Category: 1973 Redux

Chris Evert played a lot of tennis in her home state of Florida, but at the end of 1973, she had to travel all the way to South Africa to establish her supremacy over Evonne Goolagong and the rest of the Grand Prix field.

For two months, Evert had held a modest lead in the Grand Prix points standings, a table based on the results of the season’s sanctioned tournaments. A lot hung on the word “sanctioned.” The Grand Prix was organized in part to help traditional events attract stars and fend off competition from World Championship Tennis and the Virginia Slims tour, so results from those upstart circuits didn’t count. Goolagong had made a late push by reaching the US Open final, together with titles at the Canadian Open and in Charlotte, where Evert had withdrawn due to illness.

The only Grand Prix event on the ladies’ calendar in the last quarter of 1973 was the South African Open. Goolagong was the defending champion; if she won the title again and Chrissie stayed home, the Australian would claim the Grand Prix crown and its $23,750 bonus. (The runner-up would collect a healthy consolation prize of $16,250.)

Airfare from Florida to Johannesburg wasn’t cheap, but with $7,500 on the line–not to mention another $6,000 for the South African title–it would be foolish to stay home.

On November 22nd, Evert justified the journey. By defeating 17-year-old local Ilana Kloss in the quarter-finals, she secured enough points to put the Grand Prix laurels out of reach, even if Goolagong defended her crown.

It wasn’t easy. Even though Evert hadn’t lost a set since Margaret Court beat her at the US Open and the Floridian won her first two matches in Jo’burg without the loss of a single game, Kloss came out fighting. Under the lights at Ellis Park, the left-handed Kloss pushed Evert behind the baseline and relentlessly attacked the net. She took the first set, 6-2, and after dropping the second, she grabbed an early break in the third. Only at 4-all in the third set did Evert find the form that had won her 84 matches and 10 titles since February. The American won 8 of the last 9 points to advance, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4.

Chrissie was officially the queen of 1973, even if her title came with an enormous asterisk. The dominant player of the season was Court, who won three of the four majors as well as just about every other tournament she entered. But most of those events were on the Slims circuit, while Evert and Goolagong piled up points on the weaker spring junket sponsored by the USLTA. Even without entering many of the Grand Prix-affiliated tournaments, Court finished third on the league table. Bonus money was contingent on participation, though, so the $12,500 third-place check went instead to Virginia Wade, and Court would have to settle for her existing season haul of just over $200,000.

Still, Evert’s star was on the rise. She had reached two major finals, beaten Court at Wimbledon, and led the season series with Goolagong. Few would have questioned her status as the world’s top player on clay. Court and Billie Jean King wouldn’t be around forever, but promoters had little to worry about. With Chris and the wildly popular Evonne holding sway, the game was in good hands.

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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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Getting the job done between the lines was the easy part. On November 20th, 1973, Arthur Ashe made his first-ever appearance on a South African tennis court, straight-setting a fellow American, Sherwood Stewart.

1973 marked a watershed for the South African Open, as it did in the nation’s sporting scene as a whole. The government loosened its apartheid policies on athletics, if only slightly, by allowing a handful of dark-skinned visitors and permitting a limited amount of interracial competition. The headliners were Bob Foster–an American heavyweight who would fight South African Pierre Fourie in Johannesburg in December–and Ashe.

“Sports is the Achilles’ heel of South Africa,” Ashe said. “Now, I know the government is using me, but I’m using it, too.”

Foster was unabashedly mercenary in his aims. The $200,000 he picked up for the bout was his only interest. He holed up in a hotel room for the duration of his stay, and though he defeated Fourie, he left the country less of a hero to the black population than he had been when he arrived.

Ashe, on the other hand, barely left himself any time for tennis. He met with everyone from local activists to the national Minister of Sports and Recreation. The situation was more complicated than international newspapers made it out to be: Most whites welcomed him (though some admitted they didn’t believe in racial equality), while some blacks objected to his visit, believing it gave credibility to an illegitimate government.

Some things, however, were clear. “It is amazing how few people realize what South Africa really is,” Ashe told Frank Deford, a Sports Illustrated staffer who tagged along. “It is a police state. The greatest, most influential variable here is fear. Wherever I go I see that everybody is afraid.”

The entire trip was, fundamentally, a negotiation. Ashe believed in engagement and recognized that compromise was inevitable. One of the terms he set for his visit was integrated seating at the tennis stadium, and he quickly discovered that his hosts would only go so far. (Tournament director and doubles whiz Owen Williams was stuck in the middle: He may have done more negotiating than anyone.) Some black spectators were given tickets to traditional whites-only area of the grandstand, but the “blacks-only” section remained. Ashe kept most of his gripes to himself, and before leaving the country, he was persuaded to tone down his official statement.

