Kay and John P. McEnroe, Dick Scheer, Sony Ericsson WTA Tour CEO Larry Scott and Donald Van Blake were honored at the 21st anniversary of the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame on Friday evening, April 18, in New York City. The annual dinner and induction ceremony is a benefit for Eastern’s Junior Tennis Foundation, which awards grants to community tennis associations and provides scholarship programs for young players throughout New York State, Northern New Jersey and Southern Connecticut.
Dick Scheer's Hall of Fame profile by Nancy Gill McShea is published, with the permission of Eastern's Junior Tennis Foundation, here:
Only a gifted athlete would fit the profile of a well known tennis volunteer who for over 40 years has established a reputation as a diehard on the court, and only after he headlined as a major star in both football and baseball in an earlier life.
Dick Scheer certainly fits that profile. He served as Eastern’s president in 1984-85 and was honored as the section’s Man of the Year in 1993. He started playing tennis at age 33, when his career as a Manhattan attorney took precedence. He has since earned top-ten Eastern rankings in three age divisions and played for several men’s teams. In the 1940s, however, Dick was heralded as a running back at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and in the early 1950s he was a star center fielder and captain of the baseball team at Harvard University.
"Dick is a great competitor," his friend and long-time doubles partner Harry Keely said recently. "He is a winner. He is what we call a ‘tough out.’ He will fight to the end."
Accolades for Dick extend beyond the athletic fields. He has been highly regarded as a volunteer administrator during and after the years he was president and was appointed to serve as a member of and/or chair more than ten USTA and Eastern committees and boards. He was also selected to captain two USTA teams that competed on the international ITF circuit — the men’s 60 Von Cramm team and the men’s 50 Fred Perry Cup team, which won the 2001 world championship in Austria.
He became actively involved in Eastern affairs, he said, "to give back to tennis what the game has given to me…It’s been great fun." During his Eastern presidency, he predicted a strong future for key programs and initiatives that were rapidly gaining steam – USTA/Volvo League team tennis for adults, now the highly successful USTA League Tennis program; sectional sponsorship (he was involved in the Head-sponsored Eastern men’s grand prix); the early dawn of computer rankings; and the schools program. He believed that promoting tennis in the schools was a natural venue since its pilot program in New York City, under the direction of Skip Hartman, had introduced thousands of children to the game in the East.
Dick still serves on both the Eastern and Junior Tennis Foundation Boards of Directors. He has also chaired the Hall of Fame Selection Committee (1991) and the Charter and By-Laws Committee (1990-2003) and has served on six USTA committees — Grievance, chairman (6 years); Governance (long-range planning, 6 years), Executive, Nominating, Budget and Finance and Constitution and Rules.
But his athletic life before tennis still looms clearly in his personal history. When he was a star running back at Erasmus Hall, his outstanding play earned him lots of press in Brooklyn newspapers and he was recruited by the University of Tennessee, the country’s No. 1 football team in 1949. He also received offers from Cornell, Penn, Lehigh and City College, and then, like magic, transformed himself into the featured center fielder and captain of the baseball team at Harvard University.
Why Harvard? Dick’s dad, Max, had said to his son, "Get into Harvard and I’ll pay!" And why center field? He grew up in the 1940s and early ‘50s when the rivalries of the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees captured the imagination of sports fans. Friends and strangers waged raging debates — on street corners, in school classrooms, in offices and saloons or at the ball park — to determine which center fielder was the best: Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Duke Snider, who was Dick’s hero. Not only that, his high school football team won three or four games in Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers before they fled to Los Angeles. "There would be 15,000 kids cheering in the stands," Dick recalls now. "It was a nice, colorful, screaming event."
After his freshman year at Harvard, the Dodgers and the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper sponsored a team they called "Brooklyn against the world!" Dick said that any kid under 19 who could stand was eligible to try out for a position. Thousands showed up for the audition and he was one of five outfielders who made it.
