Pancho Gonzales
Encyclopedia
Ricardo Alonso González generally known as Richard "Pancho" Gonzales (or, less often, as Pancho Gonzalez) was an American tennis player. He was the world no. 1 professional tennis
player for an unequalled eight years in the 1950s and early 1960s. He won two Major
titles and twelve Pro Slam titles.
Largely self-taught, Gonzales was a successful amateur player in the late-1940s, twice winning the United States Championships
. He is still widely considered to be one of the greatest players in the history of the game. A 1999 Sports Illustrated
article about the magazine's 20 "favorite athletes" of the 20th century said about Gonzales (their number 15 pick): "If earth was on the line in a tennis match, the man you want serving to save humankind would be Ricardo Alonso Gonzalez." The American tennis commentator Bud Collins
echoed this in an August 2006 article for MSNBC.com: "If I had to choose someone to play for my life, it would be Pancho Gonzalez."
in Los Angeles. Once he discovered tennis, he lost interest in school and began a troubled adolescence in which he was occasionally pursued by truant officers and policemen. He was befriended by Frank Poulain, the owner of the tennis shop at Exposition Park, and sometimes slept there.
Because of his spotty school attendance and occasional minor brushes with the law, he was ostracized by the overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, and predominantly upper-class, tennis establishment of 1940s. The headquarters for tennis activity was the Los Angeles Tennis Club
and which actively trained other top players such as the youthful Jack Kramer
. During that time, the head of the Southern California Tennis Association, and the most powerful man in California tennis was Perry T. Jones. Jones was not only the head of California tennis, but much of the country, because the favorable climate gave that region a head start in tennis. He was described as an autocratic leader who embodied much of the exclusionary sensibilities that governed tennis for decades. Although Gonzales was a promising junior, once Jones discovered that the youth was truant from school, Jones banned him from playing tournaments
Eventually he was arrested for burglary at age 15 and spent a year in detention. He then joined the Navy just as World War II was ending and served for two years, finally receiving a bad-conduct discharge in 1947.
According to his autobiography, Gonzales stood 6'3" (1.91 m) and weighed 183 pounds (83 kg) by the time he was 19 years old. Other sources generally credit him as being an inch or two shorter but in any case he would enjoy a clear advantage in height over a number of his most prominent rivals, particularly Pancho Segura
, Ken Rosewall
, and Rod Laver
, all of whom were at least 5 or 6 inches shorter. Tony Trabert
, who was badly beaten by Gonzales on their 101-match tour and who disliked him intensely, nevertheless once told the Los Angeles Times: "Gonzales is the greatest natural athlete tennis has ever known. The way he can move that 6-foot-3-inch frame of his around the court is almost unbelievable. He's just like a big cat... Pancho's reflexes and reactions are God-given talents. He can be moving in one direction and in the split second it takes him to see that the ball is hit to his weak side, he's able to throw his physical mechanism in reverse and get to the ball in time to reach it with his racket." The flamboyant Gussie Moran
, who briefly toured with the Gonzales group, said that watching Gonzales was like seeing "a god patrolling his personal heaven."
In spite of his lack of playing time while in the Navy, and as a mostly unknown 19-year-old in 1947, Gonzales achieved a national ranking of no. 17 by playing primarily on the West Coast. He did, however, go East that year to play in the United States Championships at Forest Hills
. He surprised the British Davis Cup player Derek Barton, then lost a five-set match to third seed, Gardnar Mulloy
. Following that, in the last major tournament of the year, the Pacific Southwest, played at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, he beat three internationally known names, Jaroslav Drobný
, Bob Falkenburg
, and Frank Parker
, before losing in the finals to Ted Schroeder
.
The following year, 1948, Perry T. Jones relented in his opposition to Gonzales and sponsored his trip East to play in the major tournaments. The top-ranked American player, Ted Schroeder
, decided at the last moment not to play in the United States Championships and Gonzales was seeded number 8 in the tournament. To the surprise of most observers, he won it fairly easily by a straight-set victory over the South African Eric Sturgess
in the finals with his powerful serve-and-volley game. As The New York Times story of that first win began, "The rankest outsider of modern times sits on the tennis throne." His persona at the time was strikingly different from what it would become in future years. American Lawn Tennis wrote that "the crowd cheered a handsome, dark-skinned Mexican-American youngster who smiled boyishly each time he captured a hard-fought point, kissed the ball prayerfully before a crucial serve, and was human enough to show nervousness as he powered his way to the most coveted crown in the world." This was Gonzales's only major tournament victory of the year, but it was enough to let him finish the year ranked as the number one American player.
In 1949, Gonzales did badly at Wimbledon
and was derided for his performance by some of the press. A British sportswriter called him a "cheese champion" and, because of his name, his doubles partner of the time, Frank Parker
, began to call him "Gorgonzales", after Gorgonzola, the Italian cheese. This was eventually shortened to "Gorgo", the nickname by which he was later known by his colleagues on the professional tour. (Jack Kramer, in his autobiography, says that it was Jim Burchard, the tennis writer for the New York World-Telegram who first called him a "cheese champ".)"
When Gonzales returned to the United States Championships in 1949, once again to the surprise of many observers, he repeated his victory of the previous year. Ted Schroeder
, the top seed, had beaten Gonzales eight times in nine matches during their careers and was heavily favored. The only time Gonzales had beaten Schroeder, he was playing with a nose that had been broken the day before by his doubles partner's tennis racquet during a misplayed point at the net. In a tremendous final that has been called the 11th greatest match of all time", Gonzales lost a 1-hour and 15-minute first set 16-18 but finally managed to prevail in the 5th set. Once again he finished the year as the number-one ranked U.S. amateur. Gonzales also won both his singles matches in the Davis Cup
finals against Australia. Having beaten Schroeder at Forest Hills, he was clearly the best amateur in the world. Bobby Riggs
, who had been counting on signing Schroeder to play Kramer on the professional tour, was then forced to reluctantly sign Gonzales instead.
. During this time, Gonzales's personality apparently changed from that of a friendly, happy-go-lucky youngster to the hard-bitten loner he became known as for the rest of his life. According to Kramer in his 1979 autobiography, "The worst thing that ever happened to Gonzales was winning Forest Hills in 1949... At a time when Gorgo wasn't mature as a player he was pitted against Kramer, an established pro at his peak." Moreover, says Kramer, "Pancho had no idea how to live or take care of himself. He was a hamburger-and-hot-dog guy to start with and had no concept of diet in training... On the court Gorgo would swig Cokes through a match... Also Gorgo was a pretty heavy cigarette smoker. He had terrible sleeping habits made even worse by the reality of a tour."
Kramer won 22 of the first 26 matches and 42 of the next 50. Gonzales improved enough to win 15 of the remaining 32 but it was too late. Bobby Riggs
, the tour promoter, told Gonzales that he was now "dead meat": Kramer would need a new challenger for the next tour. As compensation, however, Gonzales had made $75,000 in his losing efforts. Kramer also said that "his nature had changed completely. He became difficult and arrogant. Losing had changed him. When he got his next chance, he understood that you either win or you're out of a job." He was now "a loner", said Ted Schroeder, "and always the unhappiest man in town."
In the southern hemisphere summer of 1950-1951, Gonzales toured Australia and New Zealand with Dinny Pails
, Frank Parker
, and Don Budge
. In December 1950, Pails won the short tour in New Zealand but in January and February 1951 Gonzales won a second and longer tour in Australia. Though Gonzales also won Wembley (where Kramer was not entered) in the fall of 1951, it is probable that both Kramer and Segura were marginally better players that year. In 1952, however, Gonzales reached the top level of the pros. In 1952 he entered five tournaments and captured four: the Philadelphia Inquirer Masters tournament, where he beat both Segura and Kramer twice in a double round-robin event ; Scarborough, England where he defeated Budge and Segura; Wembley, England again beating Segura and Kramer; Berlin, Germany where Segura and Budge lost again to him; and he was a finalist in the United States Professional Championships ("U.S. Pro") against Segura. In all, Gonzales beat Segura five matches out of six and Kramer three times in three matches. This was the first year that "Big Pancho" (Gonzales) dominated "Little Pancho" (Segura) in their head-to-head matches, and thereafter his superiority over Segura never wavered throughout their long careers.
Although the Professional Lawn Tennis Association issued rankings at the end of 1952 in which they called Segura the world pro no. 1, with Gonzales second, the PLTA rankings were notoriously quirky. The year before, for instance, when Kramer had beaten Segura 64 matches to 28 (or 58-27 according to Kramer) in their championship tour, they had nevertheless ranked Segura as the world no. 1 player. A strong case can therefore be made that Gonzales was actually the world pro no. 1 player for 1952 or, at the very least, shared that position with Segura.
At a professional event in 1951, the forehand drives of a number of players were electronically measured. Kramer was particularly known for his fine forehand, but Gonzales was recorded as hitting the fastest one, 112.88 mph, followed by Kramer at 107.8 and Welby Van Horn
at 104. Since it was generally assumed at the time that Pancho Segura's two-handed forehand was the hardest in tennis, it is possible that he was not present at that event.
In 1953, Gonzales, drawn aside from the big pro tour by Kramer (by now also a promoter), featuring Frank Sedgman
, a seven-time Grand Slam
singles winner, Pancho Segura
, Ken McGregor
(the 1952 Australian Open
champion) and Kramer himself, regressed because he had not met a high-level player for 12 months between Wembley 1952 and Wembley 1953. Consequently, in Wembley and two days after in Paris, Gonzales was severely crushed by Sedgman, the future winner of these tournaments.
In late 1953, Kramer, then a temporarily retired player (due to his back troubles), signed Gonzales (a seven-year contract) to play in a 1954 USA tour also featuring Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman and Donald Budge (the latter being replaced in March 1954 by Carl Earn for the last weeks of the tour). In the subsequent matches Gonzales beat Segura 30-21 and Sedgman by the same score. After this tour Gonzales won the U.S. Pro where all the best, except Pails, were present. Then the American played in a Far East tour (September–October 1954). He barely won over Segura and Kramer, who made his come-back in singles after a 14-month retirement. Then Gonzales had major success: he swept the Australian Tour in November–December 1954 by beating Sedgman 16-9, McGregor 15-0, and Segura, 4-2. Although Pancho was beaten by the Australian Pro Pails in the last competition of the year, Gonzales had clearly established himself as the top player in the world in 1954.
, Ken Rosewall
, Lew Hoad
, Mal Anderson, and Ashley Cooper on a regular basis. Forty years after his matches with Gonzales, Trabert told interviewer Joe McCauley "that Gonzales's serve was the telling factor on their tour — it was so good that it earned him many cheap points. Trabert felt that, while he had the better groundstrokes, he could not match Pancho's big, fluent service."
