jsackmann – Page 13 – Heavy Topspin

August 3, 1973: The Draft

*John Newcombe at the 1973 Louisville Pro Tennis Classic*

The strangest thing about contemporary reactions to the advent of World Team Tennis is that no one seemed to realize just how weird it was.

Let’s review. For decades, the contours of the tennis season had been more or less stable. Specific events came and went, but the basic idea was consistent: a global collection of single-elimination tournaments with regional circuits in each major tennis-playing nation. The pre-1968 professional tours didn’t quite fit that mold, but even they stuck with the notion of head-to-head, rivalry-based singles play. The only teams in tennis were doubles pairs and national groupings for Davis Cup, Fed Cup, and Wightman Cup.

Then, in 1973, a bunch of North American promoters, many of whom knew more about ice hockey than tennis, proposed a 16-team league that would play a 44-match schedule between May and July each year. They raised money, rented venues, sold their vision to players, and charged ahead.

Yes, May to July, that notorious wasteland on the tennis calendar.

I mean, what part of this wasn’t bizarre?

The league crept closer to reality on August 3rd when it held its official draft. The 16 teams took turns choosing a total of 312 players. Miami, with the first overall selection, went with local heroine Chris Evert. Filling out the top six, in order, were Kerry Melville, Rod Laver, Jimmy Connors, Ken Rosewall, and Rosie Casals.

Again, think about this for a moment. It was basically a bunch of rich guys and hucksters playing fantasy tennis, willing to redesign the entire sport to make it happen.

Still, the principals took the league seriously. Some of them had very good reasons to do so. The biggest winners on draft day were Houston and Philadelphia, who picked up John Newcombe and Billie Jean King, respectively. Newk and King were among a handful of players who had already committed to contracts with the league. In exchange, they were given some say in where they ended up. Billie Jean signed for a reported $100,000 per year for five years, and she was jazzed at the prospect of giving long-suffering Philadelphians a winning team to get behind. Newcombe, who would earn around $75,000, welcomed the Team Tennis format as a way to stay closer to his Texas ranch.

Newk, though, might not have understood exactly what he was getting into. Neil Amdur wagged in the New York Times that the stars were “lured by the chance to make more money for less work.” Maybe. But: 44 matches in three months? Including constant travel from one corner of the United States to the other? With Wimbledon stuck in the middle? Newcombe wasn’t going to spend much time at the ranch, and nobody was going to make it to the end of that season refreshed and ready to take on the rest of the 1974 tournament slate.

Owners were jumping into the unknown, too, maybe even more than the players were. No one knew exactly which stars would suit up, beyond the small group of early signees. Evert was noncommittal. Stan Smith fell to the third round and Ilie Năstase dropped to the fourth, as they weren’t expected to participate. Some teams seemed to run out of ideas: San Diego selected retired stars Maria Bueno and Karen Susman. Chicago spent their ninth-round pick on Bobby Riggs, and Toronto rounded out their haul with a local sportswriter named George Gross.

Only one franchise seems to have considered the value of expertise. Cleveland tapped Richard González, the long-time pro champion, as a draft day advisor. Gorgo selected Björn Borg with the 13th overall choice–a savvy call, as long as the Swede would play. In the sixth round, the 45-year-old González named himself.

Even though the 1973 draft ran out of steam after a few hundred picks, Gorgo foresaw a future with a nearly inexhaustible talent pool, one in which Team Tennis would play a valuable role. “It opens up the whole game,” he said. “Within ten years, there will be a thousand good players who’ll need some place to play.”

When the league was announced back in June, promoter Jerry Saperstein compared the venture to a game of craps. Yet the range of possible outcomes for World Team Tennis was more staggering than the stakes in the wildest casino game. The league could quickly go bust in a flurry of lawsuits, or it could prove a going concern, forcing the rest of the tennis world to make room. Win or lose, the sport would never be the same.

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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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August 2, 1973: Smart Cookies

*Bobby Riggs (left) with broadcaster Howard Cosell*

The Astrodome was booked, the one-liners were scripted. All that was left was to play the match… and count the money.

On August 2nd, 1973, promoter Jerry Perenchio struck a deal with the American Broadcasting Company–ABC–to show the Battle of the Sexes in a two-hour prime-time slot. While no one was ready to admit the exact price, reports settled on a number around $700,000. The other major networks had dropped out at $400,000 and $500,000, respectively.

