Superstar players competing in December might have wondered if the tennis season was too long. Or maybe the year-end Masters tournament was simply cursed. Whatever the reason, one of the Masters semi-finals ended when a player retired, one point away from victory–two years in a row.
In 1972, the unlucky one was Tom Gorman, who smacked a backhand winner past Stan Smith then, holding match point, told the umpire he couldn’t continue because of a back problem. Neither Gorman nor Smith got through the round-robin stage of the 1973 event, but reporters could dust off their old drafts nonetheless. This time, John Newcombe fell prey to the injury bug, and Tom Okker was the unlikely beneficiary.
Okker was the only undefeated man left in the field, having dispatched Smith, Jimmy Connors, and Manuel Orantes in straight sets. In the semi-final on December 7th, Okker finally dropped a frame to Newcombe, 6-3, but he rebounded to take the second, 7-5. Newk managed to ignore the tightness in his right knee to take a one-break lead in the third, and at deuce in the ninth game, he put away an overhead to earn match point.
And then he felt something pop. Like Gorman a year earlier, Newcombe made his decision quickly. “I might have tried to give it one last shot, to serve an ace on match point,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have been able to play the final, so what was the use?”
Ironically, the situation had once been reversed. At the 1969 Hollywood Pro, Okker hurt his ankle two points away from victory against the Aussie. He softballed two serves, Newcombe netted them both, and Okker advanced. The Dutchman earned a bit more prize money, but he couldn’t recover in time for the next round and defaulted.
Okker held the opinion that he might have beaten Newk this time, too. After all, there was still one point left to play, and Okker had saved the first match point with a strong backhand return. He had already won 91 matches in 1973, and he wasn’t about to concede the possibility of a 92nd.
Whatever would have happened had Newcombe’s knee held out, the Flying Dutchman was into the final, where Ilie Năstase was waiting. Năstase had overcome an early stumble against Gorman to defeat Newcombe and Jan Kodeš in the round robin, then kept his concentration long enough to straight-set Connors in the semi-final.
Năstase had clinched the top spot of the Grand Prix points leaderboard, but as Bud Collins wrote, much was still at stake: a “$15,000 first prize and serious consideration for status as No. 1 in the universe.” The two men had faced off six times since May, with Okker winning four, including their two meetings on indoor carpet. Neither man had taken a direct route to the final, but–cursed or not–the Grand Prix Masters ended up with a championship match worthy of its position as the season-ending showdown on the tennis calendar.
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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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