Perhaps all of the off-court contortions turned the tennis itself into an escape. In other circumstances, the pressure would have mounted as Arthur progressed through the draw: He was within shouting distance of a place in the eight-man field at the season-ending Grand Prix Masters, and a title here would push him over the line.

No matter the result, the growing crowds and nationwide adulation meant that Ashe would leave South Africa in triumph. He knew, as well as anyone, the limits of influencing social policy through sport. But his trip represented incremental progress, a step that only Arthur Ashe could have taken.

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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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A sense of humor, Tom Okker might have pointed out, was overrated.

Ilie Năstase, clown nonpareil and probably the most talented tennis player on earth, was seemingly incapable of staying serious for long. Some of his best performances came against buddy Jimmy Connors, who was happy to joke around as well. Facing a dour opponent like Okker or Stan Smith, however, the Romanian looked to the crowd for approval, forgetting that style didn’t count toward the final score.

Năstase reached the final of the 1973 Dewar Cup at London’s Royal Albert Hall with a glittering, final-set-tiebreak victory over Connors. On November 17th, battling Okker in the championship match, the magic was gone. His legions of teenage British fans adored him regardless of the outcome, and he didn’t seem to care too much either.

Okker, the “Flying Dutchman” and second place in the Grand Prix points race, was one of the few puzzles Năstase couldn’t solve. The two men had played five times already in 1973, and Okker had won three of them. Perhaps the Romanian was tired: London was his 38th week of the year in competition. But, as Lance Tingay pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, the Dutchman had played nearly as much.

The first set was a 6-3 breeze for Okker, marred only by his opponent’s usual antics. In the fifth game, Năstase gestured with his left arm while waiting to connect with a smash, apparently indicating where he planned to hit the ball. Okker protested that it was a distraction, but the umpire didn’t think it was worth a penalty. Indeed, by Năstase’s abrasive standards, it barely merited any notice at all.

The Romanian ran off four of the first five games in the second set, and he came within one point of a 5-1 advantage. But there, Tingay wrote, “his talents died.” Okker’s down-the-line passing shots hit the mark again and again, and Năstase didn’t win another game. Oddly enough for a consensus number-one player, Ilie found himself flummoxed by a challenger. “I can’t beat Okker,” he said after the match.

The victory was worth £3,000, and the title went a long way toward securing even more for the Dutchman in the Grand Prix race. Second place in the season-long competition was worth £15,000, while the third-place finisher earned £11,000. (Năstase had already clinched the £22,000 first prize.) Okker started the week with a five-and-a-half point lead over John Newcombe, and Newk’s loss the day before to Jiří Hřebec in the Davis Cup semi-final meant that he couldn’t match Okker’s 40-point Dewar Cup haul. Both men would have just one more shot to pad their totals: Okker at the South African Open, and Newcombe in the Davis Cup final, if Australia got that far.

Newk’s window had yet to close: Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall won the doubles rubber to give the Aussies a 2-1 edge against Czechoslovakia. But catching the Dutchman was never easy. Unlike his most familiar foe, Okker wasn’t one to beat 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:

By November 1973, everyone in the sports world was talking about Chris Evert, the 18-year-old Floridian on the cusp of dominating women’s tennis. For the next couple of years, though, fans hailing the victories of Chris Evert would need to be a little more specific.

On November 14th at Aqueduct Racetrack, a new champion was minted in the Demoiselle Stakes: a two-year-old filly named Chris Evert. Her owner was a Massachusetts clothing manufacturer named Carl Rosen, and Chrissie–the one who swung a racket–endorsed his tennis line. The Wimbledon runner-up and the filly wouldn’t cross paths until the following year, but Evert the tennis player kept tabs on Rosen’s equine protégé.

Both Everts would reach new heights in their respective fields in 1974. The Floridian would break through at the majors, winning Roland Garros and Wimbledon in succession. The horse would, if anything, be even more dominant. She won the Filly Triple Crown, the prestigious collection including the Acorn Stakes, the CCA Oaks, and the Alabama Stakes.

The two champions finally came face to face in July 1974 at the Hollywood Park Racetrack, when the tennis player watched her namesake take on Miss Musket in a one-on-one match race. With $350,000 on the line, Chris Evert won by 50 lengths. It was an even more comprehensive victory, and a far richer payday, than Chrissie could’ve managed against Bobby Riggs in the would-be match that–finally–had faded from the headlines.

Back in November 1973, both Chris Everts had plenty of work left to do. While Rosen celebrated at Aqueduct, the Floridian was in Johannesburg preparing for the South African Open. “You won up here,” Rosen cabled to the tennis star. “We hope you win down there.”

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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 Rod Laver and John Newcombe met to determine the champion of the 1973 Australian Indoors in Sydney, the Davis Cup semi-final was just a few days away. It was a safe bet that the Aussies would beat the visiting Czechoslovakians, but it still wasn’t certain who, exactly, would get the job done.

