Cliff Richey

Cliff Richey

Cliff Richey played like his nickname, the Bull, all forehand and refusal to yield, and 1970 was the season it paid off. He topped the inaugural Grand Prix points race, ahead of Arthur Ashe and Ken Rosewall, and took the US No. 1 ranking on a single point, a fifth set tiebreak against Stan Smith in Berkeley that October. That year also brought a Roland Garros semifinal, lost after leading by two sets, and a US Open semifinal against Tony Roche. A second US Open semifinal followed in 1972, past Rod Laver before Ashe stopped him. Raised in San Angelo, Texas, he trained alongside sister Nancy Richey under their father George, and the two became the first brother and sister ranked in the US top ten at once.

The fire that built his 22 career titles carried a cost he did not name for decades. Diagnosed with clinical depression in 1996, near his 50th birthday, Richey later wrote about the illness in Acing Depression, co-authored with daughter Hilaire Richey Kallendorf, and became an advocate for treating the disease he had spent a career refusing to show.