Early signs suggested that ABC didn’t overbid. By press time for the next morning’s newspapers, ABC chief Roone Arledge was able to say that he had sold all 15 minutes of available commercial ad time.

Of course, this being tennis in 1973, a lawsuit was pending. CBS thought it had first dibs on the broadcast. The network was ready to go to court to prove it.

Bobby Riggs continued to bask in the limelight. While Billie Jean King was in Denver, extending her win streak to 19 matches with a 6-2 6-2 defeat of Françoise Dürr, Riggs sat in a New York studio with Howard Cosell, the blustery broadcaster who would call the match. Bobby offered to play in a dress, if that would make Billie Jean more comfortable.

The press conference announcing the media deal also dribbled out another detail of the match: It would be best of five sets. Some sources claimed that Riggs let out an “audible gasp” at the idea of staying on court for so long.

But others heard a “self-contained horselaugh.” Bobby’s game wasn’t physically demanding, and the indoor venue would guarantee a climate-controlled, wind-free, lob-friendly environment, perfect for the aging sharpshooter. He was happy to let the misunderstanding ride: The hustler was a master of accepting terms that made him look like an underdog but ultimately served his own purposes.

Behind the banter, Riggs had plenty of respect–not to mention gratitude–for Madame Superstar. By turning down his initial offers earlier in the year, Billie Jean was set to make upwards of $100,000 instead of $10,000. In Bobby’s words, King was “one smart cookie.”

She wasn’t the only one.

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August 1, 1973: Boom and Bust

*The aggravatingly unplayable courts of Central Park, New York*

In late June 1973, a group of 75 irate citizens demonstrated in Manhattan’s Central Park. They weren’t protesting inflation, energy shortages, or crime–though during the rally, a young woman was mugged nearby.

No, the fuming New Yorkers had something else in mind. They wanted their tennis courts back.

New York City boasted 522 public tennis courts throughout the five boroughs. Anyone who wanted to play could sign up for court time all summer long with nothing more than a $15 annual pass, long one of the best deals in Gotham. Central Park’s 30 courts were the most popular of all. Hundreds of regulars knew to show up long before the 8 A.M. weekend opening if they wanted to play before noon. The rule was first-come, first-served, though rumor had it that you could jump the queue by bribing an attendant.

When the season opened in April 1973, 13 of the Central Park courts were out of commission. A resurfacing job, begun the previous August, dragged on and on. The cause differed depending on who you asked: Unexpected complications, micro-managing city officials, foot-dragging contractors, or uncooperative weather. The City had responded to increased interest by putting up bubbles for the first time in the winter of 1972-73. When the weather turned nice, though, the logjam on the Upper West Side remained.

All this, at the peak of the “Tennis Boom,” the moment when the sport reached a new pinnacle of public awareness and everyone suddenly wanted to play. The surge was so dramatic that by the end of the year, tennis ball manufacturers could barely keep pace with demand.

The Boom is sometimes dated to the Billie Jean King–Bobby Riggs match in September, and the publicity surrounding the Battle of the Sexes certainly helped. But King-Riggs was an effect of the Boom as much as it was a cause. The Open Era unleashed a small army of promoters on the game. Newspapers covered players and tournaments like never before. The excitement reached a peak in May 1972, when Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall–two undersized Aussies who could have been mistaken for accountants–battled for five sets on national television in the World Championship Tennis Finals.

The match was thrilling, and what’s more, Laver and Rosewall made the game look like something you, too, could enjoy.

Tennis also seemed to fit the zeitgeist. Mike Lupica, then a 21-year-old senior at Boston College contemplating a career in sports journalism, wrote:

It is a sport whose pace matches the pace of our life style–fast, faster, and blur. Even the best of three-set matches take only 90 minutes. Yet, what a 90 minutes! In the course of one hour and a half, with the grim single-mindedness that is written on the faces of the participants, tennis provides enough physical exertion to last a week, and also provides ample opportunity to work off the minute-by-minute frustrations which pierce our lives.

Alas, many would-be Boomers in midtown Manhattan remained flummoxed by delays. By early June, weekend hackers were coming to blows over court time. A few weeks later came the demonstration. There was even talk of a players’ association.

