Robert Lindley Murray: The Reluctant U.S. Tennis Champion

This is the story of a U.S. tennis champion, originally from Palo Alto, California, who at the age of twenty-three, located to Niagara Falls, New York, as a chemical engineer where he remained his entire working career of forty-three years and lived in the city or its environs for the rest of his life. His accomplishments are underappreciated in Western New York even though he twice won the U.S. tennis championships, was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and rose through the ranks of Hooker Electrochemical to president, CEO, and chairman of the board and, through acquisitions as president, was responsible for a 65 percent increase in the company’s size within a year. Just prior to his retirement, a new research facility was dedicated to him in ceremonies attended by Nelson A. Rockefeller, governor of New York State.

The man’s name was Robert Lindley “Lin” Murray. He captured the national singles titles in 1917 and 1918, the latter over Bill Tilden in an epic clash of two 6-foot-2 tennis titans. The win over Tilden was remarkable in that Murray had not played tournament or much tennis at all that summer as he took his job contract responsibilities during those war years very seriously. Yet with the championship only eight days away, he whipped himself into shape to subdue a player who was undefeated that season.

The book leads into Murray’s biography by recounting the evolution of tennis terminology as well as court size and net height. The ongoing debate as to when and where the game was introduced to the United States and hopefully its ultimate solution is put to rest. For three decades from its inception in 1881, the men’s national champions were Eastern Society’s blue-blood Ivy Leaguers while, except for Marion Jones and May Sutton from California, the women’s game, significantly hampered by the Victorian dress code, was also dominated by Eastern elite women.

In 1909 two plebian serve-and-volley San Francisco Bay Area players went east for the championships—the red-haired Maurice McLoughlin who had honed his game on the asphalt courts in Golden Gate Park and the diminutive Hazel Hotchkiss from Berkeley. They were accompanied and followed by several other California champions who challenged successfully Eastern Society supremacy for the next decade. Lin Murray followed in the wake of McLoughlin and Hotchkiss, Mary Browne, Tom Bundy, Clarence Griffin, and Bill Johnston.

Also included are short biographies of Murray’s contemporaries, many of whom led extraordinary lives. Eleonora Sears was a multi-talented athlete by day and a socialite by night; Karl Behr and Dick Williams were Titanic survivors; Nat Niles, the 1917 runner-up to Murray, won several national figure skating titles; Molla Bjurstedt, the transplanted Viking warrior, won a record eight U.S. singles titles.