In that period, Gonzales won the United States Professional Championship eight times and the Wembley
professional title in London four times, plus beating, in head-to-head tours, all of the best amateurs who turned pro, which included every Wimbledon champion for 10 years in a row. During this time Gonzales was known for his fiery will to win, his cannonball serve, and his all-conquering net game, a combination so potent that the rules on the professional tour were briefly changed in the 1950s to prohibit him from advancing to the net immediately after serving. Under the new rules, the returned serve had to bounce before the server could make his own first shot, thereby keeping Gonzales from playing his usual serve-and-volley game. He won even so, and the rules were changed back. So great was his ability to raise his game to the highest possible level, particularly in the fifth set of long matches, Allen Fox
has said that he never once saw Gonzales lose service when serving for the set or the match.
by 74-27, a series made more compelling by the fact that the two players disliked each other intensely. At the end of 1956 Kramer signed Ken Rosewall
to play another long series against Gonzales. In early 1957 Gonzales flew to Australia for the first 10 matches against Rosewall in his native country. Gonzales had developed a "half-dollar"-size cyst on the palm on his right hand and there was speculation in the newspapers that his tennis career might be over. Kramer's personal physician began to treat it with injections, and it gradually began to shrink. It was still painful, however, when Gonzales beat Rosewall in their initial match and eventually won their brief Australian tour 7 matches to 3, with Rosewall beating Gonzales in a tournament whose results did not count towards the series total. By the time the tour opened in New York in late February, the cyst had shrunk considerably and Gonzales went on to beat Rosewall by a final score of 50 matches to 26.
Kramer has written that he was so worried that Rosewall would offer no competition to Gonzales and would thereby destroy the financial success of the tour that, for the only time in his career as a player or promoter, he asked Gonzales while in Australia to "carry" Rosewall in return for having his share of the gross receipts raised from 20 percent to 25 percent. Gonzales reluctantly agreed. After 4 matches, with Gonzales ahead 3 to 1, Gonzales came to Kramer to say that "I can't play when I'm thinking about trying to carry the kid. I can't concentrate. It just bothers me too much." By this time, however, it was apparent that Rosewall would be fully competitive with Gonzales, so Kramer told Gonzales to return to his normal game — and that he could keep his additional 5 percent.
Later that year, Gonzales sued in California superior court to have his 7-year contract with Kramer declared invalid. As proof of his claim, Gonzales cited being paid 25 percent of the gate instead of the stipulated 20 percent. Judge Leon T. David found Gonzales's reasoning implausible and ruled in favor of Kramer. Gonzales remained bound to Kramer by contract until 1960."
, the very powerful young Australian who had won five Grand Slam titles as an amateur. In the 1958 tour, Gonzales and Hoad played head-to-head 87 times. Hoad won 18 of the first 27 matches and it appeared that he was about to displace Gonzales as the best in the world. Gonzales, however, revamped and improved his backhand
during the course of those first matches, just as Bill Tilden
had to do in 1920 in order to become the best in the world, and then he won 42 of the next 60 matches to maintain his superiority by a margin of 51 wins to 36 wins for Hoad.
Much of Gonzales's competitive fire during these years derived from the anger he felt at being paid much less than the players he was regularly beating. In 1955, for instance, he was paid $15,000 while his touring opponent, the recently turned professional Tony Trabert, had a contract for $80,000. He had an often bitter adversarial relationship with most of the other players and generally travelled and lived by himself, showing up only in time to play his match, then moving on alone to the next town. Gonzales and Jack Kramer, the long-time promoter of the tour, were also bitter enemies dating to the days when Kramer had first beaten the youthful Gonzales on his initial tour. Now they fought incessantly about money, while Kramer openly rooted for the other players to beat Gonzales. As much as he disliked Gonzales, however, Kramer knew that Gonzales was the star attraction of the touring professionals and that without him there would be no tour at all.
Regarding the tour, Kramer writes that "even though Gonzales was usually the top name, he would almost never help promote the Tour. The players could have tolerated his personal disagreeableness, but his refusal to help the group irritated them the most. Frankly, the majority of players disliked Gonzales intensely. Sedgman almost came to blows with Gonzales once. Trabert and Gorgo hated each other. The only player he ever tried to get along with was Lew Hoad."
Trabert also told McCauley in their interview that "I appreciated his tennis ability but I never came to respect him as a person. Too often I had witnessed him treat people badly without a cause. He was a loner, sullen most of the time, with a big chip on his shoulder and he rarely associated with us on the road. Instead he'd appear at the appointed hour for his match, then vanish back into the night without saying a word to anyone. We'd all stay around giving autographs to the fans before moving on to the next city. Not Pancho. On court, he was totally professional as well as a fantastic player." In a 2005 interview, Ted Schroeder commented on Gonzales's intense demeanor both on and off the court, "We hardly ever spoke a civil word to one another, yet we were friends. He was a very prideful man, not proud, prideful. When you understood that, you understood him.
Life on the tour was not easy. "One night", Gonzales recalled later, "I sprained an ankle badly. The next night in another town I was hurting. I told Jack I couldn't play. He said to me, 'Kid, we always play.' Jack had a doctor shoot me up with novocaine, and we played. That's just the way it was. The size of the crowd didn't matter. They'd paid to see us play."
The rigors were not only physical ones. In the 1963 United States Professional Championship, which were held that year at the hallowed Forest Hills
courts, Gonzales both dismayed and infuriated his colleagues by being the only player who was paid for his participation. Having learned by bitter experience about the exigencies of the pro tour, Gonzales had demanded, and received, $5,000 in advance for his appearance in the tournament. An out-of-shape, semi-retired Gonzales was beaten in the first round. Ken Rosewall
eventually beat Rod Laver
in the finals but neither of them collected a penny: the promoter had failed to meet his costs and couldn't pay any of the players.
, the long-time tennis promoter, writes that although Laver was "absolutely unbeatable for a year or two late in the 1960s", a "careful comparison" could be made between Laver and the somewhat older Gonzales and that Kramer is "positive that Gonzales could have beaten Laver regularly."
Kramer sees as evidence of Gonzales's superiority over Laver the fact that Gonzales defeated Laver in a US$10,000 winner-take-all, five-set match before 15,000 spectators in New York City's Madison Square Garden
in January 1970, when Gonzales was 41 years old and Laver was still considered the World No. 1 player. On the other hand, Gonzales was still a top ten player when this match occurred and Laver subsequently won this event, beating Gonzales in a straight sets semifinal.
During the span of seven years that they faced each other, Laver was 26-32 and Gonzales was 36–42 years old. While the peak of Laver was in the late 60s, the peak of Gonzales was in the middle 50s. Gonzales had a great longevity that made possible this rivalry have been competitive. However, the overall record could be biassed in favor of Laver because of the difference of 10 years between them.
events between 1949 (when he turned pro) and 1967. As has been observed about other great players such as Rod Laver
, Gonzales almost certainly would have won a number of additional Grand Slam
titles had he been permitted to compete in those tournaments during that 18-year period. Jack Kramer, for instance, has speculated in an article about the theoretical champions of Forest Hills and Wimbledon that Gonzales would have won an additional 11 titles in those two tournaments alone.
The first major open tournament was the French Championships in May 1968, when Gonzales had just turned 40. In spite of the fact that he had been semi-retired for a number of years and that the tournament was held on slow clay courts that penalize serve-and-volley players, Gonzales beat the 1967 defending champion Roy Emerson
in the quarterfinals. He then lost in the semifinals to Rod Laver. He lost in the third round of Wimbledon
but later beat the second-seeded Tony Roche
in the fourth round of the United States Open, before losing an epic match to Holland's Tom Okker
.
, a Puerto Rican younger than Gonzales by 16 years who revered his opponent.
Pasarell won a titanic first set, 24-22, then with daylight fading, the 41-year-old Gonzales argued that the match should be suspended. The referee didn't relent, and thus the petulant Gonzales virtually threw the second set, losing it 6-1. At the break, the referee agreed the players should stop. Gonzales was booed as he walked off Centre Court.
The next day, the serves, the volleys and all the prowess that made Gonzales a fiery competitor surfaced with trademark vengeance. Pasarell, seeking to exploit Gonzales's advanced years, tried to aim soft service returns at Gonzales's feet and tire him with frequent lobs. At one changeover Gonzales said, "Charlie, I know what you're doing – and it's not working!" Gonzales rebounded to win three straight sets, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9. In the fifth set, Gonzales won all seven match points that Pasarell had against him, twice coming back from 0-40 deficits, to walk off the court from the 5-hour, 12-minute epic.
The final score was an improbable 22-24, 1–6, 16-14, 6–3, 11-9. Gonzales went on to the fourth round of the championship, where he was beaten in four sets by Arthur Ashe
. The match with Pasarell, however, is still remembered as one of the highlights in the history of tennis and has been called one of "The Ten Greatest Matches of the Open Era" in the November/December 2003 issue of TENNIS magazine. But it was not this match alone which gave Gonzales the reputation, among the top players, of being the greatest long-match player in the history of the game.
The match would (largely due to the introduction of the tie break) remain the longest in terms of games played until the historic, 11 hours and 183 games long Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships
.
, the fine Australian player who won a dozen major
titles during the 1960s as an amateur when most of the best players in the world were professionals, turned pro in 1968 at the age of 32, having won the French Open the year before. Gonzales, eight years older, immediately beat him in the quarter-finals of the French championships. In the following years, Gonzales beat Emerson another 11 times, apparently losing very few matches to him. In the Champions Classic of 1970 in Miami, Florida, however, Emerson did beat Gonzales in straight sets, 6–2, 6–3, 6–2.
Another great Australian player was Ken Rosewall
, who won eight major titles during his long career, first as an amateur, then as a professional in the early years of open tennis. Gonzales played 160 matches against Rosewall, winning 101 and losing 59.
In late 1969, Gonzales won the Howard Hughes Open in Las Vegas and the Pacific Southwest Open in Los Angeles, beating, among others, John Newcombe
, Ken Rosewall, Stan Smith
(twice), Cliff Richey
, and Arthur Ashe
. He was the top American money-winner for 1969 with $46,288. If the touring professionals had been included in the United States rankings, it is likely he would have been ranked number one in the country, just as he had been two decades earlier in 1948 and 1949.
Gonzales continued to play in the occasional tournament in his 40s. He could also occasionally beat the clear number-one player in the world, Rod Laver
. Their most famous meeting was a $10,000 winner-take-all match before a crowd of 15,000 in Madison Square Garden in February 1970. Coming just after the Australian had completed a calendar-year sweep of the Grand Slams, the 41-year-old Gonzales beat Laver in five sets. He became the oldest player to have ever won a professional tournament, winning the Des Moines Open over 24-year-old Georges Goven
when he was three months shy of his 44th birthday. In spite of the fact that he was still known as a serve-and-volley player, in 1971, when he was 43 and Jimmy Connors
was 19, he beat the great young baseliner by playing him from the baseline at the Pacific Southwest Open. Around this time, Gonzalez relocated to Las Vegas to be the Tennis Director at Caesars Palace
, and he hired Chuck Pate, his childhood friend, to run the Pro Shop.
Gonzales was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame
at Newport, Rhode Island
in 1968.
In May 1968, he was the first professional to lose to an amateur, the British player Mark Cox. The then-24-year-old Cox beat Gonzales at the British Hard Court Championships
at Bournemouth
, 0-6, 6-2, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, in two and a quarter hours.
González had a long scar across his left cheek that, according to his autobiography, some members of the mass media of the 1940s attributed to his being a Mexican-American pachuco
and hence involved in knife fights. This was one more slur that embittered González towards the media in general. The scar was actually the result of a prosaic street accident in 1935 when he was seven years old: pushing a scooter too fast, he ran into a passing car and had his cheek gashed open by its door handle. He spent two weeks in the hospital as a result.