Finally, on August 1st, the 13 courts reopened. Parks Administrator Richard Clurman tried to focus on the positive: The new Har-Tru surface dried faster and would create more playing opportunities.

Reviews were generally positive. But these were New Yorkers, after all. At 7:45 A.M., two regulars started quarreling over who had first dibs on one of the new courts. They kept at it for a solid 15 minutes before one finally gave way. A block of fresh courts could fix a lot of problems, but it couldn’t solve them all.

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Generalizing Immaculate Grid

If you’re a certain kind of baseball fan, you’ve already heard about the game Immaculate Grid. It’s a clever exercise in sports trivia, with a new puzzle posted each day. There are now daily football, basketball, and ice hockey games as well.

But no tennis. We’ll come back to that.

For the uninitiated, here’s how it works. This is today’s puzzle:

The icons defining the rows and columns are team logos. For each square, you need to think of a player who spent time with both teams–or has both attributes. The upper-left square will be someone who played for both the Dodgers and the Twins. The upper-right square needs to be someone who pitched for the Dodgers and recorded at least 3,000 strikeouts.

Simply thinking of names isn’t hard enough for some trivia buffs. Every correct answer comes with a “rarity score,” determined by how many other people chose the same player. The more uncommon your pick, the better.

A tennis grid?

The biggest obstacle to an Immaculate Grid for tennis is that we don’t really have teams. Yes, there’s World Team Tennis, and there are doubles teams, but it’s not the same thing.

A partial substitute would be nationality. That’s probably the closest analogue that tennis has to teams. It’s not a perfect replacement, though. Many players have appeared for both the Dodgers and Twins, but only a small number of tennis players have switched nationality. For many pairs of nations, there is no overlap at all.

One solution, then, is to use nationalities as rows and attributes as columns. By “attributes” I mean just about anything other than nationality. We could have columns for “left-handed,” “played Davis Cup singles,” “reached a Wimbledon fourth round,” “won a tour-level doubles title,” “partnered Leander Paes,” and so on. Attributes could define rows, as well; there’s no law that says all three rows must be nationalities.

So… what the hell. Here’s a tennis-themed grid to try. Active and retired players are all fair game, as are both men and women:

There are multiple answers for every square, but I’ve included one possible solution at the bottom of this post.

The tennis version of the game only works–as far as I can tell–by using more arcane attributes than the original baseball setup. For baseball, as well as the other sports now offered, four or five of the rows/columns are usually teams, and the remainder are very well-established accomplishments. Not only does tennis lack teams in the same sense, it also doesn’t have the same set of familiar career and single-season statistical records.

For tennis, then, human curation is likely essential. When I first generated a random list of three nations (weighted by how many players appear in my database), I ended up with Denmark, Israel, and Kazakhstan. Even apart from the fact that some of the squares would have no answer at all, some of the remaining ones would be awfully obscure. If you can come up with a Danish lefty off the top of your head, you’re a better fan than I am. Good trivia games require a careful mix of difficulty and solvability, and I suspect that getting the balance right would be much trickier for tennis than for the major American team sports.

The general solution

In thinking about adapting Immaculate Grid for tennis, I realized that the same general grid-building rules could apply to anything. Think of the answers as objects–usually people, but not necessarily–and the row/column labels as attributes.

Thus, an IG-style game could be constructed for any set of objects with attributes.

One example: Film actors. Attributes could be in the form of “starred in a movie alongside x” (think “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”) or “worked with director y” or “played famous character z.”

Another one, expanding the notion of “objects”: World cities. Attributes could be population size, whether it is a national capitol, where it is located (country or continent), that it has hosted an Olympiad or World’s Fair or other significant event, and so on.

So, for any topic, assuming you were armed with a database of objects and attributes, it would be easy to automatically generate grids. Not every randomly-generated grid of attributes would work. You’d have to avoid impossibilities, like the non-existence of a Danish player who partnered Leander Paes at tour level. The remaining problem to keep the game playable would be to avoid situations where answers exist, but they are below some threshold of obscurity.

