It was all about the pants. Explosive colors, as if his legs were on fire. And patterns that looked like they were sewn together by a blind seamstress. That was the Bud Collins I remember—the longtime tennis broadcaster who died on Friday at the age of 86.
Of course he was more than that. First and foremost, he was a journalist—a sportswriter for the Boston Herald and then the Boston Globe. He wrote about other sports as well, but it was his coverage of tennis that catapulted him and, as a result, catapulted the sport. He made it approachable, providing colorful commentary on the players, always trying to identify their best qualities instead of trashing them. In fact, it reached a point when sportswriter John Feinstein joked that Collins could probably find something nice to say about Mussolini. Collins pointed out, “He did play tennis.”
Collins was known in the business for his kindness, and not just toward players. As Feinstein points out in his column,
In 2012, when Collins was unable to make Wimbledon for health reasons, writer Jason Gay asked if he could watch a match at Collins’s home. As he explains in the Wall Street Journal,
Growing up, I didn’t watch many sports. My parents didn’t follow football or baseball or basketball. But they loved tennis. Who won the Super Bowl or the World Series in 1984? Couldn’t tell you. But Mats Wilander! Man, that guy was on fire! And how anyone could confuse Vitas Gerulaitis with Guillermo Vilas is beyond me. In any event, rather than ballgames, I went to a fair amount of tennis tournaments, including the U.S. Open five years in a row. At some point I ran into Bud Collins and asked him for his autograph. He happily obliged. I wish I could’ve told him I aspired to be a journalist like him one day or asked him about writing advice. But I was 13. The best I could say was, “I like your pants!”
