In 2022, I counted down the 128 best players of the last century. Past tense is my favorite tense.
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Rod Laver [AUS]Born: 9 August 1938
Career: 1956-79
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Peak Elo rating: 2,571 (1st place, 1970)
Major singles titles: 11 (8 pro majors)
Total singles titles: 200
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Rod Laver was a superhero. A diminutive superhero with an alter ego to match.
At five-feet, eight-inches tall, the only outward sign of his athletic prowess was an oversized left arm–“the forearm of a Dungeness crab,” according to John McPhee. He certainly wasn’t going to tell you about all the titles he’d won. He never lost the backcountry humility instilled by his family of Queensland ranchers.
When Laver wasn’t competing, he embraced distractions–the more tedious, the better. The night before a match, he’d find a western on television and re-grip a pile of rackets. He cooked his own food and ran his own errands–anything to keep busy.
Friends knew when a match was approaching. That’s when he got quiet. The bloke who appeared on court wasn’t quite the same.
“The Rocket goes into a phone booth to change,” said American player Marty Riessen.
In tennis whites–or pinks, or blues, once apparel sponsors started throwing money around in the 1970s–Laver summoned all the focus he had squirreled away before he took the court. Spectators couldn’t help but notice his eyes. Other players would acknowledge fans in the gallery, give a quick smile after a good shot. Not Rod.
One onlooker caught Rocket’s eye during the 1969 US Open final. “Nothing,” he said. “Instant shutout. Two steel beads looking out of an icebox.”
When it was over, Laver would snap back just as quickly. Always a kind word at the net, always a cordial response to well-wishers. In proper Australian fashion, he was the kind of guy with whom you could play a few sets in the afternoon, then share a few beers in the evening.
But not too many. Rocket probably had another match tomorrow. He’d rather be back at the hotel, watching a western.
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There were a lot of matches, a lot of hotels, a lot of westerns. Laver played competitive tennis for more than two decades, coming of age in the years of Harry Hopman’s Australian tennis dynasty and leaving the scene when the likes of Jimmy Connors and Björn Borg had turned the game into a global media spectacle.
In fact, Rod had three careers. He won an amateur Grand Slam in 1962, then turned pro. He became the top professional in the years before Open tennis arrived. Then, with amateurs and pros reunited, he won another Grand Slam in 1969.
Laver chats with Queen Elizabeth II after winning the 1962 Wimbledon title
Alone, any one of those three careers–1956 to ’62, 1963 to ’67, and 1968 to ’79–would merit a place in the Tennis 128.
Laver’s Slams were a big deal when he accomplished them, but the hoopla, even in 1969, was nothing compared to what the media whips up these days when a player so much as comes close. When Rocket won the 1969 US Open, Sports Illustrated–often a home for lengthy feature stories on tennis stars–relegated a tournament recap to a single page.
The cover went to college football: “Ohio State Still No. 1.”
Players of his era didn’t zero in on majors the way that we do now. To them, the limitations of the slam tally were particularly obvious. Most of the greatest-of-all-time candidates–Laver, Richard González, Ken Rosewall, Jack Kramer, even Don Budge–lost years of opportunities when they went pro. González had a good case as the game’s best ever, and he had a measly two slam titles to his name.
Rocket’s eleven majors, then, are a bit beside the point. When you chop five and a half years out of the middle of a career, it can lose some luster. With the same span removed, Novak Djokovic falls from 21 majors to 13. Rafael Nadal drops from 22 to 17. Roger Federer bids adieu to a full half of his 20.
Throughout those “missing” years, all Laver did was face a tough opponent almost every day. Barnstorming across Australia, Europe, and North America, he played over 100 matches each season, a staggering number of them against Rosewall, dozens more against González. Rod was the best pro for three, possibly four years. No one in the amateur ranks was close.
It’s a bewildering thought: At his peak, the man with the two Grand Slams didn’t play any slams at all.
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But really, everything about Rocket Rod Laver defies logic.
First off, the “Rocket” tag started off as a joke. Harry Hopman liked to hand out motivational nicknames. Rosewall was “Muscles” because he was so puny. Laver was slow, so he became “Rocket.”*
* A few sources say Rod was called “Rocket” after his hometown of Rockhampton. Plausible, but boring. I say we ignore it.
Let’s review. The young Laver was short, slow, and left-handed. Playing lefty wasn’t universally considered a handicap, but at the time, it was unusual. Both Rosewall and Margaret Court were naturally left-handed, and early coaches forced both to hit their serves and forehands on the right side. Rocket’s first coach, Charlie Hollis, was a particularly useful guide for a guy who just happened to be in the neighborhood, but his greatest contribution might have been simply to let Rod hit with his dominant hand.
Early forecasts were not rosy. Rod’s father Roy thought his older son, Trevor, had a nicer game and a better chance to play competitively. “Rodney was the freak of the family,” Roy said, “the only left-hander.”
Fortunately for Rodney–not to mention generations of fans–Harry Hopman was always on the lookout for a certain kind of young man. Above a certain baseline level of skill and potential, he wanted to see a calm disposition, a fierce competitive streak, and an enormous capacity for training. Measured by that scale, Laver was the greatest prospect of all time. Other teens griped about the Hopman workload; Laver ate it up.
