Uplifting footnote to 1940 teen tennis tragedy

So what made him chase the teenage ghost in tennis whites? What drew the New York writer to the mythic story of the most promising player of his generation, a Coronado kid lost to death and then reborn as a shining ideal? “It was a mystery,” John Martin said in an e-mail last week. “I couldn’t resist. I’ve been a reporter for 50 years, and I’d rarely found a story so compelling. It was triumph, tragedy, and finally triumph.” In a ceremonial sense, we owe the resurrection of Bob Carrothers to the local Tennis Hall of Fame, which is honoring him, along with four other inductees — Ed Collins, Kelly Jones, Homer Peabody and George Barnes — at Morley Field on Saturday afternoon. To Martin, however, goes the trophy for triumphant reporting. His research in large part persuaded the Hall of Fame’s board to select for induction an 18-year-old junior champion dead nearly 70 years. To make the case for Carrothers, Martin, a Columbia University journalism professor with deep local ties — he attended St. Augustine High School in the early 1950s and San Diego State, and worked at The San Diego Union before a career in TV news — sought out those who had competed against “Gentleman Bob.” Deep in the fifth and final set of their lives, the players Martin contacted all agreed that Carrothers, if he had lived, would have been a sunny face on the cover of Life. “Had he lived, in my opinion, he would have been the best of his time,” no less a tennis authority than Jack Kramer told Martin. A month after Carrothers’ death in 1940, a national tennis writer threw this rhetorical laurel on the coffin of the athlete dying young: “In courage, sportsmanship and character I have never met his equal. There is no one who could have done more for the game by becoming its champion.” * * * In Coronado, his spirit haunted the courts. Or so it seemed to a sunburned kid growing up in a tennis-obsessed family during the 1950s. Read the entire Union Tribune story here.