Laver Recalls Vintage Days of Forest Hills

It had poured the day before, on Sunday, and the championship match was held over. “So we played on the Monday,” Rocket Rod Laver said, “and it was a dull, heavy, overcast day, not a very good day at all. The grass was still wet and we were slipping all over the court. I took off the tennis shoes and put on my spikes.”

That was nearly 20 years ago, on Sept. 8, 1969, at the U.S. Open, at Forest Hills.

The grass no longer is there, the Open no longer is there, but Forest Hills remains, going together with Laver the way a ball goes together with a racket. These days, when Laver is reminded of Forest Hills, he says, “The name, it always had a nice ring to it.”

Laver is 50 now, although he still has that shock of red hair and a sprinkling of freckles. He looks as if he still could just walk on the court and start whipping those left-handed serves the way he did to become the only player in history, male or female, to win two Grand Slams. He has aged far less than Forest Hills, it seems.

Now the West Side Tennis Club’s big event is the Eagle Tournament of Champions on clay. And although he looks great, Laver was around only to shake hands and participate in a series of exhibition matches against Fred Stolle, Cliff Drysdale, Roy Emerson and Ken Rosewall, who were all there when Laver ruled international tennis and was called, “The Rocket.”

“It was so different then,” Laver said. “The professionalism, the money. It’s all changed. Sometimes I wish I could come back, try it now, give it a go.”

When Laver came out of Queensland, Australia, to win his first Grand Slam in 1962, he did it as an amateur. Then he went off to join the barnstorming pro tours and wasn’t eligible for the major tournaments--the Open, Wimbledon and the like--until the era of professional tennis arrived in 1968. The very next year, Laver returned to win the Grand Slam again, at 31.

That’s the anniversary Laver is celebrating, because he clinched the Slam at Forest Hills. For beating Tony Roche in the Open, Laver received only $16,000, the going rate in the years before tennis boomed. Why, in his whole career, Laver earned $1,564,213, barely more than what Andre Agassi has made in three years on the tour.

“But we didn’t always just think about the money,” he said.

Even now, what Laver remembers most about the 7-9, 6-1, 6-3, 6-2 victory is that he and Roche had trouble keeping their footing throughout the match.

“I lost the first set and decided to try the spikes,” he said. “The court was very greasy, very slippery, but Tony didn’t want to change, and maybe that was his downfall. I hate to say this now, but Forest Hills, you know, it had very bad grass. The climate, the snow in the wintertime, it was hard on the ground and they could never keep it very level. When it rained, it made it that much worse.”

But he won. In the four Grand Slam title matches that year, in fact, Laver lost a total of only two sets against Andres Gimeno, John Newcombe, Rosewall and Roche. He had two Opens, four Wimbledons, three Australians and two French to his credit--11 Grand Slam events in all--but he never won another after 1969.

“I can’t complain,” he said. “Some guys, they hit a purple patch once in their lives, and maybe they do it in Roanoke, someplace like that. I hit mine at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon.”

Then Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg came along and Laver went off to legitimize the fledging WCT circuit. He lost a fifth-set tiebreaker to Rosewall in the spectacular 1972 final, when he was 34 and Rosewall was 37. In 1976, Laver joined the San Diego Friars in the new World Team Tennis league and was named rookie of the year, at 38.

He retired two years later to Newport Beach and a job in promotions for Nabisco. He endorses rackets and sneakers, plays in Grand Masters events and is a regular spectator at the major tournaments, although it’s all so different now, the way the players behave, the space-age surfaces, the atmosphere.

“My, there’s a cast of five, six people with every top player,” he said. “Nutritionists. Trainers. I go back and laugh about the times that we’d go fill up on steak and eggs just before a match. And the equipment. I was playing with a small-headed wooden racket all those years, into my 40s. When I finally tried a graphite mid-size, I was flabbergasted by how much better my game got, overnight. You get more bite on your serve, more topspin. It’d be interesting to see these players today with a small-headed racket, see how they fared.”

He wishes some of the players would stop skipping some big tournaments because of the surfaces, too, since coping with varying conditions is part of the tennis tradition--”It’s what makes you a true champion.”

He paused. “Some of the players today, they don’t realize what they’re missing,” Laver said. “A good grass court, there’s nothing better. It’s a wonderful surface to play on. You can do so much with the ball, the points are quicker, you can manipulate drop shots, topspin lobs, ground strokes. You can come to the net, stay back, anything you want. It’s easier on your feet. But I understand. The grass is harder to take care of, so a lot of the tournaments go to these other surfaces they have now. The players never learn to play on it. Times change, I guess.

“But in a way, it’s a shame they couldn’t find a way to improve the grass, keep it in. I’d like that.”