Biography | Malcolm Whitman — one annual printed his win over Doherty here and reported him not in his real form when he lost to the same man, Bay Ridge, 1902

The cover of this entry is a photograph printed in the lawn tennis annual that the United States National Lawn Tennis Association had officially adopted. Under it, in small capitals, are two lines of letterpress: INTERNATIONAL MATCH AT BAY RIDGE, L. I., and beneath that, M. D. WHITMAN vs. R. F. DOHERTY.

It shows a grass court with a crowd banked around it several thousand deep. Later in the same volume, that annual printed its president's account of the same two men playing again, at Newport, later that month, and of Whitman losing. The president wrote that Whitman was not in his real form.

That was the end of his run in the national championship. What follows is about the two documents that decided how he would be remembered, and about the men who wrote them.

**The ground.**

The pin is the site of the Crescent Athletic Club's Bay Ridge grounds, in the south-west corner of Brooklyn, above the Narrows. The club was founded in 1884 by a group of Yale graduates as a football club and grew into the largest social institution in that part of Brooklyn, with more than fifteen hundred members in the early twentieth century; it went bankrupt in 1939. Its Brooklyn Heights clubhouse of 1906 still stands and is now part of a school. Its Bay Ridge grounds do not. The New York City parks department, which runs an athletic field on part of the land today, states that this land was the site of the Crescent Athletic Club and that the field lies between Colonial Road and Shore Road from 83rd to 85th Streets.

This is the first entry this platform has placed anywhere near here. The nearest pin of any kind on the platform is 6,983.1 m away, on Liberty Island; the nearest in Brooklyn is a Flatbush school, 7,181.0 m off. Distances computed this session against the platform's stored coordinates.

**August 1902.**

The competition now called the Davis Cup was in only its second edition; the encyclopaedia records the only previous one, in 1900, at Longwood in Boston, which this platform pins separately. The English-language encyclopaedia article dates the tie to 6 to 8 August 1902. The annual prints no dates for it at all, which is why this entry carries a month and not a day.

The annual's report says the contest took place at the Crescent Athletic Club, Bay Ridge, L. I., that it caused the greatest interest all over the country, and that attendance probably reached fourteen or fifteen thousand across the three days. It says this was the first time the very best English players had come to this country and was in fact the first real trial of strength between the two nations. The visiting side was the two Doherty brothers and Joshua Pim; the home side was Whitman, William Larned and Holcombe Ward, with Dwight Davis added for the doubles.

A note on what the two sides were called. The annual calls the visitors Great Britain throughout. The modern record calls the same team the British Isles, and Pim was Irish. This entry uses the annual's wording when describing the annual and does not adopt either name as correct.

Singles were played on the first two days, doubles on the third. The draw put Whitman against Pim and Larned against R. F. Doherty. Whitman took the first two sets from Pim at 6/1 each; a thunderstorm stopped play with Larned two sets up on Doherty; and when the matches resumed the next morning the whole shape of the tie had changed. Whitman lost the third set to Pim, getting one game, then won the fourth to love with no game reaching deuce. Larned lost his last three sets and the match.

That left it level, and it put the tie on Whitman's afternoon match against R. F. Doherty. The annual's account is short. Whitman started the first set with a rush and lost only the sixth game, after being at deuce twice. The second ran with neither man more than one game ahead until Doherty led 5-4, at which point Whitman took three games in succession and the set at 7/5. The third was even to four-all, and again Whitman won the two games he needed. Larned beat Pim in the other match, and the cup stayed in America three singles to one. The Dohertys then won the doubles, so the tie finished 3-2.

**What the annual counted.**

Under the results the annual prints a table headed Summary of the Singles, with a row for each of the four men and columns for matches, sets, games and points, each split into won and lost. Whitman's row reads: matches 2 and 0, sets 6 and 1, games 38 and 18, points 211 and 166.

Two things about that table are worth saying carefully, because it is easy to make more of it than it will bear.

The games figures can be checked and they hold. Whitman's two matches were 6/1, 6/1, 1/6, 6/0 and 6/1, 7/5, 6/4. Adding his games gives 19 and 19, so 38; adding his opponents' gives 8 and 10, so 18. Larned's row reads 41 and 31, and adding his four sets against Doherty and three against Pim gives 41 and 31 as well. Both were recomputed this session rather than taken on trust.

