Louisiana Legends; Ham Richardson

Funding for the production of Louisiana Legends is provided in part by the Friends of Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by Union National Life Insurance, a Louisiana company serving Louisiana and the South since 1926. [music] [music] [music]

This is the 18th Louisiana Legend that we've been pleased to participate in on Louisiana Public Broadcasting. Uh, as I've talked to these very successful people, there's been some connecting links, some things they have in common. They're successful at, uh, whatever it is that qualifies them as a legend. That's the obvious. But they're also successful in their lives. They're people who, if I can use a cliche, they've put it together. They've got it together. There are no loose ends, no thread sticking out. Uh, most of them also had one other fascinating quality in common: they had overcome some kind of adversity that, uh, might have stopped most of us. My guest today is uh, originally from Baton Rouge, lives in New York now. And he's, of course, Louisiana's great gift to the, uh, world of tennis,

Ham Richardson. Ham, welcome to Legends. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and glad to be back in Baton Rouge. Of course. Let me ask you, uh, you began tennis kinda at, at kind of an advanced age, didn't you? Well, looking at it now, when all the- or so many of the top players play two-handed, because when they started, the racket was so heavy they had to pick it up with two hands. And you look at the Connors, and the Chris Evert, and the Borg and so forth. When I started playing fairly seriously, I was almost 13, which was fairly young, then. But now, of course, uh, to get to be one of the top players in the world, they almost have to be a very fine tennis player by the time they're 12 or 13. I want to ask you a question that, well, someone asked you before we went on the, uh, air, because I think it would be something that would be meaningful to a lot of parents. When should you start your kids with the tennis lessons and playing tennis? It's a very tough question to answer, uh, because kids are different. If the kids enjoy it, I think as soon as they want to do it, whether they're six or seven or eight years old.

I don't think it really makes a great deal of difference if they haven't started until nine or 10 or 11 or 12. If they want to be great champions in the very competitive professional world of tennis now, they almost have to have an early start. You very seldom have the better players in the world that aren't awfully good, uh, by the time they're 16 or 17 or 18. Ham, your dad, uh, Dean, uh, Roger W. Richardson, dean emeritus of the LSU School of Engineering. He started you, did he not? Yeah Dad, uh, I remember Mother saying that she could never remember a single weekend, in her married life, now over 53 years, when, uh, Dad wouldn't rather play tennis, you know. As long as he could play tennis on Saturday and Sunday, anything else that she wanted to plan was all right. And I- I have those same recollections. Dad and I played father-and-son tennis a number of times - [Weill] won the national championship- we were able to do that twice in the 1953 and '54 and we lost in the finals two other times. So, the tennis meant a great

deal to us and it's, I think, well I... pleased that I've been able to carry that on with my two sons and my daughter. My big boy Kevin, who is now 23, is now at Oxford University where I also went, so I feel very good about that. But he and I were runner-up in the national father-and-son tennis championships twice. Three generations! That's quite a- No one's ever won it in three generations, uh, Gus. And one other, uh, family Arthur Neilsen - the AC Nielsen ratings, which are the television ratings- Art Nielsen Sr. and Jr. won it. And then, Art Jr. and his son were runner-up once. Kevin and I've been a runner-up twice and I still hope that I can stay uh, reasonably fit and maybe his shoulders get a little better. He hurt it so we haven't played the last few years. We still have a crack at it. We might sneak through one day and that would be, really to me, the crowning, uh, achievement in a, you know, a very nice tennis life. Ham, unbeknownst to uh, uh, most folks, uh, you, uh, were not, or are not, the only famous member of your family. Uh, your aunt,

the late Margaret Dixon, was ,uh, the preeminent political reporter of all times in Louisiana. She was a great and, and gracious and very kind lady. I loved her. Yeah. Maggie Dixon, my father's sister, known as Jook, in the family, was a, you know, an extraordinary woman. And, uh, her death a few years ago of cancer was, you know, very tough on all of us. I, as you may know, worked for Russell Long, Senator Long, was the first job I had after I graduated from Tulane and then came back from Oxford. I worked for Senator Long for a couple of years and my aunt was responsible for introducing me to the senator and helping me get that job. And I know that his respect for her and virtually every other Louisiana political figure that I've known, of whatever persuasion, they all felt that, uh, she was a great lady. She kept an awful lot of politicians straight. I must tell you that. That column that she wrote on Sundays in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, it could be a kiss from, from the

