Heavy Topspin

The two-week Japanese swing of 1973 ended with an Australian sweep. A week after taking the title in Osaka, Ken Rosewall defended his Tokyo trophy as well. Evonne Goolagong cruised through the women’s round-robin event. Rosewall and Mal Anderson combined to win the doubles, while another Aussie, Kim Warwick, partnered Goolagong to the mixed title.

Finals day, October 14th, was a lucrative one all around: Rosewall took home $12,000 for his singles triumph and Goolagong earned $5,000 for hers. As pleasant as those paydays were–and for Evonne, there was likely an appearance fee involved as well–cash wasn’t the only reason that these particular superstars made the trip.

Rosewall, a few weeks away from his 39th birthday, had very little left to prove. He still craved a Wimbledon title, though he suspected the boycott had stripped him of his final shot. He was mulling a rich offer from the Pittsburgh Triangles of World Team Tennis, even though the players’ union still hadn’t come to terms with the league. It was possible that WTT signees would end up suspended by their own union. Viewed in that light, the Japanese junket–ultimately worth nearly $20,000 for two weeks’ work–may have just been an attempt by the one-time accounting student to pad his retirement fund.

But Muscles, the five-foot, seven-inch magician of the backhand, had another goal in mind. Australia’s Davis Cup semi-final tie against Czechoslovakia was just a month away, with the final round to follow shortly thereafter. Rosewall had a spot on the roster, but he needed to convince captain Neale Fraser that he–instead of Rod Laver or John Newcombe–deserved to suit up for the singles.

Newk showed up in Tokyo, only to struggle through three-setters in the second and third rounds. Rosewall had no such hiccups, losing just two games in his first two matches. Newcombe had disposed of the older man at the US Open in a routine three-set semi-final. But here, on clay, Muscles was imperious. He won 6-1, 6-4, his tenth straight victory, and his 19th and 20th consecutive sets won on Japanese soil.

While the remaining Davis Cup ties would be played on faster surfaces, Rosewall had succeeded in giving Fraser a bit more to think about.

Goolagong had her mind on a different target. The result of the women’s Japan Open didn’t count toward anything except bragging rights and bank balances. The nascent WTA didn’t yet have its own ranking system, and the Tokyo event didn’t count toward the standings in the Commercial Union Grand Prix.

Still, the Grand Prix race was still alive, and Goolagong had every reason to keep herself sharp. She trailed only Chris Evert on the points table, and the winner would collect a bonus of more than $23,000, half-again as large as the second-place prize. (Margaret Court was undoubtedly the season’s best player, but the Grand Prix was unaffiliated with the Virginia Slims circuit, where Court and Billie Jean King amassed most of their hardware.) Evert could have clinched the crown a month earlier in Charlotte, but illness forced her to withdraw. Goolagong waltzed past the weakened field and remained in the hunt.

Unlike the men’s Grand Prix, with ten events in October alone, the women’s schedule was spotty. After Charlotte, there was a nearly two-month gap before the South African Open, the last stop that counted toward the standings. Evert wasn’t planning to make the trip, and if Goolagong finished first there, the Australian would end the season as the Grand Prix champ.

Judging from Goolagong’s straight-set romp in Japan, Evert must have been thinking about calling her travel agent. She needed to check on flights to Johannesburg.

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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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Three weeks after the Battle of the Sexes at the Astrodome, newspaper readers could have been forgiven for thinking that a rematch was right around the corner. Even though Billie Jean King had said no to a sequel, coverage of the protagonists had continued unabated.

October 9th found both King and Bobby Riggs in the news. Billie Jean was in Oakland, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of a baseball playoff game between the Athletics and the Baltimore Orioles. The most remarkable thing about the appearance was that it was the first time King (or Riggs) crossed paths with A’s owner Charlie O. Finley, a huckster on a scale that Bobby could only dream of.

