CLIFF BUCHHOLZ

Cliff Buchholz never left tennis. He kept finding new ways to stay in it. 

For five years, from 1956 to 1960, the Buchholz boys owned the Missouri state high school championship. Butch won it twice. Then Cliff took over, beating Jimmy Parker three years running. Neither brother lost a set. 

Playing for all-white Southwest High School, Cliff beat Arthur Ashe, playing for all-Black Sumner, in a match that drew a much bigger crowd than St. Louis high school tennis usually saw. 

After graduating high school, Cliff kept winning. He made the National Indoor and Outdoor finals in 1961 and was the top-ranked junior doubles player in the country, a spot he'd also held the year before. 

He came to Trinity and helped start a dynasty. Cliff was named All-American alongside Chuck McKinley and Frank Froehling. The 1963 Tigers went undefeated, part of a streak that reached 78 straight victories by 1965, still an NCAA record. Inside College Tennis later ranked that 1963 team the fifth-greatest in college tennis history. 

He kept climbing individually too: a U.S. indoor doubles final in 1963, a U.S. Nationals doubles semifinal, wins over Manolo Santana and Stan Smith, and by 1965 a spot in the top 20 in singles and top 10 in doubles. In 1974 he won a World Team Tennis title with the original Denver Racquets. 

He also earned a law degree from Washington University. Then he pivoted from playing tennis to building it. 

First, he built places for people to play. Cliff opened the Cliff Buchholz Tennis Ranch in Steamboat Springs, along with tennis and health clubs in cities from Pittsburgh to St. Charles to Fort Collins, running them until he sold the business in 2000. 

Then he built stages for the players who came after him. In the early 1980s, he and Butch acquired the Miami tournament that would become the Lipton Championships, with Cliff as tournament director and Butch as chairman. Under their ownership, the Lipton became one of the first tournaments outside the majors to host men and women at the same site, and among the first to offer equal prize money to both. It is now known as the Miami Open. 

Cliff didn’t just stay in the game. He left it better. 

(1993)