Ben Bishop was a pawn who became a king.

Allan Carvell believed the Armory was the secret to producing nationally ranked tennis players in St. Louis after World War II, and he used him to prove it. Bishop started playing young, six or seven years old, at Triple A in Forest Park where Carvell was teaching. By his teens he was at the Armory all winter long, working his way to the number one ranking in the Missouri Valley. 

Carvell said it would take four years. It took less. By his mid-teens, Bishop made the finals of the National Junior Indoor Championships. 

After being ranked ninth nationally in the boys' 15s in 1946 and eleventh in juniors in 1949, he became the first ever member of the Junior Davis Cup to come out of St. Louis. He played alongside Ham Richardson and Tony Trabert, and earned a ticket to Forest Hills and a summer on tour with the top players of the era. 

At Colgate, he won the Eastern Intercollegiate doubles title in 1952 and served as team captain in 1953. That same year, he swept the District singles and doubles titles and won the Missouri Valley sectional doubles, adding to a run of club championships collected over the course of his playing career. 

Ask him what tennis gave him, though, and the trophies aren't the first thing he brings up. It's the people he met and the places it took him. He laughs easily talking about it, the kind of guy who looks for the bright side and the funny story in whatever happened that day. 

You get the joy of winning and the lesson of losing, he says. But mostly, you meet wonderful people. The more you give to it, the more you get out of it. St. Louis got its proof. 

(2007)