For 90-Plus Years, Pancho Segura Has Chased the Ball to Greatness
By Josh Gajewski
Everything about Segoo is a freak. He shouldn’t be alive, and he certainly never should have been an athlete. It drives him crazy when I say this, but the truth is he’s never been very good at anything in the world except hitting a tennis forehand. Otherwise, he’s no good at golf. He’s afraid to really swing the club. He can’t dance. And after forty years, he still can’t speak English (I’m kidding, Segoo) … But I’ll tell you this about Francisco Segura. There is no kindlier gentleman around on this earth. And there is no one who has ever loved the game of tennis as much.
—Jack Kramer, in his 1970 autobiography .
That’s the truth. Well, I can dance a little.
—Pancho Segura, in response, 43 years later.
He finally appears, inch by inch, slowly turning his walker into the opened doorway and then looking up at the writer who’d come to meet him. “You gonna make me famous?”
Here he is, Francisco “Pancho” Segura, 92 years old, still the entertainer, making his entrance. Of course, Pancho Segura is already famous to some, but unknown to so many others—this dependent upon one’s age, tennis acumen, and origin. If from South America, for instance, and especially from Ecuador, you’d immediately recognize this man as the legend, the one with a street named after him, and you’d know that even today he wouldn’t be able to walk that street without being stopped and saluted by the locals.
But if you’re, say, American, and perhaps only a casual fan of tennis, then Pancho Segura, shuffling forward now toward a chair, might appear as merely any old man who’s confronting the physical perils of a life’s sunset. But here, actually, is one of the great athletes to ever come out of South America. And somewhat fittingly, he’s still chasing tennis balls, only today they’re on the legs of his walker, hollowed out to help his slide.
Through an impoverished childhood in Ecuador; through 15 years as a professional tennis player back before TV made the game and its players internationally famous; through four decades as a teaching pro in Southern California who gave lessons to the stars, including names like Hepburn and Heston; through several years as coach and mentor to Jimmy Connors; and, above all, through some of the longest odds a tennis great could ever face—poverty, tiny stature (he’s about 5’7″), and a series of childhood illnesses that left him frail and bowlegged; through all of it, Pancho Segura simply followed the ball.
The truth is, everything about his life reads like legend, an impossible fairy tale. He was born prematurely on a bus, then raised in a sugar cane house with the earth’s soil as the floor. As a child, he wore shoes made from the rubber of old tires, and used toilet paper that, well, wasn’t paper at all, but just the leaves of the trees. He overcame rickets. And polio. And malaria. And a double hernia that made it nearly impossible to walk.
So how did a boy like that, born into that, become one of the best players in the world?
Well, it began when Segura’s father got a job as the caretaker of a tennis club in Guayaquil that catered to the wealthy. Little Pancho would hang around, helping Papa as needed, and sometimes acting as a ball boy for the members. One day, Pancho found a discarded racket. And, when no one was looking (the help was not permitted to play), the seven-year-old grabbed a ball and went over to a wall with that racket and started hitting. He was so small and weak, he had to use both hands.
“I liked the feeling of it, of the racket,” he remembers. And so he kept at it, day after day, always waiting for the members to go home and then, as his father cleaned up, returning to that wall. He would hit until it was too dark, or until his father simply wrestled him away to go home.
“I decided to become better,” he says. “I used to see the Great Line—a company of ships, owned by an American company, that used to take bananas [and travelers] from Ecuador. I used to say, ‘Someday I’m going to be on that boat.’”
So, we ask, tennis was a way out? “Not a way out,” he corrects. “The only way out!”
In this fairy tale, the poor boy became a Boy Wonder, all those evenings chasing that ball into the fading light sharpening his vision and quickening his feet. His talent was later uncovered and, eventually, embraced. By his late teens he’d become a local hero, the bowlegged boy from the barrio who’d become his country’s finest at the rich man’s game. By 1940, he was on that Great Line ship, headed for America.
