In 1938, Donald Budge, who died on January 26th aged 84, became the first person to achieve the tennis grand slam, winning the US, French, Australian and Wimbledon championships in the same year. It would be more than 25 years before another man, the Australian Rod Laver, equalled that feat, and in the 60-odd years since Don Budge's triumph, no other American male player has managed it.
He not only won the men's doubles, mixed doubles and singles at Wimbledon - all for the second year running - but also became the first player ever to win Wimbledon without the loss of a set. Beating John Bromwich in the 1938 Australian final, Roderick Menzel in the French, and his own doubles partner Gene Mako in the US, he confirmed his position as an American sporting legend. He refused to play in Germany that year, in protest at the Nazis' imprisonment of his old opponent Baron Gottfried von Cramm.
Don Budge's father, a printer, had played football for Glasgow Rangers but moved his family to California, where Don Budge was born in Oakland, in 1915.
In 1932, he won the Pacific Coast junior crown and, in 1933, the California state junior and senior championships as well as the Del Monte, Oakland and San Jose senior tournaments.
Representing the US four times (1935-38) in international team competition for the Davis Cup, Don Budge won 25 out of 29 matches, and in 1937 led the US team to its first victory since 1926. He effectively clinched this triumph with what is often described as the greatest match in the history of tennis, the thirdday singles match in the interzone finals at Wimbledon against the German champion, von Cramm.
He lost the first two sets and, having equalised, was 2-5 down in the fifth set - but, in a match of transcendent virtuosity, he eventually triumphed 6-8, 5-7, 64, 6-2, 8-6.
This match was filmed, so it is still possible to witness his unique talent at its height. His victory, restoring the Davis Cup to the US after its loss to France a decade earlier, was an immediate stimulus to American tennis and inspired thousands to adopt his style which was innovatively aggressive, with good weight of shot all round.
His backhand, even stronger than his forehand, made devastating use of a heavy, 15-ounce racquet, and he developed a rolled shot that was consistently accurate and awesomely authoritative.
Between 1933 and 1938, he had survived in the amateur game on tournament expense money.
It couldn't go on, and after his grand slam win, he announced that he would turn pro at the beginning of 1939. Some 16,000 people turned out to Madison Square Garden for his pro debut against his old idol, Ellsworth Vines, on the night of January 3rd, 1939. He won. In March, he beat Fred Perry.
The second World War interrupted his play. A soldier in the army air corps, he served in the Pacific, but injured his shoulder while training. He competed and gave exhibitions after the war, but could not recover his previous unbeatable form.
His book, Budge On Tennis, first published in 1939, was reprinted in the 1950s, and in 1969 came Don Budge; A Tennis Memoir. He and his first wife, with whom he had two sons, drifted apart, and in 1974 he married his second wife, Loriel.
In the world of tennis, he set out to be the best. He succeeded, and in the process, he designed the modern game.
John Donald Budge: born 1915; died January, 2000 99177973