History – Page 10 – Heavy Topspin

June 23, 1973: Bracket Challenge

*South Africa’s Bernard Mitton, who lost in the first round of qualifying but got into Wimbledon anyway*

What do you do when 80-some players pull out of your 128-man draw? It wasn’t exactly an option to skip Wimbledon or proceed with a compressed field, just because an upstart players’ union full of money-grubbing Americans wanted to make a point.

Referee Mike Gibson began by sending out a few invitations. 30-year-old New Yorker Herb Fitzgibbon was semi-retired, working as a stockbroker. Perhaps because he had beaten Niki Pilić at the Championships in 1968, Fitzgibbon got a wire telling him he didn’t need to qualify. He left his desk and headed to London.

When the withdrawals started rolling in, the qualifying tournament was underway. It quickly became clear that the 128-strong group of aspirants didn’t need to be whittled down as much as usual. The third qualifying round was never played: There would be 32 qualifiers instead of the traditional 16.

So many ATP members took their names out of the running that soon, every man who had reached the second round of qualifying was in. Even that wasn’t enough, especially when some of the lucky losers decided to back the boycott. Sherwood Stewart was one such prominent case. Stewart’s doubles partner Dick Dell was another. Dell’s older brother, Donald, was one of the ATP’s founders. As soon as Bob Maud found out he got a second-chance entry into the main draw, union representatives tracked him down and convinced him to stay out.

Ultimately, there were 49 lucky losers in the men’s draw, some of whom had failed to win a single qualifying match. That left former British Davis Cupper Paul Hutchins with a painful what-if to contemplate. Like Fitzgibbon, he was semi-retired with a day job. He entered the qualifying event, but on the first day of play, he was busy at work. He figured he didn’t have much of a chance anyway, so he called in to scratch. A few days later, he learned that had he simply shown up and lost, he could have gotten a place in the main draw.

Hutchins might have made way for Californian Dick Bohrnstedt, the luckiest loser of all. A successful qualifier in 1972, Bohrnstedt wasn’t in the draw for the 1973 preliminaries because his entry got lost. He made it in as an alternate only to lose to Australian John Bartlett in his opening match. He was given a main-draw spot anyway.

British pundits put on a brave face. “I dare say the normal excitement and tension will be far from lacking,” wrote the estimable Lance Tingay. “[A]fter all, the competitors who came in from the qualifying rounds are far from poor players.”

Some of them, anyway. 18-year-old South African Bernard Mitton was another loser in first-round qualifying. He took advantage of his good fortune–and a draw packed with journeymen–to reach the second week of the main draw. He wasn’t even the only lucky loser in the fourth round.

The real hope for the men’s tournament rested with the few stars who chose to play. ATP member Ilie Năstase defied the boycott on the orders of his national federation. When defending champion Stan Smith withdrew, Năstase became the top seed and an overwhelming favorite to win the title. Non-union youngsters Jimmy Connors and Björn Borg were moved onto the seeding list, at 5th and 6th, respectively.

The home fans would follow another ATPer, Britain’s own Roger Taylor. While union members debated whether Taylor would be shunned or merely held at arm’s length for breaking the boycott, the left-hander came within a whisker of winning the title at Queen’s Club. On June 23rd, he lost to Năstase, 9-8, 6-3, in a match with only one break of serve. Taylor would be the third seed at the All-England Club. In Tingay’s opinion, “there never was a better chance of a British men’s winner for 35 years.”

With two days left before the Championships kicked off, the press contingent had plenty of work to do. When they weren’t writing columns lambasting Jack Kramer for destroying the game, they had dozens of new names and faces to learn. This would not be a typical Wimbledon.

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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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June 22, 1973: A Team Sport

*Billie Jean King in 1975 with New York Sets owner Sol Berg*

“The condition of man,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”

Ah, so Hobbes was a tennis fan.

In 1972, the International Lawn Tennis Federation finally made its peace with World Championship Tennis, the deep-pocketed tournament circuit based in the United States. As soon as that agreement was reached, a new antagonist entered the scene in the form of the Association of Tennis Professionals, the players’ union that was now threatening the sport with a boycott at the biggest event of them all, Wimbledon.

In April 1973, the USLTA came to terms with the rival Virginia Slims circuit. Same story: The truce led to the formation of the Women’s Tennis Association.

