A hat tip to Jon Wertheim for pointing out the following situation to me, following that majestic Rome final in which Rafael Nadal bamboozled his arch-rival Roger Federer, and also tied Guillermo Vilas’ record, 53-match clay court streak:
The draw for Hamburg Masters Series had Nadal slotted to play his first-round match against Tommy “The Love Machine” Haas. Now put yourself in Nadal’s shoes (you know, those badly made ones) for a moment. Would you have wanted to play Haas – an oft-injured but always dangerous former World No. 2, and a German to boot - coming off an exhausting, epic five-set win over your arch-rival in Rome?
Bear in mind that there’s a great chance that your first-round opponent in your next event - it just happens to be Roland Garros, where your record-breaking feat will resonate with the thunder of a thousand Becker forhands! - is unlikely to be a native, and for sure not a native former No. 2, as France hasn't had one of those in the Open era.
Naw, the guy you get is likely to be a qualifier, or better yet, a wild card – say, Jean-Luc Faubourg de Nomerci, the 15-year old nephew of some French cabinet minister, who happens to be ranked No.7542.
That Nadal didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, did he?
Neither did Wert.
Anyway. . .
One of the great things about Nadal’s pending achievement – really, about any time that a long-standing record is about to be broken – is the way it enables us to revisit tennis history. In this case, the lore and legend of the Vilas, whose muscular game and complex personality sent many an ink-stained wretch on flights of gloriously purple prose. The Young Bull of the Pampas! . . . The Soulful Poet from the Pampas!
Vilas played for 19 years, starting in 1970, and he may be one of the most underestimated players of our era, partly because he was a contemporary of Bjorn Borg. And every time Borg laid eyes on Vilas, he opened up another can of whup-ass. Their games just matched up in an unfortunate way for Vilas. Nobody, ever – perhaps in the history of the game, but this we’ll never know – outran, outrallied, out-thought, out-hit or outlasted Borg on clay.
Nobody.
Borg vs. Vilas on clay was Federer vs. Andy Roddick on grass.
Borg owned Vilas on other surfaces, too, once his body matured. Here’s their head-to-head , which Borg led, 17-5. But check out the scores in this tally of their meetings in majors(ignore that silly World Team Cup result).
It’s easy to forget just how dominant Borg was, and how much it obscured Vilas’s contribution to the game. But you can argue that Vilas had a much more profound and lasting impact on the game. Let’s start with the fact that before Vilas, there was an Alex Olmedo here, a Pancho Segura there, but in general, South America was a tennis wasteland.
Things changed, and quickly, after Vilas made the great breakthrough with his 1977 win at Roland Garros. First you had the Clercs, Alberto Mancinis, and Martin Jaites, then you had the Gustavo Kuertens, Marcelo Rios’s, Gaston Gaudios,et al – as I write this, 5 Argentines are in the Top 40, and if a few more of their multitude could just say no to doping, who knows?
This, in some ways, was mainly Vilas’s doing. Not only was he a successful player, he was a much-loved one. Women swooned over his expressive features (with those soulful eyes and long, chestnut locks, he resembled a suffering saint in an icon). He wrote poetry. His good sportsmanship won him legions of admirers. If Vilas was a bull, he was Ferdinand – a strong but gentle and peaceable gladiator who left pools of blood, sweat and tears on the court and always gave his all.
This brings us to Vilas’s second great contribution, an area in which his thunder was stolen (do we detect a pattern here?) by Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova. It was Vilas who first elevated fitness to the same priority as stroke-work or on-court hitting practice. The transformation began shortly after Vilas hooked up with the Romanian former player Ion Tiriac, and the shrewd coach saw that the young man from Mar del Plata had a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for work.
Ironically, Vilas’s first great win was at the 1974 Masters (forerunner to the ATP Tour Championships) on grass. At the time, he had a solid volley and he hit a relatively flat - and always gorgeous - backhand that was as effective as any in the history of the game. In fact, Vilas won the Australian Open on grass twice (he collected four majors, all told).
