Category: 1973 Redux

The knock on Arthur Ashe was always that he was erratic. At his best, he made flashy shots that no one else would even attempt. At his worst, those same shots would go wild, one after another. Early in his career, he lost a lot of matches when his focus betrayed him and he couldn’t recover in time.

Even at his most uneven, though, Ashe could usually hang in there. He owned a big serve, perhaps the most potent first strike on tour. When other shots betrayed him, he could reel off one ace after another and keep things close. Arthur won the 1968 US Open final on the back of a 14-12 first set. In a Davis Cup match a few weeks before that against Manolo Santana, two sets reached 11-all.

Arthur Ashe was not responsible for the introduction of the tiebreak, but he certainly played some sets that made fans wish for a quicker way of wrapping things up.

On April 4, 1973, Ashe met 21-year-old Roscoe Tanner in the second round of the World Championship Tennis event in Houston. Tanner was another cannonballer, the sort of opponent who would have guaranteed a marathon set or two against Ashe under traditional rules. But the WCT tour was all-in on the tiebreak.

In their best-of-three match, Ashe and Tanner didn’t play one tiebreak… they didn’t play two tiebreaks… they played three tiebreaks. Arthur earned a 5-2 lead in the first-set breaker, but Tanner charged back and took over, 10-8. The second set didn’t feature the same self-assured serving, and both men broke three times. But the end result was nearly the same. They reached a tiebreak, which Ashe won 7-2. The American pair deadlocked another 12 games before Ashe clinched his place in the quarter-finals with another 7-2 decision.

As far as I know, nobody counted aces. Safe to say there were a lot.

The oddest thing about the match, however, wasn’t the slim margin of victory. It was the crowd. Every single face in the gallery was a member at the River Oaks Country Club, the tournament venue.

River Oaks had staged an event since 1931, when Ellsworth Vines won the inaugural title. It consistently attracted top American talent: Between 1931 and the end of the amateur era, eleven of the men in my Tennis 128 hoisted the trophy. Bobby Riggs won it in 1940. Rod Laver beat Roy Emerson for the title in both 1961 and 1962, and Laver came back as a pro to hold off Ken Rosewall in the 1972 final. The arrival of world-class tennis players was a highlight of the Houston social calendar, an annual tradition that survived into the Open era.

But in 1973, a change in the tax code prevented the non-profit River Oaks club from charging the public for admission. The club failed to find a workaround, funded the event itself, and held the matches behind closed doors.

The players, understandably, didn’t like it. The tournament had long boasted the exclusive sobriquet of the River Oaks Invitational, but times had changed. This was the era of Open tennis, and that applied to fans as well. Ashe, who served as a kind of elder statesman among the pros through his role in the burgeoning players’ union, was the most outspoken of the group. “I don’t think the W.C.T. will play here [again],” he told reporters. “They’d be nuts if they did. They aren’t in the business of promoting closed tournaments.”

Ashe didn’t mention another offense, though many newspapers did. River Oaks was exclusionary on a full-time basis: The club had no Black or Jewish members. Arthur, however, picked his spots. He was more focused off the court than he was on it. In 1973, he fought harder for his fellow players than he did for racial justice. That would change over time, a shift accelerated by his November trip to apartheid South Africa.

Back in Houston, the closed doors of 1973 proved to be nothing more than a blip. River Oaks sorted out their tax issues and the public was welcome when the WCT troupe came through in 1974. In fact, they couldn’t have opened their doors any wider. When Laver returned and defeated Björn Borg in the final, he did so on national television.

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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:

There wasn’t much room at the top of the Virginia Slims circuit. Kerry Melville could have told you all about that.

One knock on women’s tennis was a supposed lack of depth. There were undeniable stars–Margaret Court, Billie Jean King, Evonne Goolagong–and a few more credible contenders, like Virginia Wade, Rosie Casals, and now Chris Evert. That coterie hogged the limelight; everyone else merely crossed their fingers when each week’s draw came out and hoped they’d find a path to the quarters. Lance Tingay ranked Melville fifth at the end of the 1972 campaign, but no one figured she was going to crack the inner circle.

