Early in his tenure as Northwestern’s men’s tennis coach, Paul Torricelli traveled to Burlingame, California, to watch potential recruits at a prestigious junior tournament.
Hired ahead of the 1984 season to bring glory to a program that had gone over 20 years without a conference crown despite battling in the upper echelons of the Big Ten, Torricelli found his attention drawn toward a match between two spirited young personalities.
On one side of the net stood Steve Herdoiza of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
On the other, Gary Cohen of Tucson, Arizona.
“I lost pretty badly,” Cohen, an NU commit at the time, said. “The joke there is that after the match was over, we had a short conversation, and then (Torricelli) immediately hightailed it over to Steve Herdoiza.”
No one knew it at the time, but that encounter planted a seed that would eventually sprout into one of the most storied seasons in Northwestern sports history.
In 1990, the Wildcats lifted the Big Ten title, led by future two-time Grand Slam finalist Todd Martin, Herdoiza — the winningest singles player in program history — and a cast of mismatched characters who banded together to get the team over the line.
Thirty-five years later, NU has yet to repeat the feat. This is the story of the team that last tasted conference immortality.
Assembling the squad
Cohen arrived on campus in 1986 as part of a five-player freshman class acquired to inject life into the program. Yet, of the newcomers, only Cohen and one other player — Hawaiian-born Jim Cushing — survived to play on the Big Ten-winning team their senior year.
From the very beginning of their first year on campus, Cohen and Cushing established an unlikely friendship despite their wildly disparate personalities.
“Some people would call it good cop, bad cop,” Cohen said. “I was then and still am now, very direct, very straightforward. Some might say ‘in your face’ would have been a good way to describe me. … (Cushing) came at it in a very Hawaiian way. He’s very laid back and chill.”
In a transitional season for Cushing and Cohen, the ’Cats slumped to a ninth-placed finish in the Big Ten, one place from the basement in the conference’s days of nomenclatural accuracy. Yet, reinforcements would soon be on the way — Herdoiza joined the ’Cats the following season.
“Todd was the best player I ever had, but Steve was the most important one,” Torricelli said. “When he got here, things started to change.”
In the 1988 season, NU leapt up to fifth place in the conference, aided by Herdoiza’s efforts, which saw him land All-Big Ten honors as a freshman. His contributions extended beyond the rigid lines of the court to the nebulous world of recruiting.
According to Martin, he and Herdoiza had a “pretty heated rivalry” throughout their high school years in Michigan. But once Martin set foot in Evanston for a campus visit, everything changed.
“Steve just about tackled me and said, ‘You’ve got to come here, this is a great place,’” Martin said. “It was like his sense of competition with me had been extinguished by the culture of Northwestern. That meant the world to me.”
Coming into NU as the No. 3-ranked junior in the nation, Martin struggled to cope with the high demands of student-athlete life as he dealt with academic hardships and recurring sickness. He said he came “really, really close” to dropping out of NU.
“If I didn’t have wise adults in my life at the time, I would have,” Martin said.
Instead, Torricelli staged two crucial interventions: he introduced Martin to a University writing instructor and told him to go home to East Lansing, Michigan, for a week to reset mentally. The advice worked, and Martin steadily grew more comfortable.
“I just toiled through the rest of that year academically and got healthier, enjoyed my tennis and the team,” Martin said. “And in spite of my grade point average, I probably felt a sense of accomplishment in persevering at the level that I did.”
Alongside Martin, Danish transfer Chris Gregersen joined the ’Cats’ roster prior to the 1989 season after sitting out the year before due to NCAA rules. Playing at Whitman College in his freshman year, Gregersen went on a run to the Division III singles final before making the leap to Big Ten tennis.
By that time, Cohen and Cushing were the team’s co-captains with two years of experience under their belt, helping to guide their younger, more prodigious teammates. Herdoiza established himself as the No. 1 singles player, while Martin slotted below him at No. 2.
The ’Cats finished third in the Big Ten that season, losing a heartbreaking Big Ten Tournament semifinal to Wisconsin, 5-4.
“When we lost, we all made a point to watch them celebrate,” Cohen said of the defeat to the Badgers. “We wanted to make sure none of us forgot that, because we all thought the next year we could do it.”
