World Professional Champion

Peter Underwood

After winning the Grand Slam in 1962--in a tennis world split between amateur and pro-- there was one pinnacle left for Rod Laver to climb. He had to take on the great pro players, the "vagabond rug beaters."

Laver wanted only one thing: to become the best of the lot. For a record guarantee of $110,000 over three years, on January 4, 1963, he signed a contract.

Starting Over

By the end of 1962, in the pristine world of the amateurs, Rod The Rocket Laver was the best by a Rockhampton country mile--and the pros needed him desperately. Their circus was in one of its periodic holes. The cause was not a lack of top players. Champion Ken Rosewall was at his peak, and the rest of the gang weren't too bad either.

Despite chronic injury Hoad was still great, and occasionally sublime. And behind them was a superb bunch including the older masters Francisco Segura, Frank Sedgman and Tony Trabert. Pushing the veterans were the new boys, Andres Gimeno and Butch Buchholz.

Even the spear throwers were hardly pushovers: Barry MacKay, Mal Anderson, Ashley Cooper, and Alex Olmedo had collared Wimbledon and other Grand Slam titles.

But the greatest of them all, Richard Gonzales, was in one of his periodic "retirements." More than anyone, Rod Laver knew what this meant.

Pancho had contacted him secretly during the Grand Slam year. Ever the recalcitrant loner, Gonzales was now well into his thirties and playing irregularly. Nonetheless, he still didn't acknowledge that Rosewall reigned as the current Pro Champion. Further, he was under pressure for alimony from his growing number of ex-wives.

For the first and only time in his career, Gonzales was aspiring to the role of promoter. Gonzales offered the amateur champion a lucrative contract to turn pro and play him in an old style, hundred match head to head tour.

Rod called up a few insiders including Rosewall and Hoad. Don't trust Gonzales was the gist of what they said. After that, Laver decided that he'd stick with his mates. However, under the surface, the world of tennis was changing. Black money in the amateur circuit had so burgeoned that the top amateurs could be both lionized and well rewarded.

The pros continued to be ostracized. There was just no way to change the public's feeling that pro tour matches were "meaningless exhibitions."

Hoad and Rosewall

Despite Laver's amateur supremacy, his entrance into this itinerant brotherhood was painful. He discovered the tour was so unstable that Rosewall and Hoad had been forced to guarantee their offer to him with their own houses.

Laver also had some idea of what he was going to be up against on court. The pro leaders had told him that they were not intending to follow the format of the traditional head-to-head: contender Laver against champion Rosewall. In a dramatic series of confrontations between Australian world champions, Laver would have to play Hoad one day and Rosewall the next.

So on January 5, 1963, in Lew's hometown of Sydney, Laver came face to face with his boyhood idol. "Of all the great players I've met, I knew Hoad was the man who liked playing left-handers," Laver said. "Lew had been training for weeks to get ready for the match and right away he made me understand that all the pros jealously defend their reputations."

The first outing was mixed. The good part was that the tennis was great. It was four tough sets, and Laver played well, had his chances, and lost 8-6 in the final set. Further, Laver said that he "enjoyed that match more than any I had played in years."

So, he thought, had the big crowd. Ten thousand had come out to watch. Even the papers, notoriously anti-pro, raved about the match, saying that after years of dullness and division tennis had once more become exciting.

And the bad news?

"Lew and I played until after 11 pm," said Laver, "and by the time I got to bed it was 3 am. I woke about noon and at 2 pm I had to go out against Rosewall. Laver, feeling stiff and let down after lifting himself for Hoad, was no match for the Pro Champion who took him apart.

This time it was straight sets, and took less than an hour. After the match, all Laver could say to the press was: "Playing against Ken is like hitting against a brick wall." Rod had previously said that when he played Hoad for the first time he thought he was up against the best player he'd ever faced. Then Laver described as "a lot better" than Hoad.

Everything got worse from there. Laver put it this way: "Lew beat me in eight straight matches after that, and Ken did it in eleven out of thirteen. The difference between pro and amateur tennis was so great it took me months to settle down."

"I felt the pressure of being the top amateur, the man who had equaled Budge's Grand Slam, and there was a psychological barrier to break through. On some occasions the ease with which they beat me, the constant travelling, and the hard matches night after night made me feel like quitting."

Then he would be consoled by the crowds and the money, and by his record in the world's great events. But, more, his game was improving.

Always Planned

By the time the US leg got under way in March, with Hoad mercifully absent through injury, Laver was establishing himself among the top three pros. Occasionally, his game would reach a new peak. Then he would have "real hope that I would end up the world's best player like I had always planned."

One night in April, four months after his debut, the troupe hit the legendary venue of Madison Square Garden. Suddenly it came together. He took Rosewall in straight sets. Then in June, in a pro tournament in Los Angeles, Laver beat Hoad for the first time without losing a set.

Rod had broken a crucial barrier. But for most of the first 18 months as a pro, life was harsh and big victories few.

At the very beginning of his first US tour, Laver had to play in Boston against the huge Barry MacKay. Laver was looking forward to it, admitting how nice it would be to get away from a menu of Hoad and Rosewall.

But he soon found out that in certain conditions Barry could be as difficult to play as the legendary Australians. This was the first real winter for the boy from the tropics, and there was snow everywhere.