Gonzales was referred to as "Richard" by his friends and family. As the child of middle-class Hispanic parents, young Richard was well aware of the social prejudices of his day. He reportedly disliked the nickname "Pancho", as it was a common derogatory term used against Mexican Americans at the time. In the Hispanic community, the nickname "Pancho" is traditionally only given to individuals whose given name is "Francisco".
Although his surname was properly spelled "González", during most of his playing career he was known as "Gonzales". It was only towards the end of his life that the proper spelling began to be used. Kramer, however, writes that one of Gonzales's wives, Madelyn Darrow, "decided to change his name. Madelyn discovered in the Castilian upper-crust society, the fancy Gonzales families spelled their name with a z at the end to differentiate from the hoi polloi
(sic) Gonzales. So it was González for a time, and even now you will occasionally see that spelling pop up. " However, that theory is unlikely, as González
is actually a much more common spelling of that name than Gonzales. In his ghost-written 1959 autobiography, "Gonzales" is used throughout.
Gonzales became a television commentator for ABC, a rare presence at tournaments. Described as an adequate but unmotivated commentator, Gonzales would issue thoughtful comments - often magnanimous, occasionally harsh, always candid - on contemporary pros not unlike an old soldier who'd preferred dying in battle than merely fading away.
For decades Gonzales had made $75,000 a year from an endorsement contract with Spalding
for racquets and balls but was unable to get along with the company personnel. Finally, in 1981, after nearly 30 years, Spalding refused to renew the contract. He had also been the Tennis Director and Tournament Director at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip
for 16 years, another lucrative job. In 1985, he was fired after refusing to give playing lessons to the wife of his boss. As S. L. Price wrote about Gonzales in a 2002 Sports Illustrated
article, "There was no more perfect match than Pancho and Vegas: both dark and disreputable, both hard and mean and impossible to ignore."
Gonzales married and divorced six times and had seven children: he wed his childhood sweetheart, Henrietta Pedrin, on March 23, 1948; they had three children. He married actress (and Miss Rheingold of 1958
) Madelyn Darrow twice; they had three children including twin girls. He married his dental hygienist, Betty, in Beverly Hills and had one daughter. His last wife, Rita, is the sister of Andre Agassi
. According to Price's article, Rita's father, Mike Agassi
, a 1952 Olympian on the Iranian boxing team who had become a successful casino greeter in Las Vegas, hated Gonzales so much that he considered having him killed. Gonzales had coached the young Rita until she had rebelled against her father's 5,000-balls-a-day-regimen and first moved in with, then married, on 31 March 1984, the much older Gonzales. Years before, Mike Agassi, already a tennis fanatic, had once served as a linesman for one of Gonzales's professional matches in Chicago. Gonzales had upbraided Agassi so severely for perceived miscalls that Agassi had walked away and gone to sit in the stands.
Kramer says that "Gonzales never seemed to get along with his various wives, although this never stopped him from getting married... Segura once said, 'You know, the nicest thing Gorgo ever says to his wives is "Shut up" ' ". Gonzales died of cancer in Las Vegas
on July 3, 1995, in poverty and almost friendless, estranged from his ex-wives and children except for Rita and their son, Skylar, and daughter, Jeanna Lynn. Andre Agassi paid for his funeral.
was generally considered the greatest player of all time. From 1934 through 1967, during the Golden Age of Tennis, when Vines, Perry, Budge, Riggs, Kramer, Gonzales, Segura, Sedgman, Trabert, Hoad, Rosewall, and Laver were the top tier players, Gonzales was considered the best of this period. Since 1968, with the first Grand Slam of the Open Era
at the French Open, Champions such as Rod Laver
, Björn Borg
, John McEnroe
, Pete Sampras
, and Roger Federer
have been considered by their contemporaries to be greater players than Tilden or Gonzales.
Many people connected with the game, however, consider Gonzales to be the best male player in tennis history, because he was the World No. 1 tennis
player for eight years — the status of a few of the earlier years is still unclear. He was possibly No.1 in 1952, but then was probably the World No.1 for seven consecutive years, 1954 through 1960. In the article World number one male tennis player rankings Bill Tilden with Rod Laver are the next closest to Gonzales with seven No.1 ratings, followed by Pete Sampras and Ken Rosewall with six each. Pancho Segura
, who played, and frequently beat, all of the great players from the 1930s through the 1960s has said that he believes that Gonzales was the best player of all time. Lew Hoad and Allen Fox agree with this assessment. In a 1972 article about an imaginary tournament among the all-time greats, Gene Scott
had the fourth-seeded Gonzales upsetting Bill Tilden in the semi-finals and then using his serve to beat Rod Laver in the finals.
Bud Collins
, the editor of the massive Total Tennis, The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia, is guarded. He writes on page 673 that Gonzales was "probably as good as anyone who ever played the game, if not better." On page 693, however, he writes that Rod Laver would "be known as possibly the greatest player ever." And on page 749 he calls Bill Tilden "perhaps the greatest player of them all."
In 2005 a tennis historian who visited the International Tennis Hall of Fame
interviewed several great Australian players who had toured against Gonzales. Who, they were asked, was the best player they had ever played against?
Mal Anderson named Gonzales, who "was very difficult since if you did get ahead, he had a way to upset you, and he could exploit your weaknesses fast. Though over the hill, he beat Rod [Laver] until Rod lifted his game." He added, "Lew Hoad, in his day was scary, though Gonzales was best day in and day out." Ashley Cooper also named Gonzales, whom "I never beat on the tour. But I did beat him a couple of times on clay where his serve wasn’t as good." Gonzales's frequent opponent Frank Sedgman
said, "I played against probably the greatest of all time, Jack Kramer. He could put his serve on a dime and had a great first volley. The second best was Gonzales. I played him a lot — a great competitor — a great athlete."
Jack Kramer, on the other hand, who became a world-class player in 1940 and then beat Gonzales badly in the latter's first year as a professional, has stated that he believes that although Gonzales was better than either Laver or Sampras he was not as good as either Ellsworth Vines
or Don Budge
. Kramer, who had a long and frequently bitter relationship with Gonzales, rates him only as one of the four players who are second to Budge and Vines in his estimation. Kramer also, perhaps surprisingly, writes that Bobby Riggs would have beaten Gonzales on a regular basis.
Early in 1986 Inside Tennis, a magazine published in Northern California
, devoted parts of four issues to a lengthy article called "Tournament of the Century", an imaginary tournament to determine the greatest of all time. They asked 37 tennis notables such as Kramer, Budge, Perry, and Riggs and observers such as Bud Collins
to list the 10 greatest players in order.
Twenty-five players in all were named by the 37 experts in their lists of the 10 best. The magazine then ranked them in descending order by total number of points assigned. The top eight players in overall points, with their number of first-place votes, were: Rod Laver (9), John McEnroe (3), Don Budge (4), Jack Kramer (5), Björn Borg (6), Pancho Gonzales (1), Bill Tilden (6), and Lew Hoad (1). Gonzales was ranked the sixth-best player, with only Allan Fox casting a vote for him as the greatest of all time.
Performance Timeline:
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
player for an unequalled eight years in the 1950s and early 1960s. He won two Major
Grand Slam (tennis)
The four Major tennis tournaments, also called the Slams, are the most important tennis events of the year in terms of world tour ranking points, tradition, prize-money awarded, strength and size of player field, and public attention. They are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and...
titles and twelve Pro Slam titles.
Largely self-taught, Gonzales was a successful amateur player in the late-1940s, twice winning the United States Championships
U.S. Open (tennis)
The US Open, formally the United States Open Tennis Championships, is a hardcourt tennis tournament which is the modern iteration of one of the oldest tennis championships in the world, the U.S. National Championship, which for men's singles was first contested in 1881...
. He is still widely considered to be one of the greatest players in the history of the game. A 1999 Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
article about the magazine's 20 "favorite athletes" of the 20th century said about Gonzales (their number 15 pick): "If earth was on the line in a tennis match, the man you want serving to save humankind would be Ricardo Alonso Gonzalez." The American tennis commentator Bud Collins
Bud Collins
-External links:*** 2001 interview with Collins*...
echoed this in an August 2006 article for MSNBC.com: "If I had to choose someone to play for my life, it would be Pancho Gonzalez."
Amateur
Gonzales was given a 51-cent racquet by his mother when he was 12 years old. He received some tennis analysis from his friend, Chuck Pate, but mostly taught himself to play by watching other players on the public courts at nearby Exposition ParkExposition Park (Los Angeles)
Exposition Park is located in University Park, Los Angeles, California, across the street from the University of Southern California. Exposition Park houses the following:* Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum* Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena...
in Los Angeles. Once he discovered tennis, he lost interest in school and began a troubled adolescence in which he was occasionally pursued by truant officers and policemen. He was befriended by Frank Poulain, the owner of the tennis shop at Exposition Park, and sometimes slept there.
Because of his spotty school attendance and occasional minor brushes with the law, he was ostracized by the overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, and predominantly upper-class, tennis establishment of 1940s. The headquarters for tennis activity was the Los Angeles Tennis Club
Los Angeles Tennis Club
The Los Angeles Tennis Club is a private tennis club opened in 1920 at 5851 Clinton Street, between Wilcox and Rossmore, one block south of Melrose Avenue. It is the home of the Southern California Championships....
and which actively trained other top players such as the youthful Jack Kramer
Jack Kramer (tennis player)
John Albert Kramer was an American tennis player of the 1940s. A World Number 1 player for a number of years, he is a possible candidate for the title of the greatest tennis player of all time. He was considered the father and the leading promoter of the professional tennis tours...
. During that time, the head of the Southern California Tennis Association, and the most powerful man in California tennis was Perry T. Jones. Jones was not only the head of California tennis, but much of the country, because the favorable climate gave that region a head start in tennis. He was described as an autocratic leader who embodied much of the exclusionary sensibilities that governed tennis for decades. Although Gonzales was a promising junior, once Jones discovered that the youth was truant from school, Jones banned him from playing tournaments
Eventually he was arrested for burglary at age 15 and spent a year in detention. He then joined the Navy just as World War II was ending and served for two years, finally receiving a bad-conduct discharge in 1947.
According to his autobiography, Gonzales stood 6'3" (1.91 m) and weighed 183 pounds (83 kg) by the time he was 19 years old. Other sources generally credit him as being an inch or two shorter but in any case he would enjoy a clear advantage in height over a number of his most prominent rivals, particularly Pancho Segura
Pancho Segura
Pancho Segura, born Francisco Olegario Segura , was a leading tennis player of the 1940s and 1950s, both as an amateur and as a professional. In 1950 and 1952, as a professional, he was the World Co-No. 1 player...
, Ken Rosewall
Ken Rosewall
Kenneth Robert Rosewall AM MBE is a former world top-ranking amateur and professional tennis player from Australia. He won 23 Majors including eight Grand Slam singles titles and before the Open Era a record fifteen Pro Slam titles . Rosewall won 9 slams in doubles with a career double grand slam...
