Background:
Don Budge's comments after beating Baron Gottfried von Cramm 6-8, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 8-6 in the deciding match of the 1937 Davis Cup tennis semi-final between the United States and Nazi Germany. Von Cramm received a phone call from Hitler minutes before the match started, and, as Budge would later say, "came out pale and serious and played as if his life depended on every point." Von Cramm lost. In 1938 he was imprisoned by the Gestapo.

Transcript:
As Cramm and I were leaving the locker room, the telephone rang and Cramm was called back, and it was Hitler calling him to wish him good luck, in this particular match. Of course it was quite exciting because the fellow who had charge of getting the players out on the court on time had both of us by the arm, he wouldn't Cramm go, and Cram was saying, "Yes Mein Fuehrer," this and that, and it got to be quite a tense moment. However, we finally did get out on the court. And I managed to win the 3rd and 4th, and right away I was down 4-1 in the 5th set. I decided I had to get the net position away from him in the worst way. So with this in mind I made up my mind I would try to return his serve and go in behind it. Well as luck had it I did manage to get my returns in, get in to the net and make some winning volleys. I broke his serve and from there on it went to 6-all. Finally at 7-6 I broke his serve, and after 6 match points, finally won the thing, after a great struggle--falling down on the ground on my last point--but making the shot nonetheless. But as we shook hands at the net, I'll never forget what Cram said, he said, "Don," he said, "I'm very happy that I played so well against you, whom I like so much, and it was the best tennis I've every played in my life, so congratulations to the best man on this particular occasion.

Don Budge Biography:

In sheer achievement, John Donald Budge accomplished what nobody before 1938 had been able to do--he won the Grand Slam of tennis, capturing the championships of Australia, France, Wimbledon and the United States in the same year. People were suddenly speaking of Budge in the same breath with the already immortal Bill Tilden.

Born June 13, 1915, in Oakland, CA, Budge had been less interested in tennis than in baseball, basketball and football while growing up in the California City where his Scottish-born father, a former soccer player, had settled.

When the 6-foot-1, 160-pound right-hander turned to tennis, his strapping size enabled him to play a game of maximum power. His service was battering his backhand considered perhaps the finest the game has known, his net play emphatic his overhead drastic. Quick and rhythmic, he was truly the all-around player and, what is more, was temperamentally suited for the game. Affable and easygoing, he could not be shaken from the objective of winning with the utmost application of hitting power.

The red-haired young giant was a favorite wherever he played, and he quickly moved up the tennis ladder. At the age of 19, he was advanced enough to be named to the Davis Cup team. The next year, 1936, he lost at Wimbledon and Forest Hills to Fred Perry, the world's No.1 amateur, but beat Perry in the Pacific Southwest tournament.

In 1937 Perry turned pro and Budge became the world's No. 1. He won at Wimbledon and Forest Hills and led the U.S. to its first Davis Cup in 11 years, 4-1 over Britain. The most brilliant act therein was his famous revival in the fifth set of the fifth match against Germany in the person of the stylish Baron Gottfried von Cramm to win the interzone final at neutral Wimbledon. He had already beaten Henner Henkel and won the doubles with Gene Mako over Henkel-von Cramm, so, with the score knotted, 2-2, up came the decisive test, another of his classic jousts with von Cramm. Not only was Budge far back, by two sets, but he had to rise from 1-4 in the fifth to win on a sixth match point, 6-8, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 8-6, and tip the series to the U.S., 3-2.

After that the Challenge Round against Britain, also at Wimbledon, was relatively easy, though Don had to beat lefty Charlie Hare in a rugged first set, and take him, 15-13, 6-1, 6-2, to offset Frank Parker's lead-off loss to Bunny Austin. Budge and Mako won the doubles, and Don beat Austin on the third day, his 18th successive singles win on his seeming home turf. Culminating a fantastic year, Budge received the Sullivan Award as America's top amateur athlete, the first tennis player to be so honored.

The high regard in which Budge was held by fellow players, spectators and officials was reflected by the loyalty he demonstrated in 1937. He was a big attraction for pro tennis but decided against leaving the amateur ranks for another year. The United States had the Davis Cup and he decided that, in return for all tennis had done for him, he must help in the defense of the Cup for at least another year.

So he turned down the professional offers, aware that poor fortunes in 1938 could hurt, if not end, his earning power as a pro. As it turned out, 1938 would be his most glorious year. He defeated John Bromwich, 6-4, 6-2, 6-1, in the Australian final, losing only one set in the entire tournament. In the French championship he beat Roderich Menzel of Czechoslovakia in the final, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4, and yielded three sets in the tournament. At Wimbledon he did not lose a single set, beating Bunny Austin of Britain, 6-1, 6-0, 6-3, for the title, and at Forest Hills he gave up but one set-to Gene Mako in the final--in winning the U.S. crown, 6-3, 6-8, 6-2, 6-1.

Budge had won the Grand Slam and was the toast of the tennis world. After helping the U.S. retain the Davis Cup over Australia, beating Adrian Quist and Bromwich, and after four years in the World Top Ten, No. 1 in 1937-38, and five years in the U.S. Top Ten, he left the amateur ranks. He did so with the blessing of the USTA president, Holcombe Ward, and the Davis Cup captain, Walter L. Pate, who wished him well in his pro career.

