“If it hadn’t been for Lamar Hunt and his vision for where tennis should go, the sport wouldn’t be where it is today.” – Arthur Ashe
‘I give WCT a great deal of credit. It established what a pro circuit could be.” – Ken Rosewall
Most tennis observers young and old know that professional tennis as we know it today was born out of the creation of the World Championship Tennis tour by Lamar Hunt, Al Hill Jr. and David Dixon. I recently saw the new DVD “WCT The Road To Open Tennis” and it was fascinating to learn the details of how it all began as an idea and was then executed with perseverance and struggle into a major sport. The two WCT finals played in Dallas, Texas between two Australians, Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver in the early 1970s, were electrifying events featuring “the richest prize in tennis” ($50,000), and an incredible high-quality tennis by two spectacular titans. The video footage of the matches of Rosewall vs Laver shows that players like Federer, Nadal and Djokovic would have fit right into the 1970’s WCT era had they been born in that age – and Rosewall and Laver would be certain top five ATP kingpins and Grand Slam champions today.
If you have never seen video of these matches – the second final has been called “The greatest tennis match of all time” and it was televised by NBC to over 20,000,000 viewers – you have to visit You Tube and see for yourself the awe-inspiring level of tennis and speed demonstrated by “The Rocket” and ‘Muscles.” Laver vs Rosewall, despite using outdated equipment, in my opinion, is the equal of anything we have seen from Federer, Nadal, Murray and Djokovic, and it makes you wonder how “The Big Four” of today could play the kind of tennis they do with wooden racquets? Also I wonder if Laver and Rosewall were superior players as they were physically smaller and so they had to work and fight much harder on the court.
The early days of the WCT Tour were not without prehistoric facilities and comforts. A funny moment was hearing poor Dennis Ralston, one of the “Handsome Eight” talk about the cold showers in the cold arena in the middle of winter in Kansas … he sounds as if he still feels the pain of that frigid water four decades later.
Narrated by Cliff Drysdale, there’s tons of historical insights and best of all, some memorable footage. Like Rod Laver running on the beach. Drysdale’s backhand looks as solid and technically perfect as Nikolay Davydenko’s. There was also a clip of Niki Pilic hitting a backhand return winner and then doing a fist pump. Was it one of the earliest or perhaps the earliest professional tennis player fist pump? Then there was Rod Laver struggling against Ashe and after one lost point he shows extreme frustration, such extreme disgust that the normally mild-mannered Laver flung his racquet to the ground and kicked at it.
At the conclusion of the film, John McEnroe acknowledges the importance of the WCT and how it helped inspire himself and the other future greats to take tennis to a new level.
Tennis today is arguably the greatest sport on earth, feature the most amazing athletes and champions. No sport requires the amount of physical talent, fitness, training, dedication and sacrifice as tennis. And all that work and sacrifice produces man and woman at their physical best, a finished product that inspires us all to be the best that we can be as athletes and as people.
And without the ideas and dedication of Lamar Hunt, Al Hill, Jr and David Dixon and the WCT, it’s not certain that tennis would have the highest prominence in the world today that it does.
Great super champions like Muhammad Ali, Roger Federer, Bjorn Borg, Andre Agassi, Mike Tyson have the power to explode a sport into another stratosphere. But what if these performers did not have the special stage to showcase their magic? The WCT contributed mightily to give tennis that stage.
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Andrew Miller · August 1, 2016 at 4:32 pm
Those guys were one of a kind. They made efforts everywhere. They “got it”. The millions slam champs make now came from them. I read Trabert’s book about the barnstorming before WCT and, I mean, it’s just too obvious – without any of that no one would be doing anything today.
Scoop Malinowski · August 1, 2016 at 8:28 pm
Totally agree Andrew – The WCT is what set the stage for the tennis magic that came in the late 70s and has electrified the world now for five decades – Laver and Rosewall and the others played the tennis that arrested the attention of the world but it was the mentioned pioneers who built the stage and constructed the TV deal with NBC which showed the WCT finals in Dallas (NBC took the big risk to show pro tennis which at that time was not a major mainstream sport yet) –