It was Jack Kramer Day in Los Angeles on July 21st and, being on another continent at the time, I nearly missed it! But I can’t let such an occasion pass without comment.

Jack Kramer, apart from being the 1947 Wimbledon champion, is a giant of the game; a legend; a grandfather of professional tennis. In those dark days when the word “professional” was spoken of with disdain by members of country clubs and Federation officials around the world, Kramer bought a professional troupe off Bobby Riggs and, using his great entrepreneurial skills, kept it alive by offering contracts to each Wimbledon champion as their name went up on the honor board at the All England Club.

It didn’t make him popular but it kept up the pressure on the amateur establishment to look long and hard at the absurdity of keeping amateurs and professionals apart. By the time Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Ashley Cooper, Mal Anderson, Alex Olmedo and Rod Laver (all Grand Slam winners even if Rosewall and Anderson missed out at Wimbledon) had signed up, the International Federation was feeling the draft. In the early sixties, Kramer met with Jean Borotra, one of the great Four Musteketeers who was President of the French Federation at the time, at the Hotel Scribe in Paris to try and thrash out a way to bring in Open Tennis. But it was too early. Too many stuffy, prejudiced, blazored buffoons were still in positions of influence for the likes of Borotra  and others to create the necessary revolution.

Only when Herman David, chairman of the All England Club, finally threw open the gates of Wimbledon to anyone qualified to play no matter what their status, did Open Tennis arrive in 1968.

Kramer quickly set about trying to bring about some order to the new circuit and, while Lamar Hunt set the standard with his World Championships Tennis tour administered by former British No. 1 Mike Davies, Jack and Donald Dell created the Grand Prix circuit which, in effect, still exists today in the form of the ATP Tour.

Having been embraced briefly by the establishment, Kramer found himself on the opposite side of the still fractious political divide again when the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) was formed in 1972. He had accepted the players’ offer to become the first ATP Executive Director (a job he took on for no pay) and led the fledgling organization through its game-changing boycott of Wimbledon in 1973 — a contentious move that finally broke the back of the amateur establishment’s control over the careers of professional athletes.

These are the bare bones of Kramer’s influence but, working for him as I did in the mid-seventies, I had a chance to enjoy the full force of this open, charming, tough, no-nonsense character at close quarters. Although I was running the ATP’s European office from Paris, I spent a few weeks working alongside Jack at the offices he had been loaned by the owner of the May Company store on Pico Boulevard just down the road from 20th Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles.

If there was one thing that stood out about Kramer, it was his unbounded enthusiasm for the game and its players. Sometimes, when his secretary was out to lunch, the phone would ring and some rookie pro trying to find out if he had got into the next tournament would find himself talking to the man himself.

“Hiya, kid! How can I help?” Jack would ask. And, as the young man spluttered out his question, Kramer would go into all the details of the player’s ranking and where and how he needed to travel to his next destination. Nothing was too much for Jack and, as a friend and a colleague, I will always treasure what he has brought to our sport.