![]() He thrived in the team-oriented, competitive environment of a trading floor. Lynch took a job selling corporate debt at Euro Brokers. He found his way to Wall Street, following in the footsteps of his father, who worked as a bond salesman when he was not announcing Giants games. He was resigned to doubles and closed out his tennis career quietly. Persistent pain prevented him from playing singles again. After a solid freshman season, he had spinal fusion surgery. Around that time, he also began having back problems. Lynch received an athletic scholarship to South Carolina. “As Rich got older, you began to notice at the nationals that the competition was getting tougher,” said Jennifer, now a managing director at Wells Fargo Securities in Manhattan. 1 in the region and consistently ranked among the top juniors nationally. Throughout the juniors, in our age group, Lynch was perennially No. An old junior tennis magazine documents how he ran through the competition at a 1981 tournament, dropping just 10 games in his first three matches before shellacking me, 6-1, 6-0, in the final. What isn’t vague is that I always got crushed. My memory is vague, but we probably faced off about a half-dozen times. My dad, a lifelong Giants fan, was giddy when he realized he would be watching our matches in the gallery with his new friend Dick Lynch. Our parents schlepped us to tournaments all over New York and New Jersey. There isn’t one named after McEnroe.īorn four days apart, Rich and I grew up together on the junior circuit. Today, the Eastern section of the United States Tennis Association has a sportsmanship award named after Lynch. In contrast to McEnroe’s laconic one-handed backhand, Lynch hit a driving two-fisted shot reminiscent of Jimmy Connors’s. His game differed from McEnroe’s in two ways. ![]() Rich was the fifth of their six children. His mother, Roz, was a former flight attendant and Miss Pennsylvania. His father, Dick Lynch, was a former Giants football star and their longtime radio broadcaster. Lynch was also blessed with crack athletic genes. “He had the greatest hands, the greatest angles, just like Mac.” McEnroe walked in accompanied by a little kid carrying only a pencil and a piece of paper. They were hanging out in McEnroe’s kitchen when Mrs. McEnroe had just returned to New York after winning his first Wimbledon. She remembers when she first met Rich Lynch. “It was a magical time,” said Carillo, 54, who is now a CBS Sports analyst. She and McEnroe won the 1977 French Open mixed doubles championship. Mary Carillo also grew up in Douglaston Manor, where her parents still live. Since McEnroe, the highest-ranked professional tennis player from the five boroughs is his younger brother Patrick, who in 1995 peaked at No. “It isn’t every day that two players who live 10 minutes from the Open reach the final,” McEnroe said at the time. When he won his first United States Open in 1979, McEnroe faced off in the final against Vitas Gerulaitis, the son of Lithuanian immigrants and a product of Howard Beach, Queens. McEnroe’s ascent to the top of the tennis world was a part of New York City sports history that, in retrospect, seems like a fluke. John and his two brothers, Mark and Patrick, would hit thousands of practice balls against the club backboard, sending more than a few into the Lynch’s yard, which was right over the wall. They learned to play on the courts at the Douglaston Club, a tennis-and-pool hangout in the middle of the neighborhood. McEnroe and Lynch grew up on Manor Road, a street cutting through the center of Douglaston Manor, a hamlet of 600 homes on Little Neck Bay. That description, of course, also fits John McEnroe, who that same year, at 22, won his third consecutive United States Open. 1 player in the Eastern Tennis Association’s boys 10 and under division in 1981. He played with a wooden Dunlop racket, wore Sergio Tacchini clothes and gracefully moved around the court in Nike shoes. A gifted athlete, he swayed back and forth at the baseline before attacking the net behind a wicked left-handed serve. He was a tennis prodigy from an Irish Catholic family in Douglaston Manor, a leafy neighborhood in Queens.
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