The Seventies – Tennis in Transition

While my first memories of watching tennis date back to the late Sixties, it was the following decade which cemented tennis – or Wimbledon, as it’s known in the UK – as an integral part of my summer.

Professional players had only just been allowed back into the fold, so I was fortunate that all the world’s best exponents were represented on our little telly during Wimbledon fortnight. That is, provided there were no disputes over rival tours or tennis union boycotts, which had a serious impact on Wimbledon in 1972 and 1973.

In those days, Americans and Australians were totally dominant. Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Marty Riessen, the Richey siblings, Billie-Jean-King and Rosie Casals flew the Stars and Stripes while the formidable Aussie contingent included Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Roy Emerson, Ken Rosewall, Margaret Court, Evonne Goolagong and Kerry Melville.

Tennis also seemed such a simpler game to play. There were no fancy serves or other extravagancies, but nevertheless plenty of skill. This was exemplified by Rod Laver. He wasn’t tall, but his swinging leftie serves could be lethal on grass, and of course he was one of the most successful players of all time. Heaven knows how many more Grand Slam titles he would have amassed had he renounced his professional status between 1964 and 1967. I remember admiring the size of his left forearm although it wasn’t until we had colour TV in 1974 that I realised he was a redhead like me. In ’71, like many others, I was struck by the grace of young Evonne Goolagong who upset fellow countrywoman Court in the Ladies Singles Final at Wimbledon. John Newcombe’s blend of groundstrokes and effortless volleying also endeared him to me en route to the Men’s title.

Perhaps the first final I can recall seeing in anything approaching its entirety was the classic encounter between Stan Smith and Ilie Nastase soon after my eleventh birthday in 1972. I really wanted the Romanian clay-courter to win but the big blond American took it 7-5 in the fifth. Looking at recordings it seems weird that they battled it out for well over three hours on a hot afternoon without even sitting down. Ah, modern stars don’t know they are born, right?!

The following year, 81 of the leading men stuck by their principles and boycotted SW19 in protest at the expulsion of ATP union member Nicci Pilic and left gaping holes in the seedings. Suddenly a whole raft of little known European players left their mark on me. Nastase and Britain’s Roger Taylor controversially defied the action but eventually it was the Czech Jan Kodes who defeated the USSR’s Alex Metreveli in the final. I watched as usual but the men’s tournament felt like a second-class event,

There were other Europeans around in the Seventies. Spain boasted Manuel Orantes and Andres Gimeno, Holland’s Tom Okker was always watchable, and the Italian Adriano Panatta did his best on the fast grass courts. In the women’s game, Francoise Durr was a consistent seed despite possessing surely the weakest serve I’ve ever witnessed outside my own back garden! The continent even provided both finalists in 1977 when our own Virginia Wade defeated Dutchwoman Betty Stove in front of the Queen in the centenary championships.

But tennis was a-changing. When I first followed tennis, three of the four Grand Slam tournaments took place on grass, so it was inevitable that the most successful players were strong servers and superb volleyers. Unlike today, when singles and doubles are almost completely segregated by the need to specialise, the rankings in each format looked remarkably similar. Newcombe and Roche, Lutz and Smith, King and Casals, Metreveli and Morozova were familiar pairings. As grass lost its stranglehold on the circuit, so did the serve-volleyers. A new breed of tennis star began to emerge.

I confess I never liked watching Chris Evert. She never strayed far from the baseline nor seemed to hit the ball particularly hard and yet her ability to create rally-winning angles was hugely successful. In 1974, the 21 year-old Jimmy Connors kick-started the shift towards double-handed backhand strokes (anathema to me, although Dad said that was how he was taught as a child), back-of-court power-hitting and, worst of all, grunting with every shot. It did him no harm; nobody, not even Roger Federer, has surpassed his record of professional tour victories and titles. When the inscrutable Swede Bjorn Borg upset the applecart in ’76, and John McEnroe’s brattish behaviour but sublime tennis appeared the following summer, Wimbledon would never be the same again.

Gene Mayer also made a telling contribution. In the mid-‘70s, the American top-ten player was a pioneer of a new weapon of choice. When I first saw his large-headed ‘graphite’ racket, I felt he was cheating. It appeared to dwarf the traditional wooden equipment and, with a sweet-spot the size of Wales, it quickly became evident that it gave its users a distinct advantage. McEnroe was one of the last to switch but not even he could hold back technological progress.

The decade ended with me at university and tennis revolutionised. The old US-Australia duopoly had been broken, balls were being struck with greater ferocity, Britain was back in the tennis doldrums, a sturdy teenager from Prague called Martina Navratilova gave the Eastern Bloc its first global sporting superstar and Borg was inspiring a new generation of earnest boys from Sweden to pick up a racket; a racket that was no longer made from timber. I was nineteen and already way behind the times….