Most success stories end with a trophy. This one started with one. 

Ward Parker had known and admired Jack's father, Ted, for years. After Ted passed, Parker polished up a trophy the two had won together and gave it to Jack. Then he gave Jack something else. Decades' worth of St. Louis tennis history he had spent a lifetime collecting. Programs, articles, historical accounts, names and dates going back generations. 

Jack was already steeped in the game. He had played on the Washington University tennis team and spent years writing short articles, programs and plaques, and presentations on St. Louis tennis. Then he came across Sixty Years of Tennis in St. Louis: 1881-1941. He knew that was just the first chapter. 

He wasn't a writer. He was an insurance salesman. But he had Parker's collection and the backing of Butch and Cliff Buchholz and tennis historian Bud Collins. How could he lose? 

The Roots of Tennis: Blue Bloods to Blue Collars is the definitive history of St. Louis tennis. Jack served as archivist for the Missouri History Museum's tennis collection, as a member of the St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame Selection Committee, and as an ambassador for tennis wherever he went. 

The Hall of Fame he helped build would eventually honor his father. Jack made sure the story was there to tell. 

(2013)