Thanks, Bud

Editor's Note: On Friday, after years of failing health, Bud Collins died in his Brookline home at age 86. Last November, as part of TENNIS Magazine's annual Heroes issue, Steve Tignor wrote about the legendary tennis writer, broadcaster and personality.

It was entirely fitting that the U.S. Open renamed its media center in honor of Bud Collins this year. The famously colorful writer—in both word and garb—covered the first Open in 1968, and every one after until 2013. During those years, Collins made himself very much at home in the press room. For many in the tennis media, the tournament didn’t begin until we’d seen a brightly hued Bud padding around in his socks and greeting us, in that richly good-humored voice we grew up listening to on TV, with a wide smile and a word of praise for a story we’d recently written.

The Open’s selection process couldn’t have taken long, because there really was no other choice. Collins, who turned 86 this summer, isn’t just a tennis reporter; he was the first U.S. sportswriter to consider the game important enough to make it his specialty. And he isn’t just a tennis historian; by bearing witness to every significant event of the last five decades, Collins was instrumental in creating and composing the lore of the Open era. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that without Bud, there might not even be a tennis history.

Collins began narrating that history in the 1950s, when he convinced his skeptical editors at the Boston Herald to let him cover what he called the “secret sport,” which was then kept largely hidden behind country-club walls.

“To me,” Collins later wrote, “tennis was a wonderful game that could win a larger following if the press and TV—and the game’s leaders—would give it a more thorough chance.”

Over the next half century, Collins did more than his share to give it that chance. Yet change came slowly: In 1968, when Wimbledon held its first open championship, he was the only U.S. journalist to travel to London to cover it. With Collins's help, that milestone tournament helped set off the following decade’s tennis boom, a phenomenon that would find a ready voice in the silver-tongued scribe. By the early ’70s, Collins was in the CBS booth at the U.S. Open, and in 1979 he returned to London not as a lone-wolf reporter, but as the color commentator for NBC’s first serving of Breakfast at Wimbledon.

Through TV, Collins became one of the game’s pied pipers, a fun-loving proselytizer who wanted to let everyone in on his secret sport. His nicknames helped turn players into characters; after Bud, Billie Jean King would always be “Mother Freedom,” Chris Evert the “Ice Maiden,” Bjorn Borg the “Angelic Assassin,” and Steffi Graf “Fraulein Forehand.” The staid old game also became a lot more gripping when he was describing it. In Bud’s breathless style, every ball that ticked the tape was a “Netcord!”, and when two players ended up at net, they weren’t just face to face, they were “Eyeball to eyeball!”

But what makes Collins a suitable subject for TENNIS Magazine’s Heroes issue, as well as this Thanksgiving tribute, is that he’s just as generous with his enthusiasm in private as he is in public. Even as Collins' fame grew, the small-town Ohio native never lost his natural Midwestern openness and affability. Generations of sportswriters have benefited from his friendship and support; in a notoriously competitive profession, Collins has held out a welcoming hand to all newcomers.

Ten years ago in the press room at Key Biscayne, I listened to Bud talk about how delighted he was to watch a first-round match between 6’10” Ivo Karlovic and 5’5” Olivier Rochus. Bud reveled in the incongruity of the match-up, and wondered if there had ever been a greater height disparity (if he didn’t know, nobody did). I could only hope that, after so many years of traveling the circuit, I would be able to work up that kind of passion for an obscure match on a side court. Not many sportswriters maintain their youthful devotion to a game. It came naturally to Bud.

Yet I didn’t really appreciate Collins’ devotion to tennis, and its value, until I was researching my own book on the game. Looking back through years of his columns for the Boston Globe, I was struck by the way he invariably dug out a detail or two that no other reporter had. Where one writer would mention “Borg’s family,” Collins would give you all of their first names. Where someone else would talk about “McEnroe’s exorbitant fine,” Bud would have the exact amount. Everyone knew a young Evert was in high school when she made her Open debut, but Bud could tell you the school’s full name.

Over the years these details added up. Collins’ reportorial precision, borne out of his daily, loving attention to the pro tours, brought his readers closer to the game. There’s a sense in the U.S., even among many of the game’s fans and media, that tennis isn’t a big-time sport, isn’t something worth taking as seriously as football, baseball, or basketball—it’s just tennis. Bud showed that being a tennis-specific writer was a worthy pursuit, and the made the game seem even worthier by extension.

As I wrote above, it’s only fitting that Collins’ name adorns the media center at the Open: It’s the House That Bud Built. And those of us from the U.S. who get to live and work in it each year can only say: Thank you for giving us a job—a great job—to do. We'll keep trying to make you proud.