The father of Andre Agassi suspended a balloon above the six-month-old’s high chair and attached a ping-pong paddle to his hand with tape, while a three-year-old Steffi Graf was rewarded with ice cream when she hit a ball 25 times in succession. But “pushy” parents are not unique to the modern tennis era.
Shirley Fry’s father started a scrap-book for her when she was nine. One page featured a picture of Centre Court, below which was written: “Objective — Wimbledon by 1945”. From the age of ten, Lester Fry dispatched his daughter to tournaments across the United States, including a 400-mile solo train journey to Philadelphia. At 14 she competed in the US national championships.
“As soon as the children were old enough to walk, Fry started them hiking and swinging tennis rackets,” according to Sports Illustrated in 1956, the year that she crushed the English starlet, Angela Buxton, in the Wimbledon final, albeit 11 years behind schedule.
Fry is one of ten women to achieve the “career grand slam” by winning Wimbledon and the US, Australian and French championships, placing her alongside Margaret Court, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Graf and Serena Williams. She became world No 1 in 1956 and joined the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1970.
The winners of the men’s and women’s singles at Wimbledon this year each collected £1.7 million in prize money. Yet Lester Fry was not dreaming of financial rewards when he propelled his daughter towards a sporting career. Until the era of open professionalism began in 1968, competitors at the main tournaments received only travel expenses.
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In 1954, suffering from an elbow injury, Fry largely gave up the sport. Though she had claimed 11 grand-slam doubles titles by that point, she took a minimum-wage job in Florida as a copy girl, typing up stories for the St Petersburg Times. “One of her first duties as copy girl was sending the story of her own retirement down to the composing room,” the newspaper noted in 1989.
She was not the only tennis star to work as a copy girl in the Fifties around the prime of her career: Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly, who in 1953 became the first woman to win the grand slam of singles championships, also performed the role at a newspaper in San Diego, California.
Realising she preferred the court to the newsroom, Fry came out of retirement in 1955. At Wimbledon the following year she knocked out Althea Gibson, the first African-American to win a grand-slam, on the way to meeting the 21-year-old British hope in the showpiece on Centre Court.
Buxton (obituary, August 18, 2020) won the doubles with Gibson, but in the singles she had no answer to the 5ft 5in Fry’s trademark speed and tenacity from the baseline and was dismissed, 6-3, 6-1, in 50 minutes. “It seemed,” observed The Times’s lawn tennis correspondent, “that Miss Buxton became breathless, and there ceased to be any co-ordination in her movements”. Fry, meanwhile, possessed “skilful strokes, court craft, and the ability to use her qualities at the right time”.
Fry returned to a ticker-tape parade in St Petersburg and the local coastguard announced it would name a helicopter “Whirley Shirley” in her honour. She beat Gibson to win the US title two months later, then competed in several tournaments in Australia, including the 1957 Australian championships, where she again defeated Gibson in the final in what proved to be Fry’s last grand-slam appearance.
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While playing in Australia she met Karl Irvin, an American advertising executive on assignment in Sydney who also worked as an umpire. “During one match, I became furious over several of his calls and asked that he be removed and that he not work any more of my matches,” Fry recalled. “Shortly after that, we were married and had four children within the space of five years.”
They decided to remain in Australia for a while, so Fry asked for a refund on the unused portion of her return-trip travel ticket. The Australian tennis authorities sternly refused, warning that were she to receive the money she risked losing her amateur status.
The youngest of four children, Shirley June Fry was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1927. Her father, Lester, was a notary public and former athletics star at university who also ran a tennis equipment shop. Her mother, Ida, was a keen tennis player who helped to run the store.
Fry began to play internationally while a student at Rollins College, a liberal arts institution in Florida, and reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon and the final at Roland-Garros in 1948. In 1951 she won the French title but lost in the finals at Wimbledon and the US championships.
In all she won four grand-slam singles titles, finished runner-up four times and took 12 doubles titles, partnering Doris Hart on 11 occasions and Gibson on the other. She also won the Wimbledon mixed doubles in 1956 and played for six winning teams in the Wightman Cup, a rather one-sided annual contest between the US and Great Britain. It was quite a haul for a self-effacing player who, in her own assessment, owed her success more to athletic prowess and focus than natural talent.
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Her husband died of a heart attack while playing tennis in 1976. She is survived by their children, Mark, Scott, Lori and Karen, who all became capable recreational tennis players.
In middle age she raised her family in Connecticut, coached and played seniors’ tournaments. She returned to Florida in later life and sated her competitive instincts by playing a variety of sports including golf, which, to her frustration, she struggled to master. She did, though, win the pool championship in her retirement community at the age of 89.
While she saw none of the riches available to players from later generations and only a fraction of the fame, in her heyday there was less pressure and more fun, she said in 2013.
“Every tournament, we played singles, doubles and mixed doubles. Nowadays, they just concentrate on their singles,” she said. “I think we had a lot better time than they have today. We were travelling and seeing the world. That meant a lot to us.”
Shirley Fry Irvin, tennis champion, was born on June 30, 1927. She died after a period of declining health on July 13, 2021, aged 94
