Wimbledon-winning tennis hall announcer Dick Savitt has died at the age of 95

His son Bob confirmed the death but did not give a cause.

A fiercely competitive right-hander with a powerful backhand and an aggressive ground game, Mr. Savitt was one of the best American tennis players of the 1950s and one of the greatest Jewish tennis players in history. He hit what was called a heavy ball, said one of his longtime rivals, Hall of Famer Tony Trabert, in a 2011 interview New Jersey Star-Ledger. He could punish you with soil.

The hulking, 6-foot-6 Mr. Savitt rose to stardom in January 1951 when he made his debut at the Australian Championships in Sydney, where he beat defending champion Frank Sedgman in the semifinals and beat Ken McGregor to win the title. He was the first non-Australian in 13 years to win the tournament now known as the Australian Open and arrived at Wimbledon five months later as an extraordinarily confident No. 6 seed.

He played all the way to the semifinals, playing against American Herbert Flam in a match that started terribly, Savitt recalled. Flam started really well, leading 6-1, 5-1 and started laughing because it was so easy, he told the Sunday Telegraph of London. This upset me and in the next exchange I told him I didn’t mind him beating me but he better stop laughing. He had shocked me.

Mr. Savitt took the set 13-15, and won relatively easily.

On the morning of the Wimbledon final, a rematch against McGregor, he woke up at 5:00 a.m., unable to sleep, according to a United Press report, and paced his London hotel room before arriving at Center Court, where he took just 62 minutes to deliver his request. opponent. It was one of the shortest finals in Wimbledon history and remains the last time a male player has won Wimbledon on his first attempt.

The victory made Mr. Savitt only the second American to win both the Australian and Wimbledon titles in the same year, since Don Budge in 1938. Only Jimmy Connors and Pete Sampras have won it since.

Mr. Savitt rose to No. 2 in the world rankings, was featured Time magazine cover and boasted: If I’m on my game, no one can beat me. Others come uphill to me.

Yet he also admitted he could be a bad sport at times, drawing praise from the crowd for protesting referees’ decisions or giving up points at the end of a losing game. In part, he told Time, he was simply burned out after months of traveling to tournaments around the world. I have overworked tennis. I want to rest, he said. I used to be so keen, but I’ve never heard tennis before.

Mr. Savitt lost in the semifinals of the U.S. National Championships (now the U.S. Open), where he was ranked No. 1, but was sidelined by a foot infection. And while he helped the US team advance to the Davis Cup, he was bitterly disappointed not to be selected for the final round against Australia. The Americans lost 3-2 when the semi-retired Ted Schroeder replaced him.

To some, Mr. Savitts’ absence from the Davis Cup smacked of anti-Semitism at a time when many tennis clubs refused to admit Jewish members. Mr. Savitt had beaten members of Australia’s Davis Cup team earlier that year, his supporters pointed out, and he appeared poised to do so again.

Resenting his team’s captain, Frank Shields, Mr. Savitt told reporters that he felt he was the victim of a prearranged deal to get Schroeder on the team. But he believed that prejudice played no role in the move, telling Sandra Harwitt, author of The Greatest Jewish Tennis Players of All Time, that it was simply a bad time for me.

Within a year he had retired from the international tennis circuit, despite reaching the quarterfinals or better at all four Grand Slam tournaments in 1952. The majors were open only to amateurs, and when he won Wimbledon the previous year, he received nothing but shopping cards. a gift card and a silver-gilt trophy from the Duchess of Kent and Mr Savitt said all he needed was a job.

You either continued to play and took under-the-table payments or you ended up teaching at the club, he told the Star-Ledger. I didn’t want to do it. I had to decide to continue playing for a few more years or quit the game and go to work in a normal position. That’s what I did.

Mr. Savitt moved to Texas to work for an oil company and arrived in New York in the late 1950s, working as a stockbroker and investment adviser at firms such as Lehman Brothers, Schroders and Morgan Stanley. He also continued to play in occasional tennis tournaments as well as mentor younger players on the court. His patrons included students at Columbia University, which named its tennis center after him, and professionals such as Arthur Ashe and Vitas Gerulaitis.

For years, he also played singles with his son, Bob, and won the national father-son title, which represented one of Mr. Savitt’s most notable victories. A joint interview with the New York Times which he gave last year with his son and friend Bid Goswami, Columbia’s longtime men’s coach. When they finally won in 1981 after two or three tries, Goswami recalled, Dick said: This is bigger than my Wimbledon win.

Richard Savitt was born in Bayonne, NJ on March 4, 1927 and grew up in nearby Maplewood and South Orange. His father worked in a meat distribution company and his mother was a housewife.

At age 13, Mr. Savitt became fascinated with tennis while working as a ball boy at the Berkeley Tennis Club in Orange. He never had a formal lesson, but said he learned the sport by watching other players and reading instructions from Grand Slam champion Budge. He also played football and basketball, cementing his hold on Mr. Savitt after his family moved to El Paso, where he became captain of the high school basketball team and earned a basketball scholarship to Cornell University.

After serving in the Navy at the end of World War II, he enrolled at Cornell in 1946 and suffered a knee injury that ended his career on the hardwood. He went on to compile a 57-2 collegiate tennis record before receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1950. That same year, he reached the semifinals of the US National Championships in New York, losing to eventual champion Art Larsen.

Mr. Savitt won titles at the U.S. National Indoor Championships in 1952, 1958 and 1961. He also competed in men’s doubles, was a double runner-up at the French Championships with partner Gardnar Mulloy, and won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1961 Maccabiah Games, the Jewish Olympics in Israel, where he later mentored top players and helped develop tennis centers.

In 1976 he was elected International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Mr. Savitts’ marriage to Louise Liberman ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Annelle Hayes, a Hollywood actress turned interior designer, died in 2013.

In addition to the son, the survivors from the first marriage include three grandchildren.

Long after he retired from the competitive tennis circuit, Mr. Savitt made annual trips to Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, where he bumped into old friends, but resolutely focused on tennis to talk.

I think he doesn’t want to be known, Goswami told the Times last year. He was always serious about watching tennis and he didn’t like to talk too much. I remember Alan King, the comedian, had a box next to Dicks, and when Alan waved at the crowd, Dick got angry and said, Sit down. Sit down. This is about tennis.