Shirley Fry Irvin, 1940s and 50s tennis star, is dead at 94

Shirley Fry Irvin, a tennis player who won the singles and doubles titles in four Grand Slam tournaments in the pre-Open era, died Tuesday at her home in Naples, Florida. She was 94.

Her death was announced by the International Tennis Hall of Fame, where she was inducted in 1970.

At a time when the players were amateurs, the rackets were made of wood and the championship surfaces were mostly grass, Irvin (who was known as Shirley Fry in her playing time) won the French title (on clay) in 1951, the Wimbledon and American titles in 1956 and the Australian title in 1957. She then retired from tennis to start a family.

She was one of only 10 women to win singles titles at all four of those championships.

She also won 12 women’s doubles championships in those four tournaments, the first 11 with Doris Hart and the 12th with Althea Gibson. In the annual Wightman Cup competition between the United States and Great Britain, she played for six years and won 10 of her 12 matches. At 5 feet-5 and 125 pounds, she was the fastest player of her time. But apparently she didn’t care much for her talents.

Billie Jean King said I was her idol, she told The Orlando Sentinel in 2000. That flatters me, because I really wasn’t such a good player. I was not a natural. I had athletic ability, I could run and I could concentrate. I excelled in running and concentration. I had no service.

Hart, her frequent doubles partner, admired Irvin’s tenacity. Shirley was one of the best runners I’ve ever seen run, she said in 2000. Everything got out of hand.

Shirley June Fry was born on June 30, 1927 in Akron, Ohio. She was an athletic kid and tried hockey, badminton, baseball, archery, skating, swimming and running, as well as tennis. In 1999, she told The Akron Beacon Journal that I wanted to play football, but once we were in high school, it became the boys and the girls.

Tennis has won. At a Hall of Fame event in Newport, RI, in 2004, she told broadcaster and columnist Bud Collins that she had started traveling alone to tournaments across the country when she was ten.

My parents would put me on a bus in Akron and go from ID card, she said. Usually someone met me on the other side but I would go to Travelers Aid if there was a problem. It built self-reliance and it was fun.

When she was 11, she told The New York Times, I traveled by train to a tournament in Philadelphia and then, on my father’s advice, continued on to New York. I took the train to Penn Station and then the subway to Forest Hills, where he had reserved for me at the Forest Hills Inn. Then I walked all the way to the New York Worlds Fair.

In 1941, at age 14, she played in the United States Amateur Championship, the youngest person to compete there until Kathy Horvath (who was a month younger) in 1979. In 1942, she became the United States’ youngest amateur quarterfinalist. States. For 13 consecutive years (1944-56), she was in the Top 10 in the United States. She was number 1 in 1956.

She found time in 1949 to earn a degree in human relations from Rollins College in Florida. After the 1954 season, she retired from tennis due to a nagging elbow injury and got a job as a clerk at The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, where she earned about 75 cents an hour. As that newspaper recalled in 1989, one of her first jobs as a copy girl was to send the story of her own retirement to the writing room.

After a few months of recreational tennis, she entered two Florida tournaments in 1955 and won both, beating Hart in the final. That summer, she quit her job and returned to tennis full-time.

The following year saw her crown at Wimbledon, where she defeated Gibson in the quarter-final, Louise Brough in the semi-final and England’s Angela Buxton in a 50-minute final.

I play better when it doesn’t matter if I win or lose, she told The New York Times of her win at Wimbledon, which came on her ninth attempt. After eight attempts at Wimbledon, I didn’t think I would win. Her subsequent United States Championship was her first at Forest Hills in 16 attempts.

She won the Australian title in 1957 and then retired again. That year she married Karl Irvin, an American advertising executive whom she had met while working in Australia and served as referee for some of her matches.

During a match, she told The Times, I became enraged at some of his calls and asked that he be removed and that he would stop working on my matches. Shortly after, we were married and had four children in five years.

Her husband died in 1976. She leaves behind their children, Mark, Scott, Lori and Karen, and 12 grandchildren.

Irvin lived in West Hartford, Connecticut, for 35 years before moving to Florida. She taught tennis for three decades, played in senior tournaments and won the U.S. clay court championship for women aged 55 and over at age 58. When her knees gave out at age 62, she retired from tennis in favor of golf, which had become her favorite sport.

She loved golf, but she wasn’t very good at it and generally shot over 100.

It’s a little embarrassing, she said in 2000. You say, she won the Wimbledon tennis tournament? Then you see me play golf and say, How could she?

Frank Litsky, a longtime sports journalist for The Times, died in 2018. Peter Keepnews contributed to the report.