Finley had bought the team in 1960 when it was still the Kansas City Athletics; he moved the franchise in 1968. Stopping at nothing to promote the team, he replaced the mascot with a live mule and paid bonuses to players on his 1972 squad for growing mustaches. He supported the new designated hitter rule, and a couple of years later tried to convince his fellow owners to use orange baseballs. Yellow balls had made tennis more watchable on television, but Finley’s innovation was a non-starter.

In any case, Billie Jean proved to be a good luck charm. Behind 11 innings of one-run ball from Ken Holtzman, the A’s won a nailbiter, then went on to win the World Series two weeks later.

Riggs was every bit as effective in keeping his name in front of the public. He was so certain of victory in the Battle of the Sexes, he had said, that if he lost, he would jump off a bridge. A couple of King’s pals suggested the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena, better known as the “suicide bridge.”

Bobby had other ideas. It’s tempting to suspect that the Happy Hustler earned a few bucks by talking up his plans to leap from London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The relocated London Bridge was a marketing ploy that Riggs–or Finley–might have dreamt up himself. It had stood over the Thames since 1831, but when London needed a replacement, the city dismantled and shipped the old structure to an unlikely buyer, a land speculator in Arizona. The oddball tourist attraction opened in late 1971 and helped the remote, arid locale turn a profit.

Alas, Riggs couldn’t jump–or maybe he already knew that. The local sheriff said that the lake was too shallow for a safe dive, and anyone who tried it would be arrested. Still undeterred, he went out on an inflatable raft. Unable to fulfill his end of the bargain, he could at least get his picture in the paper.

Bobby’s loss had barely slowed him down. When he wasn’t floating in Lake Havasu, he put out a challenge to top women golfers, and he was signed up for a pro-celebrity tennis exhibition later that week. Rematch or no, there was always something new to promote.

* * *

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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The first week of October 1973 found elite players spread across the world. Billie Jean King wrapped up a title in Phoenix, while Eddie Dibbs scored a victory in Fort Worth and Jimmy Connors added to his title haul in Quebec. Half a world away, a new regional circuit was getting underway, with both men and women competing in Japan.

The first stop of the men’s Asian swing took place in Osaka. At the same venue, a group of women–headlined by Evonne Goolagong–played a round-robin event that would extend over two weeks. 1973 would see more top-flight tennis in Asia than ever before: After Osaka, the men would head to Tokyo, Manila, New Delhi, Tehran, Hong Kong, and Jakarta.

On October 7th, 38-year-old Ken Rosewall secured the first leg of the Asian jaunt, defeating home hope Toshiro Sakai, 6-2, 6-4. Since dropping a first-set tiebreak to fellow Aussie Ian Fletcher in the first round, Rosewall had been impeccable, losing just 21 games in 10 sets.

“Kenny Losewall” was a hero to the growing legions of tennis players in Japan. He had won a title in Tokyo the previous year, as well. His small stature and graceful game appealed to developing players who realized they would never be able to smoke the ball like John Newcombe or the six-foot, two-inch Cliff Drysdale–Rosewall’s victim in the Osaka semis.

Cliff’s wife, Jean, went along for this trip and wrote about the growth of the game in Japan for World Tennis. There were already one million tennis players in “The Land of the Rising Tennis Boom,” and many more were poised to join their ranks. Three million Japanese played a traditional variant called “soft tennis” that used old-fashioned rackets and (you guessed it) a softer ball. Coaches could spot soft-tennis players in an instant: They swung so hard that they sent groundstroke after groundstroke sailing over the fence.

Japan’s crop of internationalists was the strongest since the 1920s, when Zenzo Shimizu reached the all-comer’s final at Wimbledon. Sakai, the Osaka runner-up, was just the tip of the arrow. He had excelled when the Australians visited for their Davis Cup tie in April, taking a set from Mal Anderson and then beating Newcombe in a dead rubber. Five local players had reached the Osaka round of 16, and one of them, Jun Kuki, had beaten American Jeff Borowiak to reach the quarters. Another Davis Cupper, Jun Kamiwazumi, would become the first Japanese player on the World Championship Tennis circuit in 1974.

