Interactive Forum November 2014: Ham Richardson Backhand

[johnyandell]

I’m impressed by any subscriber who has heard of Hamilton Farrar "Ham" Richardson. But he deserves to be heard of. Ham was a different kind of man from a different tennis era: an economics major and a Rhodes Scholar, who happened to became the number one player in the United States in 1958 while still studying at Oxford. A successful Dallas stockbroker. And a man with an impeccable, lethal one-handed backhand.

According to Joseph B. Stahl, a student of the amateur game and a former writer for World Tennis, it was the best backhand in the history of wood racket tennis. As Joe wrote to me: "Going back as far as Tilden in the 1920s, I've seen a lot of backhands on film and in person, and I never saw one struck with a wood racket anywhere near as good as that of Richardson, not Budge's, not Rosewall's, not Hoad's, not Laver's. Its mechanics were perfect and he could bludgeon anything with it, high balls, low balls, anything."

I had the privilege of ball boying for Ham at a small clay court tournament in Tulsa where I grew up. At age 10 I didn't exactly have the perspective to know if it was the best backhand the game had yet seen, but I do remember the effortless grace and power of his entire game. If one picture is worth a thousand videos (or at least worth a lot) what do you guys make of this one picture?

And who had heard of Ham?

[gzhpcu]

I had heard of Ham, but never saw him play. It would be nice to see the full swing. Impact looks very clean, in any case.

Here's a couple more I found...






and I found this old video of David Cup (just doubles though...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mdux3tc-JE

[gzhpcu]

Here's a nice article on Ham:

http://www.lasportshall.com/inductee...?back=inductee

and an amusing article Ham wrote:

http://books.google.ch/books?id=jekC...player&f=false

[don_budge]

It's all in the wood…flush in the middle.

If one picture is worth a thousand videos (or at least worth a lot) what do you guys make of this one picture?

The picture? There is more to it than anyone here will be able to make of it. The white clothes. The white tennis ball flush in the middle of the traditional sized tennis racquet. It's a question of culture. Real tennis culture. White guys…rich white guys. It's ok. Calm down everybody. It's in the past.

The stroke itself? Fundamentally it says everything that needs to be said about the one hand backhand. See how the shoulder is positioned in front of the body for the backhand as opposed to the forehand which is behind the body. In terms of ball position this means that if you are to meet the ball off of your front hip when you play a forehand then you need to play the ball a full shoulder width in front of your body if you plan to seriously drive the ball and that is precisely what Hamilton is doing

Secondly…it's in the grip. If you are going to meet the ball a full shoulder width in front of your front hip then you must grip the racquet so that the hand and body fit to the shot. Hamilton's grip here is perfect as he fits to his shot like a glove.

Third it is all about balance and energy. His weight is placed neatly on his front foot although on this particular shot he has not been able to commit himself one hundred percent…it just may be a return of serve as it appears that he is to the right of centre hitting a backhand and somewhat inside the baseline.

His head has remained still throughout his swing as his shoulders are swinging around his head. No doubt Hamilton was a fine golfer as well. With the Oxford background and his stock broker responsibilities he surely had to know his way around the links as well.

Beautiful change of pace for the forum. Black and white still. One of the redeeming aspects of tennisplayer.net is its reverence for classic tennis. From Welby Van Horn to Hamilton Richardson. Ball boying…remembering the sound of the ball against the gut and wood. It is all connected…or at least it was.

[klacr]

Ham Richardson is a unique story. I happened to have heard of him through Roy Emerson.
Mr. Richardson was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and was told by doctors he would not be able to continue playing tennis. He continued to play and competed in Davis Cup. He did study at Oxford but he was a cajun boy from Baton Rouge and attended Tulane.

Sadly, He died about 8 years ago of complications from diabetes. He had a venture capitalist and investment firm in NYC.

On to the backhand...

The picture speaks volumes. Notice how relaxed he looks at the moment of impact. Head is down and eyes locked on the ball. Notice the strong and straight right arm. Pay close attention to that ball at impact, near the top of the frame in the upper quarter. His left arm is nice and relaxed as well, not flailing around, keeping complete balance. Shoulders are still turned, not turning open wildly as if he was trying to force power. Looks effortless. Key to a good one hander. He's not asking himself "Should I do more?"

