Heavy Topspin

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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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

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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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

The carmakers at Volvo didn’t know why so many of their customers were tennis players. But they were confident enough of the connection that they attached their name to the 1973 Volvo International at the Mt. Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.

The winner at the $25,000 tournament got a new car. Anyone who test-drove a Volvo in the Northeast could enter a drawing for something almost as valuable: a tennis weekend at Mt. Washington, including lessons with Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, or Fred Stolle.

Laver was the top seed and main drawing card at the Volvo. But as he closed in on his 35th birthday, the Rocket was rusty after an injury-enforced, two-month layoff. By the end of the week, he’d be thinking that he, too, could use a lesson or two from his buddy Fred.

The legendary lefty got a first-round bye, then advanced through the second round by default. His opening match came in the quarters against 19-year-old Vijay Amritraj. Laver had never seen Amritraj before, though he had probably heard about the young man’s run in Hong Kong where, three months prior, Vijay knocked out three members of the Australian Davis Cup team in succession. Since then, Amritraj had reached the quarter-finals of the withdrawal-weakened Wimbledon draw.

Vijay was better prepared. The teenager that Bud Collins called “the monsoon out of Madras” had already won two matches at Mt. Washington. He counted Laver as an idol.

On July 27th, the veteran was on track to send his acolyte home with a nice memory and a slap on the back. Laver won the first set, then reached triple match point at 6-5 in the second, 40-love on his own serve. Anyone other than an ebullient teenager would have headed for the showers.

But this wasn’t the Rocket that inspired generations of young players. Laver hit ten double faults, and as Collins wrote, his backhand “responded like fettucini.” Amritraj saved the match points, broke for 6-all, and won the tiebreak. He took the third set, 6-4.

There was no sign of nerves. At match point, Vijay broke a string with his first serve. He swapped rackets, trotted back to the line, and cracked an ace to finish the job.

Post-match talk centered on the aging hero. While Rod was healthy enough to play, he recognized he might never again be healthy enough to dominate. “I guess it’s back to the hackers,” he said, “I think there’s more left, but I shouldn’t fritter them away like that.”

Or as Stolle put it, “The Rocket isn’t firing anymore.”

In Amritraj, Bretton Woods ended up with a flashy, shotmaking serve-and-volleyer atop the semifinal bracket–just not the one they expected. As for the winners of that Volvo contest: No one could blame them if they turned up for their tennis weekend and inquired about a lesson with the energetic up-and-comer from India.

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

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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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

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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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email: