Word: laver
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tennis, only one man has achieved a grand slam of the game's four major tournaments-Don Budge, who in 1938 swept the Australian, French, Wimbledon and U.S. championships. Last week another name went into the record book beside Budge's. At Forest Hills, N.Y., Rod ("Rocket") Laver, a deceptively small (5 ft. 9 in.), bowlegged Australian, scored a smashing victory in the U.S. championships to complete his own remarkable sweep and match Budge's 24-year-old record. Laver did it by defeating Fellow Aussie Roy Emerson, the player who had beat...
Knocking Knees. A star of Australia's Davis Cup team for two years, Laver had never before managed to put two of the four top titles together. But this season he has been all but unbeatable. He won the Italian, Netherlands, Norwegian and Swiss championships, commenced his pursuit of the slam with victories over Emerson in Australia and France. In July he won at Wimbledon with such astonishing ferocity that Martin Mulligan, another countryman whom he dispatched in barely 53 minutes, gasped: "I must have offended him." By the time he got to Forest Hills, says Laver...
Wrist & Spin. Until this year, few experts rated Laver as a serious threat to Budge's lonely eminence. One of the "tennis babies" that Australia seems to breed as profusely as kangaroos, he was one of four children, all tennis players, brought up by a father who was an avid player and a mother who sometimes skipped kitchen duties to bat tennis balls around with her brood. At 15 he quit school to play tennis fulltime under the eye of Harry Hopman, the genius of Australian tennis. His booming serve and volley are impressively hard for a little...
Short (5 ft. 8 in.) and bowlegged. Rod Laver is not in the same bracket with Don Budge. The son of a Queensland sheepherder, he is temperamental, easily thrown off stride by the bad breaks of a match. He lacks the cannonlike power of a Hoad or the dexterity of a Rosewall. Instead, he relies on craftiness and a unique ability to reset his wrist in mid-stroke-just before contact with the ball -that permits him to hit the ball flat, give it top spin, or impart a low-bouncing underspin. At Wimbledon last week, everything worked...
...Laver's victory was a personal triumph, it was also a national disaster for the U.S., which failed to get a man past the quarterfinals. All four semifinalists at Wimbledon last week were Australians. Only in the ladies' division did the U.S. shine. Unseeded Billie Jean Moffitt knocked off Australia's top-seeded Margaret Smith in the tournament's biggest upset (TIME, July 6), went all the way to the quarter finals before losing to Britain's Ann Haydon. And in the finals, San Antonio's No.8-seeded Karen Hantze Susman, 19 years...