Again, for baseball, that’s not really a problem. By using only the 30 MLB teams and a small set of famous accomplishments as attributes, every possible combination probably generates either (a) a large number of possible answers, or (b) a small number of notable answers. Yesterday, one of the squares was a Chicago White Sox pitcher who won the Cy Young Award. There are only three such players, but any Cy Young winner is relatively well-known.

One solution for tennis (or other non-baseball topics) would be to rate players (or objects) by notability. It doesn’t have to be fine-grained. For tennis, you could label any player with at least 100 tour-level matches “notable,” and everyone else “not notable.” If a row/column combination had only three possible answers, none of which were notable, you could treat it the same as an impossible combination and discard that grid. Perhaps three notable players or ten non-notable players would be enough to give gamers a fair shot; it would be up to you to determine the threshold.

If there’s ever going to be a (daily) Immaculate Grid for tennis, it won’t be run by me. But if you are so inclined, feel free to steal any of the ideas I’ve laid out here.

Finally, as promised, here’s one solution to my tennis grid above:

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July 29, 1973: Horror Stories

So many things went wrong during the filming of The Exorcist that people began to believe that the movie was cursed. How bad was it? Among other things, the movie accelerated the end of a young woman’s professional tennis career.

Then again, it was also terrifying to play Chris Evert. That didn’t help, either.

The woman in question was “The Pixie from Dixie,” Linda Tuero. A classic baseliner, she once held up her end of a 326-stroke rally–on national television. She was the first woman to attend Tulane University on an athletic scholarship, even though there was no varsity women’s tennis team. She played on the men’s squad, and only when opposing coaches and players okayed it. The smart ones declined: Tuero won eight of nine matches.

She took the 1972 Italian Open with a straight-set victory over Olga Morozova, and she upset Nancy Richey when she was just 19 years old.

On a lark in early 1973, Tuero turned up for a filming in Washington, D.C. The Exorcist needed a tennis-playing extra, and she fit the bill. “They picked me right away,” she said, “because they could tell I wasn’t going to miss a ton of balls.”

She makes a brief appearance in the movie. More importantly, she met the screenwriter, William Peter Blatty. They became a couple, and Blatty was often seen in the stands at Tuero’s matches. The relationship reminded her that there was more to life than tennis, and her passion for the game began to falter.

Still, she had plenty left in her racket bag. A few weeks after Wimbledon, at the Marie O. Clark Memorial Tournament in Cleveland, Tuero won three matches to reach her first final in more than a year. It was a step in the right direction: Her semi-final victim, Frenchwoman Nathalie Fuchs, had beaten her a month earlier.

Unfortunately, the name that emerged from the other half of the draw inspired as much fear as anything Blatty could dream up. On July 29th, Tuero would take on Evert.

“The turning point of the match,” cracked one wire report, was the moment the ladies walked on court. Tuero was as tidy as ever. She didn’t make any errors; Chrissie just hit everything back for winners. The first game, on Tuero’s serve, set the tone. The reigning Wimbledon finalist won the first point with a cross-court forehand, the second with a cross-court backhand, and the next two with dropshot winners.

Evert was never one to drag things out. While Tuero twice made it to deuce, she never did win a game. The whole thing took only 40 minutes.

The Pixie from Dixie wasn’t quite ready to hang it up, but every encounter with Chrissie nudged her a little further in that direction. By the time The Exorcist hit theaters in November, the 22-year-old was done. “She had the same game as me,” Tuero said of her nemesis. “But she was better.”

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July 27, 1973: Back to the Hackers

*The Mt. Washington Hotel, before World War I*

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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July 23, 1973: No Respect For Age

When you think of tennis figures suffering under the yoke of casual sexism in the early 1970s, Jimmy Connors is not the first name that comes to mind.

And yet.

Connors, 20 years old and yet to establish himself as an equal of Stan Smith, Rod Laver, and their ilk, was best known in the summer of 1973 as Chris Evert’s boyfriend. Evert was two years younger but much further along in her career, having reached the finals at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Jimbo, by contrast, lost in the first round at the French and made the quarter-finals of the boycott-battered Wimbledon draw only to fall to Alex Metreveli.

When Connors recorded a series of upset victories in July, newspapermen fell all over themselves with jokes that he was more than just Chrissie’s paramour. The Atlanta Journal went with the headline, “Connors Also Plays Tennis.”

