Laver’s Stroke May Help Others

If you’re looking for tapes of redheaded Rodney “Rocket” Laver in his racket-flapping prime, swooping to conquer like an avenging firebird, there’s no shortage. Pete Sampras used to watch them as a kid and found inspiration.

Laver is still flying on the neural tape decks of all of us who savored his triumphant U.S. championship performances at Forest Hills in 1962 and 1969.

But now there’s another tape of a near-defeat that he does not care to see, even though Laver can be objective enough to recognize its value.

Not to sports--to mankind.

“The doctors tell me it’s unique, and it can help understand what I and a lot of others have gone through. And will go through,” he says.

Laver’s voice is coming through the phone from his home in the Palm Springs area.

There--”Home, free from the hospital at last”--he’s recuperating from the stroke that almost gave him the big L on July 27.

His voice is unmistakable. Soft, considerate, tinged with the inflections of a Queensland farm boy who got off his horse to leave Australia and whip the world with a tennis racket.

But it is hesitant, at times uncertain and unwilling.

“I’ll get over this,” he says. “Sometimes my speech blurs, and I have to think before I start talking. I’m working on it. It can be very frustrating, the speech. Movement, too. I’m learning a lot of simple things all over again, like a kid. Like,” he chuckles, “telling time.”

The tape he talks about is a rarity, on which Laver is the victim. He had begun an on-camera interview for an ESPN “SportsCentury” vignette at a Los Angeles hotel when the stroke struck.

“My fingers got numb, that’s what I remember,” he says. “I didn’t have control. I know a lot of crazy things happened to me”--among them explosive vomiting and collapse.

“According to the doctors [the neurosurgical team that took care of him at the UCLA Medical Center], this is the only tape of somebody actually having a stroke. They say it’s very valuable to study. I’m glad if it can help people,” he says, laughing, “but I’d just as soon see a tape of me hitting a backhand down the line.”

Those massive top-spinning backhands, flying from a Godzillan left arm--remarkably attached to an unremarkable 5-foot 8 1/2-inch body--terrorized tennis for two decades, netting him 11 major singles titles, lodging him with Bjorn Borg and Pete Sampras, one behind record-holding Roy Emerson.

Just as every non-white baseball player ought to remember Jackie Robinson in his prayers, the current wanderers on the ATP Tour should say one for Rod Laver nightly. He, Ken Rosewall, Pancho Gonzalez, Lew Hoad, plus a few others kept pro tennis breathing until the present bonanza came along.

Especially Laver. He was the resurrectionist at a time the pros were dead, 1962.

That year, he charged through the Australian, French, Wimbledon and U.S. championships, sculpting the first of his two Grand Slams--but as an amateur when those events barred the pros.

Pro tennis needed him and his Grand Slam luster to keep going. Rosewall and Hoad felt so needy that they put up their own money--a two-year $125,000 guarantee, a fortune then--to coax Laver onto their side so that a new tour could be formed. He led them into the promised land of open tennis and substantial prize money in 1968.

Next came his second Grand Slam in 1969.

“I wanted to do it once more when the game was open and everybody had a shot at me, not like ‘62,” he would say.

As we talk on the phone, Laver says he’s lying on his back in the living room, working at rehab exercises. We’ve talked enough for now. His wife, Mary, takes the phone.

“It was a rough two weeks when he was in [intensive care],” she says. “We [she, their daughter, son and daughter-in-law] were in there with him, at least one of us, round the clock to let him know we were there, to calm him . . . when he was conscious. It wasn’t a great place for his birthday [the 60th, Aug. 9].

“There were seizures, awfully high blood pressure. A fever they had trouble controlling--106 degrees for a few days--swelling of the brain. He had to be restrained at times. He wanted out. Sometimes he ripped out the IVs. Rough for everybody.

“But,” her voice subsides, “the lucky thing was the hotel where it happened was only two blocks from the medical center. And the neurosurgical team were all there. Within 15 minutes, they were working on him. We’re so thankful.

“The doctors have no explanation for why it happened, but they feel his athletic physique and fitness was instrumental in helping him fight and survive. He’s part of a study of strokes, taking new drugs that could or could not be placebos. We’re not told. But he’s glad to do anything that can help future patients.

“Now,” she adds, laughing, “the therapists say they’ve never seen anybody recovering from a stroke go at rehab so eagerly. But that’s Rod. The prognosis for full recovery is very good.”

You would expect this from perhaps the greatest of all tennis players. In the Slam years, the Rocket won 19 of 34 tournaments in 1962, 17 of 32 in 1969--played doubles, too. Sampras felt overworked last year, playing in 18 singles tournaments and winning seven.

Laver intends “to be back where I was, playing some tennis, some golf, gardening, getting around for my endorsement commitments.”

He’s moving about the neighborhood with help, on a walker. Nevertheless, I’d be careful about challenging him to a game, even if he’s clinging with his right hand to the walker.