Mercer Beasley

Charles Fenton Mercer Beasley (July 17 or 18, 1882-1965) was the best-known American tennis coach of the first half of the 20th century; among his star pupils were two of the best tennis players of all time, Ellsworth Vines and Frank Parker. Another famous pupil was Bitsy Grant, a top player of the 1930s, and his name is also associated with Helen Jacobs, Gardnar Mulloy, Doris Hart, and Pancho Segura, although to what degree is not clear. Beasley suffered from extremely poor eyesight; although he participated as a youth in some school sports, it was impossible for him to play tennis at more than a rudimentary level. In this he was probably unique: most other well-known tennis coaches such as Harry Hopman and Pancho Segura had generally been great or near-great tennis players in their own right.

Early life

Beasley came from a family of distinguished New Jersey jurists. His grandfather, an earlier Mercer Beasley (1815-1897), presided as Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1864 to 1897. His father, Chauncey H. Beasley, was a District Court Judge. An uncle, Mercer Beasley Jr., who committed suicide at age 47, was a longtime county Prosecutor of the Plea. A second uncle, William S. Gummere, was yet another Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, from 1901 to 1933. For many years there was a Mercer Beasley School of Law, which eventually merged into the New Jersey university system. After briefly and unsuccessfully attending Princeton in 1902, from which he was expelled after four months, Beasley worked at a number of jobs for the next 17 years including being a court investigator for the New Jersey Public Railway Company and a pressman’s devil. Eventually he became the assistant manager of the Notlek Amusement Company in Manhattan, where, among other things, he was the maintenance man around their tennis courts. He apparently knew about enough about tennis to begin giving informal lessons at the courts. Victor Elting, a member of well-known Chicago family, noticed Beasley and invited him to become a teaching professional at the Indian Hill Club of Winnetka, Illinois.

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He spent the rest of a long and active life as the most influential and possibly most creative coach in the sport. The coach at numerous schools and colleges, including Tulane, Lawrenceville, and Princeton, he is best remembered today as the long-time coach and mentor of Frank Parker, one of the best American players of the 1930s and '40s. It is said that Beasley also discovered the 14-year-old Ellsworth Vines working in a bakery in Pasadena and helped form him into one of the greatest players in the history of the game. The New York Times obituary of Vines has a slightly different age: Vines was a 15-year-old high-school student at Pasadena High when he was spotted by Beasley, then 44 and with only four years of coaching experience, and who had not yet become the most famous tennis court in America. According to the Times:

Beasley...flattened his serve and forehand into the rifle shots they became and used ingenuity in developing his fabled accuracy. A narrow strip of canvas with cutouts would be stretched across the top of the net, and Vines would spend hours drilling balls through the holes.

Beasley's 1933 "How to Play Tennis" was a highly influential book that emphasized accuracy and consistent play. He was also the first coach to see the value of so-called cross-training, in which he had his pupils develop different aspects of their game by emulating the movements from other sports such as gymnastics, basketball, track, boxing, and ballroom dancing. So well-known was Beasley that eventually Spalding Sporting Goods released its own Mercer Beasley racquet, which, for many years, was sold in stores next to those endorsed by Don Budge and Jack Kramer. Finally, Beasley was constantly seeking technological improvements. It is said that he was a pioneer in promoting synthetic strings, composite racquets, and ultralight footwear as well as being one of the first coaches to design and use the now-ubiquitous tennis ball machine.