Ted Schroeder

Ted Schroeder was an American tennis player born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1921, who grew up in Glendale, California, and learned the game under the coach Perry T. Jones at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. He won both Wimbledon and the U.S. National Championships, the two most prestigious amateur titles of his day. He was the leading American amateur in 1942 and was ranked second in the United States for four years from 1946 to 1949, the last of which saw him ranked world number one amateur. Nicknamed Lucky Ted in London for surviving a string of five-set matches, he won Wimbledon in 1949, then lost a famous U.S. Championships final to Pancho Gonzales that is often listed among the great matches. Schroeder never turned professional and played only part time after 1945 while working as a vice president of a refrigeration equipment company. He died in La Jolla, California, in 2006, and his son John became a professional golfer.