To the promised land
At the outset of the 1990 season, Torricelli made a promise. Despite boasting a mustache since graduating from high school, Torricelli told his players that he would shave if the team captured the Big Ten title.
“Our big motivating factor was to trash the ‘stache,’” Herdoiza said. “That was really what I think propelled us that year to get over the top.”
Having made major improvements to his game over the summer, Martin not only usurped Herdoiza’s top spot in the lineup but quickly rose to the No. 1 ranking in the nation, sealed following victory at the Rolex National Indoor Championships.
After an inconsistent start to the season in which the ’Cats lost four of five matches on a westward spring break trip, Torricelli settled on a lineup that would propel NU to an undefeated conference slate.
Singles:
- Todd Martin
- Steve Herdoiza
- Chris Gregersen
- Jim Cushing
- Marc Eisen
- Gary Cohen
Doubles:
- Martin/Gregersen
- Cushing/Eisen
- Herdoiza/Cohen
The final piece of the puzzle was freshman Marc Eisen, hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was recruited to add further quality to the bottom portion of the lineup.
The top two singles positions proved all but guaranteed throughout conference play, as Martin finished 12-0 while Herdoiza went 11-1. Similarly, the top two doubles spots were a nearly foolproof source of points. Cushing and Eisen would finish Big Ten play a perfect 6-0, while Martin and Gregersen went 7-1.
After finishing the conference season 9-0, the ’Cats entered the Big Ten Tournament as the No. 1 seed. They dispatched Illinois 5-0, setting up a semifinal matchup against Wisconsin, the team they narrowly lost to at the same stage the year before.
Leading 3-2 with all but one singles match concluded, Cohen saved eight match points at the No. 6 spot and prevailed 1-6, 7-6(6), 7-6(5) to give NU a crucial 4-2 lead heading into the doubles.
From there, Martin and Gregersen sent the ’Cats into the final with a characteristically dominant performance. After that match, Gregersen ridiculed their doubles opponents.
“They were just terrible,” Gregersen told The Daily in 1990. “It wasn’t even a match. It was a joke. We never picked anybody apart like that this whole year.”
After a dramatic semifinal, NU picked apart No. 2-seeded Indiana in a straightforward final.
Cushing was first off the court, and was followed in due course by Martin, Herdoiza and Gregersen.
With Cohen and Eisen still on court, the ’Cats needed just one win to seal their first Big Ten title in 27 years. As Cohen’s opponent opened up a 4-1 lead in the third set, eyes turned to Eisen at No. 5 — even Cohen’s attention strayed from his own match.
“I knew that we were up 4-0 and I knew that Marc Eisen was serving it out,” Cohen said. “All I did was basically watch Marc. I was just waiting.”
Sure enough, Eisen closed the lid on a 6-3, 6-4 victory and was mobbed by his teammates.
“I was the hero for about 30 seconds,” Eisen said. “That was definitely a team effort. It was just the icing on the cake for me to win the last match.”
(Daily file photo by Michael Kates)
Following the victory, the team lifted Torricelli on their shoulder, chanting, “Trash the ‘stache.” And the coach kept his promise. Soon after the title was clinched, Torricelli shaved off his mustache.
“They did me a favor,” Torricelli said. “It was time for a new look.”
For its efforts, NU qualified for the NCAA tournament for the first time in Torricelli’s tenure.
In Indian Wells, California, the No. 23-ranked ’Cats defeated No. 12 Alabama 5-2 in the opening round to reach the Round of 16, but couldn’t manage to knock off No. 4 Georgia in a hotly contested 5-2 defeat. At the individual championships, roughly a week later, Martin and Herdoiza each fell in the quarterfinals.
Yet, despite not making as big a splash on the national stage as his team might have hoped, Torricelli said the team’s enduring legacy would be its Big Ten triumph.
“That team really made their mark on Northwestern athletics, breaking through,” Torricelli said. “The legacy of that team is that they won. They beat the odds.”
The tennis ’Cats became the first men’s athletics team at NU to win a Big Ten championship since 1965. Torricelli said the team’s win helped kickstart a rise “out of the dark ages” across several sports programs.