The Australian earned her 1972 ranking by playing some of the best tennis of her career, picking up tournament victories on two continents with wins over Wade and Casals. She reached the final of the US Open, where she beat Evert before falling to King. Her runner-up status became a full-blown jinx in early 1973. She lost four finals in a seven-week span, every one of them to Court. Then she missed two weeks with a torn calf muscle.

Things finally began to go Melville’s way in Tucson, the last week of March. The winter circuit was mostly played indoors, but despite unusually chilly, damp weather, the event in Arizona was held in the open air. Other players, including Casals, griped about the inconsistent conditions, but Melville (known as Kerry Reid after her 1975 marriage) preferred her tennis without a roof.

The second round brought the shock of the tournament. Court, who had lost just one match in nine 1973 tournaments, fell to an unheralded South African named Laura Rossouw. The wind and cold that affected Court’s concentration didn’t appear to trouble the second-seeded Melville: Kerry breezed through three rounds with the loss of only 13 games. Her semi was just as easy: Casals delivered “one service fault after another” and the Australian beat her, 6-1, 6-2.

The Tucson final, on April 1st, was no laughing matter. Nancy Gunter (formerly Nancy Richey) was one of the hardest hitters on tour. Both women aimed for the baseline and stripped any advantage from the server: No one held until the fifth game of the match. Gunter’s weaponry kept misfiring, and what could have been a lengthy war of attrition ended as a brisk, 6-3, 6-4 victory for the Australian.

Skeptics had reason to discount Melville’s title: King was out with a stomach injury, and Court lost early. But with a $6,000 winner’s check in her pocket, Kerry had an answer ready: “I suppose there will be people like that, but it still goes up on the board, doesn’t it?”

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Elsewhere this week:

• In St. Louis, Stan Smith beat Rod Laver for the second straight week. This time it took three sets, but he finished the job with a break to love for a 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 victory.
• At the Lady Gotham Classic in New York, Chris Evert cruised to a 47-minute victory over Katja Ebbinghaus of West Germany. Looking on was Vice President Spiro Agnew, one of 2,401 spectators at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum. The $8,000 first prize increased Chrissie’s haul to $26,350 after just one month as a pro.
• Pakistan clinched its Davis Cup tie after squeaking through a five-set doubles rubber against South Vietnam. The victory earned them in a place in the Eastern Zone semi-finals against India, with the winner advancing to a likely clash with Australia.
• Bobby Riggs told a reporter that women players shouldn’t get as much money as men, “because they’re not as good.” He also said that a no top woman had had a chance against a top man since Maureen Connolly in the 1950s.

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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 March 1973, Ken Rosewall was 36 years old. He often played like a young man, but there were two decades of top-level tennis in his legs. He bristled against the requirement that players under contract to World Championship Tennis show up for every tournament, week-in, week-out. He had won the WCT circuit finals in both 1971 and 1972, defeating his friend and rival Rod Laver each time. But in 1973, it wasn’t clear if he’d even qualify for the event.

He arrived at the event in Vancouver, British Columbia at the end of March on a meaningless winning streak: He had won the tournament in 1971 but skipped it in ’72. He also showed up cranky. The previous week, organizers in Washington DC had convinced him and Arthur Ashe to try an experiment in their semi-final match. The crowd would be allowed make as much noise as it wanted, whenever it wanted–complete with an announcer to egg them on. Ashe won the match: It didn’t hurt that the Virginia native was essentially playing in front of a home crowd. Rosewall was diplomatic but direct: “It didn’t do anything to help that particular tourney or that match.”

Rosewall–the diminutive “doomsday stroking machine”–was looking for his first title since December and his first championship on the WCT circuit since beating Laver the previous May. There were no experiments in Vancouver, and only a few hundred fans showed up early in the week, anyway. Back in the quiet, Rosewall cruised though the early rounds. He needed only 40 minutes to beat Graham Stilwell and 50 to beat Tom Okker. In the quarters, Raymond Moore was a bit tougher, but the Aussie vet still lost only six games.* Onlookers knew that Rosewall was rounding into form when his backhand lobs started landing inches inside the baseline.

