Lawn Tennis As a Game of Skill: With Latest Revised Laws as Played by the Best Clubs
(Lawn Tennis As a Game of Skill - With Latest Revised Laws...)
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Richard Dudley Sears was the first national amateur tennis champion of the United States.
Background
Richard Dudley was born on October 26, 1861 in Boston, Massachussets, United States, the eldest of three sons and second of four children of Frederick Richard Sears and Albertina Homer (Shelton) Sears, both of old New England stock. He was a direct descendant of Richard Sears, who emigrated to Plymouth, Massachussets, sometime before 1633. The family included a son and daughter by his father's first marriage, and it was his half brother, Frederick R. Sears, Jr. , who initially interested him in tennis.
In Nahant, where the family spent its summers, young Richard practiced by hitting the ball against a barn door. His mother sewed pieces of old flannel shirts around rubber balls to make tennis balls, but according to family lore he did not get to use them until Frederick had finished with them.
Education
Sears was educated at the private school of J. P. Hopkinson in Boston and at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1883.
Career
In 1880 Richard Dudley Sears won the first tennis challenge cup, and the following year, at Newport, he captured the first United States national championship. He also played in England, Ireland, and France, but with less success than in his own country. Here he went on to win six more singles championships (1881 - 87) - a feat subsequently equaled only by William A. Larned and William Tilden - and six doubles championships (1882 - 87), five with Dwight as his partner and one with Joseph S. Clark of Boston.
In 1888 Sears retired from active competition in lawn tennis because of a neck injury, thought to have been sustained when he was struck by a partner's service. A few years later he turned to court tennis, an ancient game played in a large indoor court, complete with sloping roof and flying buttresses, and in 1892, at New York City, he won the first national championship.
Sears was also a prominent Boston player of squash racquets, but according to some authorities he lacked the severity to reach the top of the game. Sears edited Solomon C. F. Peille's Lawn Tennis as a Game of Skill (1885). .
In business he followed the typical upper-class Boston occupation of trustee, with offices on State Street. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston at the age of eighty-one.
(Lawn Tennis As a Game of Skill - With Latest Revised Laws...)
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
A. Wallis Meyers, the British tennis authority considered him "brilliant but erratic players". Contemporaries said of Sears "he hit with keen accuracy and fair severity".
Connections
On November 24, 1891, Sears married Eleanor M. Cochrane. They had two children, Miriam and Richard Dudley.