The court consisted of rough planking over an ice rink. MacKay "had one of the biggest serves going," said Laver, "and trying to return it on that bumpy court was like trying to swat jackrabbits with a broom." So another beating. This time, from a player down from the top.

What the Hell?

The US tour that followed in 1963 contained 60 matches in 80 days. The players were packed into a couple of station wagons. They were "on the run every minute, grabbing hot dogs, getting to bed about three every morning, driving, driving, driving."

One dangerous and freezing night when the road was like grease, the car sliding and swerving, Laver caught himself wondering just "what in the hell" he was doing. On one occasion in the boondocks, Laver was up against Frank Sedgman. To his surprise Laver found that when he reached the net, Sedgman was passing him with ease and vice versa.

Suddenly, the two players concluded the court wasn't right. When they found a tape measure it was a yard wider, and nearly a yard longer than it should have been. With only this court at their disposal, they played on.

One time the pros got a call from the Sudan. What about a show over a few days in Khartoum?

One of the players asked: "Hey, isn't there a revolution going on?" The reply was no worries. There's still money for tennis players like you.

So off they went. When the pros arrived, they discovered there were soldiers everywhere, plus a curfew, and no publicity, newspapers or radio.

The promoter reckoned that folks might still hear about the tennis by word of mouth. The next day, arriving at the courts, they found nobody there.

Eventually a few people trickled in and, late in the afternoon, play started. They started on grass, but dusk descended.

And so the four pros, with the spectators trailing along behind them, walked over to a nearby cement court with lights, and started up again. They continued until any chance of further play vanished. So many insects descended that it was impossible to see a thing, and they had to stop. The rewards for all this? A purse of $1,000.

One day in La Paz, Bolivia--altitude 12,000 feet--with their noses streaming blood and the balls zooming everywhere as a consequence of the thin air, the finalists were not even playing for money. The first prize was a $600 watch.

Yet they never stopped playing and, as Laver says, never stopped trying: "Personal pride pushed us, that's all. I tried as hard at La Paz or Khartoum as I did at Wimbledon."

Despite such rigors, Charlie Hollis's perfectionist pupil kept studying his craft. From the outset he saw precisely what was needed to match Rosewall and Hoad.

Concluding that his game didn't need radical change, he decided three aspects needed fine tuning. First, he had to cut, out lapses that cost him easy points. Second, he had to harden his serve, particularly his second delivery.

Third, he had to improve his lob. "I soon found out in pro tennis that you were dead without a good lob--by far the most underrated shot in the game."

This was a must to enable Laver to maintain the pressure on his opponents, who were, to a man, expert commanders of the net. Soon Laver had mastered offensive as well as defensive lobs, and from the backhand as well as the forehand.

By watching the superlative lobber Segura at work, eventually Laver also came to learn the art of "rafter lobbing." This was feeding the ball through the low-hanging beams of the little arenas that the pros were forced to frequent.

Laver explained how one night, when playing at a particularly low-slung venue--a converted armory--he beat Gimeno and hit a lob that "wandered among the girders as though directed by radar."

The better Laver played the better he felt. Though it had taken him two years, by mid-1964, the pro crown was looking close.

In September of that year of 1964, Laver and Rosewall met in the British Professional Championships at Wembley. This was always a crucial tourney for the pros, a sort of pro Wimbledon.

Rosewall, Vines, Budge, and Kramer had cemented their supremacy by taking the title there. Gonzales and Sedgman had captured it as well.

So the tournament was particularly important to Laver. Rosewall had won four times in a row, Gonzales had just returned from retirement, and Sedgman and Hoad were there to make a top field.

Wembley

The British Professional Championship of 1964 passed the baton. Two of the older masters and. former titleholders, Gonzales and Sedgman, were still good enough to get through to the semifinal round. There, fittingly, they faced their successors, Laver and Rosewall.

The Final between incumbent Rosewall and pretender Laver was a classic. The veteran tennis writer and historian Joe McCauley counted it as one of the greatest matches he ever saw.

Both Rosewall and Laver were masters near their peak, and they were playing for their reputations and for the top position in the tennis world. In just under three hours, despite Wembley's fast boards, the pair made hardly an error, and displayed every shot in the game.

Laver won the first set, then lost the next two. But after winning the fourth, in the final set he found himself down a break with Rosewall serving for the match.

"Suddenly," said McCauley, Rocket raised his game, "breaking back with a stream of unplayable winners." Continuing to hit out, at 6-6 Laver again broke Rosewall's serve. Then he held his own for the championship.

Here was a changing of the guard. Once more Rosewall sensed that he was about to be upstaged --just as he had been as an amateur by Hoad, and again as a new pro by Gonzales.

Yes, he was thirty, and he had had a good run at the top. But, except for the other pros and a few die hard supporters, hardly a soul knew about it.

When a reporter caught an exhausted Rosewall sitting alone courtside after his loss to Laver, he asked, "How are you feeling?" Normally careful, fair and polite, Rosewall drew on the reaches of his Aussie dialect. His head in his hands, he replied, "Like a bastard on Father's Day."

Rosewall's long reign at the head of world tennis was finally brought to an end. The Rockhampton Rocket beat his rival in 12 of their 17 meetings. He won 15 tournaments to Rosewall's 6. In the beginning of 1965, Rod Laver was officially declared the World Professional Champion.