, and Rod Laver
Rod Laver
Rodney George "Rod" Laver MBE is an Australian former tennis player who holds the record for titles won in career, and was the World No. 1 player for seven consecutive years, from 1964 to 1970...
, all of whom were at least 5 or 6 inches shorter. Tony Trabert
Tony Trabert
Marion Anthony Trabert is a retired American tennis champion and long-time tennis author, TV commentator, instructor, and motivational speaker...
, who was badly beaten by Gonzales on their 101-match tour and who disliked him intensely, nevertheless once told the Los Angeles Times: "Gonzales is the greatest natural athlete tennis has ever known. The way he can move that 6-foot-3-inch frame of his around the court is almost unbelievable. He's just like a big cat... Pancho's reflexes and reactions are God-given talents. He can be moving in one direction and in the split second it takes him to see that the ball is hit to his weak side, he's able to throw his physical mechanism in reverse and get to the ball in time to reach it with his racket." The flamboyant Gussie Moran
Gussie Moran
Gertrude "Gussie" Agusta Moran is a retired American female tennis player who was active in the 1950s...
, who briefly toured with the Gonzales group, said that watching Gonzales was like seeing "a god patrolling his personal heaven."
In spite of his lack of playing time while in the Navy, and as a mostly unknown 19-year-old in 1947, Gonzales achieved a national ranking of no. 17 by playing primarily on the West Coast. He did, however, go East that year to play in the United States Championships at Forest Hills
Forest Hills, Queens
Forest Hills is a neighborhood in the borough of Queens in New York City, New York, United States.-Neighborhood:The neighborhood is home to upper-middle class residents, of whom the wealthier residents often live in the neighborhood's Forest Hills Gardens area...
. He surprised the British Davis Cup player Derek Barton, then lost a five-set match to third seed, Gardnar Mulloy
Gardnar Mulloy
Gardnar Putnam Mulloy is a tennis player primarily known for playing in doubles matches with partner Billy Talbert. When he was the Tennis Coach of the University of Miami, he recruited Pancho Segura for the tennis team. Pancho won three straight NCAA Singles Titles in 1943, 1944, and 1945,...
. Following that, in the last major tournament of the year, the Pacific Southwest, played at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, he beat three internationally known names, Jaroslav Drobný
Jaroslav Drobný
Jaroslav Drobný was an amateur tennis champion as well as being an ice hockey player for the Czechoslovakian national team...
, Bob Falkenburg
Bob Falkenburg
Robert Falkenburg is a former American amateur tennis player and entrepreneur. He is best known for winning the 1948 men's singles Wimbledon Championship and for introducing soft ice cream and American fast food to Brazil in 1952...
, and Frank Parker
Frank Parker
----Frank "Frankie" Andrew Parker was an American male tennis player. He was coached by Mercer Beasley....
, before losing in the finals to Ted Schroeder
Ted Schroeder
Frederick Rudolph "Ted" Schroeder was an American tennis player who won the two most prestigious amateur tennis titles, Wimbledon and the U.S. National. He was the No. 1-ranked American player in 1942 and the No. 2 for 4 consecutive years, 1946 through 1949...
.
The following year, 1948, Perry T. Jones relented in his opposition to Gonzales and sponsored his trip East to play in the major tournaments. The top-ranked American player, Ted Schroeder
Ted Schroeder
Frederick Rudolph "Ted" Schroeder was an American tennis player who won the two most prestigious amateur tennis titles, Wimbledon and the U.S. National. He was the No. 1-ranked American player in 1942 and the No. 2 for 4 consecutive years, 1946 through 1949...
, decided at the last moment not to play in the United States Championships and Gonzales was seeded number 8 in the tournament. To the surprise of most observers, he won it fairly easily by a straight-set victory over the South African Eric Sturgess
Eric Sturgess
Eric William Sturgess was a South African male tennis player. Eric Sturgess attended Parktown Boys' High School in Johannesburg...
in the finals with his powerful serve-and-volley game. As The New York Times story of that first win began, "The rankest outsider of modern times sits on the tennis throne." His persona at the time was strikingly different from what it would become in future years. American Lawn Tennis wrote that "the crowd cheered a handsome, dark-skinned Mexican-American youngster who smiled boyishly each time he captured a hard-fought point, kissed the ball prayerfully before a crucial serve, and was human enough to show nervousness as he powered his way to the most coveted crown in the world." This was Gonzales's only major tournament victory of the year, but it was enough to let him finish the year ranked as the number one American player.
In 1949, Gonzales did badly at Wimbledon
The Championships, Wimbledon
The Championships, Wimbledon, or simply Wimbledon , is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, considered by many to be the most prestigious. It has been held at the All England Club in Wimbledon, London since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the other three Majors...
and was derided for his performance by some of the press. A British sportswriter called him a "cheese champion" and, because of his name, his doubles partner of the time, Frank Parker
Frank Parker
----Frank "Frankie" Andrew Parker was an American male tennis player. He was coached by Mercer Beasley....
, began to call him "Gorgonzales", after Gorgonzola, the Italian cheese. This was eventually shortened to "Gorgo", the nickname by which he was later known by his colleagues on the professional tour. (Jack Kramer, in his autobiography, says that it was Jim Burchard, the tennis writer for the New York World-Telegram who first called him a "cheese champ".)"
When Gonzales returned to the United States Championships in 1949, once again to the surprise of many observers, he repeated his victory of the previous year. Ted Schroeder
Ted Schroeder
Frederick Rudolph "Ted" Schroeder was an American tennis player who won the two most prestigious amateur tennis titles, Wimbledon and the U.S. National. He was the No. 1-ranked American player in 1942 and the No. 2 for 4 consecutive years, 1946 through 1949...
, the top seed, had beaten Gonzales eight times in nine matches during their careers and was heavily favored. The only time Gonzales had beaten Schroeder, he was playing with a nose that had been broken the day before by his doubles partner's tennis racquet during a misplayed point at the net. In a tremendous final that has been called the 11th greatest match of all time", Gonzales lost a 1-hour and 15-minute first set 16-18 but finally managed to prevail in the 5th set. Once again he finished the year as the number-one ranked U.S. amateur. Gonzales also won both his singles matches in the Davis Cup
Davis Cup
The Davis Cup is the premier international team event in men's tennis. It is run by the International Tennis Federation and is contested between teams of players from competing countries in a knock-out format. The competition began in 1900 as a challenge between Britain and the United States. By...
finals against Australia. Having beaten Schroeder at Forest Hills, he was clearly the best amateur in the world. Bobby Riggs
Bobby Riggs
Robert Larimore "Bobby" Riggs was a 1930s–40s tennis player who was the World No. 1 or the co-World No. 1 player for three years, first as an amateur in 1941, then as a professional in 1946 and 1947...
, who had been counting on signing Schroeder to play Kramer on the professional tour, was then forced to reluctantly sign Gonzales instead.
Kramer
Gonzales was badly beaten in his first year on the professional tour, 96 matches to 27, by the reigning king of professional tennis, Jack KramerJack Kramer (tennis player)
John Albert Kramer was an American tennis player of the 1940s. A World Number 1 player for a number of years, he is a possible candidate for the title of the greatest tennis player of all time. He was considered the father and the leading promoter of the professional tennis tours...
. During this time, Gonzales's personality apparently changed from that of a friendly, happy-go-lucky youngster to the hard-bitten loner he became known as for the rest of his life. According to Kramer in his 1979 autobiography, "The worst thing that ever happened to Gonzales was winning Forest Hills in 1949... At a time when Gorgo wasn't mature as a player he was pitted against Kramer, an established pro at his peak." Moreover, says Kramer, "Pancho had no idea how to live or take care of himself. He was a hamburger-and-hot-dog guy to start with and had no concept of diet in training... On the court Gorgo would swig Cokes through a match... Also Gorgo was a pretty heavy cigarette smoker. He had terrible sleeping habits made even worse by the reality of a tour."
Kramer won 22 of the first 26 matches and 42 of the next 50. Gonzales improved enough to win 15 of the remaining 32 but it was too late. Bobby Riggs
Bobby Riggs
Robert Larimore "Bobby" Riggs was a 1930s–40s tennis player who was the World No. 1 or the co-World No. 1 player for three years, first as an amateur in 1941, then as a professional in 1946 and 1947...
, the tour promoter, told Gonzales that he was now "dead meat": Kramer would need a new challenger for the next tour. As compensation, however, Gonzales had made $75,000 in his losing efforts. Kramer also said that "his nature had changed completely. He became difficult and arrogant. Losing had changed him. When he got his next chance, he understood that you either win or you're out of a job." He was now "a loner", said Ted Schroeder, "and always the unhappiest man in town."
Semi-retirement
From 1951 to 1953, Gonzales was in semi-retirement. He bought the tennis shop at Exposition Park and ran that while playing in short tours and occasional professional tournaments throughout the world. In spite of his infrequent play (because first Riggs, then Kramer, as promoters of the pro tour, didn't want him as the headliner of their tours), he had nevertheless raised his game to a higher level than before and once again was winning most of his matches. Precise records of this time are difficult to locate but Gonzales asserts in his autobiography that after the decisive loss to Kramer in their 1949-1950 tour he then beat his old antagonist 11 times in their next 16 matches.In the southern hemisphere summer of 1950-1951, Gonzales toured Australia and New Zealand with Dinny Pails
Dinny Pails
Dennis "Dinny" Pails was a former Australian tennis champion.Pails won the men's singles championship at the Australian Championships tennis tournament in 1947. Pails, an Australian who was born in Great Britain, defeated John Bromwich in the final in five sets: 4–6, 6–4, 3–6, 7–5, 8–6...
, Frank Parker
Frank Parker
----Frank "Frankie" Andrew Parker was an American male tennis player. He was coached by Mercer Beasley....
, and Don Budge
Don Budge
John Donald Budge was an American tennis champion who was a World No. 1 player for five years, first as an amateur and then as a professional...
. In December 1950, Pails won the short tour in New Zealand but in January and February 1951 Gonzales won a second and longer tour in Australia. Though Gonzales also won Wembley (where Kramer was not entered) in the fall of 1951, it is probable that both Kramer and Segura were marginally better players that year. In 1952, however, Gonzales reached the top level of the pros. In 1952 he entered five tournaments and captured four: the Philadelphia Inquirer Masters tournament, where he beat both Segura and Kramer twice in a double round-robin event ; Scarborough, England where he defeated Budge and Segura; Wembley, England again beating Segura and Kramer; Berlin, Germany where Segura and Budge lost again to him; and he was a finalist in the United States Professional Championships ("U.S. Pro") against Segura. In all, Gonzales beat Segura five matches out of six and Kramer three times in three matches. This was the first year that "Big Pancho" (Gonzales) dominated "Little Pancho" (Segura) in their head-to-head matches, and thereafter his superiority over Segura never wavered throughout their long careers.
Although the Professional Lawn Tennis Association issued rankings at the end of 1952 in which they called Segura the world pro no. 1, with Gonzales second, the PLTA rankings were notoriously quirky. The year before, for instance, when Kramer had beaten Segura 64 matches to 28 (or 58-27 according to Kramer) in their championship tour, they had nevertheless ranked Segura as the world no. 1 player. A strong case can therefore be made that Gonzales was actually the world pro no. 1 player for 1952 or, at the very least, shared that position with Segura.
