Ray Casey
Raymond J. Casey (born San Francisco, California, 1900, died Palo Alto, California, 1986) was a top American tennis player of the 1920s on the West Coast of the United States and later a successful coach. In spite of his success in California and neighboring areas he never had a national ranking because of his refusal, for economic reasons, to play on the East Coast.
A large and very powerful man for his time, Casey was a 12-letter man in athletics at the University of California, Berkeley. A left-hander, he was considered to have one of the fastest serves in the world. Although he won numerous tournaments on the West Coast, he played only twice in any of the four major Grand Slam tournaments. In the summer of 1925 he travelled with an American contingent to England. According to the Official Encyclopedia of Tennis, at the Eastbourne tournament Casey beat J.D. Patrick Wheatley of Great Britain in a 6-0 set that took only 9 minutes. This is still considered the fastest set ever played in a tournament match.[1] Later, Casey and John Hennessey reached the finals of the Wimbledon doubles. In an era in which tournament doubles matches were considered almost as important as singles, they lost one of the most famous matches in the early history of tennis, being beaten 4-6, 9-11, 6-4, 6-1, 3-6 by one of the great French teams of Jean Borotra and René Lacoste. In the singles, Casey beat three Europeans to reach the round of 16. There he lost a long, hard-fought match to the eventual Wimbledon champion, René Lacoste, 6-8, 4-6, 1-6. Later that summer, Casey won his opening matches in the American championships in New York at Forest Hills but was forced to withdraw by a sudden case of appendicitis. After that, he never again left the West Coast (which included trips to Canada and Mexico) to play tennis in the East or Europe.
In the 1950s and 1960s Casey was a successful tennis coach in Santa Monica, California, his most noted pupils being Bob Lutz and Julie Anthony. He is a member of the Northern California Tennis Hall of Fame.
References
- ↑ United States Tennis Association Official Encyclopedia of Tennis, Centennial Edition, edited by Bill Shannon, Harper & Row, New York, 1981, page 510