History – Page 12 – Heavy Topspin

May 12, 1973: The B Team Heads South

When the United States opened its 1973 campaign in Mexico City on May 11th, it was already the tenth weekend of the year that featured, somewhere around the globe, a Davis Cup tie. Regional zones around the world progressed on different schedules, and the 53-nation draw made substantial demands of weaker countries. Canada and Colombia held an opening-round tilt in February, and when the Colombians took on Mexico a month later, it was already their third round.

The Americans, by comparison, had it easy. As defending champions, they received multiple byes. A few other countries did as well. The Romanians, among other European squads given first-round passes, wouldn’t get going for another week.

The byes carried a disadvantage, however. Once they took the court, there was no coasting past uncompetitive squads like Canada or Venezuela. The byes also cost Dennis Ralston’s US team the advantage of playing at home. They hadn’t played in the United States for two and half years, and they planned to host Mexico in Little Rock, Arkansas. Mexico protested to the ILTF, which sided with the underdogs. The Americans would head back to Mexico City, where they had swept the 1972 zonal finals just eleven months earlier.

The team that flew south in May 1973 was not the same one that had made the previous trip. Stan Smith, linchpin of the US side, was top seed at the World Championship Tennis Finals in Dallas, contested over the same three-day weekend as the Davis Cup tie. Arthur Ashe and Marty Riessen, the next-best American players, were also in the eight-man WCT draw. 27-year-old Cup veteran Tom Gorman would lead the team instead. Ralston was lucky that Gorman hadn’t played a little better in March and April, or else he might have been in Dallas as well.

In 1972, Gorman had straight-setted Mexico’s Joaquín Loyo Mayo. This year, he found himself opening the tie against a fresh face, 19-year-old Raúl Ramírez. Ramírez had blasted his way through the American Zone, winning four singles and two doubles matches for his country in March. His Davis Cup momentum, combined with his proficiency on clay courts, carried over into the Gorman match. The newcomer made it look easy, defeating the American 6-4, 6-2, 6-3. It was over in less than two hours.

The upset drastically changed the outlook of the tie. Gorman was expected to win both of his singles rubbers. The other American singles options–20-year-old Harold Solomon and 22-year-old Dick Stockton–were less accomplished. Doubles stalwart Erik van Dillen mixed brilliance with a puzzling inconsistency. Suddenly, the Mexicans had a path to victory.

Coach Ralston didn’t relax for three more sets, until Solomon had polished off Loyo Mayo, 7-5, 6-4, 7-5. Solomon’s two-handed backhand and heavy spin were ideal for the surface, his attitude even more so. “He doesn’t have a big serve or volley,” said Ralston. “He’s just tough from the back and he never gives up.”

Knotted at one-all, the visitors were back in the driver’s seat. On May 12th, Gorman and van Dillen beat Ramírez and Vicente Zarazúa, dropping a 14-12 second set en route to a four-set victory. The next day, overshadowed by the exploits of Smith in Dallas and Bobby Riggs in California, Team USA would sweep the rest of the tie. They clinched when Solomon outlasted Ramírez, 8-6, 7-5, 7-5. They would face Chile in the American Zone finals in August.

Having cleared the initial hurdle, Ralston had plenty to look forward to. Smith would likely suit up for the next round, and best of all, they’d finally get a chance to play on home soil.

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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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May 11, 1973: Meet the New Boss

On the rare occasions that Rod Laver lost his cool, he channeled his anger into the ferocious serve-and-volley game that made him the best who ever lived. Imagine the crowd’s surprise, then, when after making 33 errors in a single set against Stan Smith, Laver smacked a ball into the ceiling of Dallas’s Moody Coliseum.

Despite failing to win a major title since his 1969 Grand Slam, Laver was still considered the strongest player in the world by many pundits and fellow players. But the 1973 World Championship Tennis circuit had dented that reputation. Smith beat Laver for just the third time in ten career tries when they faced off in Atlanta in March. Stan did it again a week later. Two weeks after that, the American made it three in a row.

The Rocket won four titles on the 1973 WCT circuit, but none since mid-March. In the meantime, he struggled with a nagging back injury and watched his rival rack up six titles of his own. Smith headed to Dallas as the top seed and prize money leader of the eight-man field. The draw lined up the two men for a semi-final showdown; after perfunctory defeats of Roy Emerson (by Laver) and John Alexander (by Smith), a best-of-five clash was set.