At a professional event in 1951, the forehand drives of a number of players were electronically measured. Kramer was particularly known for his fine forehand, but Gonzales was recorded as hitting the fastest one, 112.88 mph, followed by Kramer at 107.8 and Welby Van Horn
Welby Van Horn
Welby Van Horn is a retired American professional tennis player who later went on to have a career as a major tennis coach.As a 19-year-old player, Van Horn reached the finals of the 1939 U.S. Nationals only to lose to Bobby Riggs in just 56 minutes...
at 104. Since it was generally assumed at the time that Pancho Segura's two-handed forehand was the hardest in tennis, it is possible that he was not present at that event.
In 1953, Gonzales, drawn aside from the big pro tour by Kramer (by now also a promoter), featuring Frank Sedgman
Frank Sedgman
Frank Arthur Sedgman, born 29 October 1927, in Mont Albert, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, was a tennis player who was arguably the world No.1 in 1952. In his 1979 autobiography Jack Kramer, the long-time tennis promoter and great player himself, included Sedgman in his list of the 21...
, a seven-time Grand Slam
Grand Slam (tennis)
The four Major tennis tournaments, also called the Slams, are the most important tennis events of the year in terms of world tour ranking points, tradition, prize-money awarded, strength and size of player field, and public attention. They are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and...
singles winner, Pancho Segura
Pancho Segura
Pancho Segura, born Francisco Olegario Segura , was a leading tennis player of the 1940s and 1950s, both as an amateur and as a professional. In 1950 and 1952, as a professional, he was the World Co-No. 1 player...
, Ken McGregor
Ken McGregor
Kenneth Bruce McGregor was a former tennis player from Australia who won the Men's Singles title at the Australian Championships in 1952. He and his longtime doubles partner, Frank Sedgman, are generally considered to be one of the greatest men's doubles teams of all time...
(the 1952 Australian Open
Australian Open
The Australian Open is the only Grand Slam tennis tournament held in the southern hemisphere. The tournament was held for the first time in 1905 and was last contested on grass in 1987. Since 1972 the Australian Open has been held in Melbourne, Victoria. In 1988, the tournament became a hard court...
champion) and Kramer himself, regressed because he had not met a high-level player for 12 months between Wembley 1952 and Wembley 1953. Consequently, in Wembley and two days after in Paris, Gonzales was severely crushed by Sedgman, the future winner of these tournaments.
In late 1953, Kramer, then a temporarily retired player (due to his back troubles), signed Gonzales (a seven-year contract) to play in a 1954 USA tour also featuring Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman and Donald Budge (the latter being replaced in March 1954 by Carl Earn for the last weeks of the tour). In the subsequent matches Gonzales beat Segura 30-21 and Sedgman by the same score. After this tour Gonzales won the U.S. Pro where all the best, except Pails, were present. Then the American played in a Far East tour (September–October 1954). He barely won over Segura and Kramer, who made his come-back in singles after a 14-month retirement. Then Gonzales had major success: he swept the Australian Tour in November–December 1954 by beating Sedgman 16-9, McGregor 15-0, and Segura, 4-2. Although Pancho was beaten by the Australian Pro Pails in the last competition of the year, Gonzales had clearly established himself as the top player in the world in 1954.
Dominance
Gonzales was now the dominant player in the men's game for about the next eight years, beating such tennis greats as Sedgman, Tony TrabertTony Trabert
Marion Anthony Trabert is a retired American tennis champion and long-time tennis author, TV commentator, instructor, and motivational speaker...
, Ken Rosewall
Ken Rosewall
Kenneth Robert Rosewall AM MBE is a former world top-ranking amateur and professional tennis player from Australia. He won 23 Majors including eight Grand Slam singles titles and before the Open Era a record fifteen Pro Slam titles . Rosewall won 9 slams in doubles with a career double grand slam...
, Lew Hoad
Lew Hoad
Lewis Alan Hoad was a champion tennis player....
, Mal Anderson, and Ashley Cooper on a regular basis. Forty years after his matches with Gonzales, Trabert told interviewer Joe McCauley "that Gonzales's serve was the telling factor on their tour — it was so good that it earned him many cheap points. Trabert felt that, while he had the better groundstrokes, he could not match Pancho's big, fluent service."
In that period, Gonzales won the United States Professional Championship eight times and the Wembley
Wembley Arena
Wembley Arena is an indoor arena, at Wembley, in the London Borough of Brent. The building is opposite Wembley Stadium.-History:...
professional title in London four times, plus beating, in head-to-head tours, all of the best amateurs who turned pro, which included every Wimbledon champion for 10 years in a row. During this time Gonzales was known for his fiery will to win, his cannonball serve, and his all-conquering net game, a combination so potent that the rules on the professional tour were briefly changed in the 1950s to prohibit him from advancing to the net immediately after serving. Under the new rules, the returned serve had to bounce before the server could make his own first shot, thereby keeping Gonzales from playing his usual serve-and-volley game. He won even so, and the rules were changed back. So great was his ability to raise his game to the highest possible level, particularly in the fifth set of long matches, Allen Fox
Allen Fox
Dr. Allen E. Fox is a former tennis player in the 1960s and 1970s who went on to be a college coach and author. He was ranked as high as # 4 in the U.S. . Between 1961 and 1968, he ranked among the top 10 men in the U.S...
has said that he never once saw Gonzales lose service when serving for the set or the match.
Trabert and Rosewall
In late 1955 and early 1956 Gonzales beat the athletic Tony TrabertTony Trabert
Marion Anthony Trabert is a retired American tennis champion and long-time tennis author, TV commentator, instructor, and motivational speaker...
by 74-27, a series made more compelling by the fact that the two players disliked each other intensely. At the end of 1956 Kramer signed Ken Rosewall
Ken Rosewall
Kenneth Robert Rosewall AM MBE is a former world top-ranking amateur and professional tennis player from Australia. He won 23 Majors including eight Grand Slam singles titles and before the Open Era a record fifteen Pro Slam titles . Rosewall won 9 slams in doubles with a career double grand slam...
to play another long series against Gonzales. In early 1957 Gonzales flew to Australia for the first 10 matches against Rosewall in his native country. Gonzales had developed a "half-dollar"-size cyst on the palm on his right hand and there was speculation in the newspapers that his tennis career might be over. Kramer's personal physician began to treat it with injections, and it gradually began to shrink. It was still painful, however, when Gonzales beat Rosewall in their initial match and eventually won their brief Australian tour 7 matches to 3, with Rosewall beating Gonzales in a tournament whose results did not count towards the series total. By the time the tour opened in New York in late February, the cyst had shrunk considerably and Gonzales went on to beat Rosewall by a final score of 50 matches to 26.
Kramer has written that he was so worried that Rosewall would offer no competition to Gonzales and would thereby destroy the financial success of the tour that, for the only time in his career as a player or promoter, he asked Gonzales while in Australia to "carry" Rosewall in return for having his share of the gross receipts raised from 20 percent to 25 percent. Gonzales reluctantly agreed. After 4 matches, with Gonzales ahead 3 to 1, Gonzales came to Kramer to say that "I can't play when I'm thinking about trying to carry the kid. I can't concentrate. It just bothers me too much." By this time, however, it was apparent that Rosewall would be fully competitive with Gonzales, so Kramer told Gonzales to return to his normal game — and that he could keep his additional 5 percent.
Later that year, Gonzales sued in California superior court to have his 7-year contract with Kramer declared invalid. As proof of his claim, Gonzales cited being paid 25 percent of the gate instead of the stipulated 20 percent. Judge Leon T. David found Gonzales's reasoning implausible and ruled in favor of Kramer. Gonzales remained bound to Kramer by contract until 1960."
Hoad
The most difficult challenge that Gonzales faced during those years came from Lew HoadLew Hoad
Lewis Alan Hoad was a champion tennis player....
, the very powerful young Australian who had won five Grand Slam titles as an amateur. In the 1958 tour, Gonzales and Hoad played head-to-head 87 times. Hoad won 18 of the first 27 matches and it appeared that he was about to displace Gonzales as the best in the world. Gonzales, however, revamped and improved his backhand
Backhand
The backhand is a tennis shot in which one swings the racquet around one's body in the direction where one wants the ball to go, usually performed from the baseline or as an approach shot. The term is also used in other racquet sports, and other areas where a similar motion is employed...
during the course of those first matches, just as Bill Tilden
Bill Tilden
William Tatem Tilden II , nicknamed "Big Bill," is often considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. An American tennis player who was the World No. 1 player for seven years, he won 14 Majors including ten Grand Slams and four Pro Slams. Bill Tilden dominated the world of...
had to do in 1920 in order to become the best in the world, and then he won 42 of the next 60 matches to maintain his superiority by a margin of 51 wins to 36 wins for Hoad.
Much of Gonzales's competitive fire during these years derived from the anger he felt at being paid much less than the players he was regularly beating. In 1955, for instance, he was paid $15,000 while his touring opponent, the recently turned professional Tony Trabert, had a contract for $80,000. He had an often bitter adversarial relationship with most of the other players and generally travelled and lived by himself, showing up only in time to play his match, then moving on alone to the next town. Gonzales and Jack Kramer, the long-time promoter of the tour, were also bitter enemies dating to the days when Kramer had first beaten the youthful Gonzales on his initial tour. Now they fought incessantly about money, while Kramer openly rooted for the other players to beat Gonzales. As much as he disliked Gonzales, however, Kramer knew that Gonzales was the star attraction of the touring professionals and that without him there would be no tour at all.
Regarding the tour, Kramer writes that "even though Gonzales was usually the top name, he would almost never help promote the Tour. The players could have tolerated his personal disagreeableness, but his refusal to help the group irritated them the most. Frankly, the majority of players disliked Gonzales intensely. Sedgman almost came to blows with Gonzales once. Trabert and Gorgo hated each other. The only player he ever tried to get along with was Lew Hoad."
Trabert also told McCauley in their interview that "I appreciated his tennis ability but I never came to respect him as a person. Too often I had witnessed him treat people badly without a cause. He was a loner, sullen most of the time, with a big chip on his shoulder and he rarely associated with us on the road. Instead he'd appear at the appointed hour for his match, then vanish back into the night without saying a word to anyone. We'd all stay around giving autographs to the fans before moving on to the next city. Not Pancho. On court, he was totally professional as well as a fantastic player." In a 2005 interview, Ted Schroeder commented on Gonzales's intense demeanor both on and off the court, "We hardly ever spoke a civil word to one another, yet we were friends. He was a very prideful man, not proud, prideful. When you understood that, you understood him.
Life on the tour was not easy. "One night", Gonzales recalled later, "I sprained an ankle badly. The next night in another town I was hurting. I told Jack I couldn't play. He said to me, 'Kid, we always play.' Jack had a doctor shoot me up with novocaine, and we played. That's just the way it was. The size of the crowd didn't matter. They'd paid to see us play."