The country still had some ground to cover: For all the aspiring players, there were only eight registered teaching pros. No wonder Rosewall, Newcombe, and the Drysdales were so popular when they gave clinics. The boom arrived a bit later than it did in the West, but judging from the enthusiasm on display in 1973, the tennis scene in Japan was going to be a big one.

* * *

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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After injury, illness, a summer-long media circus, and a nationally-televised battle with Bobby Riggs, Billie Jean King deserved a break. After finishing up her duties in Houston, she took one… for exactly ten days.

The week after her victory over Riggs, Madame Superstar sat out as most of the top women gathered for the Slims event in Columbus, Georgia. Chris Evert edged out Rosie Casals in the semis, then claimed the title when Margaret Court withdrew with a pulled calf muscle.

One week, apparently, was enough. When the tour made its next stop in Phoenix, King was there. On October 2nd, she returned to action, facing 24-year-old Peggy Michel in the first round.

King received a hero’s welcome, but Michel had plenty of support as well. She was a local favorite, having starred for four years as part of the Arizona State tennis team. After a comfortable 6-1 first set for the top seed, Michel took advantage of the familiar conditions to mount a comeback.

Billie Jean struggled with the altitude, watching many of her serves and groundstrokes float just long. Things got worse in the sixth game of the second set, when she believed a Michel shot was out, but neither the linesman nor the chair umpire saw it. They replayed the point, and from a 3-2 advantage, King was broken to even the set.

Michel broke again in the twelfth game, helped by a King double fault at set point. The underdog won the set, 7-5. In the decider, though, the veteran regrouped, cut down on the errors, and delivered a 6-1, 5-7, 6-3 victory.

“I got through by the skin of my teeth,” said Billie Jean. It was unusual for her to spend more than an hour on court in the early going; she hadn’t lost a set in a first-round match since April. She admitted–obliquely, anyway–that she couldn’t keep up her pace indefinitely. Phoenix, she said, would be her last tournament of the year.

Would you have believed her? Could the warrior of women’s tennis really sit on the sidelines for three months?

Spoiler alert: No. No, she could not.

* * *

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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Roy Emerson wasn’t planning to head west for the 1973 Fireman’s Fund International in Alamo, California. But his tennis-camp schedule opened up, so he took advantage of the free time and made a quick trip to the Golden State.

At the Pacific Southwest, the first leg of his two-tournament swing, Emerson turned in a performance typical of his 37-year-old self. He won a couple of singles matches, then lost in straights to Tom Okker. In the doubles, he paired with Ken Rosewall to reach the semis. He was still one of the best doubles players around: Even as a part-timer, he had picked up five titles in 1973 alone.

A week later in Alamo, the Australian veteran played like a younger man. He battled through a three-setter against Jeff Austin in the second round. He overcame a 5-7 first-set loss to Roscoe Tanner to advance through the quarters. In the semi-finals, Arthur Ashe took another 7-5 first set, but Emerson stormed back to win, 6-2, 6-1.

“I play better when I don’t play so much,” he said. “I can concentrate and enjoy it more if it isn’t week after week.” Alamo–the site of the Round Hill Country Club, outside of Oakland–was just his second tournament since July, and the value of the time off was evident.

On September 30th, Emerson’s opponent in the final was a man nearly two decades his junior, Sweden’s Björn Borg. Everything, it seemed, was new to the 17-year-old, but his learning curve was extraordinary. He had lost first-rounders to middling opponents in his two previous outings on California cement. Here, though, he demolished the big-serving Vladimir Zednik and outlasted third seed Tom Gorman.