* Before Rosewall played Okker, Moore was asked which opponent he’d rather face. “Sure, I’ve got a preference. I don’t want to play either of them.”

Waiting in the semi-finals was Jan Kodeš, a 27-year-old Czechoslovakian who had never beaten Rosewall in three tries. Yet the surface favored the European. The WCT circuit didn’t concern itself with consistency: Vancouver was the third in a five-tournament string in which the players changed surface every week. Here, they played indoors at the Agrodome, but on a slow court that reminded Kodeš of European clay.

Then again, Rosewall had won the French Open–twice.

Kodeš predicted an extended baseline battle, and the contest on March 31st was exactly that. The two men broke serve 15 times, and the Czech failed to win a single service game in the second set. Yet the underdog survived a first-set tiebreak and bounced back to break in the 8th game of the third set to secure a 7-6, 2-6, 6-3 victory.

Newspapers hailed it as the match of the tournament, and it was certainly that for Kodeš. The following day, the Eastern European found himself against the crowd favorite, Seattle native Tom Gorman, who had beaten Ashe in the early going. Kodeš lost in three, and he said it felt like he was playing in Seattle–even without the authorized crowd noise of the previous week’s event.

Neither Rosewall nor Kodeš left Vancouver with the $10,000 winner’s check, but both men had proved something, if only to themselves. The aging Australian would soon resume his winning ways, and in a few months, the little-known Czechoslovakian would win the biggest title of 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:

Nine countries were represented in the 16-player field of the Lady Gotham Classic, but only one of those nations made news for its inclusion. Everyone wanted to get a look at 24-year-old Olga Morozova, the first-ever top-tenner from the Soviet Union. The New York draw was particularly tantalizing: Morozova would open against her 19-year-old traveling companion Marina Kroschina. Kroschina qualified for the event by beating the previous week’s surprise star, Marita Redondo.

It was hardly the first meeting between the two women. Morozova and Kroschina had already played seven times, including once just a few days earlier, for a place in the Akron final. (Morozova won, then fell victim to Chris Evert.) They had even faced off before in the New York metro area. Both women had made the trip to the 1972 US Open, and they met in the final of a small warm-up event in New Jersey. The older woman won that one, 6-2, 6-7, 7-5, and she led the overall series, six matches to one.

Neither that matchup nor the Soviet trip to Forest Hills satisfied American interest in the visitors. Morozova was good for a feature story at every stop on the USLTA circuit. In Akron, she told a reporter that she missed her engineering-student husband back in Moscow, she liked Boston, she didn’t care for New York, she wished she had more time to see the sights of Akron, and she loved Coca-Cola. “It is the real thing,” she said.

Nor was the larger stage of New York City too big for her. Just a few days earlier, gold-medal-winning gymnast Olga Korbut had wowed the gallery at Madison Square Garden. With a temporary tennis court installed, she would compete at the same venue. Alas, there was nothing Korbut-like about her performance on the day.

Perhaps Olga’s homesickness explained her let-down on March 29th at the Lady Gotham. Kroschina, the 1971 Wimbledon girls’ champion, took advantage of the slow, high-bouncing surface at the Garden to negate her friend’s serve-and-volley game, winning 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.

Morozova on a happier day, at Wimbledon in 1974

Both women were disappointed that the draw had paired them up so early. A tournament official told the New York Times that it was an “oversight.” More likely–I hope–it was just bad luck. Morozova was the third seed, Kroschina was a qualifier; there was a one-in-twelve chance that a random draw would generate an all-Soviet first-rounder. At least they couldn’t complain about lost prize money. Every penny they earned went back to their federation.

Kroschina never lived up to her promise. When she wasn’t traveling for tennis, she went to school to become a sportswriter, and she ultimately spent more of her life as a journalist than she did as a competitive athlete. Morozova, on the other hand, showed the way for later generations of Russian tennis standouts. She reached the final at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 1974, and partnering Evert in Paris, she won the Soviet Union’s first grand slam title.