The totals row, which reads 128 and 128 for games and 865 and 865 for points, is not a finding. Every game one man wins another man loses, so the two columns are the same number by construction. It is recorded here only so that nobody later reads it as a statement that the two nations finished level.

What the table does show is that in 1902 the association's own annual was recording an international tie down to the individual point. It is the most granular record of Whitman on a court that this entry found, and the encyclopaedia lists only 1900 and 1902 for him in the competition, which makes these his last international matches.

**Newport, from 19 August.**

The annual's account of the national championship meeting is signed by James Dwight, the association's president. He writes that the twenty-second annual championship meeting took place at the Casino at Newport on 19 August and following days, that there were no fewer than 83 entries, and that it will long be remembered as the most interesting that we have ever had. Between the end of the Bay Ridge tie on 8 August, as the encyclopaedia dates it, and the opening at Newport on 19 August, eleven days elapsed. The all-comers' final was played later still, so the interval between Whitman's two matches against R. F. Doherty was longer than eleven days and this entry does not put a figure on it.

Dwight's report has Whitman beating Knapp without trouble, then Wright in four sets, then Kriegh Collins 6/0, 6/1, 6/4, which he calls far more one-sided than could have been expected. In the semi-final Whitman lost the first set to Huntington and then won three. Dwight writes that the match was a great surprise and that it was evident that Whitman was not in his real form, which he calls a very serious matter with one of the Dohertys to meet the next day.

H. L. Doherty scratched to his brother. Dwight writes that there was a very large gathering of spectators and that the disappointment was great as the match went on: Whitman could do nothing in the first set; in the second he plainly tried hard to get started and for a time almost played like himself, and won it 6/3; he made a fight for the third, reaching four-all, but it was his last effort, and Doherty took that set 6/4 and the fourth 6/0.

So the record of Whitman's last season, written by the association's own officers in one volume, is a photograph of him beating R. F. Doherty and, later in the same volume, its president explaining why he lost to him. Larned, the holder, then beat Doherty in the challenge round and kept the title.

**Two rolls printed side by side.**

The same volume carries two lists of names by year. One is headed with the champions; the other is headed ALL-COMERS. For most years they carry different names, and the difference between them is a rule.

Until 1912 the holder of the American championship did not play through the tournament. Everyone else played an all-comers' event, and the winner of that earned one match against the holder, called the challenge round. This platform has written about that arrangement and what it did to a career at the Philadelphia ground where the women's championship was decided, and this entry does not re-argue it.

Read against each other, the two rolls give Whitman's career in five lines. 1898: his name appears in both, meaning he won the all-comers and no challenge round was played; why the holder did not appear is not established here. 1899: the all-comers roll says J. P. Paret and the champions roll says M. D. Whitman. 1900: the all-comers roll says W. A. Larned and the champions roll says M. D. Whitman. 1901: Larned in both, Whitman absent. 1902: the all-comers roll says R. F. Doherty and the champions roll says Larned.

Three national championships, in 1898, 1899 and 1900. All three were won under rules that barred anyone who had ever been paid to play, and no figure anywhere in this entry is set against anything after 1968, when those rules ended.

**The man whose name is in the 1899 all-comers roll.**

J. Parmly Paret won the all-comers at Newport in 1899 and lost the challenge round to Whitman. Sixteen years later he wrote the book that this platform's entry at the Newport Casino uses as its cover, and which supplies this entry's second image.

Paret does not hide his own place in the record; he uses it as teaching material. In his chapter on tactics he writes that close study of the technique of Dwight Davis's game was enough to win the all-comers tournament at Newport for him in 1899, that he had been beaten by Davis at Longwood the same season and had profited by it, and that he conceived the idea that Davis, a left-hander, could not cross-court a fast service on his backhand side short enough to pass a close volleyer. He gives the aggregate of that five-set match as Paret 201 points, Davis 198, a difference of three. Later in the same book he returns to it: he says he could not lob safely against Davis early on, that his opponent was a very heavy man who felt the strain, and that as the match drew out he could lob with perfect safety. Then he adds the clause that matters here, that physical condition turned the tables in his favour just as it reversed the result the next day in the challenge round against Whitman.

That is the writer's own account of why he lost to Whitman: he was tired.

**How the same writer described Whitman.**

Paret's book is a technical manual with named examples, and Whitman is in it repeatedly. Almost every appearance is in the past tense, in a book otherwise about current players.