The WCT Finals didn’t have quite the stature of the majors, but the event was getting there. Ken Rosewall had won classic duels from Laver in each of the last two years. More importantly, both were televised. Perhaps more than any other match, the 1972 title bout, with its fifth-set tiebreak, had established tennis as a made-for-TV sport. The veteran Aussies were more concerned with prestige than ratings, but there was a happy medium: The event was probably the fourth- or fifth-most important on the men’s calendar.

Before Laver could play for the elusive title, he’d have to get past Smith. On May 11th, the American started slowly, double-faulting on set point to give the first set to Rocket, 6-4. In the second, though, he once again showed that he could break the Laver serve. Smith made his move in the seventh game and won the set, 6-4. The third frame was the one that drove the Australian over the edge. After Laver vented his frustration, Smith took the tiebreak, 7-2. The two men traded breaks in the fourth, then the American attacked again in the 12th game to break again and take the match, 7-5.

Two days later, Smith finished the job–on national television–by defeating Arthur Ashe, who had knocked out Rosewall in the semis. Stan’s haul for the four-month circuit reached $154,100.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever have another 17 weeks like this,” he said.

The championship, combined with the defeat of Laver, put to rest any doubts that may have lingered after Smith won the 1972 Wimbledon title. Laver, Rosewall, and others were kept out of the 1972 Championships because of their status as contract professionals. (Smith only joined the WCT tour in 1973.) The Wimbledon field was plenty strong, but no competition was truly complete without the Australian superstars.

“Before today I thought Rod was the best and then Kenny had won the other two WCTs so he had to be right up there, too,” Smith said after securing the title. “Today is the first time I feel comfortable saying I’m maybe the best in the world.”

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May 9, 1973: Side Action

On May 9th, 1973, tennis was four days away from what one Los Angeles-area columnist called the sport’s “biggest day ever.” Fans across the United States could watch the World Championship Tennis final match from Dallas–featuring, perhaps, Stan Smith and Ken Rosewall–on NBC. A few hours later, they could tune into CBS and watch 55-year-old Bobby Riggs challenge Margaret Court in the much-hyped “Battle of the Sexes.”

Riggs called it “the match of the century.” He had ballyhooed the date so relentlessly that he might have believed it.

Everyone knew that the Riggs match didn’t really matter, that a contest between a male has-been and a female superstar wouldn’t settle anything. One Wisconsin newspaper urged its readers to watch the WCT final–that would be real tennis. But no matter how big Smith served, or how beautifully 30-somethings Rosewall and Rod Laver continued to play, the Battle of the Sexes was the event on everyone’s lips.

So, with the big day in sight, what was Bobby doing? At home in Newport Beach, he could’ve walked to a half-dozen tennis courts. But he preferred to drive 120 miles into the desert to the La Costa Racquet Club, where his long-time buddy Pancho Segura was the resident pro. The five-foot, eight-inch Riggs–Court was an inch taller–did a bit of running and played a few sets of tennis, preferably for money. When Bud Collins called for an interview, Bobby offered him a match with “two chairs”–Bud could put two chairs anywhere on Riggs’s side of the court to slow him down.

Most of all, the long-ago Wimbledon champ spent his time working the phones. After retiring as a full-time pro two decades earlier, he had tried his hand at promotion. Results were mixed, but never for a lack of effort. Riggs had a minute for anyone who asked.

If you wanted to bet against him, look no further: Bobby had “plenty of side action” on the match, though he questioned the odds out of Las Vegas that made him a 7-5 favorite. He claimed it was a tossup. “She plays like a man, I play like a woman,” he said. “She’s younger and stronger, bigger and faster. She’s got a better serve, a better volley and a better overhead. She’s got me beat in every department except, maybe, thinking, strategy, experience.”

It was true: Riggs’s brain was the only thing that could keep up with his mouth. “He has one of the quickest, most fertile minds I’ve ever seen,” said Bill Talbert, a former US National doubles champion. “His mind is always darting from one thing to another.”