The 1973 tennis calendar was a fragile thing. Promoters world-wide–and especially in the States–competed to attract the biggest stars of the game, often in pursuit of television contracts. Some of the upstarts were sanctioned; others didn’t care. There were more would-be tournaments and exhibitions than there were weeks to hold them or marquee names to play them.

And then it got worse. On June 22, 1973, Jerry Saperstein–best known as the former owner of basketball’s barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters–announced the formation of the World Team Tennis League. The 16-team circuit would begin play in May 1974.

The plan was audacious beyond belief. Modern fans know World Team Tennis as a laid-back series of summer exhibitions, a sideshow that rarely takes a top player away from any sanctioned tournament worth entering. Saperstein and his associates were thinking bigger. Teams would play forty-four matches between May and July.

In the understatement of the year, the promoter acknowledged that a few other tennis events took place during those months: “Obviously there will be conflicts, but we’ll do anything within reason to accommodate the existing tournaments.” In practice, that meant two weeks off for Wimbledon, and the rest of the existing slate could fend for itself.

The big question was whether the players would buy in. The league would need around 100 athletes, and Saperstein expected the number one man and the number one woman to sign up. (He didn’t name names, perhaps diplomatically, because both titles were up for grabs.) WTT staffers headed to London to talk up the venture. Tabling boycott-related matters, ATP leaders discussed how they should approach the new venture. Stan Smith, one of the league’s top targets, was skeptical.

Most negative of all, however, were the Brits. To many on the island, the Wimbledon boycott wasn’t the fault of an imperious power structure, or even the ATP. They blamed the Americans–or, more specifically, American money. Jack Kramer had lured the world’s best into his professional ranks for decades. Lamar Hunt signed big checks that kept stars jetting around the States for months at a time. And now, a consortium of US team owners (okay, well, John Bassett was ready to put a team in Toronto) were taking aim at the British summer season and perhaps even Wimbledon itself.

“‘Team Tennis’,” wrote David Talbot of the Birmingham Post, “will be a travesty of lawn tennis.”

It would be different, that much was certain. Several prospective owners were also involved in the upstart World Hockey Association, and the league would target a demographic that was less country club, more hockey fan. On court, WTT squads would play no-ad games, change sides only after each set, and allow mid-match substitutions.

Would it work? Saperstein, whose New York franchise would play at Madison Square Garden, admitted, “This is like rolling craps–we’ll lose money the first year.” Profitable or not, World Team Tennis would offer a challenge to the tennis establishment that would make the Wimbledon boycott seem like a mere bump in the road.

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June 20, 1973: United, Mostly

*British star Roger Taylor, who would come under immense pressure to compete at Wimbledon despite his membership in the ATP*

A disappointment for the top men and a disaster for Wimbledon, it smelled like opportunity to Billie Jean King. Five days away from the start of the Championships, a British High Court ruled against Niki Pilić, rejecting his request for an injunction against the All-England Club that would allow him to play. There was vanishingly little hope that the ATP would abandon its boycott of the tournament. Dozens of players–including defending champion Stan Smith and 1971 titlist John Newcombe–had already withdrawn.

Wimbledon released its seeding lists. Out of 16 men, only Czechoslovakian Jan Kodeš was not an ATP member. The event got a bit of a reprieve when second seed Ilie Năstase also said he would play, apparently because the Romanian federation ordered him to do so. As David Gray wrote for the Guardian in a front-page story, it was shaping up to be an “Iron Curtain Wimbledon.”

Many women were sympathetic; a few were even prepared to join the ATP’s boycott. Billie Jean, though, was hunting bigger game. “We are in a great bargaining position,” she said, thinking about the appeal of Margaret Court, Chris Evert, Evonne Goolagong, and herself at a sold-out showpiece tournament bereft of its leading men.

Wimbledon planned to pay out the equivalent of $70,500 in prize money to the men and $50,500 to the women. By the standard of tennis distributions in 1973, the imbalance wasn’t egregious. But King targeted full equality, even when her fellow players thought it impossible.

“As for the girls wanting more money,” said tour regular Patti Hogan, “aside from the fact that it can’t be done, there’s no way we could justify this to the public.”

