Continuing our series on 1968: The Year That Changed Tennis, Martin Keady, our resident tennis historian, looks back at the first ever US Open.
As the 2018 US Open approaches, the immediate context is which, if any, of this year’s Major winners – Roger Federer (Australian Open), Rafael Nadal (French Open) or Novak Djokovic (Wimbledon) – will win and thereby reassert themselves as the world’s dominant male tennis player. However, even if none of “The Big Three” win, this year’s US Open will still be historic, as it marks the 50th anniversary of the first-ever US Open.
Prior to 1968, of course, the US Open had not been “open” at all. Instead, it had been the “US Championships,” as it was restricted to amateurs. Like the three other Grand Slam tournaments, the US Major had prevented professionals from playing for the near-century that it had been in existence. (New York was the second city to host a Major tennis tournament, starting in 1881, just four years after Wimbledon had been established.)
By the late 1960s, however, this situation had become untenable, as so many of the greatest players in tennis – including arguably the greatest male tennis player ever, Rod Laver – were unable to play in the four greatest events in tennis. Finally, the tennis establishment, in the form of the International Lawn Tennis Federation (it eventually dropped the “Lawn” as more and more tennis was played on surfaces other than grass), began to waver. Then, at the end of 1967, when Wimbledon announced that from the following year it would allow professionals as well as amateurs to compete, the old “amateurs only” game was finally up.
In retrospect, it is remarkable that tennis remained even semi-amateur, or “shamateur” as it was dubbed because of the increasingly blurred lines between amateur or professional players, for so long. That was particularly true in America. After all, America had led the world not only in the professionalisation of sport but its mass commercialisation. The enormous difference between the status and salaries of professional US sports stars and their European equivalents was perhaps best summed up by the famous exchange between Babe Ruth, the legendary baseball star, and Dixie Dean, the equally legendary English football star, when they met in the 1930s. Ruth expressed absolute disbelief when he learned how little Dean was earning in comparison to him and suggested that he get himself a new agent. Dean, of course, admitted that, like every other professional European footballer and sportsman of the period, he did not have an agent at all.
Given the early professionalisation and mass commercialisation of most American sports, therefore, it is astonishing that tennis took so long to follow suit. It is true that the most popular American sports throughout the 20th century were the big four team sports (American football or gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey). However golf, like tennis, was an individual sport and it had been fully professional since the 1920s, when Walter Hagen became the first truly great, and even more importantly truly famous, golfer and soon earned the riches commensurate with his fame.
Perhaps here is a clue to the reason why tennis, especially American tennis, took so long to catch up with golf, especially American golf, and become a fully professional sport. The tennis equivalent of Hagen was Bill Tilden, the sport’s first world-famous male player who, along with France’s Suzanne Lenglen on the other side of the Atlantic, did so much to promote and grow tennis worldwide in the wake of World War I. However, while Walter Hagen was and remains a central figure in golf and golf history (his record of 11 Majors still puts him third on the all-time list of Major winners, behind only Jack Nicklaus at 18 and Tiger Woods at 14), Tilden is a much more complex, even troubled, figure who enjoys nothing like the enduring fame or status of Hagen.
That is not because of anything he did on court. “Big Bill,” as Tilden was known because of his six-feet plus height (which would make him a virtual minnow in today’s game but made him a giant a century ago), matched if not bettered Hagen’s sporting achievements. He won 10 Major singles titles, which, like Hagen, still puts him among the elite of all-time Major winners. However, it was what happened after he stopped playing tennis that undeniably damaged his reputation and arguably affected the popularity of tennis, not only in America but around the world, perhaps making it more difficult for the sport to go fully professional.
In 1946, long after he had stopped playing tennis, Tilden was arrested for having sex with an under-age boy on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. At a time when homosexuality was illegal in America, as it was in most countries, Tilden was imprisoned–and his reputation, both as a tennis player and a man, was destroyed. He never recovered and arguably the status of tennis as a sport, especially in America, was badly affected.
Nevertheless, America continued to be home to the professional circuit of exhibition matches and special “series” on which tennis players from Britain’s Fred Perry in the late 1930s to Rod Laver in the early 1960s performed to make a living after they had stopped playing as amateurs. The problem for tennis by the mid-1960s was that the game’s greatest players were ceasing to be amateurs (and thus ceasing to play in the Majors) at an increasingly early stage of their career. Whereas Perry, for example, had only turned professional when he was 27 and had already spent three years as the world’s No.1 amateur player, Laver turned professional at the end of 1962, when he was only 24 and at the absolute peak of his powers, having won the calendar Grand Slam of all four Majors earlier that year.
Consequently, by the end of the 1960s the US Major was finally ready to follow the example of the French Open (as it became in May 1968) and Wimbledon (which became fully Open less than a month later) by opening its doors to all the best tennis players, whether they were amateur or professional. Thus, in August-September 1968 the US Championships ceased to exist and the US Open began.
In 1968, the US Open was very different to how it is today. For one thing, the venue was different, as the tournament was still being staged at Forest Hills rather than the current site of Flushing Meadows. (It would continue at Forest Hills for nearly another decade, before finally switching to Flushing Meadows in 1978.) More importantly, however, it was still being played on grass. (Again, it would continue to be played on grass for nearly another decade, before switching to hard court in 1978, when the venue switched to Flushing Meadows.) This meant that, other than the clay-court specialists who flourished at the French Open (the only non-grass Major in 1968), all the best players in the world who competed at the 1968 US Open were grass-court specialists, and the majority of them were serve and volleyers.
One of them was Arthur Ashe, the first (and so far, sadly, only) truly great Black male tennis player. He won the first ever US Open men’s singles title, but just like his compatriot, Nancy Richey, who had won the first ever French Open women’s singles title a few months earlier, he wanted to remain amateur so that he could compete in the Davis Cup, which still remained closed to professionals. Consequently, it was the runner-up, Holland’s Tom Okker, who actually claimed the first prize of $14,000. Fortunately for Ashe, his US team won the Davis Cup against the reigning champions, Australia, later that year and he finally turned professional in 1969. Not long after, the Davis Cup finally followed the example of the Majors and allowed professionals to compete.
On the women’s side in 1968, it was Britain’s Virginia Wade who triumphed, surprisingly beating the defending champion, Billie Jean King, in straight sets. It would be another four years before Wade won another Major (the 1972 Australian Open) and nearly a whole decade before she finally won her home slam of Wimbledon.
By contrast, the new, professional US Open was up and running from the off, and by the early 1970s its reputation as the brashest, noisiest and downright craziest of the tennis Majors would be firmly established. Its continuing success throughout that decade, especially after its change of venue, ensured that, having lagged behind the French Open and Wimbledon in finally becoming Open, it soon led the way in the ultra-professionalization and ultra-commercialization of tennis that would eventually make it arguably the greatest and most popular individual sport in the world.
Others in this series
Brief History of Pre-1968 Tennis
1968: The Year that Changed Tennis
1968 French Open
1968 Wimbledon