The rigors were not only physical ones. In the 1963 United States Professional Championship, which were held that year at the hallowed Forest Hills
West Side Tennis Club
The West Side Tennis Club is a private tennis club located in Forest Hills, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It is currently an oasis within the City with 38 courts in all four surfaces , a junior Olympic swimming pool and many other amenities.It is most notable for hosting...
courts, Gonzales both dismayed and infuriated his colleagues by being the only player who was paid for his participation. Having learned by bitter experience about the exigencies of the pro tour, Gonzales had demanded, and received, $5,000 in advance for his appearance in the tournament. An out-of-shape, semi-retired Gonzales was beaten in the first round. Ken Rosewall
Ken Rosewall
Kenneth Robert Rosewall AM MBE is a former world top-ranking amateur and professional tennis player from Australia. He won 23 Majors including eight Grand Slam singles titles and before the Open Era a record fifteen Pro Slam titles . Rosewall won 9 slams in doubles with a career double grand slam...
eventually beat Rod Laver
Rod Laver
Rodney George "Rod" Laver MBE is an Australian former tennis player who holds the record for titles won in career, and was the World No. 1 player for seven consecutive years, from 1964 to 1970...
in the finals but neither of them collected a penny: the promoter had failed to meet his costs and couldn't pay any of the players.
Laver
Jack KramerJack Kramer (tennis player)
John Albert Kramer was an American tennis player of the 1940s. A World Number 1 player for a number of years, he is a possible candidate for the title of the greatest tennis player of all time. He was considered the father and the leading promoter of the professional tennis tours...
, the long-time tennis promoter, writes that although Laver was "absolutely unbeatable for a year or two late in the 1960s", a "careful comparison" could be made between Laver and the somewhat older Gonzales and that Kramer is "positive that Gonzales could have beaten Laver regularly."
Kramer sees as evidence of Gonzales's superiority over Laver the fact that Gonzales defeated Laver in a US$10,000 winner-take-all, five-set match before 15,000 spectators in New York City's Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG and known colloquially as The Garden, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Manhattan and located at 8th Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.Opened on February 11, 1968, it is the...
in January 1970, when Gonzales was 41 years old and Laver was still considered the World No. 1 player. On the other hand, Gonzales was still a top ten player when this match occurred and Laver subsequently won this event, beating Gonzales in a straight sets semifinal.
During the span of seven years that they faced each other, Laver was 26-32 and Gonzales was 36–42 years old. While the peak of Laver was in the late 60s, the peak of Gonzales was in the middle 50s. Gonzales had a great longevity that made possible this rivalry have been competitive. However, the overall record could be biassed in favor of Laver because of the difference of 10 years between them.
Open tennis
Most of Gonzales's career as a professional fell before the start of the open era of tennis in 1968, and he was therefore ineligible to compete at the Grand SlamGrand Slam (tennis)
The four Major tennis tournaments, also called the Slams, are the most important tennis events of the year in terms of world tour ranking points, tradition, prize-money awarded, strength and size of player field, and public attention. They are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and...
events between 1949 (when he turned pro) and 1967. As has been observed about other great players such as Rod Laver
Rod Laver
Rodney George "Rod" Laver MBE is an Australian former tennis player who holds the record for titles won in career, and was the World No. 1 player for seven consecutive years, from 1964 to 1970...
, Gonzales almost certainly would have won a number of additional Grand Slam
Grand Slam (tennis)
The four Major tennis tournaments, also called the Slams, are the most important tennis events of the year in terms of world tour ranking points, tradition, prize-money awarded, strength and size of player field, and public attention. They are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and...
titles had he been permitted to compete in those tournaments during that 18-year period. Jack Kramer, for instance, has speculated in an article about the theoretical champions of Forest Hills and Wimbledon that Gonzales would have won an additional 11 titles in those two tournaments alone.
The first major open tournament was the French Championships in May 1968, when Gonzales had just turned 40. In spite of the fact that he had been semi-retired for a number of years and that the tournament was held on slow clay courts that penalize serve-and-volley players, Gonzales beat the 1967 defending champion Roy Emerson
Roy Emerson
Roy Stanley Emerson is an Australian former tennis player who won 12 Grand Slam singles titles and 16 Grand Slam men's doubles titles. He is the only male player to have won singles and doubles titles at all four Grand Slam tournaments. His 28 Grand Slam titles are an all-time record for a male...
in the quarterfinals. He then lost in the semifinals to Rod Laver. He lost in the third round of Wimbledon
The Championships, Wimbledon
The Championships, Wimbledon, or simply Wimbledon , is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, considered by many to be the most prestigious. It has been held at the All England Club in Wimbledon, London since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the other three Majors...
but later beat the second-seeded Tony Roche
Tony Roche
Anthony "Tony" Dalton Roche is a former professional Australian tennis player, native of Tarcutta. He played junior tennis in the New South Wales regional city of Wagga Wagga. He won one Grand Slam singles title and twelve Grand Slam doubles titles. He is also very well known for coaching...
in the fourth round of the United States Open, before losing an epic match to Holland's Tom Okker
Tom Okker
Thomas S. Okker is a former Dutch tennis player. He was ranked among the world's top 10 singles players for seven consecutive years, 1968–74, reaching a career high of world # 3 in 1969. He also was ranked World # 1 in doubles in 1969.-Tennis career:Okker was the Dutch champion from 1964 through...
.
One of the greatest matches ever played
In 1969, however, it was Gonzales's turn to prevail in the longest match ever played till that time, one so long and arduous that it resulted in the advent of tie break scoring. As a 41-year-old at Wimbledon, Gonzales met the fine young amateur Charlie PasarellCharlie Pasarell
Charlie Pasarell, Jr. is a former Puerto Rican tennis player and commentator...
, a Puerto Rican younger than Gonzales by 16 years who revered his opponent.
Pasarell won a titanic first set, 24-22, then with daylight fading, the 41-year-old Gonzales argued that the match should be suspended. The referee didn't relent, and thus the petulant Gonzales virtually threw the second set, losing it 6-1. At the break, the referee agreed the players should stop. Gonzales was booed as he walked off Centre Court.
The next day, the serves, the volleys and all the prowess that made Gonzales a fiery competitor surfaced with trademark vengeance. Pasarell, seeking to exploit Gonzales's advanced years, tried to aim soft service returns at Gonzales's feet and tire him with frequent lobs. At one changeover Gonzales said, "Charlie, I know what you're doing – and it's not working!" Gonzales rebounded to win three straight sets, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9. In the fifth set, Gonzales won all seven match points that Pasarell had against him, twice coming back from 0-40 deficits, to walk off the court from the 5-hour, 12-minute epic.
The final score was an improbable 22-24, 1–6, 16-14, 6–3, 11-9. Gonzales went on to the fourth round of the championship, where he was beaten in four sets by Arthur Ashe
Arthur Ashe
Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr. was a professional tennis player, born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. During his career, he won three Grand Slam titles, putting him among the best ever from the United States...
. The match with Pasarell, however, is still remembered as one of the highlights in the history of tennis and has been called one of "The Ten Greatest Matches of the Open Era" in the November/December 2003 issue of TENNIS magazine. But it was not this match alone which gave Gonzales the reputation, among the top players, of being the greatest long-match player in the history of the game.
The match would (largely due to the introduction of the tie break) remain the longest in terms of games played until the historic, 11 hours and 183 games long Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships
Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships
The Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships is the longest match in tennis history, measured both by time and number of games. In the Gentlemen's Singles tournament first round, the American 23rd seed John Isner defeated the French qualifier Nicolas Mahut after 11 hours, 5 minutes of...
.
Final professional years
Roy EmersonRoy Emerson
Roy Stanley Emerson is an Australian former tennis player who won 12 Grand Slam singles titles and 16 Grand Slam men's doubles titles. He is the only male player to have won singles and doubles titles at all four Grand Slam tournaments. His 28 Grand Slam titles are an all-time record for a male...
, the fine Australian player who won a dozen major
Grand Slam (tennis)
The four Major tennis tournaments, also called the Slams, are the most important tennis events of the year in terms of world tour ranking points, tradition, prize-money awarded, strength and size of player field, and public attention. They are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and...
titles during the 1960s as an amateur when most of the best players in the world were professionals, turned pro in 1968 at the age of 32, having won the French Open the year before. Gonzales, eight years older, immediately beat him in the quarter-finals of the French championships. In the following years, Gonzales beat Emerson another 11 times, apparently losing very few matches to him. In the Champions Classic of 1970 in Miami, Florida, however, Emerson did beat Gonzales in straight sets, 6–2, 6–3, 6–2.
Another great Australian player was Ken Rosewall
Ken Rosewall
Kenneth Robert Rosewall AM MBE is a former world top-ranking amateur and professional tennis player from Australia. He won 23 Majors including eight Grand Slam singles titles and before the Open Era a record fifteen Pro Slam titles . Rosewall won 9 slams in doubles with a career double grand slam...
, who won eight major titles during his long career, first as an amateur, then as a professional in the early years of open tennis. Gonzales played 160 matches against Rosewall, winning 101 and losing 59.
In late 1969, Gonzales won the Howard Hughes Open in Las Vegas and the Pacific Southwest Open in Los Angeles, beating, among others, John Newcombe
John Newcombe
John David Newcombe, AO, OBE is a former World No. 1 tennis player.-Biography:He won seven Grand Slam singles titles, A natural athlete, Newcombe played several sports as a boy until devoting himself to tennis. He was the Australian junior champion in 1961, 1962, and 1963 and was a member of...
, Ken Rosewall, Stan Smith
Stan Smith
Stanley Roger "Stan" Smith is a former American tennis player and two time Grand Slam singles champion who also, with his partner Bob Lutz, formed one of the most successful doubles teams of all time. Together, they won many major titles all over the world...
(twice), Cliff Richey
Cliff Richey
Cliff Richey played amateur and professional tennis in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the brother of fellow player Nancy Richey....
, and Arthur Ashe
Arthur Ashe
Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr. was a professional tennis player, born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. During his career, he won three Grand Slam titles, putting him among the best ever from the United States...
. He was the top American money-winner for 1969 with $46,288. If the touring professionals had been included in the United States rankings, it is likely he would have been ranked number one in the country, just as he had been two decades earlier in 1948 and 1949.
Gonzales continued to play in the occasional tournament in his 40s. He could also occasionally beat the clear number-one player in the world, Rod Laver
Rod Laver
Rodney George "Rod" Laver MBE is an Australian former tennis player who holds the record for titles won in career, and was the World No. 1 player for seven consecutive years, from 1964 to 1970...
. Their most famous meeting was a $10,000 winner-take-all match before a crowd of 15,000 in Madison Square Garden in February 1970. Coming just after the Australian had completed a calendar-year sweep of the Grand Slams, the 41-year-old Gonzales beat Laver in five sets. He became the oldest player to have ever won a professional tournament, winning the Des Moines Open over 24-year-old Georges Goven
Georges Goven
Georges Goven is a retired tennis player from France.Goven won the French Championships junior title in 1964, 1965, and 1966, and the Australian Championships juniors in 1964....
when he was three months shy of his 44th birthday. In spite of the fact that he was still known as a serve-and-volley player, in 1971, when he was 43 and Jimmy Connors
Jimmy Connors
James Scott "Jimmy" Connors is an American former world no. 1 tennis player....
was 19, he beat the great young baseliner by playing him from the baseline at the Pacific Southwest Open. Around this time, Gonzalez relocated to Las Vegas to be the Tennis Director at Caesars Palace
Caesars Palace
Caesars Palace is a luxury hotel and casino located on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, an unincorporated township in Clark County, Nevada, United States in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Caesars Palace is owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment Corp....