He is offered as the great exception on watching the ball: Paret writes that perhaps the only really successful exception to the general custom of looking away from the ball among expert players was Malcolm D. Whitman, who came nearer to keeping his eyes on the ball than any other really great player Paret had seen, and that this made his passing strokes extremely difficult to anticipate. In the same paragraph Paret writes that Whitman's attack was far below his defence at all times, and that his passing strokes were seldom so fast or so aggressively directed as those of the other great players of his time.

On footwork, Paret names the reigning champion and Whitman together as faulty, and writes that ex-champion Whitman also played too frequently with straight knees, flat feet and his body squared around toward the net. On foot-faults, he writes that Whitman used to replant his left foot nervously a few inches closer to the net after tossing the ball, and that Theodore Pell has been a bad transgressor in the same way.

And on the service, Paret gives Whitman an invention. He writes that the reverse twist service was invented at just about the same time as the American twist, a little ahead in fact, by Malcolm Whitman, and that it was an attempt at a puzzling service pure and simple, but that it has never been so successful as the other delivery because it retards the server's run to the net. This platform's entry on Holcombe Ward, at Newport, sets out the other half of that passage, in which the American twist is credited to Ward as an accidental discovery.

**The page Whitman is not on.**

The dedication leaf of that 1915 book names five men and says what each gave the game: Holcombe Ward the American twist service, Robert Wrenn match-play tactics, William Larned ground-strokes, Maurice McLoughlin the overhead attack, and last Dwight Davis the Davis Cup for international competition. That leaf is the cover of this platform's Ward entry, where it is transcribed in full.

Whitman is credited inside the book with a service that Paret says came first. He is not on the page. Two of the five men who are on it, Dwight Davis and William Larned, are men the encyclopaedia and the annual's rolls record Whitman beating for the national championship: Davis in the 1898 title match, Larned in the 1900 challenge round. And the page was written by a man who had been beaten by Whitman in a challenge round himself.

This entry does not treat that as an injustice, and Paret's own reasons are not recoverable from anything read here. A dedication is a choice and not a record. It is set down because the choice was made by someone with a documented position in the results he was choosing among, and because it is the page that has travelled.

**A photograph with no photographer.**

The second image is the plate facing page 101 of the same book, captioned in small capitals RAYMOND D. LITTLE and MALCOLM D. WHITMAN under a heading reading Two Distinctive Styles of Backhand Stroke.

The book's list of illustrations credits its photographs by agency: Edwin Levick, Brown Brothers, Paul Thompson, Underwood and Underwood, H. M. Smith, Arthur E. Dunn. The Little photograph on this plate is credited to Edwin Levick. The Whitman photograph beside it carries no credit in the list at all. Whether that is because the negative was old enough by 1915 that nobody knew, or for some other reason, is not established here.

**After 1902.**

He was twenty-five. The encyclopaedia records that he sat on the executive committee of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association and held management positions in several companies, that he took a Harvard degree and a law degree, and that he was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1955. It also gives two different accounts of when he stopped: the body of the article says he retired from tennis in 1902 at the age of 25, while its own infobox gives 1917. Both are printed here and neither is adopted; nothing read this session settles it, and the championship meetings are the only competitive appearances this entry describes.

In 1932 he published a book of his own, Tennis: Origins and Mysteries, brought out in New York by the Derrydale Press with a historical bibliography compiled by Robert W. Henderson. It is a book about where the game came from rather than how to play it. A slightly altered republication was issued by Dover Publications in 2004, and it is that later edition's catalogue record, not the 1932 book, that was read this session for the imprint details. The 1932 original was not read, and nothing in this entry describes its contents beyond its subject.

Malcolm Douglass Whitman was born in New York City on 15 March 1877 and died in 1932.

**A note on a phrase.**

The encyclopaedia files his three national titles under the heading Grand Slam singles results. That phrase carries two ordinary senses, the four tournaments taken as a set and all four won inside one calendar year, and neither was available in Whitman's playing lifetime, since this platform's own entries record that the four were designated as majors only from the mid-1920s. The phrase is reported here as the article's and is not adopted.

**Status, dated.**

Read on 6 September 2026. The Crescent Athletic Club's Bay Ridge grounds are gone. A public athletic field and a high school occupy the block today, and two tennis pitches are mapped on the site in OpenStreetMap, 68.7 m and 92.4 m from the pin. Nothing here should be read as describing any arrangement later than that date.