Great picture.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[don_budge]

Primitive Sweet Spots...

Pay close attention to that ball at impact, near the top of the frame in the upper quarter.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

That ball is flush in the middle…ok maybe just to the top of center. But for all intents and purposes it's flush in the middle considering that it is a standard sized wood racquet. If you put that ball in exactly the same position in a modern day tennis racquet you would be hard pressed to not exclaim…"he flushed it!" I cannot make out the brand of the racquet.

If you see the modern players making use of every little teeny tiny bit of their 100 square monsters…you know what I mean. Much hype is made about these modern day tennis players athletic ability but if you factor in this small little fun fact that the racquets that they are using are nearly 50% bigger…how much more difficult was it to find the sweet spot of this "primitive" piece of apparatus?

[klacr]

That ball is flush in the middle…ok maybe just to the top of center. But for all intents and purposes it's flush in the middle considering that it is a standard sized wood racquet. If you put that ball in exactly the same position in a modern day tennis racquet you would be hard pressed to not exclaim…"he flushed it!" I cannot make out the brand of the racquet.

If you see the modern players making use of every little teeny tiny bit of their 100 square monsters…you know what I mean. Much hype is made about these modern day tennis players athletic ability but if you factor in this small little fun fact that the racquets that they are using are nearly 50% bigger…how much more difficult was it to find the sweet spot of this "primitive" piece of apparatus?

Just to the top of center is good db. Matter of perspective but I can see your point. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

I still drag a few of my fellow pros out to hit with the wooden racquets we have laying around our pro shop. They hate it. I thrive with them. Sadly, wooden racquets are not coming back. ever. Sorry don_budge, I feel your pain. Just makes us appreciate them even more

Back to the thread subject at hand...notice his stance as well. He's leaning on that ball and about to give it a magnificent ride. Looking at all the photo and video archives on this site, it's always heartwarming to know that great strokes never go out of style.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[johnyandell]

One additional note: closed stance and all that entails.

[stotty]

And who had heard of Ham?

No, I have never heard of Ham. He's new on the map for me. Like everyone else I like the photo and the glimpse it gives us. Players of his generation missed being immortalised by Sky TV and pocket camcorders. All we have are books and photos, and the odd grainy clip. With these guys, you just had to be there to appreciate how they truly were. Lucky John.

[GeoffWilliams]

Just to the top of center is good db. Matter of perspective but I can see your point. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

I still drag a few of my fellow pros out to hit with the wooden racquets we have laying around our pro shop. They hate it. I thrive with them. Sadly, wooden racquets are not coming back. ever. Sorry don_budge, I feel your pain. Just makes us appreciate them even more

Back to the thread subject at hand...notice his stance as well. He's leaning on that ball and about to give it a magnificent ride. Looking at all the photo and video archives on this site, it's always heartwarming to know that great strokes never go out of style.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

Neither is the Model T ford. The '32 Jag might, at least the body style, but we won't see modern frames at 65 sq. in. again. Never. Ham was another rich guy with a tennis hobby. I see he was using the Jack Kramer autograph.

[tennis_chiro]

Much more than a great backhand!

Ham Richardson is a unique story. I happened to have heard of him through Roy Emerson.
Mr. Richardson was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and was told by doctors he would not be able to continue playing tennis. He continued to play and competed in Davis Cup. He did study at Oxford but he was a cajun boy from Baton Rouge and attended Tulane.

