!Rl I'm proud to say that the following story of mine, about tennis' transition to the Open era in 1968, which ran in the May 2008 issue of Tennis Magazine, won 1st prize in this year's U.S. Tennis Writer's Association awards, which will be handed out at the Open. Here it is, in case you need a little of the sport before you get a lot.
We’ve all seen the highlight reel. Blue-helmeted cops crack protesters’ skulls at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Martin Luther King’s entourage stands over their slain leader on a Memphis hotel balcony. Another group surrounds a dying Robert Kennedy on the floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise black-gloved fists on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics. Students hurl stones outside the Sorbonne in Paris and stage a coup at Columbia in New York. Hippies twirl through an acid haze in California. Soviet tanks roll into Prague. Inner cities burn, Vietnam burns, the president quits, and by year’s end the first photo ever taken of our big, blue, turbulent planet is plastered across front pages everywhere.
That’s right, we’re back in 1968, the year when everything happened. The shadow those 12 months cast is so wide that the French have a nickname for the people who took part in them. It’s said that one “68er” (le soixante-huitard), no matter his or her country of origin, can instantly recognize another. But while there was upheaval everywhere, one image you don’t see from that year is a tennis court.
The sports figures who resonate from ’68 represented the revolutions in politics and style that were unfolding side-by-side. Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his heavyweight title the previous year for refusing to serve in Vietnam, was portrayed on the cover of the April issue of Esquire as a martyr pierced with arrows. A few months later, a long-haired Joe Namath led the upstart New York Jets toward Super Bowl III, which they would win two weeks into 1969. Over the ensuing decades, Ali and Namath would remain powerful symbols of the era.
By contrast, the winners of the French Open and Wimbledon in ’68 were Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver, nobody’s idea of countercultural heroes. Aging Aussie pros who had conquered the game’s biggest amateur-era stages after years of banishment, they looked like clean-shaven anachronisms rather than the road-hardened rebels they were. The same went for the winner of the U.S. Open, Arthur Ashe. Tennis’ anti-Ali was a lieutenant in that most despised of ’60s institutions, the U.S. Army.
Seen from the distance of 40 years and free from the more extreme fads of the time—Ashe would become a social and political figure every bit as significant as Ali—it’s clear that the genteel pastime of tennis was an important, if unsung, part of the revolutionary fabric of ’68. Rebellions raged against all institutions that year, from the Pentagon to the Kremlin, but they had one common target: Whatever happened to be the Establishment in any given place. Nowhere was that more true than in tennis. In the spring of ’68 the sport’s long-ruling amateur establishment, the International Lawn Tennis Federation—it controlled the Grand Slams, Davis Cup, and Fed Cup, and issued player rankings—would, after decades of resistance, open its gates to professionals and begin paying players to compete. The move couldn’t have come in a more appropriate year. In fact, it couldn’t have come on a more appropriate day.
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On March 30, 1968, the 106 members of the ILTF (now the ITF) gathered for a special session at the venerable Automobile Club in Paris’ Place de la Concorde. They were there to discuss the possibility of open tennis, and the location could hardly have been more symbolic. It was at the Place de la Concorde in 1789 that France’s Third Estate, the people’s representative body, had taken its own Oath of the Tennis Court. Locked out of its halls, members had met on a court-tennis court and pledged to stay together until the country had a constitution. The French Revolution was born.
The revolt that the ILTF set in motion 179 years later could hardly compare for drama—heads did not literally roll. But the unanimous vote on March 30 to allow professionals to play in a select number of ILTF tournaments was the most important change in tennis’ nine-decade history. Forty years later, we can trace the beginning of the Open era and the commercialized modern game to that day.
The process had begun with a call to action the previous winter from an unlikely place. As chairman of the All England Club, the longtime headquarters of amateur tennis, Herman David was hardly a flag-burning radical. But by 1968, he had been working for nearly 10 years to bring the pros to Wimbledon. He had proposed the change to Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association in 1959, and five years later had tried to get the LTA to unilaterally declare the tournament open. He’d been shot down both times.
By the end of 1967 David was ready to go nuclear. He would open British tennis at all costs, including withdrawal from the ILTF if necessary. What had driven him to the brink? It was, at least in part, that most universally subversive of forces, television. In the summer of ’67, the BBC had chosen its annual Wimbledon broadcast to be the first program of any sort shown in color. The experiment was a hit. A month later, the BBC sponsored the World Professional Lawn Tennis Championship, an invitational featuring eight pros that was played on Centre Court and again shown in color. A sold-out crowd watched Rod Laver beat Ken Rosewall in the final. One hundred years after the founding of the All England Club, the pros finally had a foot in its door. In December, David denounced amateur tennis as a “living lie,” and Britain’s LTA voted to make its events open to all players.
With those words ringing in their ears, the members of the ILTF gathered in Paris to craft the compromise that began the Open era. The organization, which functioned as a United Nations of tennis, needed to placate a variety of national federations. The British were ready to dissolve all distinctions between amateurs, who couldn’t accept prize money, and professionals, who happily did. But the Eastern bloc federations wanted to maintain control of their players and thus opposed professionalism. A complicated solution was brokered that divided the players into four designations—amateurs; teaching professionals; “registered players,” who could accept prize money but still obeyed their national federations; and “contract professionals,” who were associated with independent promoters like Lamar Hunt, who had begun his professional WCT Tour the previous year.
Confusion reigned, and it would be five years before the players took full control from the ILTF and dissolved all distinctions between pro and amateur. But the dam had been breached. The age of “shamateurism,” in which top amateurs were paid under the table, was over. After years of barnstorming through tiny gymnasiums in the pro-tour wilderness, the world’s best players were welcomed back. The revolution in Paris had only been a first step, but as Bob Kelleher, then-president of the United States Lawn Tennis Association and a strong proponent of open tennis, said, “You have to creep before you can crawl.”