He didn’t just play, he played like no one else. On July 23rd, he sealed a sensational week with a five-set victory over Arthur Ashe in the final of the prestigious U.S. Pro at Boston’s Longwood Cricket Club. Reeling, Ashe said, “I’ve never seen a guy keep hitting so hard and deep for so long.”

Before this week, the floppy-haired left-hander remained something of an unknown quantity. He was clearly a prospect, trained from the age of three by his tennis-playing mother and grandmother, then sent to Los Angeles for graduate study with Pancho Segura and Richard González. Completing his senior year of high school in Southern California, he left early every day to practice. He joked that he studied civics in the morning, Spanish in the afternoon.

But he declined to join Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis league. Instead, he competed in early 1973 on the USLTA’s “Mickey Mouse” circuit, where the only top-drawer competition came from Ilie Năstase. He said he wanted match practice, and he got that. His choice seemed to leave him unprepared for the big leagues, though. He lost to one middling opponent after another on the European summer circuit.

Longwood was his coming-out party. Unseeded, he drew the fearsome Smith in the first round. Stan was a bit fatigued, having just arrived from Sweden, and Jimbo’s attack was relentless. He put one backhand after another on the baseline, sweeping aside the number one player in the game, 6-3, 6-3. It was no fluke: The youngster backed up the victory with easy wins over Dick Stockton and Cliff Richey.

That put him in the final against the 30-year-old Ashe. The two men had never met in an official match. Arthur was a titan of the game, even if he was still prone to bouts of inconsistency. Connors, whatever his results for one week, remained unproven.

Neither man gave an inch. Ashe, like Smith, relied on a serve-and-volley attack, while Connors–with a “whippy forehand and a two fisted backhand”–made every move forward a gamble. They settled into a bruising battle, mostly from the baseline, with Jimbo going for broke and Arthur trying to coax errors from the inexperienced challenger. The youngster came within three games of victory in the fourth set, but Ashe dug out from a 40-love hole in a Connors service game and forced a decider.

Ashe expected to find an opening. But his opponent, he said, “just kept pounding away.” The lefty may have played like a kid, but he clearly had no intention to yield, no matter how eminent the man across the net. After three hours and ten minutes, Chrissie Evert’s boyfriend took the title, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 3-6, 6-2.

“I never played so good in my life,” Connors said.

The crowd at the top of the men’s game had to make room for yet another contender, one who could no longer be defined by his choice of romantic partners. “For one week anyway,” Ashe said of his vanquisher, “he was in a class by himself.”

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July 22, 1973: Gimeno’s Last Stand

*Andrés Gimeno (left) and Tom Okker in 1969*

Andrés Gimeno might well be the best player you’ve never heard of. One of the first Spaniards to excel on the international circuit, his accomplishments were overshadowed by Manolo Santana’s 1966 Wimbledon title. He turned pro before proving himself as an amateur, and by the time tennis went Open, he was past his prime.

Gimeno is recognized today for his 1972 French Open title, his sole major championship, won when he was 34 years old. But he was hardly a late bloomer. One of the strongest juniors of the late 1950s, he won seven Davis Cup singles rubbers for Spain in 1959 and picked up a national title the same year–thanks in part to a five-set win over Santana.

In 1960, as a 22-year-old, he emerged as one of the best amateurs in the world. He won four clay-court titles in half a season, then stunned Roy Emerson and Rod Laver in back-to-back matches to add a championship at Queen’s Club. Poised for a breakthrough at Wimbledon, he instead lost to Ramanathan Krishnan in the second round. Then as now, stars were made at the majors, and the young Gimeno failed on the big stage. The 1960 Championships marked his tenth appearance at a slam, and he had reached only two quarter-finals.

His game was good enough. He would almost certainly have risen to amateur stardom before Santana’s ascent in the mid-1960s. But Jack Kramer needed fresh blood for his professional ranks. While Emerson and Laver were the obvious choices, the Australians wanted another Davis Cup or two. Kramer gave Gimeno a $50,000 guarantee for three years, and the young Spaniard immediately joined an international barnstorming tour, playing night after night against the likes of Alex Olmedo, Ashley Cooper, and Pancho Segura. He performed in front of more fans than would have seen him in a decade of majors, but the sideline status of the pro game did nothing for his reputation, either then or in the eyes of later pundits.