Sadly, He died about 8 years ago of complications from diabetes. He had a venture capitalist and investment firm in NYC.
...
Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

It's not enough to say Ham was a unique story. I first met Ham when I got him to play in the $15,000 Lionel Invitational I was runing in Central Park in May of 1977. I got to know him better a couple of years later when he would come over to our house to play occasionally with my sponsor (on the circuit and in the brokerage business). Later he was instrumental in the escalation of the level of play at the Huggy Bears tournament. But first, a little more about Ham. I was privileged to be a dinner guest at his house in Bridgehampton once. It was a very special dinner party every weekend. Topics of conversation were much more varied than tennis technique, although there was some of that too. You see, Ham was married to Midge Turk Richardson, a former nun and parochial school principal who forsake her habit for the publishing business in New York and rose to be a force there as the longtime editor of Seventeen magazine. At the time, I was just a quiet young man trying not to embarrass myself by opening my mouth at the wrong time; just a quiet observer; only later would I come to appreciate what was going on at that dinner table. But if you knew a little about Midge, you had to recognize the complexity of Ham.

But back to Ham. He loved to compete. He was invited to play in the second Huggy Bears in 1986. We had grown from 8 teams to 16. I don't remember how much letter stock was involved the first year, but I do remember the Tennis Calcutta was about $25,000 because the Jetski Calcutta exceeded it by a couple of thousand dollars (these were mostly novices on the jetskis and my partner, Alexandra Hayden and I won the Grand Prix prize for combined performance in the tennis tournament, semis, and the jetski race, 2nd). But in the second year, Tony Forstmann had increased the letter stock part of the prize to above $200,000 and there ended up being another $240,000 added to that in the bidding process for the 16 teams. Those first two years there were no handicaps; everything just straight up. In the first year, there were no current tour pros in the field, but the second year there were four and it became more of a Pro-Am event. I was coaching Paul Annacone part-time and we got him to come play as Pancho Segura's partner. Paul got his partner, Christo van Rensburg to come and play with Tony Forstmann, the sponsor at whose house all the matches were played (except my first round match which I lost.) Somehow, we got Scott Davis to come play with Tony's brother-in-law. But the real game changer was Ham who had played at an entirely different level from Tony or his brother-in-law who were real club amateurs and was much younger than Pancho, although nearly 30 years removed from his #1 US ranking. He was invited to play and he wanted to win so he got his old doubles partners' son to come play with him, Sammy Giammalva, Jr. There were a number of other former top 100 pros in the field and we had a major tournament on our hands. We didn't know the Calcutta would end up being worth a total of over $400,000. Syndicates were formed to bid on multiple teams and strategies were formed and Ham was one of the people spearheading all that strategizing and scheming, trying to figure out how to win and he wanted to own his own team. Remember, a Calcutta is usually played for just the money the bidders put into the pool and probably less than 100% after something was taken out for expenses. But here the pool was spiked with $200,000 in letter stock and you could bid for multiple teams. So all these Wall Street types in the Hamptons were trying to figure out how to get an edge!

But the week before the tournament, Ham had a diabetic episode driving home one night and hit a telephone pole; he was out of the tournament as a player. The year before I had gotten Army Neely to come be our referee and he ended up calling all 7 matches of the main draw after being called into duty to play and lose a prelim with Tony's son-in-law (a lot of family involvement in a backyard event). He was set to be our referee again, but I also had umpires this time. We needed a substitute for Ham and Tony thought it would be nice to give Army that spot. I thought they would be too good, but Tony had made up his mind and they were the favorites and sold for over $50,000 in the Calcutta. I'm pretty sure Ham's syndicate had a piece of that team. Army and Sammy lost the first set in the first and second round (there is a whole different kind of pressure when someone bets what you think is big money on you), but they ended up winning the tournament beating Annacone and Segura in the final. The first four years of HB, Tony made the draw up so that every team could have a chance to win (or lose) their first two matches. After all, it was his money. There were no bisque handicaps at all the first two years and in years three, four and five, only in the finals. We did the draw out of a hat in year 5, but no one would believe me when I told them, so I started making a big public production out of it at the eve of the tournament/Calcutta party in year six.

