Word: laver
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...Australia: the Davis Cup, for the eleventh time in the last 13 years, by trimming Mexico, 5-0, on Brisbane's Milton Courts. Lefthanders Rod Laver and Neale Fraser each won two singles matches; Laver teamed with Roy Emerson to defeat Mexico's Rafael Osuna and Antonio Palafox in a straight-sets doubles match that lasted only 70 min. At the closing ceremony, Mexican Captain Pancho Contreras wistfully fondled the Davis Cup, announced that his team would be back to try again. Yelled one Down Under fan, bored with yet another victory: "I hope you bloody well...
...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...
...After Laver's victory, there were the inevitable comparisons with Budge. Granting the general dolor of tennis today, Coach Mercer Beasley, at 80 the judge-historian of amateur tennis, says: "Laver has more equipment than Budge ever had. He would have beaten Budge." Professional Promoter Jack Kramer, who as an amateur got halfway to a grand slam in 1947, takes a somewhat cooler view: "Right now he's not in Budge's class. Sedgman, Gonzales, Hoad, Rosewall, Segura, even Trabert, who's 32, could beat Laver. When Laver turns pro, he's going...