Bud Collins

Arthur Worth Collins Jr. was born in Lima, Ohio, on June 17, 1929, finished Berea High School in 1947 and went to Baldwin-Wallace College. Graduate school at Boston University brought him east, though the degree itself was not conferred until 2009, when the university got around to it. While a student he wrote sports for the Boston Herald, and from 1959 to 1963 he coached the tennis team at Brandeis, where one of his players was the future Yippie Abbie Hoffman. The two did not like each other, Collins said later, but Hoffman was a good competitor and had the better car.

In 1963 he joined The Boston Globe and stayed for the rest of his working life. Tennis was the beat, but the column wandered: the Red Sox, travel, politics when he felt like it. The same year he began doing tennis commentary on WGBH, Boston's public television station, and the two halves of the career ran side by side for the next half century.

The Globe column was where the reporting lived. Television gave him the audience, but it was in print that he kept the records, argued about the rankings and wrote the obituaries of players he had watched as a young man. He covered the sport's transition from amateur to open tennis in 1968 and everything that followed: Laver's second Grand Slam, the Borg and McEnroe years, the arrival of the Williams sisters. Very few writers were present for all of it, and none of the others kept a column going the whole time.

CBS used him on the U.S. Open from 1968 to 1972. Then NBC hired him, and for thirty-five years, from 1972 to 2007, he was the network's man at Wimbledon and the other majors: the figure in the corridor after the final with a microphone and a question that was usually better than the answer. When NBC dropped him in 2007 he was at ESPN by August, working Grand Slam coverage alongside Dick Enberg until 2016. In between there were PBS matches with Donald Dell in the mid-1970s and U.S. Open work for XM satellite radio.

He had the credentials of a player. In 1961 he won the U.S. Indoor mixed doubles title with Janet Hopps, and in 1975 he reached the French senior doubles final with Jack Crawford. Few people in the booth could say they had held a national title in the sport they were describing. It showed in the commentary, which was technical when it needed to be and never pretended a bad match was a good one.

Collins was the sport's memory as well as its commentator. He wrote or co-wrote a shelf of books, beginning with Rod Laver's autobiography and ending with the encyclopedia that carries his name and is still the reference tennis writers reach for when a date is in dispute.

• The Education of a Tennis Player, with Rod Laver (1971)
• Evonne! On the Move, with Evonne Goolagong (1975)
• Bud Collins' Modern Encyclopedia of Tennis, with Zander Hollander (1980; revised 1994)
• My Life with the Pros (1989)
• Bud Collins' Tennis Encyclopedia (1997, 1998)
• Total Tennis: The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia (2003)
• The Bud Collins History of Tennis (2010; revised 2016)

A set lost 6–0 is a bagel. The word is his, and the sport kept it.

That coinage is the tell. He was a reporter who could make a scoreline funny, and the sport, which takes itself seriously, let him because he was so plainly on its side.

No profile of Collins skips the clothes, so this one will not either. The pants were cut by Charlie Davidson at the Andover Shop in Cambridge from fabrics Collins brought home from wherever the tour had taken him, and the bow ties were made to match, or deliberately not to. It was a running joke he was in on, and it made him the one person at any tournament whom a stranger could find without a program. He hosted the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in 1992 and turned up as himself in an episode of Psych in 2006, which suggests he did not mind being recognized.

The honors arrived in the order you would expect from a man who was never quite a writer and never quite a broadcaster. The International Tennis Hall of Fame took him in 1994. The Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award in 1999. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association followed in 2002, and in September 2015 the U.S. Open named its media center for him, so that every reporter at Flushing Meadows now works in a room with his name on the door. He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on March 4, 2016, at eighty-six.