Ham played in HB in 87 and 88, but he failed to win a match, … as a player. But by year 4 when the Calcutta had grown to $1.4 million with a first prize of over $300,000 (1/3 to the players), we had made Page 6 of the Post and we had to go see the Suffolk County DA. It's legal to have a bet in NY on an event you are participating in, but you had to be participating. So the DA said the Calcutta owner had to be an owner/coach/player. This was before the bisques were in use except in the finals. So we made the Calcutta owner have to play one point in each set to be part of the contest. Ham had lost in the first round, but he had gotten a Romanian teaching pro introduced into the event and, of course, his syndicate owned that team, Liviu Mancas and Robbie Weiss. They were playing another sleeper team that had sold for only $1,000. Sashi Menon was supposed to play with John Fitzgerald, but Fitzi called from the airport that he was on his way home because he had a broken leg or some such thing. There had been a lot of buzz about this team leading up to the event and at the very last minute I had sent a limo to a pro tournament up Long Island to pick up one of the early round losers to get him to come play with Sashi. The draw was published already and they were set to play the Giammalva brothers in the first round and were severe underdogs. That last minute substitute player was a Swedish god as far as the ladies of the Hamptons were concerned and he had a great week. But after the Giammalvas sold for somewhere north of $50,000, no one wanted to bid on Sashi and Peter Lundgren, so Vince Van Patten made the minimum bid of $1,000 and sold off 2/3 of the team before he left the tent that night. Sashi and Peter won their owners $75,000 by first upsetting the Giammalvas and then Charlie Owens and Johan Kriek (we had unbelievable fields in '88 and '89 with 48 and 63 teams respectively and I arranged a lot of the teams on the payphone during 10 minute breaks in my chiropractic class schedule and I had to run up three flights of stairs to get to the payphone!)

I know I'm rambling on, but you have to know the whole backstory to understand Ham's thirst for competition. This was going to be a really big match for serious money and Ham was going to have to play a couple of points. He would substitute for Mancas at whatever point they wanted. But what happened was, when Ham came out to play, so did a some 30 years younger Vince Van Patten. And they played it up for everything they could get out of it. And my memory is probably imagining this, but I think Ham ended up making a winning play in one of those points, probably a knifing backhand volley. Mancas and Weiss went on to win the match 7-6, 6-7, 7-6. I think Weiss had just won the NCAA's that summer and the money was a big deal for him; certainly for Mancas, a teaching pro from Dallas/Ft. Worth. I still remember the enthusiasm and intensity with which Ham jumped onto the court to take his ready position and play his point for his team. Two years later when we started using bisques from the first round after handicapping the teams prior to the draw and doing the draw in public, we stopped having the owners play their points. While we did it, I thought it was one of the most interesting parts of the tournament. From 1990, the owners became "player/coaches" who had a 1/3 vote in when to use the team's bisques and that was supposed to fulfill the DA's requirement for participation by the owners in the Calcutta. I know Ham really enjoyed it.

Please excuse me for going down memory lane; it's a nice distraction for me. But you need to know Ham Richardson was much more than a great backhand. He was a classic tennis player and he loved engaging in the battle that was tournament tennis in the 1950's and 1960's. A lot of people look back on that era and think they were just playing "paddycake" tennis because the game has sped up so much; but nothing could be further from the truth. Those players may not have been the athletes that we see today, but they were amazing competitors and Ham was one of the best.

don

[stotty]

Please excuse me for going down memory lane; it's a nice distraction for me. But you need to know Ham Richardson was much more than a great backhand. He was a classic tennis player and he loved engaging in the battle that was tournament tennis in the 1950's and 1960's.

A lot of people look back on that era and think they were just playing "paddycake" tennis because the game has sped up so much; but nothing could be further from the truth.

Those players may not have been the athletes that we see today, but they were amazing competitors and Ham was one of the best.

don

That was a lovely and informative post. It's great to get such a broad picture of Ham and what he was like.

And, yes, ...nothing could be further from the truth. I've watched plenty of wooden racket games first hand to know exactly what you're talking about. As I said in my previous post...you just had to be there at the time to truly appreciate it.

[jlee94111]

Ham

I ballboyed for him and his partner Vic.... I thinked they ended up losing to Hoad and Rosewall... US Doubles early 60s

[johnyandell]

Nice!

[aarioli]

Ham Richardson

pretty strong grip, straight are at impact. Certainly not old-fashioned