Borg got off to a strong start in the final, as well. Despite losing four of the first five games, he reeled off five in a row to win the first set, 7-5. For the third match in a row, Emerson dropped the opener by the same score.

“An old body takes a long time to warm up,” he said.

Emmo started returning better, and he realized that Borg’s two-handed backhand often created opportunities for his own backhand volley–the bread-and-butter shot that had won a dozen major titles for the Australian. He cruised through the second set, 6-1.

An Emerson return, at 4-all in the third, proved to be Borg’s breaking point. At deuce, Emmo ran around a weak serve, blasted a forehand, and won the point. The Swedish teen double-faulted to hand his opponent the break. The veteran served it out for a 5-7, 6-1, 6-4 victory.

Emerson owned more than 100 career singles titles, but it had been awhile. How long? “You would have to ask me a difficult question, wouldn’t you?” said the champion. “Gosh, it’s been so long, I honestly can’t remember.”

Not counting exhibitions, it had been four years. His trophy haul had been doubles-only since the summer of 1969, when he ran off three titles in a row on European clay. He wasn’t about to change his schedule, though: He wouldn’t appear on a singles court again until March.

Borg, for his part, was satisfied with his second-place finish. “I play my own game and if I lose, I lose,” he said. “Next time, I’ll beat him.”

* * *

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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On clay, Ilie Năstase had no peer. The 27-year-old showman from Bucharest had won the 1973 French Open without dropping a set. In Rome, he disposed of Manuel Orantes–the next-best player in the Grand Prix points race–by the imperious score of 6-1, 6-1, 6-1. By September, he had already picked up eight clay-court titles; his only loss was a nailbiter to Adriano Panatta in Bournemouth.

Enough of the circuit was played on clay that Năstase‘s results made him the clear leader in the season-long Grand Prix. Heading into Chicago’s Tam International at the end of September, he had 408 points. The rest of the top six clustered between 284 (Orantes) and 233 (Jimmy Connors).

On less familiar surfaces, the Romanian was vulnerable. He lost to Sandy Mayer at Wimbledon and Andrew Pattison at the US Open. On cement at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles, he fell in the semi-final to Tom Okker. Now Năstase needed to contend with the fast, indoor hard courts in Chicago.

It was a surface where anybody could beat anybody. For Năstase, the threat arrived on September 27th, in the form of 23-year-old Australian Phil Dent. Dent was a promising player with many of the usual attributes of his countrymen, like a penchant for grass courts and a knack for doubles. His serve got him into plenty of tiebreaks, but it hadn’t delivered any significant winning streaks.

Though Năstase liked to clown around in the early going, he quickly learned he was in for a fight. American tennis officials had taken some of the fun out of his hijinks, too. At the Cincinnati tournament in August, Ilie spent much of the final protesting line calls, cursing the referee, and stalling in protest. When he won–Orantes, again, was the victim–the referee withheld his prize money. A USLTA disciplinary committee eventually ruled that he would be fined $4,500–half of his earnings in Cinci.

Not so long ago, the charismatic Romanian had been held up as a savior for professional tennis, a TV-friendly face and personality who could drive interest in the game. But with the rise of Stan Smith, and now Connors and Björn Borg, he wasn’t quite so indispensable. There were no shortcuts to sporting fame and fortune: He needed to keep winning.

In fairness, he never stopped doing that. He came into the Dent match with an astonishing total of 94 victories in 1973 alone.

He somehow made it 95. Dent took a close first set, 6-4. Năstase equalized by the same score. It was the highest-quality match of the tournament, perhaps the best Ilie had played on a hard court since he dueled with Connors back in March. Both men served big, returned well, and took care of the business at the net. The crowd, according to the Chicago Tribune, was left “gasping.”

The final set was the most dramatic of all. Neither man edge ahead, and the contest came down to a deciding tiebreak, the 8th of Năstase’s career. Dent couldn’t muster any more heroics, giving the Romanian the breaker and the match, 7-4. The top seed survived the scare, and the tournament kept its drawing card.