One reporter called the four-man squad of Laver, Newcombe, Ken Rosewall, and Mal Anderson “the strongest team Australia, and quite likely any country, has fielded in the 73-year history of Dwight Davis’s silver bowl.” Australia had won the Cup 21 times, and after a five-year lull in which the nation’s murderer’s row of contract professionals was ineligible, the lads from Down Under were more than ready to take it back.

Newcombe would lead the charge: Captain Neale Fraser was relying on the big-serving US Open champion. That left Laver or Rosewall for the second singles spot. Laver was two years younger, and when he played his best tennis, he was the superior choice. But he had struggled with injuries throughout the year. Until he came through a weak field in Hong Kong at the end of October, he hadn’t won a title since March. In that same span, Rosewall had picked up five.

Luckily for Fraser, he couldn’t have scripted the Aussie Indoors any better. Both veterans waltzed through the draw, progressing to the semis without the loss of a set. On November 10th, something had to give: They met in the semi-finals with, in all likelihood, a place in the Davis Cup singles lineup on the line.

There were no secrets between these two. Laver and Rosewall had faced off more than 150 times, going back to Laver’s pro debut ten years earlier. Rocket held a narrow advantage, but Rosewall had won the last two decisions, including the championship round of the 1972 WCT Finals, one of the greatest matches of all time and a television broadcast that launched thousands of amateur tennis careers. It was Rosewall’s backhand against Laver’s serve-and-volley, as it had always been.

In the decisive third set, both men battled for every point, breaking serve a total of seven times. Laver won by the narrowest of margins, 8-6. Rosewall, aware of the implications of his loss and always a man of few words, could only say, “I should have pressed harder.”

The victory earned Laver a place in the final against Newk. If Fraser had any lingering doubts about his choice, the left-handed veteran put them to rest. The Aussie Indoors final was best-of-five, and the two men went the distance, Laver grabbing the first set and Newcombe the next two. Rocket was the most dangerous man in the game when playing from behind, and he showed it again on this day.

After pushing the match to a fifth set, Laver lost his serve in the fifth game of the decider. Newcombe held for a 4-2 advantage before Rocket made his final move. Laver broke for 4-all, and two games later, he put an exclamation mark on his triumph with a blistering backhand on match point. After a frustrating season full of stops and starts, there was no longer anything holding him back.

“I reckon I was the underdog,” he said, “and this makes the victory that much more enjoyable.”

Laver the underdog: Even the Czechs didn’t give themselves much of a chance.

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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 Swedish royal family had an affection for tennis, and Björn Borg had a knack for pleasing them. In July 1973, Borg had impressed King Gustaf VI Adolf at the summer resort of Båstad, reaching the semi-finals and pushing Stan Smith to three sets. Gustaf died shortly thereafter, and when Borg returned home for the Stockholm Open, his grandson, newly-minted King Karl XVI Gustaf, was looking on instead.

The 17-year-old Borg wasn’t yet the king of the courts, or even the king of clay, but he was making a quick ascent at the same time that Karl Gustaf did.

On November 10th, the Swedish sensation pushed for a new best on home soil. To reach the semi-finals, Borg had won three straight three-setters, against little-known local Birger Andersson, the suddenly vulnerable Ilie Năstase, and the dangerous left-handed veteran Niki Pilić. His semi-final opponent, Jimmy Connors, had yet to lose a set.

The two youngsters would ultimately play 23 official matches, including four major finals. This was the first of those meetings, and it wasn’t one that the 3,500-strong sellout crowd would soon forget. Borg took the first set, 6-4, then Connors equalized with a 6-3 frame. The American had more experience competing indoors, but he could have used more support from the grandstand. After twelve deadlocked games in the decider, Borg ran away with a tiebreak, allowing Connors just two points.

The victory set up a final that would reverberate far beyond the Swedish border. Advancing through the other half of the draw was the speedy American, Tom Gorman, who upset Smith in the quarters and outlasted Tom Okker in the semis. Gorman stood in eighth place in the Grand Prix standings, hanging on to a place in the field for the year-end Masters event. Just fifteen points behind him in ninth place: Björn Borg.

The Stockholm winner would take home more than the $10,000 first prize: Either Gorman would cement his claim to a place in the Masters draw, or Borg would overtake him. Only one more “A”-level event remained on the Grand Prix calendar, in Johannesburg, and neither man intended to make the trip. At the Swedish capital’s Royal Hall, before a royal audience, two men who had squeaked through to the final would continue their fight for a place among tennis royalty.

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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:

After her triumph over Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome, everyone wanted a piece of Billie Jean King–even the United States Senate.