“Half the time,” added Segura, “I don’t know what he is saying.”

Court, for her part, was lying low in San Francisco. She practiced with coach Dennis Van der Meer and got daily treatments on her legs, which had cramped up the week before at Hilton Head.

One reporter, seeking a fresh angle on the most-covered tennis story of the year, called up Richard González, the 45-year-old legend who had had his share of encounters with Riggs. González was busy preparing for a tournament at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, the Alan King Classic. The event was just a week away. Its purse of $150,000 was yet another prize money record for 1973.

Gorgo’s take on the exhibition that was hogging all the publicity? “I couldn’t care less.”

But like everyone else, González had an opinion. “I sort of think Margaret can win it,” he said. “But I still couldn’t care less.”

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May 6, 1973: It Takes Two

*Left to right: Peter Fleming, John McEnroe, Bob Lutz, and Stan Smith*

For the May 1973 issue of Tennis magazine, five-time US national doubles champion George Lott rated the ten best doubles teams in history. He had plenty of respect for his pre-war peers–Vinnie Richards made the list with two different partners–but he wasn’t afraid to give credit to the strongest lineups in the modern game.

Atop Lott’s list was the Aussie duo of John Newcombe and Tony Roche, winner of ten major titles up to that point. Four more contemporary Aussies made the list: Rod Laver and Roy Emerson came in at sixth, while Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad ranked tenth.

Missing from the table–an omission Lott might have corrected had he revisited the list a few years later–was the American pair of Stan Smith and Bob Lutz. The two men had led USC to national championships the late 1960s, then burst onto the pro scene with a title at the 1968 US Open. They missed a few years’ worth of opportunities to team up–especially in Davis Cup–because Lutz joined the World Championship Tennis circuit before Smith did. When Stan finally switched sides for the 1973 campaign, the duo could reunite on a full-time basis.

WCT didn’t just have a tour-ending championships–coming up in the second week of May–it had a wholly separate doubles event. This one was held in Montreal, and the winning team would collect $40,000, the richest-ever prize for a doubles-only tournament. Smith and Lutz, with two tournament victories on the season, were the top seeds in their group.

On May 3rd, the American duo overcame a barrage of bad line calls to defeat Niki Pilić and Allan Stone in a four-set first rounder. Two days later, Lutz took the starring role over his better-known partner as the team withstood Laver and Emerson in a four-set match that went through three tiebreaks.

The title match, on May 6th, was a cakewalk by comparison. The challengers, Marty Riessen and Tom Okker, had played well past midnight to defeat Rosewall and Fred Stolle in the semis. Less than 12 hours later, they were back at it. But not for long: Smith and Lutz took the final, 6-2, 7-6, 6-0. Riessen and Okker had to settle for a mere $8,000 apiece.

Where, George Lott might have asked, were Newk and Roche? Roche was coming back from injury, playing a minor-league circuit in the States. Newcombe had taken a break from the weekly grind of World Championship Tennis, so he was ineligible for the big bucks in Montreal. Instead, he was spearheading a group of countrymen in Asia as they fought to regain the Davis Cup. Laver, Emerson, Rosewall, and Stolle were probably more concerned with the action half a world away in India than they were with their own results in Canada.

Concerned–but not worried. After a scare in Hong Kong a couple of weeks earlier, the Aussies were ready for Vijay Amritraj, the dashing Indian youngster. Amritraj and his teammate-brother Anand had the home court advantage in Madras, but not much else. On the first day of play, Newcombe and Mal Anderson conceded just seven games in six sets. While the doubles rubber was closer and the humid conditions favored the hosts, Newk and Geoff Masters sealed the tie in four sets.

The Australians’ relief was two-fold. Indian security forces were concerned that Pakistani terrorists would attempt to kidnap the athletes, a particularly vivid threat just eight months after a massacre of Israeli Olympians in Munich. The visitors were guarded by machine gun-wielding troops, so Newcombe and his teammates spent the trip hunkered down in their hotel rooms. Somehow they managed to muster the focus to get through the tie.

