Rod Laver

Australian tennis player

• Born: August 9, 1938
• Place of Birth: Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia

An outstanding world tennis player, Laver won the grand slam of tennis in 1962 and in 1969, the first time as an amateur and the second time as a professional. The grand slam involves winning the four major world singles’ titles in the same year: the US, Australian, British, and French championships. Laver is the only player to have accomplished this feat twice, the first to have won the grand slam since the American John Donald Budge in 1938, and the first professional player ever to have won the grand slam.

Early Life

The son of Roy Stanley and Melba (Roffey) Laver, Rod Laver (LAY-vuhr) was the third of four children. His parents; his older brothers, Trevor and Robert; and younger sister, Lois, were also tennis players. Roy Laver raised cattle in Rockhampton, Queensland, and constructed a tennis court to encourage his three sons to play tournament tennis. He was also instrumental in starting a tennis school in Rockhampton, where young Rodney enrolled. A slight, sickly child, he grew strong and tough working on the ranch and playing tennis. All three sons won a number of trophies in regional play in the early 1950s. In fact, Rod lost to his brother Robert in the 1951 Central Queensland junior final.

Rod Laver’s first coach was Charlie Hollis, who taught him the backhand and the top-spin service when Laver was only ten years old. At age eleven, when he was not spear fishing in the Pacific, Laver began to play tournament tennis and won his first tennis trophy two years later when Hollis entered him in the under-fourteen state championships at Brisbane. The next year, Laver met two people who were to have enormous influence on his career: Roy Stanley Emerson (two years his senior), with whom he played his first tennis match, and Harry C. Hopman, the former captain of the Australian Davis Cup team. Following an illness, young Laver dropped out of school that year to devote more time to the game. He was hired as a clerk in Brisbane by the Dunlap Rubber Company, for which he later performed public relations services after he became an amateur star.

Hopman persuaded Laver to go to the United States, where, at age seventeen, he won the US Junior Championship to launch his world tennis career. Following a year in the Australian army in 1957, Laver went to England, where his first major victory was a defeat of American star Barry Bruce MacKay in the Queen’s Club Tournament in London. By then his powerful service had earned for him the sobriquet “Rocket.” He also impressed coaches with his willingness to work harder in improving his skills than any of his contemporaries.

Although slight of build, the left-hander boasted of a powerful service forearm measuring thirteen inches around, a full inch larger than his other forearm. He is said to have been the first left-hander to possess a strong backhand stroke. His range of skills was broad and faultless, from delicate drop volleys to streaking top-spin ground strokes. Laver stands five-feet-nine and weighed 155 pounds in his playing days. He has blue eyes, red hair, and a freckled face. A member of the Church of England, he was known throughout his career as a free-spirited, beer-drinking, music-loving figure who would sometimes play golf in the free time available during important tournaments.

Life’s Work

Many Australian tennis players of world-class caliber were ranked much higher than Laver in the 1950s, but in 1959, Laver was chosen for the Australian Davis Cup team, joining Emerson and Neale Andrew Fraser. The Australians defeated the Americans three matches to two as Laver lost twice. His second loss was a marathon contest of sixty-six games to Alex Olmedo, a Peruvian American. Later that year, the bowlegged Laver lost to Olmedo again, this time in the finals of the US men’s singles’ contest at Forest Hills, New York. In the following year, Laver won the Australian title when he defeated Fraser in five sets. Fraser then came back to defeat Laver in the Wimbledon and Forest Hills finals later in 1960. At Wimbledon, Laver won his first English title when, teaming with Darlene Hard, they won the mixed doubles championship in 1959 and duplicated the triumph in 1960. In December 1960, Laver teamed with Fraser to win the Davis Cup finals over Italy.

In 1961, Laver failed to fulfill the expectations of the press when he lost to Emerson in the American finals at Forest Hills in three sets. Nevertheless, Laver’s brilliance was demonstrated at Wimbledon when he won his first All-England singles title by defeating Chuck McKinley of the United States in the final round in three short sets. Both Emerson and Laver (Fraser was injured in 1961) then rejected offers from Jack Albert Kramer to join the professional circuit. He finished the year by leading Australia to the Davis Cup with another victory over Italy. For the first time since 1909, a Davis Cup team had won the best of five series without losing a set to any opponent.

