Hall of Famer Claude Schoenlank (Class of 2001), who hammered his way to a once-unthinkable 41 Staten Island tennis championships – singles, men’s doubles, and mixed doubles – passed away June 9, at the age of 76.
Schoenlank’s passing, the same day as iconic football coach Dennis Barrett, was one of four Hall of Fame inductees over the last two months, following the loss of basketball stars Brenda Jordan, a pioneer of the women’s game, and Heyward Dotson, the first Staten Islander to score 1,000 points in both high school and college.
Schoenlank announced himself to the tennis community at an early age, winning three New York City private schools championships – the first when he was still in eighth grade – two city PSAL championships while at Curtis High School, and his first Staten Island singles title in 1963, all as a teenager.
A three-time Staten Island Triple Crown winner – singles, doubles and mixed doubles in the same year – he also won a pair of New York City singles, and the 1974 Bermuda Lawn Tennis Association International Open.
Absent from the local courts for three years while going to school in Germany, he returned to complete his undergraduate degree at Wagner College, before settling into a career as the resident teaching professional at the Richmond County Country Club.
Blond and mustachioed, with the build of a pulling guard – or, more particularly, the professional golfer Craig Stadler, a look-alike contemporary and multiple-time winner on the PGA tour – he spent two decades scattering would-be challengers in his wake, while winning another 13 singles titles – including 10 in a row between 1969 and 1978; a dozen in men’s doubles, including seven in a row with three different partners; and 15 in mixed doubles.
Some of those numbers would eventually be surpassed by another Hall of Famer, Ed Perpetua, whose win total, like Schoenlank’s, included the 1988 men’s doubles when the two generational champions teamed to win the whole thing, in an unofficial passing of the torch.
Even in his competitive twilight, Schoenlank remained a dangerous adversary. When he went out in the semis of the 1983 singles tournament, the big crowd – outsized for a semifinal – sent him off to a prolonged standing ovation, an homage worthy of the champion he was. His final Island title came in the 1994, the year Schoenlank turned 50, and 31 years after his first Island championship.
In more recent years, Schoenlank was a regular presence at Hall of Fame reunion dinners and Unsung Heroes breakfasts, a genial reminder of an era when tennis was in its ascendency on Staten Island and everywhere else, and in this neighborhood most of the tournament hardware gravitated to one man.