Now, both groups of Aussies–Newk and his buddies at home in Oz, and the WCT crew in North America–could sit back and wait. They had a place in the Inter-Zonal semi-finals, to be contested in November. They wouldn’t even know their opponent for months. Davis Cup ties were spread all over the Continent this weekend: Bulgaria beat Belgium, Norway stopped Denmark, and New Zealand snuck past Austria, to name just three. It was just the beginning: There were three more rounds to go before a European side earned a place against Australia. Davis Cup wasn’t just a measure of skill, it was a test of commitment.

That test was a little tougher to pass each year. Who–aside from Newcombe–would pass up a shot at $20,000 to play a Davis Cup zonal tie in India? Smith captured the ambivalence in a post-match interview. “I suppose it’ll be kind of nice,” he said, “to tell our grandchildren some day that we won the first doubles championship.” After all, the poor kids will be begging for something different after the 100th telling of how Grandpa and his friends won the Davis Cup.

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May 5, 1973: The Drop Shot Queen

*Can’t tell what Rosie Casals will do next? You are not alone.*

The 1973 Virginia Slims tour got some criticism for being so top-heavy. Margaret Court won nearly everything. When Billie Jean King was healthy, it could be a two-woman show. Rosie Casals was perhaps third in line, but even she was a tier below the headliners. In eleven events before the Family Circle Cup, she had reached the semi-final at each one. She went 2-9 in those semis. She was 0-2 in finals–against, of course, Court and King.

Rosie was a shotmaker without compare, a skill that made her and Billie Jean the best doubles team in the world. What held her back–and she readily agreed with this–was the mental side of things. (It didn’t help that she was 5-feet, 2-inches tall, either.) But with a record-setting prize at the $100,000 tournament in Hilton Head, she was able to focus. “You’ll go a long way for $30,000,” she said of the first-place check, “even to the point of concentrating.”

The first sign of the improvement came in the semi-finals, against King. Rosie had lost to her long-time pal 14 times in a row, apart form the famous double default at the 1971 Pacific Southwest. Five of their last seven meetings had come in semi-finals, in which Casals had failed to win a set. This time, however, Rosie kept her concentration and took advantage of a subpar Billie Jean. King acknowledged that she had never really gotten going in 1973.

That set up a final with Nancy (Richey) Gunter, who upset an ailing Court in the quarter-finals. The crowd couldn’t have asked for a better contrast. Gunter was a slugging baseliner; Casals was the creative netrusher. The New York Times called it “a marvelous final that dispelled notions over the inability of women to generate excitement on slow clay courts.”

(That’s what passed for a compliment in the early days of professional women’s tennis.)

It was a high-quality match from start to finish. The fifth game of the first set ran to 14 points, 8 of which were ended by winners. Gunter seized the opener, 6-3, before Rosie’s drop shots took their toll. Casals ultimately hit 30 of them, dragging her opponent into unfamiliar territory at the net–and taking advantage of Nancy’s fatigue from the rapid-fire, four-day event. Gunter spent most of the second set guessing wrong, losing 6-1 as Rosie unleashed droppers off of both her forehand and backhand wings.

Still, Gunter nearly claimed the $30,000. She came within two points of victory at 5-4, 30-15 in the decider. Casals evened the game with a chalk-spitting drop shot, then took the advantage with a passing shot winner when a befuddled Gunter came forward of her own accord. Rosie held for 6-5, then triumphed in a remarkable 43-stroke rally at 30-all in the 12th game. Gunter missed a forehand to give Casals the set and the match, 7-5.

“I didn’t want a tiebreaker,” said the champion. “I don’t think I could have made it.”

Rosie more than doubled her prize money on the year to a total of $58,500. Only Court had won as much in 1973. Only a handful of women had ever done so well from a single year of tennis, and it was still May.

With the match behind her, Casals could finally relax. The wisecracking Californian was as good an interview as ever. Asked who she would like to thank, she had a list ready: “Nancy, Margaret, Billie Jean–and everyone else who lost.”

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May 4, 1973: A British Disgrace

*Virginia Wade, Joyce Williams, and Ann Haydon Jones at Wimbledon in 1969*

The Federation Cup barely registered on the packed tennis calendar. The international women’s team competition was still relatively new: The ILTF launched it in 1963. The arrival of the Open era almost immediately shunted it to second-tier status, as the game’s stars increasingly focused on prize money, none of which was available here.