Others didn’t even care. Goolagong said, “I’d be happy to play at Wimbledon even if there was no money.” Evert, who had yet to adopt Billie Jean’s way of thinking, had similar priorities. “I’ve come over here to play tennis,” said the 18-year-old, “and that’s all I’m interested in.”

Once again, King was forced to play the long game. Without a united front that could take on Wimbledon organizers, she sought to create one. On June 20th, she held a meeting at London’s Gloucester Hotel for more than the 60 of her fellow players. By the end of the evening, she had convinced her peers that they needed a players’ union of their own. The Women’s Tennis Association was born. There would be no women’s boycott at the All-England Club, but the new organization would make its presence felt before the summer was through.

In the meantime, Niki Pilić flew home to Yugoslavia. He knew that the battle wasn’t really about him anymore. But this was still Wimbledon, where Pilić had reached the semi-final in 1967. If a compromise did emerge, he was ready to fly back at a moment’s notice.

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June 16, 1973: An American Sweep

Less than two weeks from Wimbledon, and the warm-ups were in full swing. The field divided into two combined men’s and women’s events: one in Nottingham, the other in Beckenham.

The 1973 Nottingham ladies’ draw boded well for the big event. Billie Jean King lived up to her top seed, sweeping the tournament without the loss of a set. In the final on June 16th, she defeated in-form home hope Virginia Wade, who had drubbed Chris Evert the day before.

King had watched Margaret Court dominate the circuit while she sat out with a stomach injury. Now she was riding a three-tournament, eleven-match win streak. She was well-rested, too. “I am feeling fitter at this stage,” she said, “than for quite a few Wimbledons past.”

The men’s action in Nottingham provided the surprises. Brit Roger Taylor, one of the best players present, lost in the first round. Mark Cox, another top Englishman, fell in the quarters. Jimmy Connors suffered the same fate as his love interest Chrissie, departed in the semis. Jimbo’s conqueror was another American, the oft-forgotten Erik van Dillen.

When van Dillen’s name came up, it was usually to do with his doubles prowess. Just 22 years old, he was already the veteran of two Davis Cup campaigns. He and partner Stan Smith lost a close match to the Romanians in the 1971 final. The next year, the American pair went 5-0. They saved their strongest performance of all for the hostile crowd in Bucharest, where they demolished Ilie Năstase and Ion Țiriac, 6-2, 6-0, 6-3. Many observers thought van Dillen was the best player on the court that day.

No one questioned van Dillen’s talent. He had been winning tournaments since he played 12-and-unders. The problem was consistency. One day he could outclass Smith and Năstase, or drop a 6-1, 6-0 wrecking ball on Arthur Ashe, as he did in February 1973. Then he would fail to put two good sets together for a month.

In Nottingham, van Dillen upset both Cliff Drysdale and Dick Stockton to reach the semi-finals. At that stage he encountered a “surprisingly quiet” Connors. Jimbo took the second set but the underdog retook the ascendancy with a comfortable three-set win. Van Dillen’s final opponent was another player with a two-handed backhand, the South African Frew McMillan. The American struggled with McMillan’s double-hander in the first set, but when it started going astray, van Dillen capitalized with his best game. The score: 3-6, 6-1, 6-1.

Naturally, he won the doubles, too.

Then he headed to Queen’s Club. He was entered in qualifying.

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Down in Beckenham, two men tested the limits of a single tiebreak set. Wimbledon and other British tournaments adopted the first-to-seven tiebreak for the first time in 1973. Of course, they had to do things a little differently. Instead of holding the shootout at six games apiece, they would wait until eight-all. And the deciding set would be played the old-fashioned way, even if it took all week.

Soviet standout Alex Metreveli took the Beckenham title 6-3, 9-8(9). That’s a second set consisting of 16 games plus another 20 points. The challenger who pushed Metreveli to such extremes was gaining a reputation for turning routine victories into dogfights. The runner-up in question: Björn Borg. A week after his 17th birthday, playing just his third career grass tournament, the Swede made it clear he was more than just a dirtballer.

In the semis, Borg had dismissed the Australian Owen Davidson, a veteran with two grass-court titles in the last month. Davidson was suitably impressed. He said, “I cannot remember ever playing a better 17-year-old.”