, and he hired Chuck Pate, his childhood friend, to run the Pro Shop.
Gonzales was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame
International Tennis Hall of Fame
The International Tennis Hall of Fame is located in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. The hall of fame and honors players and contributors to the sport of tennis and includes a museum, grass tennis courts, an indoor tennis facility, and a court tennis facility.-History:The hall of fame and...
at Newport, Rhode Island
Newport, Rhode Island
Newport is a city on Aquidneck Island in Newport County, Rhode Island, United States, about south of Providence. Known as a New England summer resort and for the famous Newport Mansions, it is the home of Salve Regina University and Naval Station Newport which houses the United States Naval War...
in 1968.
In May 1968, he was the first professional to lose to an amateur, the British player Mark Cox. The then-24-year-old Cox beat Gonzales at the British Hard Court Championships
British Hard Court Championships
The British Hard Court Championships is a defunct Grand Prix tennis and WTA Tour affiliated tennis tournament played from 1968 to 1983 and 1995 to 1996. It was held in Torquay before moving to the West Hants Tennis Club in Bournemouth in England in the United Kingdom from 1927 to 1983 and in 1995...
at Bournemouth
Bournemouth
Bournemouth is a large coastal resort town in the ceremonial county of Dorset, England. According to the 2001 Census the town has a population of 163,444, making it the largest settlement in Dorset. It is also the largest settlement between Southampton and Plymouth...
, 0-6, 6-2, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, in two and a quarter hours.
Personal and family life
González's parents, Manuel Antonio González and Carmen Alire, migrated from the Mexican state of Chihuahua to the U.S. in the early 1900s. González was born in 1928, the eldest of seven children. Kramer writes that "Gorgo was not the poor Mexican-American that people assumed. He didn't come from a wealthy family, but from a stable middle-class background, probably a lot like mine. He had a great mother and there was always a warm feeling of family loyalty. If anything, he might have been spoiled as a kid. It's a shame he suffered discrimination because of his Mexican heritage". However, according to other sources, Gonzales's father worked as a house-painter and he, along with his six siblings, were raised in a working class neighborhood. In his autobiography, González states, "We had few luxuries at our house. Food wasn't abundant but it was simple and filling, and we never went hungry. Our clothes were just clothes – inexpensive but clean."González had a long scar across his left cheek that, according to his autobiography, some members of the mass media of the 1940s attributed to his being a Mexican-American pachuco
Pachuco
Pachucos are Chicano youths who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothing and spoke their own dialect of Mexican Spanish, called Caló or Pachuco...
and hence involved in knife fights. This was one more slur that embittered González towards the media in general. The scar was actually the result of a prosaic street accident in 1935 when he was seven years old: pushing a scooter too fast, he ran into a passing car and had his cheek gashed open by its door handle. He spent two weeks in the hospital as a result.
Gonzales was referred to as "Richard" by his friends and family. As the child of middle-class Hispanic parents, young Richard was well aware of the social prejudices of his day. He reportedly disliked the nickname "Pancho", as it was a common derogatory term used against Mexican Americans at the time. In the Hispanic community, the nickname "Pancho" is traditionally only given to individuals whose given name is "Francisco".
Although his surname was properly spelled "González", during most of his playing career he was known as "Gonzales". It was only towards the end of his life that the proper spelling began to be used. Kramer, however, writes that one of Gonzales's wives, Madelyn Darrow, "decided to change his name. Madelyn discovered in the Castilian upper-crust society, the fancy Gonzales families spelled their name with a z at the end to differentiate from the hoi polloi
Hoi polloi
Hoi polloi , an expression meaning "the many", or in the strictest sense, "the majority" in Greek, is used in English to denote "the masses" or "the people", usually in a derogatory sense. Synonyms for "hoi polloi" include ".....
(sic) Gonzales. So it was González for a time, and even now you will occasionally see that spelling pop up. " However, that theory is unlikely, as González
Gonzalez (surname)
González is a family name that originated in Spain. In Spain, it is the second most common surname with 2.08% of the population bearing the surname.. It's also very popular in Latin America, being the most common one in countries like Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Paraguay, and thus making it...
is actually a much more common spelling of that name than Gonzales. In his ghost-written 1959 autobiography, "Gonzales" is used throughout.
Gonzales became a television commentator for ABC, a rare presence at tournaments. Described as an adequate but unmotivated commentator, Gonzales would issue thoughtful comments - often magnanimous, occasionally harsh, always candid - on contemporary pros not unlike an old soldier who'd preferred dying in battle than merely fading away.
For decades Gonzales had made $75,000 a year from an endorsement contract with Spalding
Spalding (sports equipment)
Spalding is a sporting goods company founded by Albert Spalding in Chicago, Illinois, in 1876 and now headquartered in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The company specializes in the production of balls for many sports, but is most-known for its basketballs...
for racquets and balls but was unable to get along with the company personnel. Finally, in 1981, after nearly 30 years, Spalding refused to renew the contract. He had also been the Tennis Director and Tournament Director at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip
Las Vegas Strip
The Las Vegas Strip is an approximately stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard in Clark County, Nevada; adjacent to, but outside the city limits of Las Vegas proper. The Strip lies within the unincorporated townships of Paradise and Winchester...
for 16 years, another lucrative job. In 1985, he was fired after refusing to give playing lessons to the wife of his boss. As S. L. Price wrote about Gonzales in a 2002 Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
article, "There was no more perfect match than Pancho and Vegas: both dark and disreputable, both hard and mean and impossible to ignore."
Gonzales married and divorced six times and had seven children: he wed his childhood sweetheart, Henrietta Pedrin, on March 23, 1948; they had three children. He married actress (and Miss Rheingold of 1958
Rheingold Beer
Rheingold Beer, introduced in 1883, is a New York beer that held 35 percent of the state's beer market from 1950 to 1960. The company was sold by the founding Liebmann family in 1963...
) Madelyn Darrow twice; they had three children including twin girls. He married his dental hygienist, Betty, in Beverly Hills and had one daughter. His last wife, Rita, is the sister of Andre Agassi
Andre Agassi
Andre Kirk Agassi is a retired American professional tennis player and former world no. 1. Generally considered by critics and fellow players to be one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Agassi has been called the best service returner in the history of the game...
. According to Price's article, Rita's father, Mike Agassi
Emmanuel Agassi
Emmanuel B. Aghassian, Anglicized as Emmanuel "Mike" Agassi , is a former boxer and the father of Andre Agassi....
, a 1952 Olympian on the Iranian boxing team who had become a successful casino greeter in Las Vegas, hated Gonzales so much that he considered having him killed. Gonzales had coached the young Rita until she had rebelled against her father's 5,000-balls-a-day-regimen and first moved in with, then married, on 31 March 1984, the much older Gonzales. Years before, Mike Agassi, already a tennis fanatic, had once served as a linesman for one of Gonzales's professional matches in Chicago. Gonzales had upbraided Agassi so severely for perceived miscalls that Agassi had walked away and gone to sit in the stands.
Kramer says that "Gonzales never seemed to get along with his various wives, although this never stopped him from getting married... Segura once said, 'You know, the nicest thing Gorgo ever says to his wives is "Shut up" ' ". Gonzales died of cancer in Las Vegas
Las Vegas metropolitan area
The Las Vegas Valley is the heart of the Las Vegas-Paradise, NV MSA also known as the Las Vegas–Paradise–Henderson MSA which includes all of Clark County, Nevada, and is a metropolitan area in the southern part of the U.S. state of Nevada. The Valley is defined by the Las Vegas Valley landform, a ...
on July 3, 1995, in poverty and almost friendless, estranged from his ex-wives and children except for Rita and their son, Skylar, and daughter, Jeanna Lynn. Andre Agassi paid for his funeral.
Place among the all-time great tennis players
For about 14 years from around 1920 to 1934, Bill TildenBill Tilden
William Tatem Tilden II , nicknamed "Big Bill," is often considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. An American tennis player who was the World No. 1 player for seven years, he won 14 Majors including ten Grand Slams and four Pro Slams. Bill Tilden dominated the world of...
was generally considered the greatest player of all time. From 1934 through 1967, during the Golden Age of Tennis, when Vines, Perry, Budge, Riggs, Kramer, Gonzales, Segura, Sedgman, Trabert, Hoad, Rosewall, and Laver were the top tier players, Gonzales was considered the best of this period. Since 1968, with the first Grand Slam of the Open Era
Open era
Open era or Open Era may refer to:* Open Era , the period since 1968 where professionals can compete in Grand Slams* Glasnost era, the increased openness in the Soviet Union from the mid-1980s...
at the French Open, Champions such as Rod Laver
Rod Laver
Rodney George "Rod" Laver MBE is an Australian former tennis player who holds the record for titles won in career, and was the World No. 1 player for seven consecutive years, from 1964 to 1970...
, Björn Borg
Björn Borg
Björn Rune Borg is a former world no. 1 tennis player from Sweden. Between 1974 and 1981 he won 11 Grand Slam singles titles. He won five consecutive Wimbledon singles titles and six French Open singles titles...
, John McEnroe
John McEnroe
John Patrick McEnroe, Jr. is a former world no. 1 professional tennis player from the United States. During his career, he won seven Grand Slam singles titles , nine Grand Slam men's doubles titles, and one Grand Slam mixed doubles title...
, Pete Sampras
Pete Sampras
Pete Sampras is a retired American tennis player and former world no. 1. During his 15-year tour career, he won 14 Grand Slam singles titles and became recognized as one of the greatest tennis players of all time....
, and Roger Federer
Roger Federer
Roger Federer is a Swiss professional tennis player who held the ATP no. 1 position for a record 237 consecutive weeks, and 285 weeks overall. As of 28 November 2011, he is ranked World No. 3 by the Association of Tennis Professionals . Federer has won a men's record 16 Grand Slam singles titles...
have been considered by their contemporaries to be greater players than Tilden or Gonzales.
Many people connected with the game, however, consider Gonzales to be the best male player in tennis history, because he was the World No. 1 tennis
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
player for eight years — the status of a few of the earlier years is still unclear. He was possibly No.1 in 1952, but then was probably the World No.1 for seven consecutive years, 1954 through 1960. In the article World number one male tennis player rankings Bill Tilden with Rod Laver are the next closest to Gonzales with seven No.1 ratings, followed by Pete Sampras and Ken Rosewall with six each. Pancho Segura
Pancho Segura
Pancho Segura, born Francisco Olegario Segura , was a leading tennis player of the 1940s and 1950s, both as an amateur and as a professional. In 1950 and 1952, as a professional, he was the World Co-No. 1 player...
, who played, and frequently beat, all of the great players from the 1930s through the 1960s has said that he believes that Gonzales was the best player of all time. Lew Hoad and Allen Fox agree with this assessment. In a 1972 article about an imaginary tournament among the all-time greats, Gene Scott
Gene Scott (tennis)
Eugene Lytton Scott was an American tennis player of the 1960s.Scott was the grandson of Dr. Eugene C. Sullivan, one of the inventors of Pyrex and chair and president of Corning Glass Works. He graduated with a BA in history from Yale University in 1960, where he was a member of Skull and Bones...
had the fourth-seeded Gonzales upsetting Bill Tilden in the semi-finals and then using his serve to beat Rod Laver in the finals.