1973 couldn’t have driven the point home any more clearly. At the same time that women’s teams from South Africa to Norway to Korea competed for the Cup, $100,000 was at stake in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Needless to say, plenty of stars were missing at the quaint, old-world club in Bad Homburg, Germany where the one-week event was held.

Virginia Wade, however, was always ready to wear the colors. She had played every installment of Federation Cup since 1967. She led the British squad to runner-up finishes in each of the previous two years, falling to the hosts–Australia in 1971, South Africa in 1972–each time. Aside from another Cup stalwart, Evonne Goolagong, Wade was the best player there.

She had extra motivation, as well. The British team was well-financed, with cash prizes for players who recorded wins. The arrangement was not entirely novel, but the fact that it became public–even discreetly–was rare.

The Brits knew there were no guarantees, especially if it came down to a final against Goolagong and the Aussies. But Wade’s side had never, in a decade of Federation Cup play, failed to reach the semi-finals. With so much top-tier talent missing, anything less was unacceptable.

The 30-country field was whittled down to eight in a just a few days of best-of-three-match ties. Two nations didn’t play at all: Poland refused to compete because of South Africa’s participation, and Chile’s team didn’t show up at all. (It’s possible they stayed home for the same reason.) There were few early surprises. The United States needed a deciding doubles rubber after an unknown Korean named Jeong Soon Yang upset Patti Hogan. But the Americans weren’t expected to make a deep run anyway: The four-time champions were missing a football team’s worth of stars. Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, and Nancy Gunter were at Hilton Head, and Chris Evert was finishing her senior year of high school.

On May 4th, Great Britain took on Romania in the quarter-finals. Romania was well-known for its exploits in the men’s game: Ilie Năstase was arguably the best player in the world, and with Ion Țiriac, he had made his country a perennial Davis Cup contender. The women had no such résumé. Veteran Judith Gohn was no threat against someone like Wade, and unknowns Mariana Simionescu and Virginia Ruzici were 16 and 18 years old, respectively.

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Simionescu (left) and Evert in 1980, when both were married to fellow tennis pros

Wade dispatched Gohn with ease, handing off the baton to Joyce (Barclay) Williams, a 28-year-old Scot who had reached the quarter-finals of the US Open two years earlier. Alas, the British number two had no way of preparing for this crucial rubber. Lance Tingay captured the youthful verve of Simionescu:

She exploded into action, this strong, jolly lass of only 16, who laughed when she hit winners, laughed when she had winners hit against her and laughed when she fell over. And what fine winners hers were!

Simionescu’s forehand was “forked lightning,” the best weapon off that wing of any of the women in Bad Homburg. While she was every bit as inconsistent as you’d expect of a hard-hitting, inexperienced teen, she pulled out the victory, 6-3, 6-8, 6-3.

That left the stage open for Virginia Ruzici. Veteran journalist David Gray, who sang Simionescu’s praises nearly as heartily as Tingay did, judged Ruzici to be even more talented. The Romanians played as if they had nothing to lose, and the attack of Gohn and Ruzici snatched the deciding doubles rubber from Wade and Williams, 7-5, 6-2.

More than anything else, the British defeat was a reminder that women’s tennis was–finally–truly global. A dozen years earlier, the only international women’s competition was the Wightman Cup, which pitted the Brits against a United States squad each year. Now there were 28 more nations to contend with, most of them outside the Anglosphere. Romania hardly had a presence in the women’s game just a few years earlier; now they were two rounds away from a Federation Cup title.

This being 1973, though, it wasn’t that simple. Romania, like Poland, objected to the inclusion of South Africa in international sporting competitions. All of the sudden, the surprise victory against the UK set up a semi-final against South Africa. The Romanian coach had instructions from the upper reaches of his government to default such a tie if it arose. The country’s Davis Cup team had done so just five years earlier.

ILTF and federation officials spent the rest of the day in a flurry of diplomacy. For five hours, phone calls and telegrams bounced back and forth between Bad Homburg and Bucharest. The semi-final was rescheduled from Saturday morning to Saturday afternoon to give the negotiations more time. At last, the Romanians agreed to play. The potential for glory was, at least this time, on this stage, greater than the implicit approval of the apartheid regime.