* * *

Borg, Metreveli, and van Dillen would be three dark horses to watch at Wimbledon–if there were a men’s tournament worth the name. Players and federations had made no progress toward resolving the status of Niki Pilić, the Yugoslavian player banned by his national body, sanctioned by the ILTF, and now heartily backed by the players’ union. Nearly 100 players were ready to boycott.

On June 16th, Pilic and Arthur Ashe headed out to the All-England Club, hoping to get some practice in. They didn’t make it past the door. “I turned them off,” said the club secretary, “because this is a private club and they are not members.”

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June 13, 1973: A Heldman Special

By 1973, Julie Heldman had put together a fine career. The 27-year-old had never challenged for a place at the very top of the women’s tennis hierarchy, but she had amassed a couple dozen tournament victories, semi-final showings at Roland Garros and Forest Hills, and victories over most of the leading players in the game. Hampered by knee problems that year, she was reduced to a bit part on the Virginia Slims tour. She still recorded upsets of Kerry Melville and Nancy Richey.

Heldman was already laying the groundwork for a second career. After an early exit at Hilton Head, she shared the commentary booth with Bud Collins and called the Richey-Rosie Casals final for NBC. She had been immersed in tennis since birth. Her father, Julius, was a strong player with several match wins at Forest Hills. Her mother, Gladys, took up the game late and with a passion. She ran the magazine World Tennis–teenage Julie and her sister Carrie were frequent bylines–and put together the groundbreaking Virginia Slims women’s tour in 1971.

None of that helped Julie on June 13th, 1973. She was in the third round of the Green Shield Kent Championships in Beckenham, a traditional grass-court warmup for Wimbledon. Her opponent, South African Linky Boshoff, was only 16 years old. Heldman was having a tough time putting away the first set. As if a sore knee wasn’t enough, now she had the yips, barely able to toss the ball to serve.

On set point, Julie snuck in what the Daily Telegraph called a “Heldman ‘special’,” an underarm serve with heavy spin. Boshoff, flustered, couldn’t get it back.

The umpire, Pat Smyth, asked Boshoff, “Are you happy with that service?”

Heldman piped up, “It’s too bad if she’s not. Am I supposed to warn her when I’m about to hit a drop shot?”

Smyth acknowledged that the serve was within the rules. Afterward, he explained, “I just wanted to add a little courtesy to the match.”

Julie hit two more underarm serves that day, and she trotted out the tactic occasionally throughout a successful grass-court season. She even deployed it once on match point. Life could be hard as a career woman on a tour full of teenagers. Occasionally, Heldman was able to get her revenge.

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Speaking of cagey veterans: Everyone was still talking about Bobby Riggs–even Chris Evert was asked about a possible match after her French Open final. Of course Bobby was going to try to cash in.

On June 13th, a businessman and avid amateur player named Alvin Bunis announced the 1973 “Grand Masters” tour, to begin in July. Riggs would be joined by several other former greats–including Jaroslav Drobný, Frank Parker, Pancho Segura, and Vic Seixas–in a series of weekend tournaments worth $250,000.

59-year-old Gardnar Mulloy, a 1948 Wimbledon semi-finalist who had been winning age-group titles for decades, would be the oldest of the group. One pressman asked Mulloy why he signed up for the tour.

“Money.”

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June 11, 1973: Senior Sportswoman

Every year since 1936, Princeton University had awarded the William Winston Roper Trophy to the standout athlete of the school’s senior class. In 1973, the honor went to Carl Barisich, a defensive tackle drafted by the NFL’s Cleveland Browns.

Barisich’s award was a little different than the forty that had come before it. 1973 was the first year that Princeton’s graduating class comprised both men and women–including, of course, female athletes. Rather than pit the genders against each other, Princeton reserved the Roper Trophy for the best male athlete. A second distinction, the Senior Sportswoman Award, would be given to the outstanding female.

The women of Princeton’s first coed class had fully integrated themselves into the school’s athletic life, excelling in squash, swimming, and crew. But there was really no competition for the first Senior Sportswoman, named by the university on June 11th. Without question, the honor belonged to tennis captain Marjory Gengler.

