Word: lavers
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...tennis has been good to Amateur Rod ("The Rocket") Laver: it has lured away everyone who might make the nimble Australian redhead work up a sweat on the courts. For years. Lefthander Laver, 23, labored as a B-team scrub on the great Down Under squads that dominated amateur tennis, taking his lumps regularly from such talented first-stringers as Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall and Ashley Cooper. Even after the varsity turned pro, Laver could not seem to win the big ones: he lost twice in the finals at Wimbledon, twice more at Forest Hills. But this year The Rocket...
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...
Foreign tennis fans could find small hope in the fact that Emerson & Co. probably will not be around to defend the Davis Cup next year: at week's end Fraser was already talking about retiring: Emerson and Laver insisted they had no immediate plans to turn pro. But these days, the top amateurs, both in the U.S. and Australia, almost always defect to the pros. But Australia plans for such losses. Ever since 1950, the ever-changing Aussie roster has almost always been good enough to lick the rest of the world. The teams...
...Davis Cup in 1957; they might have repeated in 1958 if Peruvian Alex Olmedo had not carried the U.S. to victory. Both turned pro with varying success: Cooper has done well, but Anderson is erratic and unspectacular. They were ably replaced as Davis Cuppers by Fraser, Laver and Emerson...