Laver’s greatest year as an amateur was in 1962. He began the year by defeating Emerson for the Australian title, followed by a much-heralded victory in the French championships in Paris. On the slow-clay French court, he came from two sets behind in the finals against Emerson to win. He defeated Emerson yet again for the title in the Queen’s Club Tournament in London just before his Wimbledon victory, where he defeated another countryman, Martin F. Mulligan, in less than one hour in the final contest. He lost only one set during the entire tournament. When Laver won the US title two months later at Forest Hills, over Emerson in four sets (losing only two sets in this tournament), he completed the sweep of the four major world titles in tennis, commonly called the grand slam. Laver was the first player in twenty-four years to accomplish this feat. Another redhead, American star Don Budge, had won the grand slam in 1938, the year of Laver’s birth. In September, 1962, Time magazine praised Laver’s “vicious ground game and the cunning way he masks his shots.” Laver also won the Norwegian, Dutch, Irish, German, Italian, and Swiss singles titles that year, and won the United States Tennis Association Indoor Championships doubles title with McKinley and the Italian doubles title with Fraser. His victories in the French, Italian, and German titles secured him “the clay court triple,” a feat that only one other player had managed, fellow Australian Lewis A. Hoad in 1956. He finished his near-perfect year by teaming with Emerson to gather Australia’s eleventh Davis Cup title in the previous thirteen years. The Australian team swept Mexico 5-0.

In late December, Laver, noted already for his popular broad-brimmed Australian sun hat, acceded to blandishments from the professionals and signed a three-year contract for a $110,000 guarantee with the International Professional Tennis Association. In truth, he had reached every goal attainable by an amateur player. Yet his introduction to the professional ranks was something of a surprise. On January 5, 1963, he lost to Hoad, 6-8, 6-4, and 8-6. When he lost to another Australian professional, Kenneth R. Rosewall, in four sets in April, he had yet to win a match as a professional in four attempts. Laver lost nineteen of his first twenty-one professional matches, mostly to Hoad and Rosewall. (Laver’s rivalry with Rosewall, a friendly one, lasted through more than 130 matches and into 1976; Laver won the majority of them.) In his book, Education of a Tennis Player (1971), Laver wrote of repeated nosebleeds he suffered during this period, as well as the difficulties of long travel. He wrote of matches in La Paz, Bolivia, and Khartoum, Sudan, often on nonregulation-size courts.

Laver persevered, however, and broke Rosewall’s string of four straight professional world singles’ titles from 1960 to 1963. Laver was the world titleholder from 1964 to 1967 and again in 1970. Teaming with Earl H. Buchholz, Jr., in 1965 and with Andres Gimeno in 1967, Laver won the world professional doubles crown.

In 1968, English officials relented to pressure from the professionals and opened competition at Wimbledon for the first time to both amateur and professional players. Laver remarked that his only regret was that the new players would never realize the sense of elation that the professionals felt at being recognized as respectable again. Laver celebrated by winning the Wimbledon title in his first year back. Next year, he won his second grand slam sweep, the first professional player to do so. After winning the Australian, English, American, and French titles in 1969, Laver was at the peak of his career. Analysts noted that except for boxing, no sport was dominated in the way Laver did tennis. In 1969, he won thirty-one consecutive tournament contests at the age of thirty-one.

Laver continued to play superior tennis for several years. He won the United States Professional Indoor Championships title at Philadelphia in 1969, 1970, 1972, and 1974. He won the professional world singles title again in 1970 and was runner-up in 1971. Laver added other championships to his list, winning the Canadian and South African titles in 1970 and teamed with Emerson to capture the Wimbledon doubles crown in 1971. He also won the Italian singles championship for the second time in 1971. His earnings began to decline in 1972, but Laver remained among the top world-class players through 1975. Two of his most famous matches were losses. His 1972 World Championship Tennis circuit (WCT) final with Rosewall in Dallas lasted three hours, thirty-four minutes, and was picked by Tennis Magazine as the fifth greatest match in history. At age thirty-six, Laver met the American Jimmy Connors for the first time in Las Vegas as part of the WCT. Although coached by his old rival, Emerson, Laver lost to his younger opponent 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5 in a televised match amid publicity compared to a boxing match. In 1973, once all professionals were allowed to participate in the Davis Cup, Laver, together with John Newcombe, led the Australian team to a 5-0 victory over the US team, ending its five-year run. He was frequently playing with injuries to his back and knees by this time but still managed to become rookie of the year in world team tennis at the age of thirty-eight, while playing for the San Diego Friars in 1976. He retired in 1978.

In 1966, Laver married an American woman, Mary Benson, with whom he had one son, Rick. Mary died in 2012. Laver was awarded the Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1970. In 1998, while being interviewed for a documentary on the greatest athletes of the twentieth century by ESPN, Laver suffered a moderate stroke and was taken to the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center for recovery. The stroke affected his right arm and shoulder primarily. He relearned how to play tennis to rehabilitate himself.

Australia honored Laver in 2000 by renaming center court of the National Tennis Centre in Melbourne the Rod Laver Arena, and in 2003 the Australia Post put his portrait on a stamp as part of its Australian Legends Award. His achievements are also remembered in the annual Rod Laver Queensland Junior Championships.

Significance

The two grand slam achievements of 1962 and 1969 earned for Rod Laver a prominent place in sports history. Including competition in both doubles and singles, he won twenty titles in the four major world tournaments, at the time a mark below only those of Emerson (twenty-eight), John Newcombe (twenty-five), and Frank Sedgman (twenty-two); his twenty titles tie him with William T. Tilden. The London Daily Telegraph’s annual rankings placed Laver among the top ten players in the world twelve times from 1959 to 1975. He was ranked first in 1961, 1962, 1968, and 1969; second in 1960; third in 1971; and fourth in 1970 and 1972.

“The Rocket” also played in one of the longest matches in tennis history when he defeated Anthony Dalton Roche of Australia 7-5, 22-20, 9-11, 1-6, 6-3 in a semifinal contest of the Australian Open in Brisbane in 1969. For three straight years, he led the professional ranks in earned prize money: in 1969 with $124,000; in 1970 with $201,453; and in 1971 with $292,717. In 1971 Laver became the first tennis professional to earn more than one million dollars in prize money; he won more than $1.5 million all together. In 1981, he was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. Several sports commentators have dubbed him the greatest tennis player of all time because of his longevity, versatile playing style, and gentlemanly behavior on court, and in a poll conducted by the Associated Press in 2000 he was selected as the Male Tennis Player of the Century. Furthermore, because of his aggressiveness and ruthlessness during play, he is considered to be one of the first modern players of the game. He holds the distinction of being an Australian Living Treasure. On October 1, 2017, Laver was inducted into the Southern California Tennis Hall of Fame.

Bibliography

Asinof, Eliot. “Why Rocket Is Better than the Best.” New York Times Magazine, 30 Nov. 1969. Print.

Fein, Paul. Tennis Confidential: Today’s Greatest Players, Matches, and Controversies. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002. Print.

Gay, Jason. "Rod Laver Loves the Modern Game." Wall Street Journal—Eastern Edition, 09 Sept. 2013: B9. Business Source Complete. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Jares, Joe. “A Two-Armed Bandit Hits the Jackpot.” Sports Illustrated (1975). Print.

Laver, Rod. Rod Laver: A Memoir. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Laver, Rodney George, with Bud Collins. Education of a Tennis Player. New York: Simon, 1971. Print.

Laver, Rodney George, with Jack Pollard. How to Play Championship Tennis. London: Macmillan, 1965. Print.

McCauley, Joe. The History of Professional Tennis. London: Short Run, 2003. Print.

Myles, Stephanie. "Laver, Riggs Among 2017 SoCal Hall of Fame Inductees." Tennis.life, 27 June 2017, www.tennis.life/2017/06/27/laver-riggs-among-2017-socal-hall-of-fame-inductees.html. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

“The Respectable Rocket.” Time, July 5, 1971.

“The Rocket’s Slam.” Time, September 21, 1962.

"The Tennis World Reacts: Class of 2017." International Tennis Hall of Fame, 23 Jan. 2017, www.tennisfame.com/blog/2017/1/the-tennis-world-reacts-class-of-2-01-7. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.