Gengler won every set she played as an undergraduate, and the team as a whole was nearly as successful. In May 1973, Princeton Alumni Weekly put her on the cover, with the headline, “Princeton’s Best Athlete.” No more qualifiers were needed. The Eastern intercollegiate circuit wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of competitive tennis, but Gengler’s exploits extended further. The USLTA rated her the top singles and doubles player in the region, and she won a mixed doubles match at Wimbledon in 1972.

Some women in Princeton’s first coed class felt constant pressure to act as a representative for their gender. Gengler didn’t want that, and she almost said no to Princeton for that very reason. Tennis made it easier. “The men’s team welcomed us, didn’t make us feel like women’s libbers,” she said. “Now we have forty women in what used to be a traditional men’s club and the men are afraid we’re going to turn it into a sorority.”

After graduation, Gengler could have opted to join the women’s tour. She played a handful of tournaments in the summer of 1973, coming within one victory of qualifying for Wimbledon. Ultimately, she became an honorary member of the men’s tour instead. She married Stan Smith in 1974 and traveled the circuit with her new husband.

Back at Princeton, Gengler’s positive experience proved to be representative after all. At graduation, the salutatorian declaimed–in Latin, as was the tradition–“Ut tempora mutantur … vobis tamen persuadetis ut radix malorum non sit co-educatio.” Translated to the common tongue: As times change, you become convinced that co-education is not the root of evil.

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June 10, 1973: Sense and Sensibility

*Evonne Goolagong at the 1973 Italian Open*

All signs suggested this would not be your typical Italian Open women’s final.

First of all, it would be played on the Foro Italico’s famed centre court. The Italians were unashamed by their preference for men’s tennis. Women’s matches tended to be scheduled at odd hours on outer courts. This time was different, and the house was packed.

The two ladies remaining in the draw were the reason why. Chris Evert, the 18-year-old American, was making her first appearance in Rome. She was just seven days removed from a near-miss in the Roland Garros final. Opposite Evert was Evonne Goolagong, just two years older, and already a crowd favorite. Even those male fans who disdained women’s tennis could enjoy Goolagong. The adjective of choice for the Australian was “lithe.”

Goolagong, however, was not at her best on clay. She had beaten Evert in the Wimbledon semi-finals the year before, then lost five in a row since. Evonne rarely maintained her focus through an entire match, and steady, persistent Chrissie was exactly the kind of opponent to exploit those lapses.

On June 10th, the final began as expected. Goolagong made too many unforced errors, and Evert took a 4-2 lead. Then the Australian’s forehand began to find its targets. The Guardian‘s David Gray described it as a “battle between sense and sensibility,” the “calmly practical” Evert against the “natural” Goolagong, who “needs to be sure that her own special magic is working.”

That magic saved Evonne at 3-5 in the first set tiebreak, when she recovered with a down-the-line forehand winner. The Aussie took the opener, 8-6 in the breaker.

From that point, it was all Goolagong. Evert won just 11 points in the second set and lost the frame at love. “I felt that I could run for miles,” Evonne said. “I have never played better on a clay court.”

“I hope she hasn’t,” Evert replied.

Goolagong’s head-to-head record against Chrissie still stood at a meager 2-5, but she couldn’t have asked for a better confidence boost to wrap up her stint on the Continent. Now she would head to Wimbledon, the site of her greatest triumph just two years before.

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June 7, 1973: Boycott

Boy, that escalated quickly.

Two days after the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) upheld the ban on Yugoslavia’s Niki Pilić, a group of nearly 100 top professionals made it clear that if Pilić couldn’t play Wimbledon, neither would they.

The voice of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) was Cliff Drysdale, a veteran South African player who served as the body’s president. Drysdale represented almost every notable player in the game: Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe, Ken Rosewall, Stan Smith, and more. Just a few pros stood outside the ATP’s ranks, like Jimmy Connors. Both Jimbo and his manager, Bill Riordan, had decidedly independent streaks. Some Eastern Europeans answered only to their national federations, and a handful of youngsters–such as Björn Borg–had yet to sign up. That was it.

Drysdale said that the suspension was a mistake, and that the ILTF couldn’t prove otherwise. The Yugoslavs claimed that Pilić had “refused” to play a recent Davis Cup tie. The player said he had never committed to suiting up for Yugoslavia. In the union’s view, there was no evidence that Pilić ever promised anything, and that was that. The South African claimed to be optimistic that upcoming meetings between the two organizations would result in a solution. But the general readiness to forgo the biggest event on the tennis calendar suggested otherwise.