Olga was optimistic about US-Soviet relations: “I think in the future our two countries will become very good friends. I hope.” The USSR didn’t last long enough to realize her forecast. But her goals for Russian tennis were overwhelmingly satisfied. A half-century later, all-Russian first-round meetings are no longer news. Morozova’s countrywomen are so numerous on tour that it wouldn’t even occur to them to complain.

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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:

Few seasons in tennis have been as pivotal, with effects as far-reaching, as 1973.

You already know about the Battle of the Sexes. Billie Jean King transcended the circus staged by her opponent and the media to make a resounding statement for her gender, avenge Margaret Court, and–never forget–play some great tennis. No single match has ever been so central to the culture as a whole.

The same season saw the structure of the modern professional game start to fall into place. We tend to think of the sport’s history fitting neatly into two buckets: before and after 1968. Yet the first several years of the Open era were anything but neat. Competing tours bid for players, once-powerful national federations threatened to exclude stars from majors, and the Davis Cup–until recently the absolute pinnacle of the sport–was a shell of its former self as contract pros were forbidden to take part.

Things got so contentious that a joke arose around this time: You couldn’t put on a tennis tournament without someone filing a lawsuit.

Many of the issues converged at Wimbledon in 1973. The International Lawn Tennis Federation banned Yugoslavian Niki Pilić from the tournament for allegedly refusing to play a Davis Cup tie. The nascent Association of Tennis Professionals went to bat for Pilić and threatened to boycott the Championships. Wimbledon never took the challenge seriously and didn’t negotiate in good faith. In the end, more than 80 players–including defending champion Stan Smith and most of the best men in the world–sat out the prestigious event.

The situation was back to normal at Forest Hills a couple months later for the US Open–but what was normal? The ATP had a seat at the table, and players–men and women alike–had more power with every month that passed. The 1973 US Open was the first major with equal prize money, a milestone that–had the Battle of the Sexes not eclipsed it a month later–would stand as one of the most significant achievements of Billie Jean King’s career.

For all the off-court distractions, the level of tennis in 1973 was a connoisseur’s dream. Veteran Aussies Rod Laver and Margaret Court often dominated their respective tours, Court doing so with a child in tow. King, when she was healthy, was as good as ever. Smith played some of the best tennis of his career. At the same time, a new generation nipped at their heels. Lovebirds Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors cleaned up on the lower-status USLTA circuits. Björn Borg, Martina Navratilova, and Guillermo Vilas made their initial statements on tour as well, signs that the future of tennis would be a whole lot more global than its past.

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2023 marks the 50th anniversary of that memorable season. This year, I’ll write a series of short essays about 1973, each one marking a notable event from that day. I started with March 22, when Evert and Navratilova faced off for the very first time.

We’ll cover the battles, the boycotts, and the breakouts, as well as any other random thing that catches my eye. You can expect a couple of these vignettes every week until December, when the first-ever truly open Davis Cup reached its conclusion.

There were winners and losers in 1973, as there always are. Thanks in large part to the revolutions that came to a head that year, the losers got a better deal than ever before. Bobby Riggs often lamented the result of his match against Billie Jean. “But, hey, a happy ending,” said the inveterate hustler. “I cried all the way to the bank.”

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Keep up with this project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which will show 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:

By 1973, Stan Smith didn’t have much left to prove. He won the 1971 US Open, then took the Wimbledon crown in 1972. For five years running, he had been a key part of the USA’s champion Davis Cup team, staring down the hostile Romanians in Bucharest to cap his 1972 campaign.

But there was one thing Smith’s feats had in common: Rod Laver hadn’t been there. The Rocket skipped the 1971 US Open, and he was kept out of Wimbledon the following year when the Championships banned contract professionals. Contract pros were also excluded from Davis Cup, so the Australian team couldn’t use Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, or Tony Roche–a foursome that would’ve made the Aussies overwhelming favorites under different rules.