Most pros quickly sank or swam. The circuit had room for only one champion and a select group of credible challengers. Gimeno floundered against the power game of Richard González in 1961, and he proved unequal to prime-age Laver and Ken Rosewall. But the Spainard hung on. Throughout the 1960s, he was probably one of the top ten players–amateur or pro–in the world. In his career, he beat Laver at least 36 times, Rosewall 31, and González 18. He amassed winning records against the other mortals in the pro game: 34 wins against Olmedo, 21 over Barry MacKay, and 45 against Butch Buchholz.

Transplanted to another era, Gimeno would be remembered as a Stan Wawrinka type, a perennial contender who could deliver classic matches against the very best of his peers, even if he was rarely the favorite. Aficionados hailed the 1972 Roland Garros crown as an overdue laurel. Gimeno’s 2009 induction to the Hall of Fame was even more unfairly delayed.

Alas, the Spaniard wouldn’t have a final chapter to parallel those of Laver and Rosewall. In 1972, he tacked on titles in Eastbourne and Gstaad, then pushed Stan Smith to five sets at the US Open. But he hurt his Achilles tendon and sputtered through the year-end Masters event. The injury was slow to heal, and he won back-to-back matches only twice in the first half of 1973. Defending his title in Paris, he lost in the second round to the young Guillermo Vilas, 6-2, 5-7, 8-6.

Gimeno’s ailing calf allowed him one final push. When the Spanish national federation kicked him off the Davis Cup team for participating in the ATP’s Wimbledon boycott, he headed instead to Hilversum, the site of the Dutch International. A minor tournament in a crowded week, the Dutch attracted a middling field, and native hero Tom Okker was the overwhelming favorite. The fastest man in tennis, Okker delivered, reaching the final without losing a set. Gimeno had a tougher time, but despite stumbles against Australians Ian Fletcher and Geoff Masters, he survived the other half of the bracket.

The two men had faced off eight times. Even though Okker held a six-year age advantage, the veteran had won four of their encounters. On the Hilversum clay on July 22nd, Gimeno’s wiles kept it close. They battled for nearly four hours. The Spaniard grabbed the opening frame 6-2, but the Flying Dutchman took the lead with a pair of 6-4 sets. Gimeno kept the local crowd on tenterhooks, forcing a decider by winning the fourth in a tiebreak. Only then did Okker finally pull ahead for good, securing the fifth set and the match, 6-3.

The result was Gimeno’s career in miniature: A tough opponent, a near-miss, and few headlines to show for it. The next month, he would announce from Barcelona that his Achilles needed surgery. He would retire from competitive tennis. The game lost one of its leading lights, even if few fans recognized what a great competitor he had been.

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July 20, 1973: Replacement Players

Italy and Spain began their 1973 Davis Cup campaigns with a shot at going deep. The two Mediterranean strongholds could line up with quality pairs of singles players, even if neither one boasted a world-beating star like Romania’s Ilie Năstase or the USA’s Stan Smith.

Back in May, the Italian duo of Adriano Panatta and Paolo Bertolucci steamrolled Bulgaria, dropping just one set in five matches. The same weekend, Spanish stalwarts Manuel Orantes and Andrés Gimeno overcame Sweden. While the result looked close on paper–the Swedes won two of five rubbers–Orantes set the tone with a 6-1, 6-2, 6-1 drubbing of Björn Borg in the first match.

Those two victories set up Italy and Spain for a semi-final clash. But when the sides met in Turin, beginning on July 20th, Panatta and Bertolucci were missing. Orantes and Gimeno were out of action, as well.

The roster shuffles could be traced back to another Davis Cup tie that took place during that weekend in May. Niki Pilić didn’t make himself available for Yugoslavia, and six weeks of maneuvering later, scores of top men boycotted Wimbledon. Some national federations threatened to retaliate, but most settled on inaction. The newly-united players could make or break tournaments, so there was no use poking the bear any further.

The federations in Spain and Italy, however, insisted on one last flex. During the first week of Wimbledon, the Italians announced that Panatta and Bertolucci–who took part in the ATP boycott–would be suspended for three months. That took them out of the Davis Cup tie and effectively handed the semi-final to Spain.

