The great Bud Collins was one of the most colorful personalities in sports
No man will ever be as identified with a sport as much as the colorful Bud Collins was with tennis. Though Collins, who died Friday at the age of 86, covered Boston sports, Muhammad Ali and Vietnam, it was tennis that was his true calling. The former national champion was a constant, unwavering present in that world for more than six decades and when health forced him from the sport over the past few years, something always felt missing.
Viewers and readers of a certain age wouldn't remember a time when Collins wasn't the authority on tennis, with his bow tie, excitable voice, quirky pants, questionable pronunciations and seemingly omnipresence around the sport, with his high-profile gigs on televisions, writings in countless publications and a major role in almost every documentary that's ever been associated with the sport.
Collins knew everybody but, most importantly, everybody knew Bud Collins. And the next person to say a bad word about him will be the first.
He was as fascinating for how much he knew about forehands, backhands and volleys than he knew about the long history of the sport. The introduction to his 750-page tennis encyclopedia included references to the Dauphin of France, King Henry V, the Globe Theater, Shakespeare and Agincourt -- and that's just on the first page.
(Photo by Jeff Gross/Getty Images)
At the end of the eight-page introduction, Collins took readers on a whirlwind, year-by-year tour of the 129 years of professional tennis history. You got the sense he didn't even have to crack open a book to research it.
When the U.S. Open named its media center after Collins last year, the plaque read: "Journalist, Commentator, Historian, Mentor, Friend."
(Photo by Ross Land/Getty Images)
That's not a bad legacy to leave.
