Australian tennis player Fred Stolle in the 1963 Wimbledon final. He lost to American Chuck McKinley in straight sets. (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Fred Stolle, an Australian tennis star who won 19 Grand Slam titles in the 1960s and remained a popular figure in the sport for decades, first as a coach and then as a broadcaster, died March 5 at 86.
His death was announced by the Australian tennis federation and the International Tennis Hall of Fame, which did not say where or how he died.
A 6-foot-3 right-hander with a powerful backhand, devastating lob and formidable serve-and-volley style, Mr. Stolle was part of a golden age of Australian tennis, dominating the international circuit with fellow countrymen Bob Hewitt, Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and Roy Emerson. His cool approach to the game — and sluggishness in the mornings, after late nights drinking Foster’s beer and partying with other tennis greats — earned him an ironic nickname: Fiery Fred, or just plain Fiery.
Mr. Stolle played his best tennis in the pre-open era, winning 10 Grand Slam titles in doubles and seven in mixed doubles at a time when professionals were barred from competing at major tournaments.
He initially had far less success in Grand Slam singles events, and for a time he seemed as though he might be a perennial runner-up: Mr. Stolle lost the first five major singles finals he reached, including three straight at Wimbledon and four straight against his friend Emerson, known as Emmo.
But in 1965, Mr. Stolle broke through at the French Championships. Playing on clay, his least favorite surface, he overcame a nightmarish first set in the finals at Roland Garros — the New York Times reported he made 26 errors — and won the next three sets to dispatch fellow Australian Tony Roche.
The next year, Mr. Stolle won his second major singles title at the U.S. Championships, now the U.S. Open. Going into the tournament, he was dismayed to learn that he was unseeded, in an apparent oversight by administrators at Forest Hills: “They must think I’m just a bloody old hacker,” he said.
Mr. Stolle went on to play some of the best tennis of his career, routing Emerson, the No. 2 seed, in straight sets before beating John Newcombe in the finals. “I guess the old hacker can still play,” he joked.
For all his success at Grand Slam events, Mr. Stolle said his proudest moments as a player came in helping lead Australia to three Davis Cup championships. His involvement in the competition dated back to 1951, when at age 13 he was selected as a ballboy for a match at Sydney’s White City Stadium. The intensity of the tournament led him to give up cricket and focus on tennis, and set him on a path to compete with Australia’s Davis Cup team for the first time in 1964.
During the Challenge Round against the United States that year, Mr. Stolle kept Australia’s chances alive — and prevented the Americans from winning the cup for a second straight time — by beating Dennis Ralston in a marathon five-set match, 7-5, 6-3, 3-6, 9-11, 6-4. Mr. Stolle called it “the greatest thrill of my tennis playing career.”
“The Grand Slam tournaments were important,” he wrote in his 1985 memoir, “Tennis Down Under,” “but my heart belonged to the Davis Cup.”
Mr. Stolle later settled in the United States and turned to coaching, helping guide Vitas Gerulaitis to the 1977 Australian Open title. He also worked as a commentator, partnering with fellow tennis Hall of Famer Cliff Drysdale to form a popular broadcasting team at ESPN.
When Mr. Stolle’s son, Sandon, launched a tennis career of his own, Mr. Stolle was able to follow the action from the booth. While working for the Nine Network in Australia, he called his son’s 1991 Centre Court match at Wimbledon, in which Sandon pushed John McEnroe to a fourth-set tiebreaker.
Doing the commentary, he said, was “like a dream come true.”
Frederick Sydney Stolle was born in Hornsby, a Sydney suburb, on Oct. 8, 1938. His father, a railway laborer, played tennis Sunday mornings and taught the fundamentals to Mr. Stolle, who would collect balls during his father’s games and practice with friends on the street outside his home.
Mr. Stolle drew chalk lines to create a makeshift court, knocked the ball over an invisible net and worked on his form while flogging a tennis ball against the side of the house, creating what he later recalled as a thunderous “whump, thump, thump” that his mother quietly tolerated. “Playing against a veranda with a mother who didn’t complain had something to do with patience and love. That’s what I grew up with,” he wrote in his memoir.
At 15, he left school to work at a bank and found crucial support from a company officer, Cliff Sproule. A tennis administrator and former player, Sproule helped arrange for Mr. Stolle to get time off for tournaments, making it possible for Mr. Stolle to start his traveling career at 21.
Mr. Stolle turned pro in 1967 and continued to play in major singles tournaments through the 1970s. In 1981, he and Newcombe made it all the way to the U.S. Open semifinals, where they lost to eventual champions McEnroe and Peter Fleming, who were almost half Mr. Stolle’s age.
Mr. Stolle was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985. In 2005, he was named an officer of the Order of Australia.
In addition to his son, survivors include his wife, Pat; and two daughters, Monique and Nadine, according to Tennis Australia.
Although Mr. Stolle earned only a fraction of what professional tennis players make today, he considered himself lucky. “In our days,” he once told the Melbourne Herald Sun, “we used to just go out and hit tennis balls and then have a few beers and relax.”
Mr. Stolle and Emerson, his longtime doubles partner, had what tennis journalist Bud Collins described as a “snooze and booze” system, in which one of the men would stay out late partying while the other rested up at home, preparing for their match the next day.
The players “took turns cooking steak and eggs for each other,” Collins recalled in a 2007 essay, and courted disaster during a tournament on Long Island in 1965, when they broke their routine and both stayed out all night.
“We got to the club just in time for the 11 a.m. match,” Mr. Stolle recalled. “Didn’t feel too great, so we jumped in the club pool with our tennis gear on. That woke us up a little anyway, but the first two sets nearly killed us.”
They won all the same, beating Americans Jerry Cromwell and Jim Osborne 22-24, 9-7, 6-4.