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:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)