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Dick has never had much reason to think about it. Brought up in New Jersey's middle-income suburbia (his father has his own food brokerage business), Dick, an only child, had a happy-go— lucky, comfortable youth marked by a passion for athletics of any sort, but particularly baseball and football. He never picked up a tennis racket until he was 13, dropped it almost immediately because "I didn't like it. Tennis is considered sissy by some people here in America." A year later, after watching the New Jersey State tournament from the vantage point of a ballboy, Dick decided that tennis was not so sissy after all : "I saw Don McNeill [1940 National champion] and other good guys play. Any kid that sees tennis like that all the time will want to play it well."
You Have to Be Eager. That summer Dick won a local boys' tournament, entered the New Jersey Public Parks tournament and lost, love and love, in the first round. In 1943, the Savitt family moved to El Paso, Texas, where the gangling (6 ft. 1 in.) kid of 16 became infatuated with basketball and practically gave up tennis again. By his senior year (1945) Dick, a high-scoring forward, was El Paso High's co-captain and all-state choice. He played a little tennis on the side.
When the Navy stationed him in Memphis, Dick's athletic talents got him a soft job sorting equipment and a chance to play basketball with the Navy team that was ranked fifth in the country. Next year, as a Cornell freshman, Dick was good enough to make the varsity squad, but a gash under his eye and a badly wrenched knee sent him back to tennis. Winters in Ithaca, N.Y. are rugged, and the only place he could practice was in the big indoor armory, "competing with R.O.T.C. tanks rumbling around. You had to be real eager to play." Dick was real eager.
A driving desire to excel made him the team's No. 1 player that spring, got him a 1947 national ranking of 26th. The next year, Dick improved his volleying and began to come to the net more, but by then the postwar California tennis foundry was in high gear, spewing out rafts of young tennis comers. Dick was still 26th in 1948. With a sound ground game that largely compensated for his slowness of foot, Savitt jumped ten numbers in the national ranking, and ended the next year as No. 16.
But he still had not beaten anybody very notable. He wanted fiercely to be the best; to be the best, he had to learn how to beat the field. Last year, with college off his mind—and only tennis on it—he set to work to learn a winning game.* He learned how to use his tremendous strength and stamina to wear down his faster-footed opponents. His ground strokes from the baseline were solidified by the years of trying for length and pace when he was too slow to get to the net. He modified and simplified his serve, always a potent weapon, and got his first serve in oftener without losing any of its power. He won the Eastern Intercollegiate, Eastern Clay Court and New York State tournaments—all relatively minor events and all on clay—before tackling the first of the grass-court circuit, the Pennsylvania championship at the Merion Cricket Club.