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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Roy Emerson [AUS]Born: 3 November 1936
Career: 1953-77
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Major singles titles: 12
Total singles titles: 119
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In September 1962, Rod Laver completed his first Grand Slam with a 2–6, 4–6, 7–5, 4–6 defeat of his fellow Australian, Roy Emerson. It was the tenth meeting between the two players that year, every single one of them in a final. In less than four years, the two men had faced off a whopping 30 times. Laver led the series, 19 to 11.
That year, Laver beat Emerson in seven title matches–at the Australian Championships, the Altamira International in Venezuela, the River Oaks tournament in Houston, the Italian Championships, the French Championships, Queen’s Club, and now the US Nationals. Emerson fell short at Wimbledon only because of a freak injury in the doubles. “He has beaten some great players in the finals,” joked Emerson to the Forest Hills crowd.
Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel: Laver was likely to turn pro. For the last fifteen years, the professional game had steadily chipped away at the amateur ranks. Wimbledon champions received particularly lucrative offers. Of the six winners there between 1955 and 1962, only Neale Fraser chose to remain an amateur.
“It will be nice playing someone else in these finals,” Emerson said.
Even Emerson probably didn’t realize how true that would prove to be. Between 1963 and 1967, the six-footer from Queensland would reach ten more major singles finals, and he’d win them all. He won 12 titles overall in 1963, and he rode a 55-match win streak to an astonishing 19 titles in 1964. He did all this while playing doubles–usually winning–almost every week. Laver called him “the best men’s doubles player of our era,” with 16 major titles to prove it.
After Laver turned pro, there was little incentive for Emerson to follow. Roy’s brother-in-law, 1957 Forest Hills champion Mal Anderson, said, “Top amateurs nowadays make more than the average pro anyway. Emerson collected a healthy paycheck from a sinecure at Philip Morris*, and the best amateurs collected several hundred dollars per week in “expenses” when they played tournaments.
* Few celebrity endorsers have ever been so ambivalent. “Part of my job was to smoke my employer’s product at company functions and store appearances. I took tiny puffs and tried not to inhale because I didn’t want smoke in my lungs…. I was the most uncool smoker ever.”
There was a heavy downside risk in joining the professional ranks, as well. Even apart from the money, he might have struggled against the different standard of competition. Even Laver had a tough time when he first switched. Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated that Emerson “would not be an immediate pro success and, as un-colorful as he is, he would be absolutely veiled in defeat.”
Roy wouldn’t turn pro until 1968, when Open tennis removed much of the decision’s gravity. He was the last great amateur champion.
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It is easy to overrate Emerson. His 12 grand slam singles titles were the most of any player until Pete Sampras won his 13th at Wimbledon in 2000. Even now, Emerson’s haul is good for fifth place on the all-time list.
It’s an impressive tally, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he benefited from a particularly weak era. Most of the top players of his generation had defected to the pros. There was also a dearth of men’s tennis talent coming of age in the 1960s. The next great players to come along after Emerson, Arthur Ashe and John Newcombe, were seven and eight years younger, respectively.
Laver wrote, “Roy rose to the top on the back of natural attrition,” though he adds, sportingly and probably correctly of Emerson’s peak, “Emmo was on fire in those years, and he’d have given me some tremendous matches had I still been around.”
An even more skeptical view comes from pro tennis majordomo Jack Kramer. For his 1978 book, The Game, Kramer imagined a world in which men’s tennis had never been separated into amateur and pro ranks. He listed his hypothetical Wimbledon and Forest Hills champions for each year from 1931 to 1967. His counterfactual gives every single 1960s title to Laver, Ken Rosewall, or Richard “Pancho” González. In reality, Emerson won four of those majors; all Kramer will say is that Roy (or one of several other contenders) might have “sprung a surprise.”
Still, it’s easy to take all of this too far. Emerson did win those dozen majors. You can only beat the guy on the other side of the net, and from 1961 to 1965, he did exactly that–about 500 times.
Emmo–the Aussies weren’t very creative with nicknames–was two years older than Laver, and the pair reached the top of the amateur game at about the same time. Emerson won his first two majors in 1961, both with final-round triumphs over Rocket Rod. He beat Laver in five title matches that year, and some journalists placed him first in their year-end rankings.
My retrospective Elo ratings aren’t quite so rosy, but they demonstrate how competitive Roy was with the rest of the field–even including the professionals. Here are his year-end Elo rankings from 1961 to 1967:
Year Elo rank 1961 3 1962 2 1963 4 1964 1 1965 2 1966 2 1967 3
Emmo was one of only three players–along with Laver and Rosewall–to hold the number one position in that seven-year span. He topped the Elo list for 57 weeks between mid-1964 and mid-1965, and he had brief spells as number one in 1962, 1963, and 1966. He wasn’t the best player of his generation, but the numbers suggest that he would’ve been a contender for every major title–even if his countrymen from the pro ranks had been around to stop him.
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Emerson was a fitting apex to Australia’s great run of world-beating amateurs, a star who would wipe you off the court in the afternoon and buy you a beer in the evening.
Arthur Ashe spoke for a generation of players:
Everybody loved Emmo as a man and respected him as a player. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like him. Everywhere on the circuit, he’d be the last one to leave the bar at night and the first one on the practice court next morning. He’d stay there longer too. Emmo closed more bars and practice courts than anybody I’ve ever known.
