The carmakers at Volvo didn’t know why so many of their customers were tennis players. But they were confident enough of the connection that they attached their name to the 1973 Volvo International at the Mt. Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
The winner at the $25,000 tournament got a new car. Anyone who test-drove a Volvo in the Northeast could enter a drawing for something almost as valuable: a tennis weekend at Mt. Washington, including lessons with Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, or Fred Stolle.
Laver was the top seed and main drawing card at the Volvo. But as he closed in on his 35th birthday, the Rocket was rusty after an injury-enforced, two-month layoff. By the end of the week, he’d be thinking that he, too, could use a lesson or two from his buddy Fred.
The legendary lefty got a first-round bye, then advanced through the second round by default. His opening match came in the quarters against 19-year-old Vijay Amritraj. Laver had never seen Amritraj before, though he had probably heard about the young man’s run in Hong Kong where, three months prior, Vijay knocked out three members of the Australian Davis Cup team in succession. Since then, Amritraj had reached the quarter-finals of the withdrawal-weakened Wimbledon draw.
Vijay was better prepared. The teenager that Bud Collins called “the monsoon out of Madras” had already won two matches at Mt. Washington. He counted Laver as an idol.
On July 27th, the veteran was on track to send his acolyte home with a nice memory and a slap on the back. Laver won the first set, then reached triple match point at 6-5 in the second, 40-love on his own serve. Anyone other than an ebullient teenager would have headed for the showers.
But this wasn’t the Rocket that inspired generations of young players. Laver hit ten double faults, and as Collins wrote, his backhand “responded like fettucini.” Amritraj saved the match points, broke for 6-all, and won the tiebreak. He took the third set, 6-4.
There was no sign of nerves. At match point, Vijay broke a string with his first serve. He swapped rackets, trotted back to the line, and cracked an ace to finish the job.
Post-match talk centered on the aging hero. While Rod was healthy enough to play, he recognized he might never again be healthy enough to dominate. “I guess it’s back to the hackers,” he said, “I think there’s more left, but I shouldn’t fritter them away like that.”
Or as Stolle put it, “The Rocket isn’t firing anymore.”
In Amritraj, Bretton Woods ended up with a flashy, shotmaking serve-and-volleyer atop the semifinal bracket–just not the one they expected. As for the winners of that Volvo contest: No one could blame them if they turned up for their tennis weekend and inquired about a lesson with the energetic up-and-comer from India.
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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.
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