Except Spain responded with a footgun of their own. The Spaniards suspended Orantes, Gimeno, and Antonio Muñoz for “disobedience of the norms dictated by this federation.” Everybody knew what that meant.

Less clear was who, exactly, would contest that European Zone semi-final. The answers would have been comical had the stakes not been so high.

Suiting up for Spain was 36-year-old Manolo Santana, a former Wimbledon champion who had barely competed in three years. He faced Italy’s second-stringer, 20-year-old Corrado Barazzutti. Barazzutti had a promising career ahead of him, but he had yet to demonstrate much of that potential. He came into the tie on a four-match losing streak and still sought his first quarter-final at a top-level event. Santana, though, was a shadow of his former self. The youngster came out on top in four sets.

The second tie was even more anonymous. Antonio Zugarelli, a 23-year-old Italian best known for upsetting Tom Gorman a month earlier in Rome, took on the 20-year-old Spaniard Jose Higueras. Higueras, even more than Barazzutti, was a prospect to watch. But he had far less experience, especially outside of his native country. Zugarelli took advantage of the novice to give Italy a straight-set victory and a 2-0 lead.

There was no way back for Spain’s ragtag squad. Higueras teamed with Juan Gisbert to grab the doubles rubber, but he lost another straight-setter to Barazzutti on the final day of the series. Italy’s replacement players handily outplayed their Spanish counterparts.

The irony of Italy’s victory is that they would be so much weaker in the next round, the European Zone final. The Spanish federation had suspended its ATP members for a month–just enough for the one Davis Cup tie. The Italian federation had punished Panatta and Bertolucci by keeping them out for three–so long that they wouldn’t be eligible for the final, either.

Barazzutti and Zugarelli, the unlikely heroes of Turin, would have their work cut out for them.

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July 19, 1973: Equal Prize Money

The Women’s Tennis Association was barely four weeks old, and it had already delivered a blow to the prevailing men-first attitude around the sport.

On July 19th, US Open tournament chairman Bill Talbert announced that the 1973 event would be the first-ever major to offer equal prize money to men and women. In 1972, women’s champ Billie Jean King received $10,000 to men’s titlist Ilie Năstase’s $25,000. This year, both winners would get $25,000.

The total prize pot was a record $227,200, and it would be split equally between the genders. Making the difference was a new sponsor, Ban deodorant, which kicked in $55,000. “We feel that the women’s game is equally as exciting and entertaining as the men’s,” said a representative of Bristol-Myers, Ban’s parent company. “We hope that our direct involvement with the 1973 US Open clearly indicates our positive position on behalf of women in sports.”

Talbert agreed. He suggested that the women’s game offered higher-quality rallies, while too many men copied superstar serve-and-volleyers without learning proper groundstrokes to support their attacking game.

If anyone complained about the new reward structure, Talbert said, “I’ll just tell the men to go out and sell their product better.”

First and foremost, the announcement marked an enormous step for King and her WTA brethren. “Thank goodness for Billie Jean King,” said Chris Evert.

Along a different dimension, the Ban “sports grant” signaled how far pro tennis had come in just five years. Gladys Heldman and the initial group of women’s contract pros had recognized from the beginning that female fans and recreational players were an untapped market, and they sold that vision to corporate sponsors like Philip Morris. Talbert was probably right about the quality of the the women’s game, but in another way, it didn’t matter. Ban, and now the US Open itself, understood that prize money was much more than an enticement for top players. Bristol-Myers wasn’t just a purveyor of quality antiperspirants. The company sought to represent a vision of the future.

Jack Kramer, the longtime promoter and now co-founder of the ATP, was slow to learn that lesson. He later wrote that he found another sponsor for the men, as well. To use Talbert’s phrase, the men did sell their product better, thanks to Kramer. But the Open declined the additional money. The tournament decided it was better to offer equal prizes–and align itself with a certain set of values–than to extend the already record sums on offer to half the field.

On this historic occasion, reporters couldn’t help but reach out to Bobby Riggs. The 55-year-old vanquisher of Margaret Court wired back, “I am leaving immediately for Denmark for an operation.” He was talking about a sex change, his chauvinistic way of acknowledging what he had long since figured out: There was an awful lot of money in women’s tennis.

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