In 1973, Smith himself was a 26-year-old contract pro, playing for the World Championship Tennis circuit alongside Rod. Davis Cup would finally be open to everyone, as well. Before the season began, Laver held a 5-2 advantage in the head-to-head, including wins in all three of their meetings at majors. Rocket padded his total with a victory in the Toronto semi-finals in February, then another for the Hilton Head title in March.

For more than a decade, Laver had been the man to beat. At age 34, he still was.

Both men played well to reach the Atlanta final. Each was pushed to three sets in the quarters but recovered for a dominant semi-final performance. Smith blasted past his frequent nemesis, Cliff Richey, 6-3, 6-2, and Laver, the event’s top seed, turned in one of his strongest showings of the year to shut down Cliff Drysdale, 6-2, 6-1.

The final promised to be a fitting conclusion to exciting week of tennis. The tournament announced a seven-day attendance of 47,524, a record for a WCT event. Among the crowd on Sunday was Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and his wife. It was a far cry from the old days of barnstorming pros when Laver, Rosewall, and Richard González would stop in Atlanta for a night, lucky if they drew 3,000 fans.

Laver won many of his matches before the first ball was struck. “There’s always the danger of being psyched out by playing Rod,” said Smith after the match. “I mean you think the guy is so good and you don’t know what you have to do to beat him.”

On the other hand, Stan wasn’t the sort of player to be psyched out. Fellow players considered him confident to the point of arrogance. He also had a knack for ignoring anything that might get in his way, a particularly useful skill when he took on the eminently distracting Ilie Năstase for the 1972 Wimbledon and Davis Cup titles.

In the end, the mental game might have been beside the point. Standing six-feet, four-inches tall, Smith owned one of the biggest serves on the circuit. On this day, it was even deadlier than usual. He won 37 of 44 service points. Only once did Laver manage more than one return point in a game. The Rocket didn’t attack as much as usual behind his own serve, and Smith took the match, 6-3, 6-4.

The American was proud but realistic. Holding his $10,000 winner’s check, he said of his opponent, “He’s still the best.”

Rocket wasn’t one to argue. A little while later, he came back out on court with his old friend Roy Emerson and won the doubles.

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This is the third installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

It was a big day for underdogs. The Akron Beacon Journal ran with the headline, “Is Marita Next Superstar?”

Not a typo.

The story of the first round was 17-year-old Californian Marita Redondo, who came through qualifying at the Akron Open to earn a meeting with Evonne Goolagong. Goolagong had reached the final round at four of the previous five majors, and onlookers thought Redondo looked “awed” by the superstar she now faced. The Filipino-American teenager later admitted she was nervous–but she got over it. She beat Goolagong, 6-3, 7-5.

With the benefit of hindsight, the press corps would have focused a bit more on Martina, not Marita. 16-year-old Martina Navratilova was playing just her fourth tournament in the States, and her opening match was her first encounter with Chris Evert. Evert was only two years older, yet she had already reached the final four at both Wimbledon and the US Open.

They pair would go on to play 80 times, three-quarters of them in finals. Akron provided a modest stage for the women to begin what would become one of the greatest rivalries in sporting history.

At least the cameramen were well deployed for the match:

Navratilova lost, 7-6, 6-3, but it was probably the best she had played thus far as a pro. After Evert seized an early break, Martina got it back, and the Czechoslovakian even came within two points of the first set, serving at 6-5, 30-love. A decade later, on an indoor surface like this one, the match would have been over. But in 1973, Chrissie was as cool under pressure as ever, snatching four points in a row from the Navratilova serve to force a tiebreak, then winning the first-to-five breaker, 5-1.

Keeping Evert close was all that most of her peers on the USLTA circuit could manage. Chrissie had just lost a nail-biter to Virginia Wade two weeks earlier in Dallas, but Akron would kick off a run of five tournament victories in a row before Margaret Court finally stopped her at Roland Garros.

Meanwhile, Marita Redondo would have to settle for a handful of trophies on what was left of the amateur circuit. While she would compete into the early 1980s, the Goolagong upset remained her most prominent victory.

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This is the first installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.