Jack Kramer

Jack Kramer, who has died aged 88, was one of the greats of American tennis, as both player and entrepreneur. He changed the face of the game and earned a fortune in the process. After retiring from professional play in his 30s, he became a force in promotion and organisation, while in the second half of his life he switched his attention to golf, making another fortune from that sport. In between, he sat alongside Dan Maskell in the BBC television commentary box at Wimbledon, until dropped at the behest of the championship's organisers, the AELTC (the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club). He was the archetypal get-up-and-go crewcut American, full of energy and ideas, and hugely competitive.

First, though, he was a great tennis champion of the 1940s, developing a powerful, ruthless serve and volley game, with one of the best second serves in history and immense mental toughness. He was considered by many to be second only to Don Budge as a master of the game at the time.

Born in Las Vegas, the son of a railroad worker, he grew up in the Los Angeles area and became a junior member of the American Davis Cup team of 1939, for a contest played in the shadow of Hitler's invasion of Poland. With a 2-0 lead after the first day,the US risked putting in Kramer and Joe Hunt for the doubles. They lost. Then, heavyweights Bobby Riggs and Frank Parker lost too, giving the cup to Australia.

It was the last such event until after the second world war - in which Kramer served in the coast guard - when he and Ted Schroeder regained the cup from Australia in 1946. Against the same oppoents, they retained it in 1947, but for the general public the Davis Cup would never again be so vital a competition as in the prewar period, when it had been at least as important as the Grand Slam championships.

Kramer now seized his moment at these, too. He had already won the US men's doubles in 1940, 1941 and 1943, and in 1946, aged 25, he won the singles, while at Wimbledon that year, seeded second, he and fellow American Tom Brown won the men's doubles. In the Wimbledon singles, though, after dropping just four games in his first three matches, Kramer lost dramatically - conceding the second set 15-17 - to Jaroslav Drobny ("a chubby little unseeded guy from Czechoslovakia. The field was so undistinguished," he said later).

Among those watching his surprise defeat was Gloria, his wife. Kramer had sold their car to finance her trip. He had also worked in a meat-packing plant owned by Wilson Sports, until he persuaded them they should pay him, but let him off the work, leaving him free to play tennis.

The following year, 1947, marked Kramer's peak. Not only helping the US retain the Davis Cup, he also won the men's doubles and singles championship at Wimbledon and the US. His doubles partner was now Robert "the praying mantis" Falkenburg (whose name Kramer misspells throughout his book The Game). In the singles at Wimbledon he stormed to the semi-finals before having a four-set match. Even in this, against Australia's Dennis Pails, Kramer took the other sets to 1, 1 and 0.

Delayed by the late arrival of King George VI, his finals match, against ex-doubles partner Tom Brown, was another straight sets win for Kramer - and lasted a mere 45 minutes. Not only was the match itself unusually brief. Kramer introduced shorts to the Centre Court that day - though Britain's Bunny Austin had introduced them to the game.

That was to be the end of Kramer's Wimbledon career. He had played for only two years, and in the doubles never lost a match. In singles, he had played 11 and won 10.

He now disqualified himself from the Grand Slams - having never attempted the French or Australian championships - by turning pro in 1947. His debut, against Riggs, was at Madison Square Garden, New York. A crowd of 15,000 braved the city's heaviest-ever snowfall to see them. Kramer lost, though when they went on the road to tour the US, he finished 69-20 up. He made over $70,000 against Pancho Gonzalez, well over $100,000 playing Riggs and even more playing Frank Sedgman: vast sums then. He also won the Professional singles in 1948, and in 1949 the World Professional doubles (with Riggs) and singles. That same year, banned from Wimbledon as a pro by the All England Club, he turned up defiantly as his old partner Schroeder's "second".

More importantly to the development of the sport, he began promoting tournaments in 1952, and, with an arthritic back, retired from play two years later to concentrate on tennis the business. One of his achievements was, as he told Tennis Week magazine, "to bring the game to 85 to 95 cities outside the big cities on an annual basis". So successful was he that Jack Kramer's circus (he heard nothing wrong in that phrase) came to control the pro tennis world for 15 years, dominating the game and laying the foundations for the celebrity-based publicity machine and mega-bucks business we know today.

The circus was not always honest. Kramer admitted to the Guardian in 1981 that he had bribed Gonzalez to play less than his best against Ken Rosewall, that "we tried to get Pauline Betz to go easy on Gussy Moran" and "sometimes only played one set in the doubles for real".

From 1961 till 1974, the BBC put Kramer alongside the great Dan Maskell in the commentary box. It proved an edgy partnership. Des Lynam seems to have enjoyed hearing it: "They were the perfect match, coffee and cream," he declared, in happy sports commentator style. Maskell, with the fastidious good manners of the reticent expert and English gent, carried on through just-audibly gritted teeth.

The All England Club forced the BBC to drop him after 1974, perhaps wrongly holding him responsible for the 1973 players' boycott, a complex affair that began when the International Tennis Federation asked the Grand Slam tournaments to ban Nikki Pili´c for dropping out of a Davis Cup tie for Yugoslavia, and Wimbledon (alone) complied. Kramer had a hand in what happened. He had helped form the Association of Tennis Professionals in 1972 and was its first executive director - and it was the ATP that called the boycott, which the Romanian Ilie Nastase and Britain's Roger Taylor were the only ATP players to break.

This victory allowed the game's professionals to wrest control of their affairs from the old-school amateur part-time officials, and Kramer was dropped from the BBC in revenge. Yet this player power was the inevitable consequence of having opened up Wimbledon to the pros in 1968. Indeed, it ushered in the kind of tennis world that Jack Kramer's circus had shown was possible back at the end of the 1940s.

Kramer claimed that he lost interest in tennis after this, but in 1978 came his book How to Play Your Best Tennis All the Time and the following year The Game: My 40 Years In Tennis; he continued to be a big-event spectator; and it was as "Mr Tennis" that he attended Ronald Reagan's 1981 gala dinner for "America's finest sportsmen", sitting with, among others, Joe DiMaggio and OJ Simpson.

Turning his attention increasingly to golf, he had become by the 1990s owner of both the Los Serranos golf courses in California's Chino Hills, an hour from his Los Angeles home. He was assisted in the business by his sons, headed by Bobby.

Kramer underwent three hip replacement operations and may have played his last tennis match in 1994, when he lost to one of his grandchildren - a result he still felt defensive enough to have to explain: "When you can't run too far," he said, "you have to overplay every ball you can hit, so you make a lot of errors." He was 72 at the time.

Half a century on from his championship win, Kramer was to be seen, almost forgiven, in the Royal box at Wimbledon, watching the 1997 men's finals. He was, after all, one of the greatest tennis players of the 20th century and a founder of the modern game.

Despite his claimed loss of interest in the sport, he continued to hold views on the leading players, and was following the US Open championship in progress at the time of his death from cancer. Gloria died in 2008, and he is survived by his sons Bob, David, John, Michael and Ron.

• John Albert Kramer, tennis player and promoter, born 1 August 1921; died 12 September 2009