In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Rosie Casals [USA]Born: 16 September 1948
Career: 1962-83
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1970)
Peak Elo rating: 2,274 (3rd place, 1971)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 29
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Rosie Casals was one of the greatest doubles players of all time. She won 112 titles, half of them with lifelong friend and rival Billie Jean King. She was no slouch on the singles court either, racking up over 800 career match victories and at least 29 titles. She reached another 56 finals in a two-decade span from 1961 to 1981.
Among her singles championships are two of the most important events in the early history of professional women’s tennis. In 1970, Gladys Heldman arranged a pro tournament in Houston for the Original Nine, the women who were so outraged by the staggering difference between men’s and women’s prize money at the prestigious Pacific Southwest that they opted for an upstart event instead. Casals beat Judy Dalton in the final to secure the $1,600 first prize.
Three years later, Rosie claimed the title at the first-ever women’s event with a six-figure purse. At the 1973 Family Circle Cup on Hilton Head Island, Casals edged Billie Jean King in the semi-finals and squeaked past Nancy Richey in the final, 3-6, 6-1, 7-5.
She was more often the bridesmaid. She lost to King 50 times, Margaret Court 32 times, and Chris Evert 21 times in 22 matches. (As a consolation, she was 29-0 against Val Ziegenfuss.) Rosie peaked at #3 in the accepted rankings of the day, and she more often found herself in the back half of the top ten. Not bad for a largely self-taught woman from a working-class family who stood a mere 5-foot-2.* In fields with all-time greats such as King, Court, Richey, Evonne Goolagong, and Virginia Wade, every second- or third-place finish counts as a triumph.
* and a quarter!
Yet the talented Casals got tagged early on with the “underachiever” label. Depending on who explains it, she was too short, insufficiently motivated, psyched out by King, or–this one comes from Rosie herself–“too creative.”
Billie Jean even danced on the line of calling her friend lazy. Counterfactuals are tricky–maybe Casals could’ve achieved more had she worked harder off the court. But a look at her record throughout the 1970s, and especially in the early part of the decade as independent professional women’s tennis found its footing, suggests that she was working as hard on the court as anyone in the game.
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First, the charges. King wrote in an early autobiography:
It did sort of irritate me when people wrote all that junk about Rosie getting psyched out by me when it counted. … I was not only a much better player than Rosie, but she was also much lazier.
I often told her–and remember we were doubles partners for seven straight years–that if she were going to try and play the net game, as short as she was, even far shorter than I, then she was going to have to be five times better conditioned than anybody else. But she didn’t want to hear that. Rosie was quite content being number five or six in the world. … She’d rather have a good time with her friends. You know what Rosie loves the best in all the world? Amusement parks. I’ll bet she’s been to every one on the face of the earth that’s worth anything.
Billie Jean has become more circumspect over the years, and Casals’s work ethic didn’t come up in King’s recent book, All In. The author gives herself credit for surviving a killing schedule in 1971 as she played alongside Rosie in the first full season of the Virginia Slims tour:
Despite the relentless schedule, I took seventeen of the thirty-one singles titles I played for and had a 112–14 record. If you tossed in the twenty-two doubles titles I won, nearly all of them with Rosie, I easily played more matches that year than Johnny Bench played baseball games (149).
All those titles, combined with the steadily growing prize purses for women’s tennis, meant that King became the first female player to earn more than $100,000 in a season. Rosie won enough to come in third in the prize money race. She earned $62,000–over $400,000 in present-day dollars.
She did it by matching Billie Jean’s workload every step of the way. King played 126 matches… Casals played 123. King won 22 doubles titles… so did Rosie. (They won 19 together, and Casals added two with Judy Dalton and one with Françoise Dürr.) I don’t have complete doubles results for every event that year, but she may have lost as few as four doubles matches in the entire season. Oh, and when one event was short of ballkids, Rosie filled in.
Casals (left) and King at Wimbledon in 1972
Rosie’s schedule was almost as demanding again in 1973, and from 1974 to 1978, she tacked on as many as 44 World Team Tennis ties each year to the regular tournament season. No woman played as many events on the 1971-78 Virginia Slims tour. At the end of her 1974 WTT campaign for the Detroit Loves, she said, “Everybody’s tired.”
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There’s a persistent narrative throughout tennis history that the best shotmakers tend to have flighty personalities and fail to live up to their potential. You rarely hear Novak Djokovic called a “great shotmaker”–though of course he is–because he’s also so good at everything else. Even when an all-time great like John McEnroe is recognized for his spectacular physical feats, commentators tend to seize on what the athletic genius didn’t do. Somehow, McEnroe’s career, with its seven singles majors, has gone down in history as a disappointment.
So it is with Rosie Casals. Veteran Australian coach Harry Hopman watched her as an 18-year-old and pronounced her the best junior prospect in the world. Bud Collins called her the greatest shotmaker in women’s tennis history. She didn’t live up to the billing, reaching only two major singles finals and losing both.
Short women had a better chance in the game of the 1970s than they do today–Billie Jean was only 5-foot-4. But even then, the deck was stacked against someone as small as Casals. A 5-foot-2-inch netrusher could just barely survive in the 1970s game, and to do so, she needed an extensive bag of tricks. Journalist Grace Lichtenstein, who wrote a book about the 1973 season, said she was “among the most powerful and the most acrobatic, with an overhead that could take the cover off a ball and a few flat-on-the-floor and behind-the-back shots that hadn’t been named yet.”