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While the announcement of tennis’ brave new era made headlines, it could hardly compare to the story that would break the next day. On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson shocked a national television audience by announcing that he wouldn’t run for another term in the fall.
Like tennis’ amateur era, Johnson’s doom had been sealed by the rising influence of television. 1968 marked the first year that events in Vietnam were widely broadcast by satellite on the nightly news. No longer able to control the flow of information about the war, the U.S. government could only watch as the Vietcong staged a surprise attack on January 30 that came to be known as the Tet Offensive. The maneuver was largely a military failure from the Vietcong’s perspective, but it was a public-relations disaster. What America saw on TV were U.S. soldiers being killed at its embassy in Saigon. Popular opinion would turn permanently against the war.
By the end of February, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, the mouthpiece of Middle America, would make a rare on-air editorial comment, voicing his opinion that Vietnam was lost. It was the straw that broke Johnson’s back. “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war,” the president reportedly said.
The end of amateur tennis and the demise of the Johnson administration on consecutive days may seem like an accident of history. But the same anti-establishment forces, which had come to a head in 1968, brought each of them down.
Tennis had been resolutely amateur since its origins on the lawns of England in the 1870s. In its earliest incarnation it had been played at the nation’s public schools, where the sons of the upper class were educated in how to be “gentlemen.” A spirit of fair play, the love of friendly competition for its own sake, and a devotion to a well-rounded life were at the core of the gentlemanly—or amateur—ethos, which informed all walks of English life.
In the U.S., that ethos was imported by East Coast prep schools and Ivy League colleges and became a ruling principle of the cricket and tennis clubs built by the WASP elite. Over the decades, it proved to be a durable philosophy and spread far beyond England and the Ivy League. By the 1940s, Australian tennis coach Harry Hopman was instilling it in his young players, who would include Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, and Roy Emerson. Together they would dominate the last two decades of the amateur era. While they weren't all members of the upper class, the Aussie greats are recalled today as the epitome of sporting gentlemen—the last of a tennis breed. But one by one, even they left the amateur game for the pro tours. The code of the gentleman had given way to the law of the market.
Aristocratic rule proved equally durable in the U.S. government, starting with the turn of the century administration of Teddy Roosevelt, who built a tennis court at the White House, and peaking with the administration of his cousin Franklin 30 years later. Even as the ’60s brought challenges to all forms of traditional authority, President Johnson continued to rely on the establishment’s finest products to guide his foreign policy. These were “the best and the brightest” in journalist David Halberstam’s famously ironic formulation, men like Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and William Westmoreland. Despite their best intentions and impeccable résumés, they led Johnson straight into the quagmire of Vietnam.
The announcements by the ILTF and Johnson on March 30 and 31 opened two sets of Pandora’s boxes. Tennis’ would take years to empty, as it spent the next decade remaking itself into a mainstream professional sport. The effect of Johnson’s de facto resignation was immediate. Suddenly the most powerful position of authority in the world essentially stood vacant. The result was a months-long, worldwide frenzy of rebellion. On April 4, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. Inner cities across the country erupted in riots. On April 23, students at Columbia University in New York seized administration buildings and held them for a week, causing the school to be shut down. The standoff ended with a violent police raid. On May 2, student protests in Paris ended in violent clashes with police in which hundreds of people were wounded. This was the beginning of France’s now fabled “May ’68.” Workers joined the students and called nationwide strikes. A mass shutdown of the country lasted through the month and eventually led to a referendum on the rule of President Charles de Gaulle.
Riots and strikes aside, May ’68 is remembered fondly by those who were there as a brief window of liberation, when people of all backgrounds stopped to engage each other. It was in this setting that open tennis made its Grand Slam debut at Roland Garros.
Compared to other events of that spring, the Open era had gotten off to a slow and sleepy start. The first tournament in history to welcome amateurs and professionals had been played at the end of April in the drizzly English resort town of Bournemouth. While old pro Pancho Gonzalez took an early tumble, the cream wasted no time in rising to the top: Laver and Rosewall reached the final.
After that off-Broadway rehearsal, the pros took their act to the big stage at Roland Garros. What they found at the first French Open were standing-room-only crowds of Parisians looking for refuge from the battles on their streets. “Roland Garros was a port in a storm,” wrote Rex Bellamy of the London Times. “In a strife-torn city, the soaring center court blazed with color. People even perched on scoreboards. . . . The first major open was played in the environment nightmares are made of. But the tennis was often like a dream.” In the insurgent spirit of the moment, tennis’ old rebels, Laver and Rosewall, lived up to their legend and made the final, which Rosewall won. The professional game had arrived.
While tennis fans in Paris got a break from the realities of 1968, the rest of the world continued to implode. During the tournament, Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed in Los Angeles. He had been running for the Democratic nomination for president, and his death sent the party on a despairing path toward its convention in Chicago in August. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia was heading toward a confrontation with its communist patrons in Moscow. Czech party leader Alexander Dubcek had helped create Prague Spring, a brief period of liberation similar to Paris’ in May, by loosening state control over the citizenry—“socialism with a human face,” he called it.
As the American and European summers careened toward those twin disasters, tennis found a pleasant space between them, on the lawns of the All England Club. The two weeks of the first open Wimbledon were the sport’s grand reunion party. Gonzalez returned for the first time since 1949; Rosewall for the first time since ’57. In the end, Laver reclaimed his throne, easily winning the title after five years in exile. To former player and author Gordon Forbes, being at the event was akin to watching a film burst into color, “rife with images, crammed with humor and pathos.”
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