The unexpected political brouhaha had at least one positive effect: It pushed the British loss out of the UK papers. No one was happy about the early exit, but it was easy to forget. This was, after all, just the Federation Cup. There were bigger events in tennis happening around the world, and the next two months would bring a crop of exploits and controversies guaranteed to keep British tennis fans focused elsewhere.

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May 3, 1973: Chasing $30,000

The Family Circle Cup wasn’t officially a circuit-ending championship, like the men’s WCT doubles finals in Montreal the same week, or the WCT singles finals in Dallas the week after. But it might as well have been. The Virginia Slims women’s tour settled its conflict with the USLTA just in time for 16 of the best players in the world to compete for record-setting prizes.

For Margaret Court, it was her final tournament before taking on Bobby Riggs in a much-anticipated exhibition. Billie Jean King was healthy again, and she no longer had to worry about fighting an international legal battle just to enter Wimbledon. Chris Evert and Evonne Goolagong remained outside the Slims fold, but this week even offered an apparent Evert clone: 17-year-old Floridian Laurie Fleming. Fleming won four qualifying rounds, then demolished veteran Julie Heldman for a place in the quarter-finals.

A likely Court-King final was nothing new: The two women had been facing off for more than a decade. This week’s story was the prize pot that one of the stars would take home. This wasn’t just the Family Circle Cup, it was the $100,000 Family Circle Cup, with a $30,000 check for the singles winner. No women’s tennis tournament had ever offered such a rich reward. In fact, it was the biggest prize in the history of women’s sports altogether.

Most of the 16 ladies in Hilton Head had been competing for years with five-figure stakes on the line. But this was something different. They could be forgiven a few jitters this week.

On May 2nd, the first day of play, the nerves-of-steel award went to Nancy (Richey) Gunter, a 30-year-old veteran with two major titles to her name. In the first round, she drew Frenchwoman Françoise Dürr. Dürr had come through qualifying and had vast experience on slow surfaces like the South Carolina clay. After a see-saw battle, Dürr reached match point in the third set. Gunter saved it–and two more–to force a tiebreak. The Frenchwoman came close again in the sudden-death, first-to-five-pointer, taking a 4-2 lead. But Gunter, perhaps the strongest baseliner in the women’s game, cracked three winners in a row to fend off Dürr and advance to the quarters.

Not for nothing did Cliff Richey–Gunter’s brother and a top player himself–say that Rafael Nadal reminded him of Nancy.

Waiting in the round of eight was top seed Margaret Court. The Australian had dominated Gunter for years, winning 11 of 12 since 1965, including their last five meetings. But after dispatching 16-year-old Kathy Kuykendall in the first round, Court came down with a cold. Three victories away from a financial windfall and ten days ahead of her match with Riggs, Margaret’s body betrayed her.

On May 3rd, a sluggish Court dropped the first set to Gunter, 7-5. She mustered the energy to even the score with a 6-1 second set, then grabbed a 2-0 edge in the third. Just when she had secured the momentum, leg cramps struck. She stalled so much that umpire Mike Blanchard threatened a default. Margaret’s husband Barry told a reporter, “She’ll stay in there until she gets cramps on her hands.” He recommended that she play without shoes to improve her circulation. Through some combination of socks, stalling, and sheer stubbornness, Court reached 5-2, 40-15 on her own serve.

For the second day in a row, Gunter played her best with her back to the wall. She saved the match points, and after breaking the Australian’s serve, didn’t allow her another game. Court was in no shape to compete; it just took Nancy a little while to react appropriately. The American took the match by a final score of 7-5, 6-1, 7-5.

Gunter’s victory earned her a substantially bigger chunk of that $100,000 prize pool, along with a semi-final date with third-seed Kerry Melville. King and Rosie Casals comfortably advanced to fill out the final four. While Court was optimistic that her illness would pass, she would have to head to California–and her date with Bobby Riggs–on a losing streak.

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April 30, 1973: Truce

*Margaret Court (left) and Billie Jean King holding a Waterford vase full of cash ahead of the $100,000 Family Circle Cup in Charleston*

“In tennis,” said a Philip Morris staffer involved with the company’s sponsorship of the women’s game, “it seems like it takes three to tango.”

