Career
Smith played collegiate tennis at the University of Southern California, under Coach George Toley, where he was a three-time All-American and won the 1968 NCAA singles championship and the 1967 and 1968 doubles titles. At USC, Smith was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity.
As a kid, he went to get a job as a ballboy at the Davis Cup but was turned down because the organizers thought he was too clumsy http://www.onlinecollege.org/2010/02/16/50-famously-successful-people-who-failed-at-first/.
In his 1979 autobiography, Jack Kramer, the long-time tennis promoter and great player himself, ranked Smith as one of the 21 best players of all time.
In 2005, TENNIS magazine ranked Smith as 35th in its "40 Greatest Players of the TENNIS Era".
Smith was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1987.
Following his playing career, Smith became active as a coach for the United States Tennis Association. He now has his own academy with Billy Stearns called Smith Stearns Tennis Academy, which is in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
Smith married Princeton University tennis player Marjory Gengler. They later mentored South African tennis player Mark Mathabane, helping increase pressure on the South African government to end Apartheid. Today, Smith lives in Hilton Head with his wife and four children, all of whom competed in collegiate tennis. In Hilton Head he also is a co-owner of the highly successful tennis academy Smith Stearns.
Read more about this topic: Stan Smith
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)