Over the weekend, on Friday, April 29, the Junior Tennis Foundation will host the 24th annual Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame awards dinner at The Water Club in New York City. This year's inductees include Al Picker. Hear what admirers Justin Gimelstob, John McEnroe, and Bud Collins have to say about this worthy Hall of Famer.

Al Picker

By Nancy Gill McShea
Photo Credit: Ed Goldman

(May 2, 2011) Imagine getting arrested while running through a tunnel and suddenly Superman swoops in to save you. That would be Al Picker, alias The Newark Star-Ledger columnist Clark Kent -- sans cape but with famous glasses intact -- who took on his Superman persona to rescue his friend John Korff.

“I ran through the Lincoln Tunnel…while training for a 100 mile race,” said Korff, a USTA board member and Mahwah pro tournament organizer. “I got arrested in the middle of the tunnel. The only way I stayed out of jail was by showing the police a story Al wrote about me in that day's paper…I got Al on the phone to say I was a real person. He wrote about the incident in the next day’s paper. It’s good to have a pal like Al.”

Al was everybody’s pal during his amazing 60-year run (1946-2005) as a columnist and reporter for The Star-Ledger. Tennis players respected him because he showed up at tournaments in every nook and cranny and was fair, positive and accurate in his reporting. He understood the sport, was passionate about it and always had a smile on his face. Add that all up – it’s Superman!

John McEnroe will vouch for that. “Al has covered tennis and has written about me for a very long time,” John said. “I appreciated Al’s sense of humor and his interest in the game…he is one of a very few tennis writers who actually knew me, understood me, and even recognized that I also had a sense of humor.”

Justin Gimelstob, the journalist/broadcaster who ranked 65th in the world, cast his vote, too. “Al taught me from a very early age to respect the quality of a person’s work and helped my entrée into this field,” he said. “He came to watch me play for 25 years; he didn’t sit behind a computer and file a story. In our interviews I learned about loyalty, that the relationship between an athlete and a writer is a partnership of trust invested in together.”

Dick Savitt, the 1951 Australian and Wimbledon champ who never misses a tennis news tidbit, was impressed that “Al was thorough, his articles always accurate and he never wrote anything negative about anyone.”

Nicole Arendt, ranked 49th in the word in 1997, still has articles Al wrote about her. “I looked forward to our little interviews [juniors to the pros]…lots of them…all over the world,” she said.

Neil Amdur, The New York Times sports editor/beat tennis writer, echoed the consensus: “Al was a hard-working journalist who loved tennis and covered it well.”

The tennis writer Steve Flink said that watching Al work for the first time was an eye opener. “I was 19, a reporter in training and I went to South Orange (N.J.) with Clark Graebner to watch him play a final,” Steve said. “Clark won the tournament and Al kept asking him questions in his straightforward way…Al was polite yet persistent, low key yet forceful, smart yet unassuming. Clark rolled his eyes…but he respected Al, knew that he was a professional doing his job…That left an indelible impression; I wanted to be like Al, to gain the respect of the players yet not make a nuisance of myself.”

Bud Collins said “tennis fans in New Jersey were lucky that Al was their man about tennis…His reportage and columns…kept his readers well informed. He knew the game, the players, the coaches…and came up with many a scoop. This went on for years, then decades as he made his name as the dean of American tennis writers. He covered other sports, too, but his heart was in tennis. I have fond memories of sharing press boxes with Al at Mahwah, Forest Hills, Flushing Meadows, Madison Square Garden, Orange and too many date-lines to recount.”

Al’s career goes so far back he actually filed his stories in the mid-‘50s with Western Union, which would send them to the paper in Morse code. In those days the Associated Press (AP), UPI and Reuters did not have reporters on the spot, so Al sent stories to all three wire services in addition to handling his own assignments.

The Superman image gained momentum in 1945 while Al was a student at Newark’s Weequahic High School. At 14 he took on two jobs. He worked as a copy boy at The Star-Ledger and then began writing about high school sports. He played piano in a combo and during summers performed for shows at hotels in the Catskill Mountains. In 1949 he won the Scholastic Magazine prize for Best Short Story.

Next stop was Montclair State. He earned bachelor and master’s degrees in secondary business education and was the sports information director there before continuing studies in the doctoral program at New York University. “I refined my typing skills at N.Y.U. and hit 126 words per minute,” Al noted. "That speed proved invaluable in making deadlines."

When Al retired from The Ledger in 2005, he had spent 99 years combined in two jobs. He devoted 39 years to education, first as a school teacher (24 years) before taking on a supervisory role (15 years) at his Weequahic alma mater. He simultaneously covered sports and tennis (60 years) for the state’s largest paper.