But Tiriac saw in his protégé’s stocky, muscular frame and appetite for work the makings of a clay-court specialist nonpareil. So he had Vilas add loads of topspin on both sides and he put him on to the tennis version of an Ironman Triathlete’s training regimen. Vilas responded as eagerly as a well-bred draft horse responds the yoke. All he wanted to do was work.
I got on very well with Vilas for a long time, until he and Tiriac were busted for taking under-the-table appearance money from a tournament in Rotterdam. We had a falling out over that, because Willy (that was Vilas’ nickname) thought I’d betrayed him by siding with the prosecutors instead of joining the chorus crying, “scapegoat!” (it’s a long and complicated story, which I covered in full in my book The Courts of Babylon). Vilas was disgraced and suspended, although it was late enough in his career for it not to matter that much. Over time, we became friends again. My wife and I sat in a player box with him to watch the U.S. Open men’s semis a few years ago, and things have been great ever since.
The other day, I was part of a conference call with Willy, to discuss his feelings about Nadal’s achievement. The story of how his 53-match streak ended is fascinating and bizarre – in addition to being an interesting comment on the utterly chaotic state of tennis in those early days of Open tennis.
Vilas’s streak in ’77 began with a bang, with the run that bagged him the title at Roland Garros, his first major.(Borg did not play Roland Garros that year). That his entire streak was compressed into a four-month period is in itself a feat of endurance (Nadal’s run, by contrast, dates back to April of 2005). But by the time Vilas was deep into the draw at Aix en Provence, in late September, he was running on fumes.
Enter Ilie Nastase and the infamous “spaghetti” racquet. The controversy actually began at the U.S. Open that year when Mike Fishbach, a journeyman pro, showed up with a strangely strung racquet. It featured some strings that were wound with an extra strand of string and even some monofilament fishing line, making the string extra-thick and rough.
The crudely enhanced strings provided wildly exaggerated bite on the ball and greatly enhanced topspin. Shots flew wildly and bounced erratically, as if the balls themselves were out of round. Fishbach used it to upset two players, including former Wimbledon champ Stan Smith, at Forest Hills. As there were no rules whatsoever governing racquets or strings, it was all perfectly legal - although Fishback created a huge call for immediate, regulatory action by the ITF.
Nastase, the childish – and child-like - clown prince of the game, was fascinated by the racquet. Facing the seemingly invincible Vilas on clay, he decided to use the spaghetti racquet in the final of the Aix tournament – even as the International Tennis Federation was busy outlawing it. According to Vilas, the rule banning unconventional stringing had already been approved by the ITF; it was scheduled to go into effect almost immediately after the Aix en Provence event.
Vilas was perturbed. Here was Nasty, using a racquet that was already de facto illegal. And on top of that, Vilas finished an epic, four hour-plus, five-set semifinal (against the French player, Eric Deblicker, who was also using a spaghetti-strung racquet!) on the same day as the final.
Just two hours after outlasting Deblicker, Vilas had to go back out to face Nastase - who was now wielding the novelty racquet. It was all too much for Vilas. After facing the zany, zooming bounces Nasty threw at him for over two hours, Vilas simply quit – in protest.
“Really, I didn’t lose to any player,” Vilas said on the phone, without a trace of bitterness, the other day. “I lost to a racquet.”
When he was asked if he would feel sad to see his record broken, Vilas said:
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Vilas doesn’t think the clay record is that big a deal; he says he didn’t even know he had it until Nadal began to approach it. It wasn’t sour grapes on Vilas part, either. For he said of Nadal:
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There you have it. The record book shows that Vilas went on to win his next 21 matches on clay, and then he ran out of calendar. Furthermore, Vilas has another record, of which he is – justifiably – even more proud. He’s still the all-time consecutive match winner with 46 (all in 1977 as well). It proved to be a monumental year, in which Vilas tied Rod Laver’s record for most titles with 17 (Vilas's match record was 145-14).
Is this saga strange enough for you? If not, here’s more. At the end of the year, the main ranking sources (this was pre-ATP computer rankings) could not agree on the World No. 1. Borg, with his 3-0 head-to-head advantage on Vilas, got the nod from Tennis (over my protest, as I was outvoted on the ranking panel). World Tennis magazine went with Vilas.
Here is Vilas’s assessment of borg:
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