Quite a challenge, he might have added, when two of them despise each other.

When the Open era began in 1968, the sport’s governing bodies made it clearer than ever that women’s tennis was not a priority. Many tournaments went men-only, and equal prize money was a pipe dream. In September 1970, the “Original Nine” women players, managed by magazine publisher Gladys Heldman and supported by Joseph Cullman of Philip Morris, struck out on their own. Independence was the only possible path to respect.

By 1973, the Philip Morris-backed Virginia Slims tour was a thriving concern. Tennis boomed as both a spectator sport and a recreational activity for men and women alike. The women still relied on Cullman’s support, but the tour’s stops around the United States–led by stars such as Billie Jean King and Margaret Court–were major events, drawing thousands of fans.

The USLTA belatedly realized what it was missing. Just a few years earlier, the organization had put women’s stars on outside courts and signed off on prize money distributions that sometimes gave men nine-tenths of the pot. Now, it scrambled to organize a women-only circuit. With a combination of financial inducements, appeals to personal loyalty, and threats–the Slims tour was non-sanctioned, after all–the USLTA attracted a decent slate of players.

The mud-slinging began even before the first ball was struck. The US federation had the power to ban American players from events such as the US Open. Now with its own tour, the USLTA served warning that it might do just that. Heldman filed suit in January, charging an “illegal trade boycott,” among many other offenses.

“Heldman” became a dirty word in USLTA circles. But the real victims were tennis fans. Both Slims and USLTA events could be outstanding: The Slims didn’t lack for stars, and the presence of young Chris Evert on the federation circuit guaranteed a solid turnout at every stop. Yet the events paled in comparison to what could have been. Neil Amdur of the New York Times wrote that the divide “saddled both circuits with watered-down player draws and produced dull, often routine first-round matches.”

Marilyn Fernberger, a long-time tournament promoter in Philadelphia, was more direct. “The girls have to get together,” she said. “They’re not strong enough to make it alone. If they don’t, they’ll only hurt themselves and women’s tennis in the long run.”

Little progress was made until April, when the stakes rose even higher. The ILTF, the international governing body that worked closely with national associations, said that it would ban all Slims players–not just the Americans–from federation-run events around the world. King, Court and the rest would be suspended from Wimbledon, the US Open, and every other notable tournament for the rest of 1973.

A reporter asked King what she would do if the ILTF blocked her from entering Wimbledon. Well, she said, she’d probably have to sue.

In the end, the whole kerfuffle was shown to be nothing more than a cash grab. The three sides–the USLTA, Philip Morris as the backer of the Slims tour, and the players–sat down on April 27th. The outline of a deal was quickly reached: Philip Morris would pay $20,000 to the federation in lieu of sanction fees. No players would be suspended. The tours would continue to operate as planned over the summer, and Heldman would manage a combined circuit after the US Open.

The players made it official when they okayed the deal on April 30th. They met the ILTF’s deadline, so they could compete in Europe over the summer. Billie Jean, in particular, was relieved. As the lead player representative, she had faced the stress of the circuit’s legal situation at the same time that she promoted the tour and attempted to win a title every week. Now she could head to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and compete for a record-setting $30,000 winner’s check at the inaugural Family Circle Cup.

Arthur Ashe had been through similar struggles in the men’s game. In mid-April, a reporter asked him about the Slims situation. “There has to be cooperation, a meeting of the minds,” Ashe said. “The sport has never been this big before. So everyone is going to have to have that spirit of cooperation and pull together. There’s enough for everybody.”

So it proved–especially once the federation got out of the way.

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April 29, 1973: Mark Cox’s Consolation Prize

Arthur Ashe had good reason to be confident. Entering the final of the United Bank Classic in Denver, he had beaten Mark Cox seven times in eight tries. The two times they met on the 1973 WCT circuit, Ashe had conceded eight games–combined.

“For some reason, I always play pretty well against him,” Ashe said after whipping Cox in the Charlotte semi-final a week earlier. “His game complements mine better than my game complements his. Mark has no junk in his game; he just hits nice, flat, fluid strokes.”

