Pancho Segura, former tennis champ, dies at 96
Pancho Segura, a bowlegged tennis player who rose from poverty in Ecuador to become one of the finest tennis players of the 1940s and ’50s, sporting a powerful two-handed forehand and a tactical brilliance that he later employed as the coach for a young Jimmy Connors, died Nov. 18 at his home in Carlsbad, San Diego County. He was 96.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his son Spencer Segura.
“Segoo,” as he was sometimes known, stood just 5-foot-6 on legs that were bowed by a childhood case of rickets, a result of malnutrition. But he wielded what Jack Kramer, a frequent opponent and fellow member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, once called “the single greatest shot in the history of tennis”: a forehand that, resembling the swing of a baseball batter, made him “the two-fisted killer from Ecuador” to courtside announcers in the United States.
Playing before the open era, at a time when only amateurs were eligible to compete in major tournaments such as Wimbledon, Segura won the U.S. Clay Court Championship in 1944 and the U.S. Indoor title two years later. He reached the finals in four Grand Slam doubles tournaments before turning pro in 1947, going on to attain a level of financial stability that had eluded him for years.
“If it wasn’t for tennis,” he told Life magazine in 1961, “I’d be checking coconut trees in Ecuador.”
In one remarkable three-year stretch that began in 1950, when Segura was ranked the No. 1 player in the world, he won three straight U.S. Pro singles titles on three different surfaces, flummoxing opponents with his largely selftaught style.
“He holds his hands like a Las Vegas gambler,” five-time Grand Slam champion Tony Trabert said after losing a match to Segura. “You never know what they are going to do.”
Segura won a total of six U.S. pro singles and doubles championships, and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1984.
Playing during the sport’s early barnstorming professional era, he developed a reputation as a leg-slapping showman, known for engaging crowds and gently mocking opponents, tapping his forehead and flashing a knowing grin after he nailed an unexpected lob or drop shot.
“I played on islands that were specks in the Indian Ocean,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, “and I played for the sheikh of Kuwait and I played at midnight in Madrid for $1,000. Errol Flynn used to send a car to pick me up.” At times, he later said, he played on cow manure in India. “Hell, it was so hard, the ball bounced straight, but it didn’t smell very good.”
Segura was also a shrewd observer of the game, nicknamed Sneaky by players such as Vic Braden because “he knew how everyone played, how everyone hit the ball, what they’d do on every point.”
It was a talent that he put to use as a coach, working as tennis director at clubs in California after playing his last U.S. Pro tournament in 1962. His pupils included 16year-old Connors, who soon went on to become the No. 1 player in the world and later described Segura as a “father” figure, crediting the coach with teaching him “strategy and percentage tennis.”
“He’s in another world with a racket in his hands,” Segura told Newsweek in 1975, praising his star student while lamenting Connors’ tendency to act the villain on the court. “I tell him to give fans the peace sign, not the finger. But what can you do? He’s just a kid.”
When Segura was asked what he would do if it was his own son who was acting up on the hard court, heckling fans or berating opponents, he replied: “I’d tell him, ‘You little brat, get off the court.’ ”
Francisco Olegario Segura was born prematurely on June 20, 1921, on a bus traveling from Quevedo to Guayaquil, according to Caroline Seebohm’s biography “Little Pancho.” His father was a caretaker at a tennis club in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, and it was there that 7-year-old Francisco began learning the game while working as a ballboy.
A sickly child, he suffered a hernia and malaria that kept him from playing soccer but shaped his signature tennis swing, forcing him to use both hands to hit the ball.
He developed footwork and arm strength that made him a South American champion and drew the attention of Gardnar Mulloy, a fivetime Grand Slam doubles champion who was coaching the University of Miami tennis team. Segura won the collegiate singles title three straight years while at Miami, from 1943 to 1945, and left the school without a degree to focus on his tennis career.
An early marriage to Virginia Smith ended in divorce. In addition to his wife of 56 years, Beverley Moylan of Carlsbad, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Spencer Segura of Darien, Conn.; a daughter from his second marriage, Maria Segura of San Diego County; three sisters; a brother; and four grandchildren.
Segura, who became a U.S. citizen in 1991, remained a keen observer of tennis in recent years, telling ESPN in 2009 that — contrary to the sport’s genteel reputation — part of the game’s greatness lay in its fiercely egalitarian nature.
“It doesn’t take more than a racket and a heart to play this game,” he said. “It’s a great test of democracy in action. Me and you, man, in the arena. Just me and you, baby. Doesn’t matter how much you have, or who your dad is, or if you went to Harvard or Yale, or whatever. Just me and you.”