Lord, uh, which she, uh-uh was kindly inclined. And when, uh-uh, she thought that, uh, a skulduggery, or wrong-doing was going on, it was a nightmare to wake up on a Sunday morning and open Maggie Dixon's column. I remember one time at the house, she had come by and one of the Louisiana political leaders had really upset her by offering to do something if she would, uh, perhaps, you know, lay off a little bit in what she was doing and she said "I told him, I've been tempted by better men than you, Governor [laughter] so don't worry about that. You know I'm going to do it. Call it as I see it." And, uh, I guess that's the way it, kind of we were brought up, you know. Did politics ever have any particular appeal to you? Do you ever consider it? Yes, very definitely. I and, uh, like most young college students, you go to college and you are interested in a number of things and only occasionally, there's a young man gets, you know, terribly interested in politics. I was not particularly interested

in politics when I was growing up in Baton Rouge or at Tulane. When I was at Oxford, studying overseas, I found that I had to represent, maybe defend is a better word, the United States' positions on many, uh, areas that I was not really very well informed about. And I had to learn, you know, what was going on. I then had to learn whether or not I agreed with what our country's position was. And this was back in the '50s when we were talking about the Greeks and the Turks fighting over Cyprus and what the...and then the Suez Canal invasion and of the British and the French. And I realized that I had, because I was there, a responsibility to know a little more about it and I did get quite interested. And that was one of the things that then encouraged me to want to work with Senator Russell Long, which is one of the great experiences of my life. I admire Senator Long very much and think that the training that I had, learning what really happens in politics. But, I made the decision when I left Senator Long, after working there for two years, that in order to go into

politics, you should be financially secure. That was my feeling, because I didn't want to have to worry about making my living, you know, in a political job. And so I thought what I would do is go out and try and have a successful business and make money, and then possibly at a later date come back and get involved in politics. And I still keep up very much and I, a number of our political leaders are friends and uh... How does New York politics stack up to politics back home, Ham? Well, I think politics most places is very much the same. You're talking about people, you're talking about conflicts, you're talking about some extraordinarily bright people, intellectually, who can think of answers, but can't communicate. You're talking about others who, obviously great communicators, who may not be as deep in their thinking and maybe don't have as many answers, but perhaps make better political leaders because they can get people to follow them. And in New York you have the full gambit of, er, the same as you do here. I think we are fortunate to have a

good mayor in Ed Koch, I mean, but the idea of Ed Koch as the mayor of New York being a Lousiana politician, you know, it's a little -far fetched- a little far fetched. You attended University High in Baton Rouge. And you didn't just attend, but the pattern was already evolving in your life. You graduated with the best scholastic average record in your class. Well, Gus, I hate to say that I don't think that's 100 percent true. We had an extraordinary class. There were four guys in my high school senior class who just about had all A's. And all of them have, you know, gone on and had very successful careers. I hope some of them will be listening. My friends Dale Bennett, who's a physician, and James Ortell and David Burleson were all four of us were at the top of the class and we had an extraordinary group of people. Then, you went to Tulane. Right. And got a degree in what? I got a bachelor of arts degree majoring in economics and minoring in English.