Bud Collins
Bud Collins
-External links:*** 2001 interview with Collins*...
, the editor of the massive Total Tennis, The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia, is guarded. He writes on page 673 that Gonzales was "probably as good as anyone who ever played the game, if not better." On page 693, however, he writes that Rod Laver would "be known as possibly the greatest player ever." And on page 749 he calls Bill Tilden "perhaps the greatest player of them all."
In 2005 a tennis historian who visited the International Tennis Hall of Fame
International Tennis Hall of Fame
The International Tennis Hall of Fame is located in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. The hall of fame and honors players and contributors to the sport of tennis and includes a museum, grass tennis courts, an indoor tennis facility, and a court tennis facility.-History:The hall of fame and...
interviewed several great Australian players who had toured against Gonzales. Who, they were asked, was the best player they had ever played against?
Mal Anderson named Gonzales, who "was very difficult since if you did get ahead, he had a way to upset you, and he could exploit your weaknesses fast. Though over the hill, he beat Rod [Laver] until Rod lifted his game." He added, "Lew Hoad, in his day was scary, though Gonzales was best day in and day out." Ashley Cooper also named Gonzales, whom "I never beat on the tour. But I did beat him a couple of times on clay where his serve wasn’t as good." Gonzales's frequent opponent Frank Sedgman
Frank Sedgman
Frank Arthur Sedgman, born 29 October 1927, in Mont Albert, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, was a tennis player who was arguably the world No.1 in 1952. In his 1979 autobiography Jack Kramer, the long-time tennis promoter and great player himself, included Sedgman in his list of the 21...
said, "I played against probably the greatest of all time, Jack Kramer. He could put his serve on a dime and had a great first volley. The second best was Gonzales. I played him a lot — a great competitor — a great athlete."
Jack Kramer, on the other hand, who became a world-class player in 1940 and then beat Gonzales badly in the latter's first year as a professional, has stated that he believes that although Gonzales was better than either Laver or Sampras he was not as good as either Ellsworth Vines
Ellsworth Vines
Henry Ellsworth Vines, Jr. was an American tennis champion of the 1930s, the World No. 1 player or the co-No. 1 for four years in 1932, 1935, 1936 and 1937.-Biography:...
or Don Budge
Don Budge
John Donald Budge was an American tennis champion who was a World No. 1 player for five years, first as an amateur and then as a professional...
. Kramer, who had a long and frequently bitter relationship with Gonzales, rates him only as one of the four players who are second to Budge and Vines in his estimation. Kramer also, perhaps surprisingly, writes that Bobby Riggs would have beaten Gonzales on a regular basis.
Early in 1986 Inside Tennis, a magazine published in Northern California
Northern California
Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...
, devoted parts of four issues to a lengthy article called "Tournament of the Century", an imaginary tournament to determine the greatest of all time. They asked 37 tennis notables such as Kramer, Budge, Perry, and Riggs and observers such as Bud Collins
Bud Collins
-External links:*** 2001 interview with Collins*...
to list the 10 greatest players in order.
Twenty-five players in all were named by the 37 experts in their lists of the 10 best. The magazine then ranked them in descending order by total number of points assigned. The top eight players in overall points, with their number of first-place votes, were: Rod Laver (9), John McEnroe (3), Don Budge (4), Jack Kramer (5), Björn Borg (6), Pancho Gonzales (1), Bill Tilden (6), and Lew Hoad (1). Gonzales was ranked the sixth-best player, with only Allan Fox casting a vote for him as the greatest of all time.
Performance timeline for major tournaments
As amateur player Pancho Gonzales won at least 17 singles titles, including 2 Grand Slam tournaments. As professional player he won at least 85 singles titles, including 12 Pro Slam tournaments; at the same time he was banned to compete in the Grand Slam events. During this professional period he won 7 times the World Pro Tour. The Open Era arrived very late to Gonzales when he was in his early forties. Even at this advanced age he was able to win at least 11 singles titles. Overall Gonzales won at least 113 titles in his successful career in a span of 25 years.Performance Timeline:
| Titles / Played | Career W-L | Career Win % | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grand Slam Tournaments Grand Slam (tennis) The four Major tennis tournaments, also called the Slams, are the most important tennis events of the year in terms of world tour ranking points, tradition, prize-money awarded, strength and size of player field, and public attention. They are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and... |
Amateur | Professional | Open Era | 2 / 17 | 43–15 | 74.14 | |||||||||||||||
| 1947 | 1948 | 1949 | 1950 - 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | ||||||||||||
| Australian Australian Open The Australian Open is the only Grand Slam tennis tournament held in the southern hemisphere. The tournament was held for the first time in 1905 and was last contested on grass in 1987. Since 1972 the Australian Open has been held in Melbourne, Victoria. In 1988, the tournament became a hard court... |
A | A | A | Unable to compete | 3R 1969 Australian Open - Men's Singles Rod Laver defeated Andres Gimeno 6–3, 6–4, 7–5 in the final to win the Men's Singles title at the 1969 Australian Open.See also:# Rod Laver # Ken Rosewall # Tom Okker # Tony Roche ... |
A | A | A | A | 0 / 1 | 2–1 | 66.67 | |||||||||
| French | A | A | SF 1949 French Championships - Men's Singles Frank A. Parker defeated Budge Patty 6-3 1-6 6-1 6-4 in the final to win the Men's Singles title at the 1949 French Championships.See also:-Seeds:... |
Unable to compete | SF 1968 French Open - Men's Singles Roy Emerson was the defending champion but lost in the quarterfinals to Pancho Gonzales.Ken Rosewall won in the final 6–3, 6–1, 2–6, 6–2 against Rod Laver.-Seeds:... |
A | A | A | A | A | 0 / 2 | 9–2 | 81.82 | ||||||||
| Wimbledon | A | A | 4R 1949 Wimbledon Championships - Men's Singles Ted Schroeder defeated Jaroslav Drobný 3–6 6–0 6–3 4–6 6–4 in the final to win the Gentlemen's Singles title at the 1949 Wimbledon Championships.See also:-Seeds:The seeded players are listed below... |
Unable to compete | 3R 1968 Wimbledon Championships - Men's Singles Rod Laver defeated Tony Roche 6-3 6-4 6-2 in the final to win the Gentlemen's Singles title at the 1968 Wimbledon Championships.-Seeds:# Rod Laver # Ken Rosewall # Andrés Gimeno ... |
4R 1969 Wimbledon Championships - Men's Singles Rod Laver was the defending champion and won in the final, 6–4 5–7 6–4 6–4, against John Newcombe.-Seeds:# Rod Laver # Tony Roche # Tom Okker # Ken Rosewall ... |
A | 2R 1971 Wimbledon Championships - Men's Singles John Newcombe defeated Stan Smith 6–3 5–7 2–6 6–4 6–4 in the final to win the Gentlemen's Singles title at the 1971 Wimbledon Championships, England.-Seeds:The seeded players are listed below... |
2R 1972 Wimbledon Championships - Men's Singles Stan Smith defeated Ilie Năstase 4–6 6–3 6–3 4–6 7–5 in the final to win the Gentlemen's Singles title at the 1972 Wimbledon Championships.-Seeds:The seeded players are listed below... |
A | 0 / 5 | 10–5 | 66.67 | ||||||||
| U.S. U.S. Open (tennis) The US Open, formally the United States Open Tennis Championships, is a hardcourt tennis tournament which is the modern iteration of one of the oldest tennis championships in the world, the U.S. National Championship, which for men's singles was first contested in 1881... |
2R | W | W | Unable to compete | QF | 4R | 3R | 3R 1971 US Open - Men's Singles Stan Smith defeated Jan Kodeš 3–6, 6–3, 6–2, 7–6 in the final to win the men's singles title at the 1971 US Open 1971 US Open.See also:# John Newcombe # Stan Smith # Arthur Ashe ... |
1R 1972 US Open - Men's Singles Ilie Năstase defeated Arthur Ashe 3–6, 6–3, 6–7, 6–4, 6–3 in the final to win the men's singles title at the 1972 US Open. See also:-Key:* Q = Qualifier* WC = Wild Card* LL = Lucky Loser* r. = retired-Final Eight:-Section 1:-Section 2:... |
1R 1973 US Open - Men's Singles John Newcombe defeated Jan Kodeš 6–4, 1–6, 4–6, 6–2, 6–3 in the final to win the men's singles title at the 1973 US Open. See also:-Key:* Q = Qualifier* WC = Wild Card* LL = Lucky Loser* r. = retired-Final Eight:-Section 1:-Section 2:-Section 3:... |
2 / 9 | 23–7 | 76.67 | ||||||||
| Pro Slam Tournaments | Professional | 12 / 26 | 60–14 | 81.08 | |||||||||||||||||
| 1950 | 1951 | 1952 | 1953 | 1954 | 1955 | 1956 | 1957 | 1958 | 1959 | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | ||||
| French Pro French Pro Championship In 1930 the "Association Française des Professeurs de Tennis " held its first pro tournament, titled "Championnat International de France Professionnel" June 18–22, 1930, and is considered as a part of the professional grand slam from 1927 to 1967 till the advent of Open Era.From 1930 the French... |
NH | F | NH | SF | A | A | F | A | A | SF | A | A | A | 0 / 4 | 7–4 | 63.64 | |||||
| Wembley Pro Wembley Championship The Wembley Championship was a tennis event held from 1934–1990 with some periods of inactivity in between and is considered as a part of the professional grand slam from 1927 - 1967 until the advent of the open era... |
W | W | W | F | NH | W | SF | SF | A | A | SF | A | A | SF | A | A | A | 4 / 9 | 22–5 | 81.48 | |
| U.S. Pro | A | 2nd | F | W | W | W | W | W | W | W | A | W | A | QF | F | SF | A | A | 8 / 13 | 31–5 | 86.11 |
| Total: | 14 / 43 | 103–29 | 78.03 | ||||||||||||||||||
Singles
- Wembley ProWembley ChampionshipThe Wembley Championship was a tennis event held from 1934–1990 with some periods of inactivity in between and is considered as a part of the professional grand slam from 1927 - 1967 until the advent of the open era...
(1950, 1951, 1952, 1956)
- US Pro Tennis Championships (1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961)
Sources
- The Game, My 40 Years in Tennis (1979), Jack Kramer with Frank Deford (ISBN 0-399-12336-9)
- The History of Professional Tennis (2003), Joe McCauley
- Man with a Racket, The Autobiography of Pancho Gonzales, as Told to Cy Rice (1959)
- Rich Hillway, tennis historian - Q&A with the Aussies
- The Tennis Book (1981), Edited by Michael Bartlett and Bob Gillen (ISBN 0-87795-344-9)
- The Lone Wolf, by S. L. Price, Sports Illustrated, June 26, 2002
- World of Tennis Yearbook 1971 (1971), by John Barrett, London
- Little Pancho (2009) by Caroline Seebohm