But Cox, a 29-year-old Cambridge economics graduate from Leicester, was no pigeon. The left-hander held a permanent place in the record book. His 1968 defeat of Richard González at Bournemouth made him the first amateur to defeat a pro in the Open era. He scored upsets of Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall in the years that followed. To reach the Denver final, he won three-setters over Jan Kodeš, Brian Fairlie, and the big-serving Roscoe Tanner.

(How hard did Tanner hit a tennis ball? One fan with baseball on his mind suggested that if Hank Aaron didn’t break Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, they ought to give Tanner a bat.)

Playing for the Denver title on April 29, Cox’s “nice, flat, fluid strokes” often proved unreturnable. Ashe’s typically booming serve went awry, and he was forced to come in behind too many weak offerings. The Brit feasted, hitting what Arthur called “winners and winners and winners.” The match was even more lopsided than Ashe’s recent wins: Cox took the final, 6-1, 6-1.

While the surprise victor could hardly complain about his $10,000 winner’s check, the triumph was bittersweet. It was the final week of the WCT’s 1973 circuit. The top four players in Group B–the gang in Denver–advanced to the tour finals beginning May 9th in Dallas. Rosewall, Ashe, and Marty Riessen already had their spots locked up. Cox’s points from the Denver title moved him into a fourth-place tie with countryman Roger Taylor. The Dallas berth was decided by the two mens’ head-to-head record. Cox and Taylor had played once in 1973, a quarter-final in Copenhagen back in February. That match went to Taylor in a third-set tiebreak.

So by the slimmest of margins, Taylor, not Cox, would head to Texas to meet the best of Group A: Laver, John Alexander, Roy Emerson, and the hottest man in tennis, six-time winner Stan Smith. Cox would have to settle for a flight to Italy and an early start on his clay court campaign.

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April 27, 1973: Battle of the Undergrads

*A 1973 college match at the Nicollet Tennis Center in Minneapolis*

By the time she was 19, Molly Hannas had been playing against boys and men for years. It wasn’t until she was 1973 that her story caromed off the zeitgeist.

Hannas started her career playing high school tennis in Kansas City–on the boys’ team. She headed next to Purdue, competing against women and finishing runner-up in the Big Ten conference tournament. After a year, she transferred to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. There was a women’s team there, but like at most institutions in 1973, it was nothing more than a club sport–an opportunity to get some practice with a part-time coach and play a few matches against local opponents.

Molly quickly got the lay of the land at Macalester and realized she could compete with anybody there, regardless of gender. The men’s coach, Jack Bachman, didn’t have any problem with her trying out for his team. She not only made the cut, she won the ladder competition and began the 1973 season as the squad’s number one player. Hannas’s first victim smashed his racket in frustration. Bachman kept the damaged stick as a souvenir.

In her own telling, Hannas wasn’t fighting any larger battle: She just wanted to play tennis. She assumed the same of the college boys across the net, and few of them treated her badly. Still, her success marked another tiny step on the road to gender equality in college sports. Title IX, the U.S. law that forbade sex-based discrimination at schools receiving federal funding, had passed in 1972. But no one had yet applied the law to athletics. Progress remained in the hands of one-off lawsuits and small-scale trailblazers like Molly.

The reputation of Macalester’s new star spread quickly. Bachman’s tally of broken rackets remained at one–it’s harder to get angry when you expect to lose. Hannas’s teammates were supportive–her doubles partner, John Molder, was especially complimentary–and competitors around the conference* learned that they needed to ignore her gender. “I thought I’d be embarrassed if I got beat,” said a vanquished rival from Bemidji State. “But I don’t. She’s just a real good player.”

* The best team in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference belonged to Gustavus Adolphus College, where the squad included a strong doubles player named Tim Butorac. Tim’s son Eric would star with the Gusties 30 years later, then go on to reach the Australian Open doubles final in 2014.

On April 27, Macalester’s season was winding down when the Associated Press sent Molly’s story out over the wire. She made the paper back at home in Kansas City. She even got a squib in the “People in Sports” column of the New York Times. The Times didn’t make an explicit connection to the upcoming Bobby Riggs–Margaret Court match, barely two weeks away, but no reader would’ve missed the link. It had been the biggest story in tennis for a month.

Hannas stayed focused on her local battles. “I like to think I play in Billie Jean King’s style,” she said. “But I’d never be able to match her.”

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