You graduated from Tulane Phi Beta Kappa and won a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford, England. What kind of an experience was that for a young man from Baton Rouge, Louisiana? Gus, I would have to say that that was one of the, you know, pivotal experiences of my life. I mean I was a very blessed, lucky young man. I tried very hard. I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I worked hard at tennis and at school and, you know, my family was very secure and very supportive. I would throw out. You were saying there was another famous member of my family, Margaret Dixon. My brother Roger, who was three years older was just named to the Baton Rouge High School Hall of Fame. I think they selected 10 outstanding alumni, and Roger is now professor of mathematics in Australia, in Canberra, the Australian National University, and is literally one of the great mathematicians in the world. He's now at MIT on a sabbatical. But at any rate, we grew up with a comfortable, very loving,

supportive family who wanted to help, you know. Mother and Dad helped us do whatever we wanted to do. And yet to go from Baton Rouge and then New Orleans, I traveled all over the world as a young tennis player. But then to live in one of the great institutions of learning, Oxford, with the people there, to see the other students was just terribly broadening. I am delighted that my son Kevin, who graduated from the University of Virginia last year, was able to get into Kebel College at Oxford and he is there now and I'm just so almost jealous of the experience that he's having. Because it doesn't matter where you come from or that it has to be Oxford, but any place, you know, to go from where you are, your people to see a different kind of environment and to understand the way other people think. To me was a marvelous eye-opening experience, making me more, you know, really tolerant of other people's beliefs, why they think, why they argue with us, why they're different, where they come from. And I think it's the kind of thing that I would really encourage, you know.

I'm encouraging my other two children to try and do it and also I'd encourage you and, you know, if you have a chance to do it, just send your kids abroad for a year or two for education. I think it's the most marvelous thing you can do. Let's talk for a moment about tennis. You won the national Boys Tennis Championship in 1948 so you were off like a bullet. Obviously, the world was gold and the future was bright and in the words of a Broadway musical "something happened on the way to the forum." You developed diabetes. Right, I developed diabetes in 1949, which was the year after I had won the national Boys Tennis Championship, and the first several doctors that I talked to felt that I shouldn't continue to play tennis because it was too strenuous. I was very fortunate in meeting a doctor here, Dr. Cheney Joseph, who helped me figure out how, as a young man growing up with diabetes and having strenuous exercise one day

and perhaps no exercise, you know, for another day and traveling around the world, how to adjust my regime to be able to handle growing up with diabetes and playing in tennis tournaments. Were you tempted to quit? No, I really never was. Billy Talbert, who was a close friend in New York, was captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team my first years on it, Billy was a diabetic and I knew that he had been able to be the number one or two tennis player in the United States for years and therefore perhaps naively I assumed that it wasn't much worse than a bad cold and when you figure out what to do about it. And then you go about your business and you take care of yourself and you learn as much as you can about your diet and taking a shot of insulin every day. And I was figuring the other day, I've had diabetes now about 33 years and I've had one shot a day every day of those 33 years and, in the early days I took two shots a day. I've probably had, you know, 15,000 shots of insulin now over the years. Ham, you've had some astonishing, astonishing attainments as a

tennis player. You reached the semifinals at Wimbledon. You beat the top seed, Budge Patty. Well, probably the most exciting tennis match that I played was when I was 17 and Mother took me over to Wimbledon. The Baton Rouge Rotary Club gotten together and they'd raised about five or six or seven hundred thousand dollars. Five or six or seven hundred dollars. In those days that was a lot of money, enough to pay for the airplane fare over and back. And I was the National Junior Champion in the United States then, and I did beat the defending champion Budge Patty and then I played doubles with Patty who had won both the French and the Wimbledon titles in 1950. And in '51. I beat him and then we played doubles and got to the semi-finals. And in the 1956, I was able to get to the semifinals once again and had a really, a pretty good chance of winning the tournament. The only time I had a very good shot at doing it and I lost in a

tough four set match to Lou Hoad of Australia who then beat Ken Rosewall in a very good match in the final. Do you think that diabetes stopped you from reaching a peak that you might have gone on to? In a word, maybe. I don't know the answer to that, Gus. I don't really think so. I mean, I was, I don't think I would have been as strong. I don't think I would have perhaps worked with 100 percent dedication to be the best tennis player in the world the way a number of people my age, competitors were doing, because I had other interests, and I don't think that that would have changed whether I'd been a diabetic or not. I think the diabetes, in many ways, was good for me, because it encouraged me to take care of myself. I think I grew up a little more at age 15. I was a little more serious. I knew that if I wanted to do all the things, you know, that this great big wonderful life offered, I had to, you know, figure out how I was going to handle things and, you know, then organize my time a little better. So I think probably the diabetes may have even helped,