Budge's 1938 season was limited to eight tournaments, of which he won six on 43-2 in matches. His incredible 92-match, 14-tournament winning streak that began after a January 1937 loss to Bitsy Grant was ended by Quist in four sets at the Pacific Southwest. His farewell to amateurism was a defeat by Bromwich in his home territory, Berkeley, in the Pacific Coast tourney.

He made his professional debut at Madison Square Garden in New York early in 1939 and, before a crowd of 16,725, defeated Ellsworth Vines, 6-3, 6-4, 6-2. On tour, Budge defeated Vines, 21 matches to 18, and also defeated Perry, 18-11. On tour with the 47-year-old Tilden, Budge beat him, 51-7.

Budge won two U.S. pro titles at Forest Hills before entering the Air Force in 1942: 1940 over Perry, 6-3, 5-7, 6-4, 6-3, and 1942 over Bobby Riggs, 6-2, 6-2, 6-2. A shoulder injury suffered in military training reduced his post-war effectiveness, and he lost the pro tour hegemony to challenger Riggs in a close journey of one-nighters, 24-22. Still, he battled to the U.S. Pro tourney finals of 1946,'47,'49, and '53, losing the first three to Riggs and the last to 25-year-old Pancho Gonzalez, 13 years his junior, and left little doubt as to his greatness. "I consider him," said Bill Tilden, "the finest player 365 days a year who ever lived." He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1964.

Baron Gottfried von Cramm Biography:

If any player was the prince charming of tennis, he was Gottfried von Cramm, a baron of the German nobility, six feet tall, with blond hair, green eyes, and a magnetism that, in the words of Don Budge, "made him dominate any scene he was part of."

The most accomplished tennis player Germany had known, von Cramm must be one of the finest players never to have won the Wimbledon Championship, for which he was runner-up three years in a row--to Fred Perry in 1935 and 1936, and to Budge in 1937.

Von Cramm, who was known as The Baron, was also runner-up to Budge for the U.S. Championship in 1937 and runner-up yet again to Budge in what has been termed the greatest Davis Cup match ever played, the fifth and deciding match in the 1937 semifinal between the United States and Germany. Budge came from 1-4 and had match point five times before he hit the final shot, racing across the court beyond the alley, and he lay sprawled on the ground as the umpire declared the United States to be winner. The score of the match: 6-8, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 8-6.

Said The Baron at the end, when he stood at the net waiting for Budge to pick himself up from the ground: "Don, this was absolutely the finest match I have ever played in my life. I'm very happy I could have played it against you, whom I like so much. Congratulations." The next moment, their arms were around each other.

Von Cramm, a right-hander, born July 7, 1909, at Nettlingen, Hanover, Germany, was noted on the court for his endurance and tenacity. In recalling their thrilling Cup match, Budge related how he put four successive first serves in play his very best, and all four came back as winners for von Cramm.

Few have endured as he did in taking the first of his two French titles in 1934. Five set matches were the rule as he fought through four of them (of six), and snatched a match point away from Jack Crawford in the final, 6-4, 7-9, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3. Two years later another five-setter was his ticket to victory over the World No. 1 Fred Perry, ending with an astounding shutout, 6-0, 2-6, 6-2, 2-6, 6-0. But Perry beat him in 1935 and 1936, and Budge bested him in 1937 as von Cramm lost three straight Wimbledon finals, a record for frustration he shares with Herbert Lawford (1884-86) and Fred Stolle (1963-65). He won six German titles, 1932-35, and remarkably, after the war, in 1948 and 1949, the last at age 40.

But that wasn't the last that aficionados heard of The Baron. He had always loved representing the Fatherland in Davis Cup, was saddened by the Nazi takeover, and elated at the welcoming back of a democratic Germany to the tennis community in 1951. He played three more years for the Cup, leading Germany in 1951 to four wins and the final of the European zone with a 9-1 singles record, beating men half his age such as Dane Kurt Nielsen, soon to be a Wimbledon runner-up. In 1953, at 44, he returned to Paris to say adieu in defeat by France, registering the last of his 58 Cup singles wins over Paul Remy, 30. He was a Cup centurion, one of the select 14 who played more than 100 matches (111). His most productive year was 1935: 11-1 in singles, 4-1 in doubles. In 1937, the year he came so close to winning the Cup, he was 7-2 in singles, 4-1 in doubles.

Popular everywhere he went, von Cramm delighted Americans in 1937 as a U.S. champ and runner-up, finalist to Budge at Forest Hills and victor with Henner Henkel over Budge and Gene Mako in Boston, and at the Australian in 1938 where the two Germans were doubles runners-up to John Bromwich and Adrian Quist.

Von Cramm, at the height of his career when Hitler was preparing for Germany to launch World War II, declined to speak for Nazism in his tennis travels and was imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1938. After the war, during which he was a hero on the Russian front, he had a successful business career and was an administrator in tennis, serving as president of Lawn Tennis Club Rot-Weiss in Berlin. The Baron died in an automobile crash near Cairo, Egypt, November 8, 1976, and a year later was enshrined in the Hall of Fame.