The 1973 campaign had brought Ilie down a peg, but only one. Dent, like Mayer and Pattison before him, had shown that the charismatic cad could be beaten–on a fast court, at least. Any more would-be challengers needed to hurry. However things ended in Chicago, Năstase’s next stop was Barcelona, where he would return to his beloved clay.

* * *

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 Battle of the Sexes concept was so popular that, for a few months in 1973, it seemed like everyone would have a go at it. Throughout the summer, local clubs hosted their own, pitting, say, a woman teaching pro against a men’s age-group champ. In one oddball variation, the woman was seven months pregnant.

By the time Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs settled things at the Astrodome, the public had had enough of the banter and ballyhoo. Riggs wanted a rematch, but America wanted a break.

The last gasp* of the season’s sensation came three days after the Battle itself, in Atlanta on September 23rd. Riggs had appeared at the city’s Bitsy Grant Tennis Center for a doubles exhibition with a few other prominent senior citizens the day before. The main event of the weekend, though, was an intersex matchup even more ridiculous than Billie-versus-Bobby.

* Haha, no, of course this wasn’t the last gasp.

The main drawing card in Atlanta was the facility’s namesake, Bryan “Bitsy” Grant. The 63-year-old pride of Southern tennis had first cracked the national top ten in 1930, won two matches against Australia for the 1937 Davis Cup squad, and twice reached the semi-finals at the US National Championships. Like Riggs, he was a touch artist. The nickname gave it away: He stood only five feet, four inches tall.

For a $500 prize, the eminent Georgian would take on the second-ranking woman player in the South, 19-year-old Betsy Butler. Butler had starred the previous year at Augusta College, playing No. 1 singles on the men’s team. She hadn’t yet tallied many victories on the pro tour, but just a few days earlier, she had lined up in doubles against Evonne Goolagong and aced the Australian twice in a row. Grant had never served as well as the tall teenager already could.

Chris Cobbs, the reporter who covered the match for the Atlanta Constitution, sounded like he would have rather spent his Sunday at home. Bitsy’s first serve kept missing the target, and after he forced a third set, his 63-year-old legs couldn’t keep up anymore. Butler, wrote Cobbs, “dealt another blow to male chauvinist pride and answered a few questions nobody had even thought to ask.”

Young Betsy took the “Atlanta regional” Battle of the Sexes, 6-1, 5-7, 6-3. “A man my age,” said Grant, “has to be a damn fool to play singles like this.”

He was talking about himself, of course. But he could take solace in the fact that he wasn’t the only damn fool running around in September 1973. In defiance of both common sense and Father Time, legions more were ready to cheer the old men on.

* * *

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:

 

Billie Jean King was the star of the week, there was no doubt about that. Her comprehensive victory over Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome ensured that. Still, it was an awfully good run for Rosie Casals.

On September 22nd, King’s time in Houston finally came to an end. The adrenaline rush of the Battle of the Sexes sputtered out, and in the semi-finals of the Slims event at the Net Set Racquet Club, Billie Jean lost to Casals, 7-6, 6-1. Her favorite racket went missing just before the match, but that wasn’t really the issue: she was “mentally and physically exhausted.” That, she said, “and the fact that Rosie played better tennis.”

Casals had a knack for stepping up on big stages. She won the first Slims event in Houston, back in 1970, and she took the $30,000 top prize at the record-setting Family Circle Cup earlier in 1973. The five-foot, one-inch netrusher was perhaps the best doubles player of her era, winning well over one hundred career titles, including five Wimbledons with Billie Jean. The perpetual runner-up or semi-finalist in singles, she was the second-leading money winner on the 1973 Slims tour, and with King and Margaret Court absent, she picked up a title in St. Louis the week before the Battle.