“A most rewarding and satisfying period,'' said Al, who also provided radio coverage in the ‘50s and ‘60s for CBS Sports and ABC WorldWide Sports. An advanced intermediate tennis player with a couple of jobs, a marriage and family – wife Anita, daughter Susan and son Michael; that’s more complicated than it sounds.

As tennis grew in prominence, The Ledger elevated it to a featured sport. In 1954 Al expanded news of the game with “On Tennis" columns and on-site coverage of Wimbledon, French Open, the US Open and Davis Cup matches plus important junior events.

He also covered the New Jersey State and Gene Scott’s Eastern Grass Court Championships in South Orange, Anne Cummings (18s), senior grass courts, the Hamlet Cup, the Mahwah event, the Concord Hotel juniors (1973-91, the Easter Bowl, the Port Washington Junior Championships and numerous ETA events.

Al’s informal style captured the excitement and ambience surrounding big-time tennis so fans could experience the passion and heat of action on courts thousands of miles away. Readers began to understand the emotional day-to-day life of athletes involved in a world-wide sport played on a year-long basis.

In a sport known to keep writers at bay, his easy personality helped him form relationships with players on the way up, like Pam Casale, and with established stars like Arthur Ashe.

He followed Pam through high school, the juniors and the pros, said she was frank in interviews, allowing readers and fans to…gain insight into…women’s tennis. She spoke about the rigors of worldwide travel. "A lot of hard work," she would say. "Not as glamorous as one would think…No time for sightseeing. Anxious moments playing against good friends…

“Al became part of my family,” said Pam, who in 1984 ranked No. 15 in the world. “I once played Chris Evert on Wimbledon’s Center Court and asked my mother to find Al and invite him to sit in the Friends’ Box. I was getting killed, 6-0, 4-0, came back to win the second 7-5 but lost the third. Al was there cheering. When I beat Bettina Bunge to get to the Mahwah finals, my father couldn’t wait to open the paper and read what Al wrote. Al rooted for us all. We were the boxers and he was the trainer sitting in our corner supporting us.”

Patti O’Reilly, one of the famous O’Reilly triplets of Ridgewood, N.J., another Mahwah veteran, said she would turn around at almost every ETA tournament she played and “Al would be sitting in the front row, smiling. He had a warm and welcoming manner and you knew that tennis was his passion.”

Al saw Arthur Ashe play when he was 15. “I followed him and after he retired we spent hours viewing US Open matches in the press box,” Al said. ”In 1989, after I had heart bypass surgery and returned to work…at the Forest Hills Invitational, I received a surprise call from Arthur. He wanted to know how I was feeling, advised me not to overdo it, to make sure I covered myself from excessive sunlight. A warm and thoughtful expression that made you realize how special he was.

"The following year, Kean University…needed a replacement commencement speaker. My wife, Anita, an assistant registrar, asked if I could get Arthur…He graciously accepted and came through with one of the most memorable and stirring addresses in the school's history."

Tennis beat writers shared some memories. “Al became a trusted friend,” said Doug Smith, a tennis correspondent/reporter with USA Today and other papers. “In the mid-90s we helped our newspapers save expense-money by sharing a house when we covered Wimbledon…Most tennis journalists covering Grand Slam events…for major newspapers wrote one story (800-1000 words) per day. I felt overworked …my daily workload included a major story, two side bars (300-400 words) and a package of notes (700 words). I complained until I watched Al punch out a major story, side bar, package of notes and a 1,000-word column/commentary daily while covering Wimbledon and the US Open. He never complained.”

Steve Flink mentioned that he, too, shared a room with Al at Wimbledon in 1982 to save on expenses…”…the pre-computer days when writers still worked on typewriters,” Steve said. “Al would work on his daily piece in the press room but finish the writing back in our room. That meant that sleep was simply out of the question. Al would be up as late as possible and would dictate his stories over the phone. He…taught me that there is no substitute for persistence.”

Sid Dorfman, 91, a columnist for The Ledger, said It may be a cliche, but “Al Picker became Mr. Tennis, as well known in England and France as he was in the U.S. He covered the sport as one of the most important tennis writers in the country.”

Al has been honored with multiple awards --Tennis Week Magazine, Tennis Writer of the Year, 1977 and 1983; the U.S. Tennis Writers Association, Lifetime Achievement Award, 1994 (he was vice president of the association); and the New Jersey Sportswriters Association, Journalistic Achievement Award, 1997, along with the Key to Newark City Hall, for outstanding coverage of tennis events. Al has also been a voting member of the media for over 20 years in selecting the annual recipients to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I.

Does Al Picker miss his tennis beat? “Sure I miss it,” he said. “I loved covering the tournaments, writing profiles and meeting the people but I certainly don’t miss the deadlines!”

Read the rest of the inductees profiles: Melissa Brown, Robert L. Litwin, Brian Hainline M.D.