rather than hurt. Physically, on the other hand, it's a serious ailment. I mean it's still the third leading cause of death. You know, as people get older, more heart attacks are caused by diabetes which is in many ways a blood vessel disease, the first manifestation of which is the pancreas doesn't secrete the insulin that you need and so that used to be enough to kill people. Well, with insulin and now the other oral drugs that you can take, you can digest your food. You can live a very good life, but it still is a problem. And it's one of the reasons, as you know, that we were talking about and I've been active with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, which is really trying to find a cure for diabetes. Let me interrupt for a moment and share some statistics with our friends. Between '51 and 1956, Ham was among the top 10 tennis players 11 times and he was rated first in 1956 and 1958. So Ham Richardson was the real thing. Now there's an incident that is very interesting in your career. One year you were invited to be a member of the United States Davis Cup team.

And they said that your wife could not attend and you declined membership. Can you tell us what happened? I believe that was in 1957, and I was at Oxford then. And in previous years, that was the first year that I had been married. I was married in '56 and that -- perhaps it was '56 instead of '57 -- and I had been trying to figure out how I could get away from Oxford, go to Australia to play the final match. The Davis Cup in those days was organized little differently than it is now. You had an American zone where you had say eight countries: the South American countries, Canada, Mexico, United States. You had the European zone where you had about 20 nations playing. You had the Asiatic zone. The reason being that tennis was not a major sport and the cost of sending a team from Japan, say, to the United States to play Davis Cup, you know, didn't occur to people. So

we had, I had, played all the previous matches to get the United States into the position to play the winner of the European zone. We had to play the winner of the European zone, and that year I think it was Italy, and then the winner of that had to play Australia. The nation that had won the cup the previous year didn't have to play any of those preliminary matches. It was called the holding nation; they held the cup. The other countries played a challenge to get there. And the answer is: I, it would have been difficult for me to get away anyway. I was a diabetic. I found that I played better when my wife was with me and could help take care of me and make sure that everything was fine. And I presume I was a little upset at the time about the idea that for the first time they'd said that wives couldn't go. So I did turn it down. Another time, when I was the number one player in the country in 1958 and I went to Australia and I had never lost a singles match to either of the two colleagues on the United States team, Barry Mackay or Alex Olmedo, and then the Davis Cup captain at the last minute, after I'd played all the

matches up until the final, said I don't think that you should play. I think we ought to play Olmedo and Mackay in singles and you just play doubles with Alex Olmedo. As it turned out we won the cup, Davis Cup, that year and in the final in the doubles match I was very unhappy that I was not playing singles because I felt I had deserved to play and our captain at that time said that, because I was a diabetic, he was not sure that I could last three hard days in the heat of Brisbane, Australia, even though I'd beaten all the players and you know... But anyway that was a very tough. What kind of, what kind of money could a man make in professional tennis in those days? I remember Jack Kramer and, and Pancho Gonzales were kind of the heroes of the times in the late '40s and then the early '50s and they were making about a hundred thousand dollars a year, which was probably equivalent to four or five hundred thousand a year if, if and they were the best tennis players in the world and number one or two. They had won Wimbledon in the United States and they're pretty championships and pretty well dominated tennis. And

the only way they could make it was not playing tournaments, because they really weren't professional tournaments, but one night stands. I remember umpiring a match when I was about 14 years old at Istrouma High School between Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer. I think it was 1947 or '8 and probably, probably 1948. So I would have been 15 years old. And they played before about 300 people in the Istrouma gym. Frank Parker who is a national champion, and Dinny Pails, who had been an Australian national champion, and Jack Kramer and Bobby Riggs, you know, and they had 300 people and these were the equivalent of Borg and Connors. Two questions: Who's the best tennis player you've ever seen play the game and who's the best tennis player you've ever played? Most of us tend, when asked that question, to list somebody that we played against as both the best ever and I'm not sure that that's right.