The win came at a time when the University was fighting for legitimacy against a growing public perception that it didn’t belong in the Big Ten. After the win over Indiana in the Big Ten Tournament final, Cushing spoke to The Chicago Tribune about the bigger picture behind the team’s win.
“We’ve all read how people think Northwestern shouldn’t even be in the Big 10,” Cushing said in 1990. “I think we’ve proven now that not only can we compete, but today, we’re No. 1.”
Martin moves on
The summer before the 1990 season, Martin had already begun to make moves on the professional tour.
After success in a series of satellite events, Martin moved up to the Challenger Tour and promptly won a tournament in New Haven, Connecticut. He then moved on to another Challenger in Winnetka — an event Herdoiza was also playing — where he beat Georgia All-American Al Parker, 6-0, 6-0.
“Steve walked on the court after I went to put my rackets away,” Martin recounted. “He got in my face, and he typically spoke with his finger pointing at you anyway, and he basically yelled at me. He said, ‘You have no business playing college tennis.’”
Martin’s ability to translate his game to the professional circuit became even more apparent during the middle of the 1990 season, when he was offered a wildcard to the Chicago Volvo Championships just after the team’s spring break trip.
The Wildcat No. 1 took down ATP No. 98 Tim Wilkison in three sets in the first round, before facing off against Michael Chang, the 18-year-old American phenom less than a year removed from his Cinderella run to the French Open title. While Chang prevailed 6-3, 6-4, Martin’s performance demonstrated that he could go stroke-for-stroke against the game’s elite competitors.
Torricelli recalled watching the tournament with an agent and asking him for an honest assessment of how far Martin could make it on the tour.
“I was thinking he’d say, ‘Oh, I think he’ll be Top 100,’” Torricelli said. “He didn’t even hesitate and said, ‘Top 30.’ I was like ‘What? Top 30 in the world? God, maybe I better start letting him sit up front in the van.’”
After the 1990 season concluded, Martin played a number of professional events over the summer to test the ATP waters before going pro in August.
Over the next decade, Martin would become one of the best players in the world, performing on the most iconic stages the sport has to offer. He reached a career-high ranking of No. 4 in the world, and reached two Grand Slam finals — losing to Pete Sampras in the 1994 Australian Open final, and then falling narrowly short in a heartbreaking five-set defeat to Andre Agassi in the 1999 U.S. Open final.
Throughout that odyssey, Martin often had his former teammates in his corner, cheering from the stands, just as they used to do on neighboring courts.
“It definitely kept us together as a team,” Eisen said. “I probably remember some of his bigger matches in the Grand Slams more than he does.”
Members of the 1990 squad would make concerted efforts to attend tournaments Martin was competing at together. Cohen recounted going to Wimbledon and the Canadian Open with some of his teammates and getting a behind-the-scenes look at Martin’s life on tour.
“In a weird way, it made us feel like a piece of us was there playing with him,” Cohen said.
35 years later
The squad has continued to stay in touch, meeting up for occasional reunions and maintaining a text group chat. Today, each member is successful in their respective careers.
Torricelli is still at NU, working in the Office of Alumni Relations and Development since 2015 after passing the baton to current coach Arvid Swan in 2007.
Martin has remained involved in tennis, coaching Mardy Fish and Novak Djokovic in his early post-retirement career and serving as the CEO of the International Tennis Hall of Fame until 2023. Herdoiza, too, continues to work in the sport, leading a tennis academy in Michigan.
Cushing serves as the CEO of Elevated Materials, a battery materials manufacturing company in Northern California. Cohen is an Arizona Trial Court judge in his hometown of Tucson. Eisen is an ear, nose and throat doctor in Connecticut. Gregersen moved back to Denmark, where he serves as a CSO for a small software company.
Despite significant dissimilarity in their lives — in location, occupation and indeed still personality — the 1990 NU men’s tennis team remains forever bonded by more than just the shared experience of lifting the Big Ten trophy together.
“Whenever we get together, we continue to make new memories,” Cushing said. “We went through the stages where we’re all out trying to find our place in the workforce. Fast forward a little bit more, we’re all married and trying to figure out how to be good parents to our children. And fast forward a little bit more, now our kids are moving on. As a group, we continue to stay together and support each other through all of our phases of life.”
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