From the beginning, Rosie had been one of Riggs’s most acerbic critics. She was a reporter’s dream, sitting in the locker room with beer in hand, dishing out one-liners about friends, enemies, and a certain 55-year-old who–she never failed to point out–walked like a duck. When Billie Jean requested a female voice in the Astrodome commentary booth, Casals was the obvious choice. The television producers told her to say whatever she wanted, short of profanity. She obliged.

Rosie also displayed an eerie forecasting prowess. On the telecast, she predicted a 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 triumph for King.

As she continued her run in Houston, she didn’t let up on the old man. “Bobby choked,” she said. “[Co-commentator Gene] Scott said he was a good athlete; I said he wasn’t. He’s old and out of shape–out of our league. I don’t think he could break into the women’s top ten.”

With Casals in the role of attack dog, Billie Jean could afford to be magnanimous. “I felt sorry for him,” she said. “He had tried hard and given his best. I know how that feels. I know what it means to lose. He’s been a great loser.”

That isn’t to say that Riggs was ready to make a habit of it. He was already back in action on the 22nd, joining a group of 60-somethings–including former top-tenner Bitsy Grant–for a doubles exhibition in Atlanta. He and partner Hank Crawford won in straights, and Bobby collected $100 a set.

The Battle of the Sexes had changed the world, but Riggs and King–not to mention Casals–were already back to the grind.

* * *

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:

 

Less than 24 hours after polishing off Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome, Billie Jean King was back at the Net Set Racquet Club in suburban Houston. She had won two matches at the Virginia Slims tournament on Monday, and on September 21st, she returned to play the quarter-final.

In front of about 400 fans–quite a shift from 30,000 the night before–King took apart 15-year-old Robin Tenney, 6-1, 6-1. She probably spent more time with the press, fielding the inevitable questions about a Battle of the Sexes rematch, than she did on court. Another contrast: Instead of $100,000, this victory was worth about $1,000.

In Saturday’s semi-final, Billie Jean would meet her old friend (and Battle television commentator) Rosie Casals. The two women had come a long way in just three years.

The Houston event was not one of the most lucrative or well-attended stops on the Slims circuit. But it carried a great deal of historical weight. In 1970, the top women pros objected to a insulting prize-money split at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles, a longstanding stalwart on the tennis calendar. Gladys Heldman of World Tennis magazine put together her own event in Houston for the same week. Nine women signed symbolic one-dollar contracts, and the Pac Southwest field was gutted. Casals won that first tour event.

The next year, King and Casals went back to Los Angeles. The prize money situation had not improved, and the ladies had a convenient target for their dissatisfaction in Jack Kramer, the tournament director and former superstar player. Kramer believed that fans didn’t want to watch women’s tennis. “Evidence” piled up as the ladies were exiled to outer courts and men’s matches entertained the grandstand crowds. A week–well, a decade–of frustration came to a head after a bad line call in the 1971 final. Midway through a first-set tiebreak, King and Casals walked out, and the match went down as a double default.

That was the last professional women’s match at the Pacific Southwest. While the Los Angeles tournament retained a prime position in the men’s Grand Prix, awarding $11,000 to its 1973 champion, the women’s event turned into a sideshow. There was no longer any prize money at all.

On September 21st, when King joined Casals, Nancy Richey, and Françoise Dürr in the Houston semis, 17-year-old Kathy May led a distinctly lesser field into the Pacific Southwest final four. The Los Angeles Times reported on the men’s matches–Jimmy Connors saved match point to squeak past Stan Smith–but the unofficial organ of the Southern California tennis world didn’t bother to mention to May or her rivals.

Kramer, Connors, Ilie Năstase, and Arthur Ashe were part of a crowd that followed the Battle of the Sexes on locker room televisions. One group of line judges abandoned their posts to join them, and Kramer had to man a line himself. When Connors and Năstase were called to play a doubles match, they didn’t budge; Kramer had to push them out the door.

As it turned out, people really wanted to watch women’s tennis.

* * *

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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