**Gaps this entry declares.**

Nothing in this entry is inside quotation marks. The condition this series applies is that machine-read text earns quotation marks only where the same copy was set by two independent printers. All three written sources used here are single typesettings: one annual, one instruction book and one encyclopaedia article. No newspaper setting of the Bay Ridge result was sought this session, and finding one remains open.

The exact extent of the club's grounds is not established. The parks department places the site between Colonial Road and Shore Road from 83rd to 85th Streets; the encyclopaedia article on the 1902 tie places the club at Narrows Avenue and 85th Street, which is a block east of Colonial Road, and says the site is now the Fort Hamilton High School athletic field. Both are recorded, neither is resolved, and the radius below is set to cover the disagreement.

Which court on those grounds the Whitman and Doherty match was played on is not established. The standing caution in this series is that a tennis club is not a tennis court, and it applies here with the extra difficulty that the courts no longer exist.

Where the second image was taken is not established. The plate carries no location and nothing in the frame names a ground; it is not offered as a photograph of Bay Ridge.

Nothing was read from the association's minutes, so what the association thought about Whitman's 1902 season at the time is not established, and no statement in Whitman's own name was read for this entry.

**Coordinate.** 40.626677, -74.037422, precision radius 300 m. The anchor is the site of the Crescent Athletic Club's Bay Ridge grounds, Brooklyn, New York.

Three readings were taken and they are of three different kinds, which is the test this series applies after finding that two agreeing geocoders can be two instances of the same kind of estimate.

The pin itself is a mapped object: OpenStreetMap way 222790564, tagged as a park and named Fort Hamilton Athletic Field, whose centre is the coordinate above, obtained through an Overpass mirror. The second reading is from the road network rather than from any object on the land: the Esri world geocoder resolves three of the four street intersections that bound the block, Shore Road and 83rd Street, Colonial Road and 83rd Street, and Colonial Road and 85th Street, each with a full match score, and the centroid of those three lies 29.1 m from the pin. The fourth corner does not resolve, because Shore Road curves away and the Esri geocoder returns a street in Howard Beach for it; that failure is recorded rather than worked around. The third reading is a premises address, 8301 Shore Road: the Esri geocoder returns it as a point address 205.5 m from the pin and the Census Bureau's address-range geocoder returns it 252.7 m from the pin. Those last two lie 78.9 m from each other and both sit on the school building at the west end of the block, not on the field, so they are reported and are not averaged in.

The radius is 300 m because it is a measurement rather than a preference. The furthest bounding corner of the block, Shore Road and 83rd Street, lies 260.0 m from the pin, and the encyclopaedia's alternative placing of the club at Narrows Avenue and 85th Street lies inside that. A smaller circle would not enclose the ground or the disagreement about where it was. It is not wider because nothing else is near: the nearest pin of any kind on this platform is 6,983.1 m away. All distances were computed in-session.

**Cover.** Wright and Ditson's Officially Adopted Lawn Tennis Guide for 1903, published in Boston by Wright and Ditson, reporting the 1902 season; digitised from the New York Public Library's copy, sponsored by Google, catalogued by the Internet Archive as not in copyright. The plate on the leaf the archive numbers n55 in its scan, 2292 by 3800 px, mean brightness 202.4 of 255, standard deviation 72.8. Opened at full size and examined; the leaf that follows it returns a mean of 254.2, consistent with a blank verso.

The photograph is printed sideways on the leaf and is reproduced here as it sits on the page. It is a wide view across a grass court. A net runs left to right through the middle distance; one player stands well back on the far side toward the right of the frame and a second is nearer the centre; a tall umpire's chair stands beside the net. Spectators fill the far side of the frame in a dense bank several rows deep, and more stand along the near side in the foreground, close enough that individual straw boaters are the largest objects in the picture. Behind the crowd are trees, a building with a steep gabled roof toward the left, and a slender pole against an open sky.

Printed matter in the frame, recorded as a negative: nothing legible. No banner, board or scoreboard in the photograph can be read at this resolution, and this entry does not describe one. The two lines of letterpress beneath the photograph are on the page and not in the scene.