The local paper wrote of his departure, addressing him directly: “Let us remember how upon crossing a sidewalk a small child watched you and uttered in a strangled voice, ‘There goes Pancho Segura, champion of champions.’ Pancho, the chance that you most desired has come. You go to the city of skyscrapers and clamorous noise. But do not change anything, even if they offer you the National Bank. Be the modest and simple young man that I met, the friend of all.”
And so he went, chasing the ball to wherever it led.
———
“The fans would come out to see the new challenger face the old champion, but they would leave talking about the bandy-legged sonuvabitch who gave them such pleasure playing the first match and the doubles. The next time the tour came to town, the fans would come back to see Segoo.”
—Jack Kramer
This was pro tennis in Pancho Segura’s day: four players making their way across America in a pair of station wagons, followed by a van carrying two folding canvas panels that, stitched together over a hard surface, made a court. They would unfurl that court wherever they could—big arenas, like Madison Square Garden, and little ones, like a high school gymnasium in the Plains, or an opera house in Saratoga.
Forget “Breakfast at Wimbledon,” this was more like “Dinner in Des Moines,” where Pancho and the rest of his barnstorming bunch were as much educators or ambassadors as they were entertainers, introducing many to tennis for the first time.
Asked what he remembers most about those days, Segura says, “Finishing at 12 o’clock [at night] and driving 200 miles to another town. But I knew the other guy who was playing me was in the same boat and didn’t have an edge on me.” The other guys, for the better part of 15 years, were Jack Kramer, Bobby Riggs, and Dennis “Dinny” Pails. Kramer and Riggs, who’d each won Wimbledon as amateurs, were the headliners; Segura and Pails were secondary, or as Kramer called them, “the animal act.” But it was Pancho who often left patrons the most fascinated: he was so much smaller and darker, and bowlegged, and he hit the ball so differently, clubbing his forehand with both hands on the racket instead of the usual one, never letting go of how he learned to swing it as a frail little boy.
That quirky, baffling, powerful forehand was Pancho’s ticket, the very thing that got him onto a Great Line ship in the first place, then a scholarship at the University of Miami, and finally a spot on the pro circuit. Wimbledon and the other majors, at the time, were only only open to the unpaid amateurs. Someone like Pancho, who came from nothing, could only play for free for so long. So after a brief stint as an amateur, he signed with this new and uncertain pro game. Kramer and Riggs were paid in the thousands every week by the promoters; Pancho and Pails earned $300 a week.
———
“You know how much money they’re splitting in London? Six million in prize money!”
Pancho Segura is now in front of the TV. All day, he’s been asking his longtime friend, a former pro and current owner of the Bobby Riggs Tennis Center in Encinitas—where we are—to put on the Tennis Channel. Federer is playing Gasquet.
“I played in front of a lot of people, but I didn’t make any money,” Segura says, watching. “You’ve got a guy like Federer—$70 million in prize money alone!” Segura is obsessed with numbers. With wealth. With fame. Perhaps this is a natural byproduct of coming and going just before it all happened—before big money made it to tennis. “I came at the wrong time,” he says. “Because I didn’t make enough money and I didn’t get recognition. I won big tournaments, the best tournaments, but I didn’t get recognition because they were not Open. I couldn’t play Wimbledon when I was a hell of a player.”
When the Tennis Boom hit in the 1970s, and the sport’s top players were rock stars, Pancho Segura was earning a living as a teaching pro at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. It wasn’t a bad life, hitting balls with Katherine Hepburn, Julie Andrews, and Doris Day. But again, it was a circumstance in which Pancho was, by far, the least-paid and least famous player on the court. He also badly missed the competitiveness of the pro game.
