William Augustus Larned

William Augustus Larned (1872-1926), American tennis player who, in 20 years of active play, was ranked 19 times among the best 10 players in the United States. Born in Summit, New Jersey, Larned attended Cornell University in New York, winning the intercollegiate championship in lawn-tennis (now simply called tennis) for the school in 1892. While at this time he was rated the sixth best tennis player in the United States, he was forced to leave the game a few years later after he contracted a rheumatic ailment while fighting with Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War (1898). Able to return to tennis in 1901, he won the U.S. men’s championships seven times between 1901 and 1911 and played six times on the U.S. team in the Davis Cup, an international men’s competition. He retired from competition in 1912. Larned surpassed all other American players in the mastery of groundstrokes, and although he was sometimes erratic and weak as a defensive player, he established himself as the most brilliant of American tennis players prior to Bill Tilden, who dominated the sport in the 1920s. Larned was also the inventor of the steel-frame tennis racket.