run fast enough to reach the ball.
It was also very unrewarding to try clever, touch passing shots against Stan. He was so big and fast that if he were given any time at all he would reach out a long arm and get to almost anything. The best play against Stan was to whack the ball hard into an opening before he had time to react and move or reach. Unfortunately for me, I specialized in tricky delicate passing shots and lobs, designed to keep an opposing net-rusher off balanced and confused. Stan was my worst nightmare. He didn't get confused and his balance was awfully good.
My tournament record against Stan was 1 win against 5 losses, with my lone win coming the first time I played him when he was 18 years old and national junior champion. I was in my mid-twenties and very experienced. Being short and tricky, I specialized in chopping up inexperienced junior players They didn't know what I was going to do with the ball and I knew exactly what they were going to do. It was a formula designed to provide me with hours of fun and them with hours of frustration and misery (which, come to think of it, was what constituted so much of my fun). I slaughtered Stan in the Southern California championship about 6-1, 6-1 and didn't give him another thought for a year. It was then that I ran into him in the finals of the Tucson Invitational where he beat me in three close sets after beating Charlie Pasarell in the semis. He wasn't great, but he was enormously improved from the previous year.
In the ensuing years we played four more times and he beat me worse every time. By the end he was just teeing off on everything I hit and blasting me off the court. Because of this I became very irritable playing Stan. I felt weak, frustrated, and most of all, short. Stan towered over me by eight inches, and I felt like a pigmy. The heavier he served and the harder he hit, the more I felt like I was shrinking. And Stan didn't help matters by his attitude. He was supremely confident-- a nice guy totally honest, hard-working, decent, forthright, and admirable in every way --yet I found him very annoying to play. He walked in a very erect and self-assured manner, almost supercilious. In fact, he appeared cocky even though he really wasn't. Stan hardly acknowledged your presence across the net and never seemed even slightly perturbed if you hit the greatest shot in the world. His walk never changed and his facial expression was serene. It was bothersome that he seemed not to notice that you were alive. His attitude hinted of "That was a nice little shot, but it won't do you any good since there is no question that I will win the match anyway."
Stan's composure was sorely tested during the final round of the Davis Cup in 1972 when he defeated both Ilie Nastase and Ion Tiriac in Bucharest Romania, while leading the US team to a 3-2 victory in the face of some of the worst sportsmanship and line calls yet seen in that event. At that time it was still a gentleman's game and the players genuinely cared about their reputations for honesty and sportsmanship. No one was yet accustomed to being cheated by an opponent or putting up with disrespectful, "in your face" types of gestures. Nastase was well on the way to changing all of that and the money in the newly open game provided leverage enough to keep the officials docile.
Although Stan's tenure at the top of the game was brief, he was a wonderful champion and represented the highest virtues of the game's great players --serenity in the face of adversity, discipline, hard work, and single-mindedness of purpose.
Click here to go to Roy Emerson article
Click here to go Part One of Stan Smith article
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