Fred Stolle, Golden-Age Australian Tennis Star, Dies at 86

New York Times

09-03-2025

Fred Stolle, a popular Hall of Fame Australian tennis player who won 19 Grand Slam titles, including two singles championships, during a golden age for his countrymen internationally, died on March 5 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 86.
His granddaughter Sydney Bose said the cause was cardiac arrest.
Stolle had his greatest success in the 1960s when he and other Australian players, like Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe, dominated the sport in the pre-open era before professionals were allowed to join amateurs in 1968 to play in major tournaments.
Stolle was on the strong Australian squad that won the Davis Cup, the international men's team event, from 1964 to 1966.
But Stolle also lost three consecutive Wimbledon singles finals, twice to Emerson, from 1963 to 1965. Stolle once said that Emerson was a better athlete than he was and a 'bit quicker around the net.'
Stolle won his first singles title at the 1965 French Championships (now the French Open), where he rebounded from losing an error-filled first set, 3-6, to overcome a fellow Aussie, Tony Roche, 6-0, 6-2 and 6-3 in the next three games.
In the second set, The New York Times reported, 'the tall blond Stolle punched his backhand volley and stroked his service more cleanly' and 'quickly found that he could overpower Roche's backhand.'
In the third set, Stolle attacked the net 'for repeated winners' with his backhand volley. 'It was his sharpest tool all afternoon.'
A year later, Stolle defeated Newcombe to win the United States National Championships (now the U.S. Open), in Forest Hills, Queens. Stolle had lost to Emerson in the finals in 1964.
The four-set victory over Newcombe earned Stolle a 'Man in the News' profile in The Times, which described him as resembling a 'dehydrated octopus' — because of elbows and knees that 'jut out like stunted tentacles' — as he waited for a serve.
'But when he uncoils,' the article added, he 'moves with a fluid grace that has propelled him to the finals of the world's major tennis championships during his career.'
It was a particularly satisfying victory for Stolle, who had felt slighted by the fact that he had not been seeded by officials at Forest Hills.
'They must think I'm just a bloody old hacker,' he said before the tournament. After winning, he said, 'I guess the old hacker can still play a bit.'
From 1962 to 1969, he won 10 Grand Slam doubles championships (three at the Australian Championships, two in France, two at Wimbledon and three at Forest Hills) with his partners Bob Hewitt, Emerson and Rosewall.
Stolle also won two Australian, two United States and three Wimbledon mixed doubles Grand Slam titles, with partners who included Margaret Court, Lesley Turner Bowrey and Ann Haydon Jones, one of his fellow inductees into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985. Stolle was also inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1988.
Frederick Sydney Stolle was born on Oct. 8, 1938, in Hornsby, Australia, a suburb of Sydney. His father, Wilfred, was a railroad worker, and his mother, Mildred (Hucker) Stolle, managed the home. Both played tennis and taught Fred the sport.
Fred was a ball boy on courts in Sydney, and for a Davis Cup match in Australia in 1951. He also played cricket as the wicketkeeper, but his hands kept getting banged up, so his mother told him to stick to tennis, he told The Times.
His career would spread over more than 30 years during which he earned the nickname Fiery, or Fiery Fred. Conflicting accounts suggest that the monikers reflected his competitiveness or, ironically, his morning listlessness after partying late in the night.
As his career wound down, Stolle was the player-coach of the New York Sets (later the Apples) of World Team Tennis, leading them to championships in 1976 and 1977. He also coached Vitas Gerulaitis, who played for the Apples, for several years.
In 1978, Stolle was hired as the tennis pro at the Turnberry Isle Country Club in Aventura, Fla., a job that he held for about 25 years.
He continued to play — mostly doubles — into his 40s.
In 1979, he and Emerson advanced to the doubles semifinals of the U.S. Open but lost to the fourth-seeded Stan Smith and Bob Lutz. Two years later, Stolle, 42, was back in the doubles semifinals with Newcombe, 37, against John McEnroe and Peter Fleming, who were 22 and 26. Stolle and Newcombe lasted until the fifth set.
While Stolle and Newcombe hugged and laughed at their good fortune as they extended the match by winning the third and fourth sets, their opponents barely spoke to each other.
When a reporter asked Stolle afterward if he thought that victory was possible, he was quoted by The Boston Globe as saying: 'For the first two sets, I was so bloody nervous I couldn't even hit the ball. Then when John hit a ball off my neck, I wasn't nervous — just twitching.'
In addition to his granddaughter Sydney, Stolle is survived by his wife, Patricia (Beckman) Stolle; two daughters, Monique Stolle-Lemon and Nadine Delius; his son, Sandon, a former professional tennis player who won the 1998 men's doubles title at the U.S. Open; seven other grandchildren; and his brother, Don.
Stolle was also a television commentator in the United States, for ESPN, and in Australia, for the Nine Network and Fox Sports.
David Hill, who as a producer at the Nine Network hired and worked with Stolle as an analyst, wrote in an email that Stolle was able 'to tell you what was going to happen, not what had just happened.'
Hill, who in the 1990s became the president of Fox Sports in the United States, added: 'His big thing was the seventh game of a set, and who won the seventh likely determined the eventual winner of the set and the match. And he was inevitably right.'