**Second image.** J. Parmly Paret, Methods and Players of Modern Lawn Tennis, edited by S. Wallis Merrihew and published in New York by American Lawn Tennis on 1 August 1915; digitised from the University of California's copy, sponsored by Google, catalogued by the Internet Archive as not in copyright. The plate on the leaf the archive numbers n150, 3359 by 5200 px, mean brightness 187.9 of 255. Opened at full size and examined, and its neighbours measured: the leaf before it, which is also a plate, returns 183.8, and the text leaf after it returns 232.7. Both plates print; neither is one of the blank halftones this series has found elsewhere in these Google-scanned sporting volumes.

It carries two photographs side by side. Little, on the left, is upright at the end of a stroke on a court with a net and a figure in the background. Whitman, on the right, is crouched low with the racket head dropped behind him and his weight forward, in a light shirt and light trousers. Behind him are a low wall of rough stone, dark trees, and a rounded object raised on a slender open framework, which does not resolve further and is not identified here. A white court line runs across the foreground at his feet.

Printed matter in the frame, recorded as a positive but not part of either photograph: the leaf carries a perforated library ownership stamp reading UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA in the right margin, the same stamp this platform has recorded on another leaf of the same copy.

The caption below reads, in small capitals, RAYMOND D. LITTLE and MALCOLM D. WHITMAN, with a heading reading Two Distinctive Styles of Backhand Stroke and a note saying that Little uses a rolling lift-stroke with considerable top-spin, that Whitman's backhand was made with a short swing and an under-cut, and that he was very tall and crouched a good deal in play. The tense is worth noting: Little's stroke is described in the present, Whitman's in the past. He had been thirteen years out of the game when the book appeared.

**Sourcing note.** No passage in this entry is inside quotation marks, for the reason given under gaps. Every attribution above is paraphrase, and the capitals used for the plate captions and the dedication names reproduce what is set on those objects rather than quoting a text.

**Sources.** Wright and Ditson's Officially Adopted Lawn Tennis Guide for 1903, reporting the 1902 season, for the account of the international matches at Bay Ridge, the attendance, the draw and the singles results, the Summary of the Singles table, James Dwight's signed report of the championship meeting at Newport including its 19 August opening and his judgement on Whitman's form, the rolls of champions and of all-comers' winners, and the cover plate: https://archive.org/details/wrightditsonoff07unkngoog , read as text at https://archive.org/download/wrightditsonoff07unkngoog/wrightditsonoff07unkngoog_djvu.txt with the plate at https://archive.org/download/wrightditsonoff07unkngoog/page/n55.jpg . J. Parmly Paret, Methods and Players of Modern Lawn Tennis, American Lawn Tennis, New York, 1 August 1915, for Paret's account of his own 1899 all-comers win and challenge-round defeat, his appraisals of Whitman's eyes, attack, footwork and foot-faults, the attribution of the reverse twist service, the dedication page and the list of illustrations with its agency credits: https://archive.org/details/methodsandplaye01paregoog , read as text at https://archive.org/download/methodsandplaye01paregoog/methodsandplaye01paregoog_djvu.txt with the plate at https://archive.org/download/methodsandplaye01paregoog/page/n150.jpg . Encyclopaedia article on Malcolm Whitman, for the birth date, the death year, the 1898 title match against Dwight Davis, the 1899 and 1900 scores, the two conflicting retirement dates, the Hall of Fame election, the administrative and business career and the 1932 book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Whitman . Encyclopaedia article on the 1902 International Lawn Tennis Challenge, for the 6 to 8 August dates, the naming of the visiting team as the British Isles and the placing of the club at Narrows Avenue and 85th Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_International_Lawn_Tennis_Challenge . Encyclopaedia article on the Crescent Athletic Club, for the 1884 founding, the membership figure, the 1939 bankruptcy and the Brooklyn Heights clubhouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Athletic_Club . New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, Fort Hamilton Athletic Field, for the statement that this land was the site of the Crescent Athletic Club and for the block boundaries: https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/fort-hamilton-athletic-field/history . Internet Archive catalogue record for the 2004 Dover edition of Tennis: Origins and Mysteries, for the Derrydale Press imprint of 1932 and Robert W. Henderson's bibliography: https://archive.org/details/tennisoriginsmys0000whit . The Esri world geocoding service, the Census Bureau geocoder, and OpenStreetMap way 222790564 with the two mapped tennis pitches at the site, obtained through an Overpass mirror, for the coordinate. Every count of this platform's own entries, every cross-reference and every neighbouring-pin distance was queried against its stored records this run, and every arithmetic figure was recomputed in-session.