Mike Davies might just be the most important figure in tennis history who even tennis fans have never heard of. That is because he wasn\u2019t one of the sport\u2019s great champions, or even one of its greatest broadcasters or writers. Instead, he was an administrator, but he was not just any old administrator. Indeed, he was probably the most important administrator in the history of tennis, who arguably did more than anyone else to usher in the Open (or fully professional) era in 1968. As a result, he was the man who really made modern tennis.<\/p>\n
Mike Davies was born in Swansea, in Wales, in January 1936, just six months before the great Fred Perry completed his remarkable hat-trick of Wimbledon titles. Perry, whose eight Major titles (in addition to his Wimbledon hat-trick, he won three US titles and also triumphed once apiece in both Australia and France) still make him Britain\u2019s greatest ever tennis player, was to prove a major influence on the young Mike Davies.<\/p>\n
First and foremost, it was Perry, alongside Dan Maskell, a former player, coach and Davis Cup-winning captain who later became \u201cThe Voice of Wimbledon\u201d as the BBC\u2019s main tennis commentator, who first identified the teenage Davies as a potentially gifted tennis player. He then helped to accelerate Davies’s development by arranging for him to travel to Australia in the particularly grim post-war British winters, so that he could practise in warm-weather conditions.<\/p>\n
However, Perry was also incredibly important to Davies in that he provided the template for what a professional tennis player should be. That was because Perry had ended his own stellar amateur career less than six months after completing his Wimbledon hat-trick, in order to earn his living (and finally make some money from the sport he loved) on the fledgling North American professional circuit. Some three decades later, in the late 1960s, Davies would build upon Perry\u2019s historic decision by helping to turn tennis into a truly professional sport, indeed one that before the coronavirus crisis brought it (and almost everything else) to a halt had arguably become the greatest and most successful individual sport in the world.<\/p>\n
However, before those landmark achievements as an administrator and financier of tennis, Davies enjoyed an impressive career as a player. Although he never scaled the heights of Fred Perry by winning the Wimbledon Men\u2019s Singles title (no other British player would do that until Andy Murray, 77 years after Perry\u2019s last Wimbledon triumph), he was still good enough to reach the 1960 Wimbledon Men\u2019s Doubles Final, alongside another Englishman, Bobby Wilson. At a time when almost all the top men\u2019s and women\u2019s singles players competed in doubles as well, Davies and Wilson were a sufficiently powerful pairing to pull off an enormous upset in the quarter-finals, when they knocked out the defending champions, Roy Emerson and Neale Fraser, two of the very best Australian players in the Golden Age of Australian tennis. (Emerson, of course, would hold the record for most Majors won by a man \u2013 12 \u2013 until first Pete Sampras and then \u201cThe Big Three\u201d of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic passed that mark, while Fraser, having lost in the last eight of the doubles in 1960, went on to win the Men\u2019s Singles title at Wimbledon just a few days later.)<\/p>\n
Reaching the Men\u2019s Doubles Final at Wimbledon was to prove the highpoint of Mike Davies\u2019s playing career. Having defeated another all-Australian doubles pairing in the semi-finals (Bob Hewitt and Martin Mulligan, two of the lesser-known Australian stars of the era but who still formed an impressive doubles team), he and Wilson succumbed in the Final to America\u2019s Dennis Ralston and Rafael Osuna, Mexico\u2019s greatest ever tennis player, who would go on to add the 1963 US Singles title to his 1960 Wimbledon Doubles win. In the era before tie-breaks, and when even doubles finals were played out over just three sets (partly to ease the pressure on players who played both singles and doubles), Davies and Wilson lost 7\u20135, 6\u20133, 10\u20138, with the third and final set proving particularly long and arduous. Nevertheless, more than 60 years on, Davies remains the only Welshman to reach any senior Wimbledon Final, although the great rugby player, J.P.R. Williams, who won Junior Wimbledon as a teenager, might have matched or surpassed Davies’s achievements if he had decided to concentrate on tennis rather than rugby.<\/p>\n
The 1960 Wimbledon Doubles Final was not only the high-point of Davies\u2019s playing career but effectively marked the end of it, at least as an amateur player (and therefore one who could compete in the sport\u2019s biggest tournaments). Later that year, he joined yet another professional tennis tour in North America. There had been a number of them since Fred Perry\u2019s transatlantic migration in the late 1930s, but none of them had lasted for very long, partly because they were largely starved of the sport\u2019s very best players, who preferred to remain amateur (or at least \u201cshamateur\u201d, or semi-professional) so long as they could continue to compete at Wimbledon, Roland Garros and the other Major tournaments.<\/p>\n
However, the professional tour that Davies joined was different to its predecessors in one important way, namely that it was organised and fronted by Jack Kramer, who had been probably the best male tennis player of the immediate post-war era, winning the US title in 1946 and both Wimbledon and the US title in 1947, before he had turned professional. Kramer graduated from playing on the professional tours to eventually running them, and when Mike Davies began playing for him, he proved the ideal man to learn from when it came to running a proper, organised, professional circuit. Indeed, Davies learned so fast and so well that eventually he would eventually replace Kramer as the most important architect of professional tennis, at least on the men\u2019s side of the game. (Billie Jean King, who was both a great champion and <\/em>a great organiser-activist, deserves that accolade in women\u2019s tennis.)<\/p>\n