The next few weeks would be the first real test of the ATP’s strength. The players’ union had been formed only nine months earlier, during the 1972 US Open. Two powerful factions–the ILTF and Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis (WCT)–had just reached a peace pact of their own, divvying up the calendar and ending the prohibitions on some types of players at certain events. The players needed to be at the negotiating table, too. They were, as Ashe put it, “tired of being stepped on by two elephants.”

Ashe took an officer role alongside Drysdale. But the force behind the union was former player and promoter Jack Kramer. Kramer had won Wimbledon in 1947 by perfecting the serve-and-volley game, then gone on to dominate the professional ranks. He quickly moved into management, recruiting amateur stars and running the pro tours. Traditionalists demonized him for soiling the game with dollar signs, but Big Jake simply wanted the players to get their share of the action. There was lots of money in “amateur” tennis.

Kramer liked the tell a story about getting called into the office of one of the USLTA’s chief administrators. The man had heard that Jack–still an amateur in those days–was making a healthy living collecting “expenses” from tournaments beyond the amount necessary to keep him fed and sheltered on the road. It was common practice, but everyone was expected to go along with the charade of playing wholly for the fun of it. Instead, Kramer told the man: Yes, absolutely, he was earning more than he spent. He had a wife and sons to feed. In my situation, he asked, wouldn’t you do the same?

The federation bigwig sent Kramer on his way. The matter was dropped.

From the mid-1950s onward, Jack fought for Open tennis, and he made at least a handful of his fellow players rich. He saw far into the future, predicting a sort of Grand Prix tournament schedule a decade before it came to pass. His pros played tiebreaks long before the majors did. Most of all, he realized that the health of the sport depended on the players–a truism now, but a radical notion at the time. Long before 1973, he knew that the athletes needed their own organization. He told Billie Jean King that the women ought to have one, too.

Kramer’s story is important because his motivations were so often misconstrued. Tennis had given him a comfortable life, so detractors saw him as a money-grubber. His involvement in the Wimbledon boycott caused some–especially in Britain–to accuse him to trying to destroy the game entirely. History has cast him as a villain for different reasons: His support for unequal men’s and women’s prize money inadvertently triggered the formation of an independent women’s tour. But for all of his faults, Kramer pushed for a vision that was awfully close to what professional tennis ultimately became.

Ultimately, Big Jake would play only a supporting role in the drama of the 1973 Wimbledon Championships. While he had a front row seat, the decision–and the sacrifice–of a boycott was up to the players themselves. The ATP’s stated mission was to “unite, promote and protect” the interests of its members. Pilić was one of them, and it sure felt like he was being trod upon by an elephant. The ILTF didn’t recognize the resolve–or the power–of their new adversary. That would soon change.

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June 5, 1973: The Brigands Final

*Ilie Năstase (left) and Niki Pilić ahead of the 1973 Roland Garros final*

“The greatest thing about the French,” said John Newcombe, “is that it’s so bloody hard to win.”

The greatest thing about Ilie Năstase was that he made everything look so easy.

The 26-year-old Romanian was, by all accounts, the greatest clay-court player on tour. He had cruised through six rounds in Paris without dropping a single set. Only one man–Roger Taylor, in the quarter-finals–earned a set point against him. Năstase erased it with a sharply-angled backhand that few other men would’ve dared attempt.

The surprise of the tournament was the other finalist: Yugoslavia’s Niki Pilić. Pilić had begun the fortnight in the news for other reasons, after his national federation suspended him for missing a Davis Cup tie. The ILTF allowed him to play the French and delayed a decision on his appeal to June 1st. “Somebody would be embarrassed,” wrote the New York Times, “if by then Pilić was in the final.” Oops.

Pilić, a 33-year-old lefty who hadn’t reached the quarter-finals of a major since 1967, took advantage of a soft draw, then turned in the match of his life to defeat Adriano Panatta in the semi-finals. “He must have been annoyed at me for serving so well,” said the southpaw. “The way I played today, I could beat anyone.” Even Năstase?

A week of rain pushed the schedule back two days, and the final was at last contested on Tuesday, June 5th. The Romanian came out tense, and he dropped the first three games. The embattled Pilić appeared capable of an enormous upset.