The hat of a champion, at the 1962 Australian
While Muscles Rosewall never really grew into his nickname, Rocket Laver most certainly did. John McPhee, writing in 1970, called him “the fastest of all tennis players. He moves through more square yards per second than anyone else, covering ground like a sonic boom.”
Rod also developed a game to overcome the disadvantage of his size. Hollis preached spin, spin, and more spin, commanding the young Laver so relentlessly to hit over the ball that his arm would ache for days after each lesson. The most common adjective used to describe Rod’s game over the years was “wristy.” No one else relied so much on that part of their racket arm.
“Short blokes can’t hit flat balls,” Hollis told him. “Big men don’t need spin, but the little runts like you do.”
Every serve had spin on it as well. It had to. “Even today,” he said in 1971, “if I serve as hard as I can it won’t stay in without topspin. I can’t see the baseline except through the net.” Somehow, even surrounded by lanky cannonballers like González, Arthur Ashe, and Stan Smith, Laver was often credited with the best serve in the game.
“I have found my size to be more an asset than a weakness,” Rocket once said. He served like a rhino and moved like a gazelle, so it was hard to argue.
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Phase one of the Laver story kicked into gear in 1959, when he reached all three finals at Wimbledon. His personal success surprised some pundits, but it was typical that an up-and-coming Australian would reach the final. Ashley Cooper had broken through in 1958, then turned pro. Rod’s only top-class opponent en route to the singles final was American youngster Barry MacKay, who pushed him to five sets.
The 20-year-old Laver fell short against Alex Olmedo in the singles final. With countryman Bob Mark, he fell short in the doubles, as well. His first Wimbledon title came in the mixed, with Darlene Hard. Hard was only two and a half years older than Rocket, but she clearly saw him as the junior partner. “Okay,” she said to open their partnership. “I’ll serve first and take the overheads.”
In 1960, Rod picked up the Australian title with a defeat of countryman Neale Fraser. Fraser won rematches for the titles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills. Some spectators at this point considered Laver a “dullish, uninteresting fellow to watch.”
Either the detractors weren’t paying attention, or the lefty’s tennis would get a whole lot more exciting in a short span of time.
Laver beat American Chuck McKinley in just 53 minutes for the 1961 Wimbledon crown. While he fell to Roy Emerson in the Australian and US finals, he picked up a total of 15 tournament victories that year. One of them came at the German Championships, where he outlasted a series of opponents with considerably more experience on European clay. That, as much as anything else, was a hint of his breadth of skill and the greater things to come.
It all came together in 1962. Rocket won the Grand Slam and another 18 titles besides. The three grass-court majors were easy pickings; he knocked out Emerson in two of them and yet another Australian, Martin Mulligan, in a 52-minute Wimbledon final. Roland Garros was the tough one. He needed three five-setters in the last three rounds to get through. In the final, Emerson led two sets to love, 3-0 in the third set.
Rocket would never lose his flair for the dramatic. John Underwood wrote in 1971:
[W]hen Laver is behind, he appears to be–he is–more dangerous; when he is forced into the extremes of the court, into the corners, he has an astonishing faculty for drawing back and ripping through his best shots. There is a suspicion around that he is only at his best when he is behind and has to rally. He seems always to be making it back from 15-40, or two sets to love.
Down 0-3 to Emmo, Laver reeled off six straight games and finished the day with a 6-2 final set. That season, though, opportunities for such comebacks were rare. He was the unanimous number one amateur, and Aussie tennis fixture Sir Norman Brookes considered him the best player in the world–professional or amateur–even before Rod secured the final leg of his Grand Slam.
By that point, it was an open secret he’d be switching sides. The pro circuit needed a star, and there was nothing else left for Laver to prove. Plus, who could turn down a $110,000 guarantee?
Emerson wasn’t complaining. He joked after losing in New York: “It will be nice playing someone else in these finals.”
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1963 appeared to prove Sir Norman wrong. After leading Australia to its fourth consecutive Davis Cup victory in December, Laver got his first taste of professional tennis. Facing Rosewall and Lew Hoad, he floundered.
He lost 19 of his first 21 matches against the two men. He began a punishing tour by taking just 8 of 40 decisions from Ken.
Much has been made of Laver’s tough transition. The easiest way to illustrate how the amateur and pro ranks compared in the 1950s and 1960s is to say, simply, “Even Laver struggled when he went pro.” And he did. And the overarching point is valid. Jack Kramer and later promoters signed the best players in the amateur game, so it stands to reason the pro circuit featured stronger competition.
At the same time, the transition was as much to blame as the level of play. Rod told the New Yorker in early 1963:
Competitively, the professional game is entirely different. In amateur tennis, you can take it easy during the early part of the week and conserve yourself for your top matches on Friday and Saturday. Here, every match is tough… You must raise your whole game and maintain that level.
Everybody knew it, too. No rookie professional since Kramer in the late 1940s had succeeded immediately. Rosewall said that his game improved 25 to 30 percent in his first three years as a pro. Adrian Quist, the former Australian champion turned columnist, predicted from the get-go that Laver would “settle down, and he could be the best of the lot.”