Around that time, however, an old friend of Pancho’s—a woman he’d unsuccessfully tried to romance years earlier — came around looking to find a coach for her teenage son. The kid’s name was Jimmy Connors. “He plays like you, has the same attitude as you,” Pancho remembers Jimmy’s mother, Gloria Connors, saying. “I said, ‘I’d be delighted to, if he plays like me.’ And he did.”
When watching Jimmy, he adds, “I felt it was me playing, sometimes. Because he tried for every point. He plays like Nadal. Perfect (for me to coach). Just perfect. And he was perfect for tennis because he created enthusiasm and color.” Color. It’s a word Pancho repeats frequently. “I wish today’s game had more color,” he says.
———
In his mind, Pancho is still playing. He watches the game every day, from wherever: Dubai, Shanghai, Paris or, like today, London.
“I place myself there and I say, ‘Why’d you do that? Use your brain!’ The only thing I don’t like today is they don’t come in (to the net) enough. You’ve got love-30, love-40, second serve, attack and take the net away, play more aggressive. That’s what I’d like to see.”
He is, though, in awe of what the sport has become—the money, the game, the fame. And he isn’t shy about sharing his thoughts. The greatest ever? “Federer. Because it’s a complete pleasure. A gift we get. God gave him a gift. He’s so natural.” The greatest today? “Djokovic. The No. 1 (ranking) is going to be Nadal because he has the best record (this year), but Djokovic has a better return of serve than Nadal. He can stroke it deeper, he moves almost as well as Nadal, and he’s bigger, has a bigger first serve. So he might be a little better, just a tiny bit.”
And how about the current South American great, Juan Martin del Potro? “Del Potro is not too smart of a player. If I was coaching del Potro, nobody would beat him. He never plays the backhand down the line. It’s always cross court. I know it’s a natural shot, cross court, but down the line—nobody returns that. If I was coaching del Potro, I would put towels down on the court and I’d make him return serve down the line.”
And, finally, what of the next generation?: “That [Grigor] Dimitrov should be the player, but there’s a guy from Poland, too, Jerzy Janowicz. Now, if (Janowicz) had any brains … He drop-shots too many times. His selection of shots is bad. … I like that Bulgarian boy (Dimitrov), but he’s too good-looking for the game. He’s got a hell of a game, he should be the best player within two years, he’s another Federer. But he might be too … I don’t know if he’s a ladies’ man. To play tennis, you have to be single-minded. Because if you aren’t, somebody else is.”
A few minutes after Pancho calls Dimitrov a ladies’ man, a pretty woman in her fifties walks into the clubhouse. Pancho takes her hand as they’re introduced, and says, “You look too good to be true. You’d make a dead man walk.” The woman laughs and blushes her way out of the room, and Pancho giggles. “Errol Flynn was my buddy,” he says. “You remember Errol Flynn? He was a ladies’ man. He loved the action, he loved gambling, loved broads.”
Pancho then quiets, focusing his attention back on the TV. Federer is trying to close out Gasquet. “I miss the competition,” he says, his voice low. “I’m too [expletive] old now. I’m fighting Forest Lawn instead of Forest Hills.” But when asked about old age, if it’s all the more difficult or frustrating after having been a great athlete, he says without hesitation, “No, I’m very grateful. I’m very grateful to the Lord for giving me a chance to make it to 93, 94. I’m grateful that my dad took a job as a caretaker of a club in Ecuador. I’m very grateful that I came to the United States, because it’s the only country that gives a man a chance to make it on his own. It’s one of the few countries where a man can do what he wants to do. The only advice I’d give is to believe in yourself. I don’t care where you’re born, whether you’re Jewish, black, blonde. Believe in yourself and believe in what you want to do. That’s the only advice I can give you.”
Soon enough, Pancho Segura is up again, pushing his walker toward the door, and then, two inches at a time, shuffling down a long and narrow walkway toward an awaiting car. His legs still curve inward like the bananas from his country. And his eyes remain fixed on the tennis balls in front of his feet.
There goes Pancho Segura, champion of champions.
