Vitas Gerulaitis was remembered during his funeral as a man who never let tennis interfere with his fun.
Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, Guillermo Vilas and John McEnroe - the men who kept Gerulaitis from being No. 1 in the world - were pallbearers Thursday at the ceremony rich in sorrow and mirth.Gerulaitis, 40, was killed last weekend when carbon monoxide gas seeped into the cottage where he was staying.
"Forty years was not long enough for Vitas to live, but it was enough to leave a lasting impression on all of us," Connors told the congregation at St. Dominic's Roman Catholic Church in this Long Island community.
Gerulaitis' fellow broadcaster and New Yorker Mary Carillo recalled his 21st birthday party, which took place at a hotel on the road.
"He wasn't one to stick a candle in a cupcake and call it a birthday," she recalled. Instead, he invited everyone in the hotel, and many came in pajamas.
"If he had anything to say in today's proceedings," Carillo said, "he would have told all of us to wear our pajamas."
The congregation of some 350 had come to mourn over Gerulaitis, and Carillo had them laughing at him. That, she said, was how it should be: "His legacy is laughter. . . . We all have to tell each other stories about him; we have to keep him alive."
Neither Borg nor McEnroe spoke at the funeral. The latter was unshaven, looked despondent and cried during the 90-minute service.
Others who attended included tennis stars Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Virginia Wade, and actress Janet Jones, who once dated Gerulaitis.
"He was much more than a world class tennis player," said Jones, the wife of hockey star Wayne Gretzky. "His game in life was always to give, never to take."