The stories of hyper-fit Aussies get a bit repetitive, but Emerson was the fittest of them all. He took coach Harry Hopman’s advice to heart, running circles around his teammates–sometimes almost literally. When the Davis Cup squad ran ten kilometers to the beach, the rest of the group stopped to take a dip while Emmo ran straight back.
The physical training paid off on court. In one stretch between 1961 and 1967, Emerson won 44 of his 64 five-setters. Even in short matches, Emmo pushed his opponents to the limit. He played fast, knowing that most of his peers couldn’t recover as quickly between points.
Emmo’s fitness ameliorated the effects of his full-tilt lifestyle, as well. Bud Collins described Emerson’s and Fred Stolle’s system as “snooze and booze.” One of them would go out, and the other would rest up for the next day’s tennis.
All that time in the gym also helps explain his relatively late peak. He was 24 years old when he won his first major, at the 1961 Australian Championships, after seven years of experience at grand slams. His best years came later still. While dynamic shotmakers like Laver and Lew Hoad could break through earlier, grinders tended to take more time to develop. Laver’s defection to the pros opened the way for Emerson to dominate the amateur tour in 1963, but it’s possible he would have emerged as a superstar around that time no matter what.
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Emerson’s development on clay courts was even slower than his growth into an elite player on grass. In time, though, it was as complete as the rest of his game. He reached the French Championships final in 1962 and won it all in 1963.
When the American team chose clay as the surface for the Davis Cup Challenge Round in 1964, Emmo won both of his singles matches. By then, the home team didn’t dare hope for anything different. The Americans figured they would lose the two points to Emerson; they aimed to win the other three. (They didn’t.)
Emerson at the 1967 French Championships
Perhaps Roy started with a bit of an advantage. The Emerson family lived on a farm in tiny Blackbutt, Queensland. They laid out their own tennis court by spreading out anthills for a playing surface and stringing up chicken wire for a net. The resulting court was probably closer to clay than anything else.
Nonetheless, Emmo wasn’t prepared for his first outing at Roland Garros. Hopman brought him along on the Aussie Davis Cup squad’s world tour in 1954, and the 17-year-old got a early taste of European tennis:
In the French Championships I was drawn to play a bloke I’d never heard of, a Hungarian named József Asbóth, in my first match. The kid fresh out of Blackbutt was overjoyed to be up against a nobody. I raced into the dressing room and I said to Ken Rosewall, “Muscles, I’ve a great chance of winning the first round.” He asked who I was playing. “József Asbóth.” Ken held up three fingers. I said, “What’s that?” He said, “That’s how many games you’re going to win against József Asbóth in three sets.”
Next day I’m waiting on court two at Roland-Garros and out walks this gentleman in long creams. I thought he was the umpire, so I introduced myself. He said he was pleased to meet me and his name was József Asbóth. We started playing. Muscles was watching in the stands, a big grin on his face. It was a slaughter. Józseph, who was 37 and a clay specialist who had won the French singles crown in 1947, had the ball on a string. Seemingly without hardly moving he was always in the right place to return my shot. His clever lobs and chips and drop shots all played with control jerked me all over the court. I was drenched with sweat and his creams weren’t even creased. Ken’s prediction was wrong. I won more than three games, I won nine. József carved me up 6–4, 6–1, 6–4.
Thirteen years later, Emerson was the one doing the carving. At Roland Garros in 1967, he lost only one set in his last four matches, and he beat Tony Roche for the title. The championship completed Emmo’s second career Grand Slam, making him the first player to accomplish the feat.
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By the time Open tennis arrived in 1968, Emerson was 32 years old and past his peak. The 1967 French was his last time reaching the semi-finals at a major. Still, he continued to excel in doubles. Emerson and Laver won the doubles at the first Open tournament, at Bournemouth in 1968. They also teamed up to win the Australian Open in 1969 and Wimbledon in 1971.
Emmo held his own against Laver on the singles court, as well. In 1968, they split ten meetings. In 1969, the year of Rocket Rod’s second Grand Slam, he still snuck off with a victory over his old rival in Japan.
1967 was Emerson’s last Davis Cup campaign, wrapping up a remarkable nine-year run in which the Aussies won the Cup eight times. Roy won 34 of his 38 matches in that span, serving as the anchor of the team for the last five seasons. His reign ended in 1968 only because he signed as a contract pro, making him ineligible. His country could’ve used him; they didn’t win the trophy back until 1973.
Nonetheless, he was a tireless fighter for the green and gold. At the 1973 Aetna World Cup, an international team event for professionals, Emerson came up with a surprise win over Arthur Ashe. He hadn’t beaten Ashe since defeating the American for the 1967 Australian title. Ashe, a Davis Cup veteran, recognized what motivated the players from Down Under. “When Emmo puts on the Australian jock or shirt or whatever it was he wore tonight, he does well.”
Most of the what-ifs of Emerson’s career end up casting a bit of doubt on his legacy. What if Laver and Rosewall had remained amateurs? What if Emmo had turned pro and failed to make the grade?
One lingering hypothetical works the other way. In 1966, Emmo was the two-time defending Wimbledon champion. In his quarter-final match with Owen Davidson, he chased down a ball, slid on the grass, and crashed into the umpire’s chair. He hurt his shoulder, and though he continued playing, he lost the match.
With Emerson out of the picture, Manolo Santana won the tournament. But Santana recognized his good fortune. “Everyone knows Roy Emerson is the true champion.”