It's very hard to say that Bjorn Borg, who won Wimbledon five times and won the French championship six times, was not the greatest tennis player that ever lived. However he was not playing at Wimbledon against players who played on grass tennis courts all the time. I think that probably there were three or four people who have played -- possibly Kramer, possibly Gonzales, very likely Rod Laver, possibly Frank Sedgman, who was a great Australian player, and all of those guys were marvelous players on grass tennis courts. On grass, you should play with a big serve, getting to the net very quickly, a very aggressive volley. Well, Borg won Wimbledon five times with a great serve, but not really a great volley -- just a marvelous forehand, two-handed backhand, incredible accuracy. He had to play perfect tennis because he was playing quote the wrong game. His game wasn't suited to grass. He had to play it so well in order to beat the people whose games, you know, many times were suited to grass. He almost lost several matches over there against players who weren't of his caliber just because they had giant

serves in the grass tennis court. A lot, a rambling answer to a very difficult question. A lot of it depends on the surface you're playing on. I don't think there's any question that Borg was the greatest clay court player that ever lived. I don't think he was the best grass court player. The best tennis player that I ever played, when he was playing well, was Lew Hoad. I mean, Hoad who beat me in the semis at Wimbledon in '56 and Pancho Gonzales said he's the best player he ever played and he thinks he was the greatest that ever lived. I mean, when he was on, he would just wipe you off the court. But he wasn't on all the time. So are you the greatest player that ever lived if on any given day you could beat anybody or if you played 100 matches, you'd win? What did you think of Borg's recent announcement that he was hanging 'em up, retiring? I think he probably made a very good decision. I think one he has won virtually everything. He never won the U.S. Open. You know Sam Snead never won the U.S. Open in golf. Doesn't mean they weren't great champions. And he obviously has made enough money out of the game so he doesn't have to worry about that. If he didn't

really enjoy playing the tournament tennis anymore, and he were not going to be the best, I can understand, you know, not wanting to do it. I think it's disappointing for all of us. I think the professional counsel, if that's the proper, proper name for the body that didn't let him play last year in the major tournaments without having to qualify, was pretty foolish to do that because I think they really hurt the game of tennis, if there is such a thing. You know, other than the people who play it and so forth. But I think it's sad. He was a great champion. What, what all do you do with and what have you done for the diabetes association? I know that you've been active in their behalf. I'm a director of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, which is now a little over 10 years old. We've raised about $20 million for diabetes research, as well as encouraging the federal government to give hundreds of millions dollars into diabetes research, and in New Orleans, the last several years, we've had a Ham Richardson and pro celebrity tennis tournaments where several of my friends have been nice

enough to come down from New York and California to play at the New Orleans Hilton Hotel. Esther Cabakov, who was an old friend, has been nice enough to donate the facilities there, and they have eight indoor tennis courts. And in October we have a lovely dinner dance and raise money and then that's the main effort that I have, that specific event that I've tried to contribute to the most. It's, it's like lots of other things. You could give your life to the worthy cause of raising money to cure diabetes. Because that's what we are going to do in a few years. And, you know, you have to kind of balance it between other things. I sometimes think instead of being a professional tennis player, which I never was, you know, I, I really have been a professional diabetic because for 30 years as a quote example of a diabetic who was able to overcome the problems and become a successful athlete and, you know, presumably whatever businessman, father, etc., I really have probably gone to, you know, 200 events at different times

to show young diabetic kids and others that, you know, it's all right here. Here I am. If I can do it, lots of other people can. You can, too. And it's very hard to turn down because they can't get somebody else to substitute for you as they can for something else because you're the guy that did it. Ham, it's been a pleasure having you on this program and, of course, it's a pleasure to welcome you home to not only Louisiana, but to your hometown where your parents Dean and Mrs. Richardson still reside. And you certainly qualify as a Louisiana legend and it's been a pleasure meeting you for the first time and getting to know you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Gus. It's been a pleasure being here. Funding for the production of Louisiana Legends is provided in part by the Friends of

Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by Union National Life Insurance, a Louisiana company serving Louisiana and the South since 1926