Casals on the run in 1974
Margaret Court was rarely one to give unnecessary praise, but she snuck some into a backhanded compliment: “[S]he gets around the court pretty well, too. She’s built so close to the ground, you know.”
If Rosie wanted to convince the public that she was more than just an impulsive raw talent, she didn’t exactly help her own cause. She would grab cigarettes from fans after matches, and she was often seen with a post-game beer in hand. Later, she switched to cigars. After dropping the first set to a player she should’ve beaten easily in 1973, she said, “Shit, I just forget how to play from day to day, and it takes me a set to learn again.”
King puts it down to fundamentals:
On the court she loved to discover new ways to hit the ball, but she never really worked hard enough on developing the kind of sound, basic game you need to reach the very top. All champions, I think, have one great shot, what I call their bread-and-butter shot, the one they can call on at any time to get them through a crisis. With Rosie, there wasn’t any. Very flash on everything, very colorful. But also very erratic–and just not conscientious enough.
You can see why Rosie eventually sought out other doubles partners.
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Despite all the ups and downs–or maybe because of them–Casals was made for professional tennis. She came from a poor family of El Salvadorean immigrants, and she often felt out of place among the country club set that represented so much of tennis in the 1960s. Even in the Bay Area, with its ample supply of public courts and history of middle-class stars, she was an outsider.
Before the start of the Open Era in 1968, it was possible for a few of the best female players to make a good living from federation stipends and under-the-table payments from “amateur” tournaments, but the economy was extremely top-heavy. Some estimates suggest that a superstar such as King or Court was able to make $25,000 a year, while most of their opponents barely covered expenses. As the Virginia Slims tour became established, Billie Jean said, “The money wasn’t important, but the principle involved was.” Rosie would’ve agreed with the second part of that statement, but I doubt she was on board with the first.
Casals jumped at the chance to be one of the four women in George McCall’s pioneering women’s pro tour in 1968 and 1969. And even later, when the entire circuit turned professional, a quirk of the Slims tour offers an interesting illustration of how Casals performed when there was money on the line.
The 1970s Virginia Slims events offered an extra attraction on the final day of tournaments. In addition to the singles and doubles finals, the semi-final losers would play a match (usually a pro set to eight games) to determine the third-place finisher. The winner took home more money. To give an example at random: In the third-place match at the 1973 Virginia Slims of Columbus, Georgia, Julie Heldman beat Rosie, 8-5, and received a check for $1,950. Fourth place was only good for $1,650, $300 less.
The loss to Heldman was an aberration. Casals played more of those third-place matches than anyone else, and she won at a rate just behind only King and Betty Stöve. Here are the ten women who contested the most third-place matches, sorted by wins:
Player Matches Record Win % Rosie Casals 38 28-10 73.7% Virginia Wade 25 15-10 60.0% Kerry Reid 18 13-5 72.2% Betty Stöve 12 10-2 83.3% Nancy Richey 11 6-5 54.5% Billie Jean King 8 6-2 75.0% Martina Navratilova 10 5-5 50.0% Julie Heldman 9 5-4 55.6% Françoise Dürr 11 3-8 27.3% Wendy Overton 7 1-6 14.3%
Even though semi-final losers often ended up in the consolation round due to fatigue or minor injury, Rosie skipped the third-place match only once.
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Casals loved the pro ranks, and fans in the evolving, rowdier era adored her in return.
Lichtenstein wrote:
You didn’t applaud a Rosie Casals, you cheered her until your throat got hoarse, because that’s what her game was all about. Even more than Billie Jean, Rosie brought gut-clutching excitement to the women’s game, an excitement that was the natural extension of her personality.
Rosie embraced the chaos of World Team Tennis, which encouraged spectators to get involved. There were no requests of “quiet, please,” and cheap beer ensured that the crowd wouldn’t heed one anyway. Casals recognized that WTT appealed to would-be fans like she used to be, “the common person” who would feel out of place at a country club and would never travel to Wimbledon or Forest Hills.
And she wasn’t afraid to jump in the fray. In 1974, she said, “Hecklers don’t bother me. I’m glad I’ve played well enough to make them mad as hell.” She once responded to catcalls by launching a serve into the grandstand.
She also rarely hesitated to speak her mind. She was one of the few women professionals who were vocally committed to the women’s lib movement, while Billie Jean–who put her tennis first and feared alienating the masses by moving too fast–set a more cautious standard. This is the woman who, in the run up to the Battle of the Sexes, called Bobby Riggs “an old, obnoxious has-been … who can’t hear, can’t see, walks like a duck and is an idiot besides.”
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Casals never turned into a has-been. While she eased off the singles tour in the early 1980s, she continued to play doubles at an elite level. She reached five major finals with Wendy Turnbull between 1980 and 1983, and they were crowned champions at the 1982 US Open. She won her last tour-level doubles title in 1988, aged 39, partnering another ageless wonder, Martina Navratilova.
Rosie was one of a kind, and the players who came after her made her look even more unique. In a 1982 interview, she told the New York Times, “There’s not enough contrast from No. 1 down to No. 100. Too many people play the same now.”
The trend has continued. Certainly there are no modern contenders of her stature. Even with 5-foot-5-inch Ashleigh Barty atop the ranking table, no one shorter than Camila Osorio’s 5-foot-4 ranks in the top fifty. In a 2019 podcast with Carl Bialik, Casals said there were no modern players who reminded her of herself. Unfortunately, she’s right. Today’s women’s game is thriving, but a modern-day Rosie Casals would make it even better.