It didn’t take long for the newcomer to sort things out. 1963 was the last season in which Rosewall would get the better of their head-to-head record. Richard González returned to the circuit in 1964, and Laver took 5 of 12 decisions from him that year. The Australian soon reversed that record, too. Rocket particularly established himself at the “pro slam” events. They weren’t as prestigious as their amateur equivalents, but they did draw strong fields. Between 1964 and 1967, he reached the final of all 12 pro slams, winning 8.
The key to pro success was a big serve, both to keep points short and to take advantage of frequent indoor venues. Rosewall, for all the beauty of his groundstrokes, was always looking for an opening to come in. Rod didn’t need to look. Despite his height, his serve was the finest on the circuit, good enough to follow to the net every time. Only González was even in the conversation.
At the close of 1964, pundits had reason to pick either Rosewall or Laver as their pro number one. From 1965 on, there was no longer anything to debate. That applied to the amateurs as well. Emerson held sway among the traditionalists, and there was no doubt whose game had improved more since the two Aussies last met in 1962.
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The transition from an amateur-pro divide to Open tennis in 1968 was no problem for Laver. It was, however, a bit rocky for the game itself. It took more than a decade for the modern tour calendar to emerge. In the meantime, stars like Rod played a schedule not entirely unlike their earlier pro circuit, just with the majors tacked back on.
Laver, Rosewall and the rest continued to sign six-figure contracts with promoters. In exchange, they agreed to participate in specific events–a lot of them. The result was that the best players followed each other around the globe, facing off constantly.
In the six years between 1968 and 1973, Rocket spent a staggering amount of time battling the strongest players in the game. He met his ten most frequent opponents a total of 205 times: 34 matches per season. (He won 154 of them.) He played Rosewall 32 times, Emerson 26, Fred Stolle 23, Tom Okker 22, and Tony Roche 20. He won his first 18 meetings with Arthur Ashe.
This, more than anything else, explains how we can say that Laver was the greatest player ever. For the first time in tennis history, all the top players duked it out. Many otherwise unremarkable tour stops had all-stars on every single line of the draw. At one middling event in 1969–right after Wimbledon, no less–Laver came out on top of an 16-player field by beating Okker, Rosewall, and John Newcombe in succession.
You can see how the majors posed little problem for Rocket in those years. Top-notch facilities, early-round cakewalks, days off between matches–for Rod and Muscles, this was tennis on easy mode.
Laver lost the first Open major to Rosewall, at the French in 1968. At Wimbledon, he picked up where he left off in 1962, straight-setting Ashe and Roche for his third career title there.
Then, 1969, the second Grand Slam. You have to feel for Roche, another left-hander from Down Under who played the best tennis of his career that year. Roche even beat Laver five times between January and May, just never when it mattered. At the Australian, Rocket came out on top of a 7-5, 22-20, 9-11, 1-6, 6-3 semi-final, and Roche snatched the first set of the title match at the US Open.
Roche, at least, had company. At the Australian, Laver beat Emerson, Stolle, and Andres Gimeno. At the French: Stan Smith, Gimeno, Okker, and Rosewall. Wimbledon: Smith, Cliff Drysdale, Ashe, Newcombe. Forest Hills: Dennis Ralston, Emerson, Ashe. After those easy early rounds, every one of the four slams featured four opponents who either made the Tennis 128 or rank among the first couple dozen names who missed.
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There was never any mystery about why Laver won so much. He served big, he volleyed well, his groundstrokes were solid, he was fast, he could improvise, he was mentally solid… all that before he fell behind and got even better.
González told John McPhee that Rocket’s weakness was the “bouncing overhead”–a smash struck after letting the ball bounce. Presumably Gorgo was joking.
Central to Laver’s strategy was a willingness to go for winners when no one else would. Dick Crealy, an Australian who took him to five sets at the 1969 French, said, “[Y]ou make your best shot and he’ll knock it for a winner and do it with contempt.” Tom Gorman added, “Laver plays so well off other people’s power that it gets discouraging.”
Rosewall might have possessed the sturdiest mind of any of Rod’s rivals, but even he found that an impossible winner off the Laver racket could “boggle the concentration.”
That was the idea.
Rocket explained in 1971:
If I’m in trouble, I attack. It’s my game. If I have the choice—play this ball back, just dump it back or try to hit it out—I go for the winner. Why just lob it back? You’re liable to miss either way…. After a while, it can become a psychological thing. Run one down at 15-40 and make it, and you are only a point from being even. If you have hit a winner under pressure like that when the other guy thinks you wouldn’t dare, you have got something else going.
Perhaps this was another lesson from the pro circuit. Against such a towering cast of rivals, no one could win every night. You certainly couldn’t beat Rosewall by playing it safe. Laver’s superpower–though he rarely needed it–was this ability to turn desperation into a weapon.
All of the great Australians understood that, beneath it all, it was just a game. On the ropes, Laver didn’t feel like a superhero. But he never conceded an inch. What the hell, he told himself. “They can’t shoot you if you lose.”
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