Bald Facts From The Boston Hacker

Collins grew up 50 yards from a tennis court in Berea , Ohio and has tried to stay at least that close ever since. "I'd wake up on summer mornings to the soft, thin pop of a racket hitting a ball," he says. "I still remember what a pleasant sound that was." His father had been athletic director at Baldwin-Wallace College , where Bud tried to impersonate a student, played tennis and other sports and graduated "in a real squeaker" in 1951.

He made his first pilgrimage to Forest Hills at 18. "I had listened to radio broadcasts and tried to picture the forest and the hills," he recalls. "I couldn't even envision grass courts." He and two friends gulped as much tennis as they could in two days. "I bought a grass-stained ball to take home and show to everybody. I put it on a shelf and it turned white again."

In 1954 he arrived at Boston University as a graduate student in public relations. "I had read F. Scott Fitzgerald and I wanted to go East where they wore striped ties and tweed coats." He became a junior sportswriter on the Boston Herald , promptly won a byline and abandoned both Ohio and public relations. One day the sports editor asked him to cover a tennis tournament, unaware that he was dealing with a tennis nut. "He thought it was punishment," Collins remembers. "I thought it was heaven."

By the end of the 1950s he was writing an all-sports column in the Herald, coaching tennis at Brandeis University (where one of his players was Abbie Hoffman—"We didn't like each other, but he was a good competitor. He also had a better car than I did") and making the most of the one major tournament in Boston , the National Doubles.

He regularly threw a party for the players—the "Fuzzy Ball"—which one year almost provoked an international incident. The revelry attracted the Boston police , who showed up with a paddy wagon. "But, Officer," Collins protested, pointing at Rod Laver , Ashley Cooper and others, "these gentlemen are the Australian Davis Cup team."

"What the hell is the Australian Davis Cup team?" the Irish cop replied.

A Gaelic guest managed to placate the lawmen in time and the party rocked on to its natural climax, a 4 a.m. victory by Cooper in the indoor standing broad jump.

Collins had become so conspicuous as Boston 's resident tennis maniac that he was the natural choice to do the commentary when WGBH, the local educational station, began televising the National Doubles in 1963. "I took him into the stands during a match and told him to just tell me what he saw," says Greg Harney, who produces tennis on WGBH. "He did that for an hour and a half. It was like a rehearsal. Then we went ahead and did the show, and the response was amazing. People loved it."

Toting his tapes, Collins tried to interest the commercial networks in televising more tennis. "It was like selling the first vacuum cleaner to a guy who'd been using brooms all his life," he says. "I'd get five minutes from some executive. Tennis was like a talking-canary act to them." Nevertheless, he did Forest Hills for NBC in 1964 and began a five-year hitch with CBS in 1968.

Meanwhile he had moved his writing base to the more prosperous Boston Globe . He branched out to the news pages, filing a series of articles from Africa and traveling to Vietnam . He announced in 1967 that he was a candidate to succeed Boston Mayor John Collins , with a campaign slogan of "Keep Collins Mayor," but his trial balloon popped and he withdrew.