NEW YORK -- Tony Vincent's father, Salvatore, was from the old school, a hard working classical musician who played first trombone for the New York Metropolitan Opera and couldn't see his son fiddling around with some crazy game that didn't earn him a nickel.
'You're wasting your time,' he hollered at him. 'Go out and get yourself a job.'
Tony Vincent didn't care about any job. Growing up on the sidewalks of residential Elmhurst, N.Y., not that far from the fabled Forest Hills' tennis courts, he preferred hustling over to the neighborhood schoolyard every day to work on his serve and his backhand.
'I got a pretty good idea of how my father felt about me playing tennis all the time when I came home one day and found my racket broken in half,' laughs Vincent.
Was his father responsible for that?
'He was the only one home,' Vincent laughs some more.
That was more than 40 years ago. Today, carefree, curly-haired Tony Vincent still has no regular job, having retired after putting in 17 years as a successful stock market investor in Wall Street, and he's still playing tennis five times a week at 55. Playing it well enough, too, so his father never breaks any of his rackets anymore.
Vincent never attracted too much publicity during the 12 years he was on the regular tennis circuit, not so much because his technical mechanics on the court weren't sound but possibly because he played essentially the same kind of game Harold Solomon does now. Purely and simply, he always was and still is a scrambler.
That didn't prevent the stocky World War II Air Force bombardier from being ranked among the top 20 tennis players in the United States seven different times between 1946 and 1956, winning the Wimbledon seniors' doubles championship with Gardnar Mulloy in 1971 or earning the U.S. 35-year and over title in either the singles or doubles on five separate occasions.
He has, in his time, beaten such great players as Lew Hoad, Billy Talbert, Tony Trabert, Tony Mottram, Nicola Pietrangeli, Fausto Gardini and Mulloy in competition, and even Pancho Gonzalez once in a practice set. Still, there aren't that many people outside the immediate tennis cognoscenti who don't start scratching their heads when you mention his name to them.
'It doesn't bother me that much,' says Vincent, a life-long bachelor born in the Bronx. 'Deep down, I know how good I am. I don't have to showcase. Fred Kovaleski and I play together and we think we're the best doubles team there is, but we play for the enjoyment, not the publicity. I'm really over the hill. Who's gonna write about a 55-year-old man?'
For someone who characterizes himself that way, Vincent still gives an excellent account of himself on the court. Scratching and scrambling all the time, of course. Bob Towers, the New York advertising executive who has been staging exhibitions in the East for more than 45 years, calls Vincent 'the John Barrymore of tennis.'
'He has a certain flair about him when he plays, an instinctive sense of showmanship,' Towers says.
Vincent smiles over that description, and when he tries to explain it, he tends to gloss over his ability.
'Most of the guys I play against never say I play great,' he says. 'They generally say, 'Geez, I enjoyed the match.' Maybe that's because of some of the things I say and do while we're playing.'
One of the things Vincent did in an exhibition doubles match at Cape Cod a few years ago drew a big howl from the gallery. Chuck McKinley, the former Wimbledon titlist, and Hank Greenberg, the baseball Hall of Famer who has become a remarkably accomplished tennis player in recent years, were on the other side of the net when McKinley hit a ball that glanced off Vincent's head.
'Usually I wear a cap,' he explains, recalling the incident. 'It was so hot on this particular day, I wore a rubberband instead of a cap to keep my hair down. I always brush my hair forward and it started to fly all the way back when the shot McKinley hit broke the rubberband. I didn't know whether to go for my hair or the ball.'
Turning serious, Vincent says he considers beating Hoad in the Monte Carlo quarterfinals in 1956 the biggest victory of his career. He also calls Greenberg, the 70-year-old former Detroit Tigers' first baseman, 'one of the toughest competitors' he has ever seen on a tennis court, and he's serious about that, too.
'I never saw him play baseball,' Vincent says, 'but I can't possibly imagine he played it with any more determination and intensity than he does tennis.'
He did, and you know what, Tony?
When Hank was a kid, his father told him he was wasting his time on some crazy game, too.