“I can always tell after the first two or three games how I will play,” Năstase told Laurie Pignon of the Daily Mail. “The feel of the ball on the racket; the way my body moves, and if my eyes take in everything. When I play badly I get cross with myself for I know I am not giving the people what they have paid to see.”

At the second change of ends, Ilie must have known something that wasn’t yet apparent to the rest of the stadium. He unleashed backhand after backhand to win six games in a row and 11 of the next 12. When Pilic shifted tactics and attacked his forehand in the third set, Năstase hit a string of winners off that wing as well. Final score: 6-3, 6-3, 6-0.

Pilić might have repeated the post-match summary of Năstase’s semi-final victim, Tom Gorman: “Not a good enough volley. Not a good enough second serve. Too good an opponent.”

One French newspaper called the championship match “A Brigands Final,” referring to Pilić’s limbo and Năstase’s on-court antics. The Romanian often veered between charming character and combative cad, but on this day, he kept the theatrics in check. He struck an off-key note only after the match, when he told the crowd that his US Open title the previous year had meant more. With the French title in the bag, he was ready to take on Wimbledon, where he had come within two games of victory the year before. His idol, Manolo Santana, had ridden clay-court expertise to a title at the All-England Club, and Năstase was ready to do the same.

* * *

As if an 80-minute drubbing wasn’t bad enough, Pilić’s day got worse after the match. The ILTF delivered its judgment. It wouldn’t uphold the entire nine-month suspension sought by the Yugoslavian federation, but it assessed a one-month ban. That would keep the Croatian out of both the Italian Open–already underway in Rome–and Wimbledon.

Astute observers recognized that this was only the beginning. David Gray of the London Daily Telegraph reported various retaliatory proposals mooted by members of the Association of Tennis Professionals, the new players’ union. The men could boycott the Davis Cup, or perhaps they would no longer cooperate with the ILTF’s tournament schedule, essentially unleashing an outright war between the old guard and newer pro circuits like Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis.

Gray felt that the ILTF had overplayed its hand. “They still apparently feel that they can control the destinies of the players without proper consultation,” he wrote. “They are likely to find that they are living in the past.”

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June 4, 1973: Cross-Court Crossovers

*Basketball star Artis Gilmore (left) with miler Jim Ryun*

In 1973, tennis was all the rage. But wouldn’t the game be even more fun with stars from other sports? That was the thinking behind the third annual Dewar Sports Celebrity tournament at Kutsher’s Country Club in Monticello, New York.

While the 12-player field was all men, parallels to the recent Battle of the Sexes spectacle were obvious. 62-year-old baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg–a Bobby Riggs pal, no less–was the defending champion. The contrasts were not just between the old and the young. Three of the invitees were basketball players, including seven-foot, two-inch Artis Gilmore, while track and field athletes like Jim Ryun might have passed unnoticed on the street.

Players were picked for their celebrity, not their tennis prowess. Ryun said that he began running because he “couldn’t do anything else,” and he swung and missed on at least one serve. Gilmore’s groundstrokes were softer even than Riggs’s, and Miami Dolphins running back Jim Kiick* griped that the rackets weren’t big enough. Heavyweight boxer Bob Foster was on hand as an alternate, and he was perfectly happy to remain on the sidelines.

* Kiick’s daughter Allie has fared better. She has won seven ITF singles titles and peaked at #126 in the WTA rankings.

The whole tournament took place in one day: June 4th. Hoopster Rick Barry took the individual honors, flashing a big serve and an intensity that suggested he couldn’t simply turn off his competitive streak. After players cycled through a doubles round robin, switching partners throughout the day, the group was whittled down to four. Greenberg and basketball star Gail Goodrich would play for the title against Barry and the man who had just broken the NFL’s single-season rushing record: O.J. Simpson.

In addition to his speed, Simpson had what the New York Times called a “tricky forehand.” But Greenberg and Goodrich were the class of the group, perhaps the only two men present who regularly played tennis. They took the final in a single pro set, 8-2.

Greenberg, his playing days long behind him, was the most accustomed to this kind of half-serious exhibition. He closed the day with a one-liner worthy of a Catskills comedian.

“It’s not so much how you play this game,” he quipped. “What counts is whether you win or lose.”

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