The tennis boom extended to the highest ranks of society. Former Vice President Spiro Agnew was an enthusiastic–if erratic–player. New York Representative “Battling Bella” Abzug cleaned up when she bet on Billie Jean against her fellow Riggs-backing Congressmen. Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker told a group of high students that he would challenge King once he was finished with the Watergate hearings–if he could ever shore up his backhand.

Madame Superstar was invited to Washington to speak to a Senate subcommittee on the subject of the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA), a law proposed to support the broader gender-equality goals of Title IX, which had passed the previous year. The bill had foundered in the House of Representatives, but Senator Walter Mondale revived it for consideration by the Senate.

In both a prepared address and a question-and-answer session on November 9th, King emphasized that stereotyping and discrimination started early. She chose tennis as an 11-year-old, when she was told to pick a “ladylike” sport. As she rose through the local junior ranks, she saw travel funding and other advantages given to boys without half her promise, while she got nothing. It was a vicious cycle: There were few professional role models for athletic young girls, and without early support, few of those girls would do any better.

King was one of the few to break through, and she delighted to see how things were changing. “Little boys come up to me and say, I want to be a great tennis player like you,” she told Senator Richard Schweiker. “They don’t think of me as a woman or man; all they know is I am an athlete.”

There was little talk of specifics; King’s appearance was, in part, a gambit to generate positive press for the WEEA. Besides, who would pass up the chance to meet the sports hero of the hour? “I saw the whole tennis match,” said Schweiker, “and I am one of the tennis buffs who would not think of challenging you.”

Congress–some of it, anyway–was just trying to catch up with the times. As part of a larger package, the WEEA would pass in August 1974, authorizing grants for various type of educational programs. Title IX wasn’t yet primarily linked to sports, and its regulations wouldn’t be finalized until 1975. At every educational level, women’s teams and programs were already sprouting up, many of them with new scholarships attached. Legislation only accelerated a process that–thanks in part to Billie Jean and other role models–was already reshaping American culture.

“Women are starting to have more self-respect, walking tall,” King told the subcommittee. “I think a lot of it is just because of that match against Roberta Riggs the other day.”

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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 Dewar Cup circuit was not what it used to be. British tennis in general was fighting a rearguard action against richer tournaments around the world, as players chose dollar signs over tradition. The Dewar’s-backed late-season mini-tour had once spanned six weeks and featured Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong. By 1973, it was down to four weeks, and the fields were considerably less star-studded.

It wasn’t all about the money, but the money didn’t help. The total purse for women at the Dewar Cup of Edinburgh, the second stop on the circuit, was $3,500 (£1,430), including $825 for the singles winner. By comparison, at the Virginia Slims Championships in Florida just a few weeks earlier, first-round losers took home $800. The same performance at a Whiskey circuit stop was worth a measly fifty bucks, or twenty pounds sterling.

Dewar’s, the booze-selling sponsor, tried to emphasize the opportunities that a lower-profile circuit gave to young players. (17-year-old Sue Barker took part, as did Romanian teens Virginia Ruzici and Mariana Simionescu.) Another positive aspect, at least for local fans, is that the events were increasingly dominated by British players. In Aberavon, Wales, the first stop, Mark Cox and Virginia Wade took the titles. In Edinburgh, on November 3rd, 21-year-old Brit John Feaver challenged Wimbledon semi-finalist Roger Taylor for the men’s title, while Wade faced Julie Heldman for the second week in a row.

In Wales, Heldman had tried and failed to outhit Wade, and she went down quickly. What fans didn’t know is that just about everything was going wrong for the 27-year-old American. The press had come down on her–unfairly, she thought–for her win by retirement over Billie Jean King at the US Open, she was going through a bad breakup, and she had a nagging cough, spiraling into a bronchitis that would take her out of action the following week. If that wasn’t enough, she hated her new haircut.

She might have disliked Wade even more. Decades later, she still prickled at the British player’s “arrogance and dismissiveness.” No matter that the odds were against her, Heldman would throw the kitchen sink at her leonine nemesis.

The London Observer‘s Shirley Brasher credited the American with “clever changes of spin and pace,” the sort of game to put Wade off balance. Heldman lost the first set, but when Wade started rushing into errors in the second, the American took advantage and forced a decider.

It became as testy a battle as the two ladies had ever contested. Words were exchanged in the third game of the deciding set; alas, the British press did not record them for posterity. In the end, wrote David Gray, “Miss Heldman concentrated so hard on winning the intellectual battle that she lost accuracy and concentration.” Wade took the final set, 6-1, despite the fact that, according to Lance Tingay, her “evenness of temperament was tried to the full.”

Wade hardly needed to call her accountant about another $825 prize, but there was one consolation. Taylor, the men’s champion, got the same amount. While the Whiskey circuit was on the way down–in a few years it would disappear entirely–the shrinking rewards of the Dewar Cup were distributed equally to men and women.

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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: