This year’s Wimbledon Championships marks the 50th anniversary of a dispute which saw 81 male players boycott the tournament and changed tennis forever.
Top stars including defending champion Stan Smith, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Arthur Ashe and Ken Rosewall stunned the sporting world by turning their backs on the most gilded event in tennis.
The build-up to the Championships was dominated by the ‘will they, won’t they’ saga, but the pervading opinion of the authorities was that there was no chance the players would sacrifice playing at Wimbledon. They were wrong.
“It was huge, huge,” recalls tennis historian Richard Evans. “It was the front-page lead in every newspaper in Britain for five days. The game would never be the same again.”
As with many more notable and bloodier conflicts in living memory, this one was sparked by a relatively minor dispute in eastern Europe.
But tensions between the warring factions – the players who had turned professional five years earlier, and the still amateur tennis federations administrating them – had been simmering for some time.
Those tensions boiled over when Yugoslavian player Nikki Pilic was banned by his country’s tennis federation – of which his uncle, General Dusan Kovac, was the president – for refusing to play in a Davis Cup match.
The recently formed players’ union, the ATP, duly threatened to boycott Wimbledon in support of one of its members, unless the ban was lifted.
“He came along at just the appropriate moment,” Evans said. “It was the classic situation of an amateur federation president demanding a player play Davis Cup when that player, who was a professional, had already signed a contract to appear in a doubles tournament in Montreal.
“His uncle got so angry he banned him for nine months. Then the International Lawn Tennis Federation (now the ITF) banned him for six weeks, knowing full well it would take him right into the middle of Wimbledon.”
The ATP board, comprising Smith, Ashe and fellow American player Jim McManus, Britons Mark Cox and John Barrett, chief executive Jack Kramer and president Cliff Drysdale, met in the basement of the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair to vote on whether to boycott, the day before the Wimbledon draw was due to be made.
Drysdale had canvassed the opinions of players at the recent tournaments in Rome and Paris – and to his surprise, found the mood to be mutinous.
“The media were sitting on the hotel steps, about 12 of us, waiting for the decision,” Evans said. “By then Cliff had been to Westminster to talk to the minister of sport and there had also been an injunction. It was all happening.
“But eventually they came down on the Thursday night to break off. Then they slept on it. The Wimbledon draw was being made on the Friday morning and the players were there practising.”
Cox and Barrett – staying loyal to Wimbledon – and Smith voted not to boycott but Ashe, McManus and Kramer voted for.
Drysdale therefore had the casting vote and he abstained.
“Jack said afterwards ‘I nearly fell off my chair, what a politician the guy is’,” added Evans. “Because Cliff was in a terrible situation. He knew if he voted to boycott it would all be on him and if he voted not to boycott it would be the end of the association.
“John Newcombe had phoned Jack in the middle of the night and said ‘if you don’t boycott, I’m out’. It would have started a whole run and people would have left the association.
“But by abstaining the vote remained 3-3 and (under ATP rules) the motion was carried. The decision to boycott was phoned through to referee Captain Mike Gibson, who had just done the draw and had to rip it up because 81 players had quit on him.”
The rebel players were branded ‘money grabbers’ by the press, but there was far more to it than that.
“The media got it wrong,” said Evans. “The sports editors were faced with ‘who’s the bad guy, who’s the good guy?’. And the bad guy couldn’t be Wimbledon.
“Therefore the players had to be the bad guys, which was very difficult because Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Arthur Ashe, John Newcombe, they were hugely popular sporting stars.
“So they settled on poor old Jack Kramer and made him the bad guy. He was supposedly leading the players.
“But it wasn’t about money. It was about detaching themselves from the stranglehold of the LTA and the ILTF, as it was then. The players finally said ‘we are not going to put up with amateurs telling us, professionals, how to run our lives’.”
Wimbledon had to hastily put together a new field comprising mainly eastern Europeans, whose federations did not allow them to be ATP members, and young players – including a 17-year-old Bjorn Borg – who were not yet contracted.
Three ATP members broke ranks; British number one Roger Taylor, Romanian Ilie Nastase (a divisive figure at the best of times and who claimed his federation made him play), and Australian Ray Kelbie, because he said he could not afford not to play.
“Roger Taylor was in a terrible position, because he was the number one, the big man in British tennis,” Evans said.
“But his father was a Sheffield steelworker and union man. And he was telling his son ‘you can’t be a scab’. But the media and the public were saying ‘Roger, you’ve got to play’.
“Eventually he played, lost in the semi-finals and wasn’t very popular in the locker room for a long time.”
As a footnote to an extraordinary episode in world sport, the name that graces the champions’ wall inside Centre Court – and pub quizzes to this day – is Czech Jan Kodes, who beat Russia’s Alex Metreveli in three sets for the title.
Madrid Open: Nadal roars to victory against De Minaur
Rafael Nadal delighted his home fans at the Madrid Open as he roared to an impressive victory over Alex de Minaur on Saturday.
The Spaniard battled to a 7-6 (8-6) 6-3 victory to earn his first win over a top-20 player in the world rankings since the ATP Finals back in 2022.
De Minaur had beaten Nadal last week in Barcelona, but the five-time Madrid champion was not to be denied this time in front of a crowd which included King Felipe VI along with football stars Zinedine Zidane and Vinicius Jr.
Emerging triumphant from an epic 77-minute opening set proved decisive, with Nadal more comfortable in the second as De Minaur missed an opportunity to become the first player to beat him in consecutive weeks since Novak Djokovic achieved the feat way back in 2011.
Nadal will take on Pedro Cachin in the third round after the Argentine dumped out Fances Tiafoe in three sets.
"I'm super happy to be able to be competitive against a great player like Alex and play over two hours," Nadal said, per the ATP Tour website.
"It means a lot to me and the atmosphere here is just a joke, so I can't thank enough everybody here.
"It still needs time [until I am back to my best]. I think for moments it has been a good level of tennis. I was able to do positive things, but still on and off.
"But I really believe that tennis hasn't been an issue for the last two years. More the physical issues.
"If I am able to play weeks in a row and if I am able to play tennis, then I'm going to see how far I can go and how competitive I could be. But that's not the case yet, just step by step and let's see how I recover."
Elsewhere at the tournament, Australian Open champion Jannik Sinner, playing as the top seed at a Masters 1000 event for the first time, cruised to victory over fellow Italian Lorenzo Sonego to start his campaign in style.
It took Sinner just 69 minutes to win 6-0 6-3 and improve to 26-2 in a remarkable 2024 season so far.
“I know Lorenzo quite well and we have a good friendship off the court, we play Davis Cup together, we practise a lot together,” Sinner said.
“The mental side was a little bit different than it used to be, so I'm just happy how I handled the situation. He didn't play at his best. I think we saw this. I wish him all the best for the rest of the season.”
Progress was harder to come by for Daniil Medvedev as he lost the opening set to Matteo Arnaldi, though the third seed eventually battled through 2-6 6-4 6-4 to book a third-round clash with American Sebastian Korda.
There was a surprise result, though, with Brazilian qualifier Thiago Monteiro ending the fine recent form of Stefanos Tsitsipas with a 6-4 6-4 victory.
Tsitsipas was 10-1 on clay this year going into the match, but the sixth seed crashed to a shock defeat just a week after Monteiro had lost in the first round of a Challenger Tour event in Portugal, marking a rapid reversal of his fortunes.
“Every week you have a new opportunity," said Monteiro. “These past few weeks I wasn’t feeling really good on the court. I was trying to do well at Challengers but it didn’t work.
“I just kept up the hard work, day by day. Even when I was not feeling good and not winning matches, I kept believing in myself, and this week it has paid off.
"For sure one of the biggest wins of my career. I knew it was a really tough match and I tried to just believe in myself all the time."
Sunday’s matches will see Nadal’s compatriot Carlos Alcaraz continue his campaign with a third-round clash against Thiago Seyboth Wild.
Swiatek soars into Madrid Open last 16 after dropping just two games against Cirstea
Iga Swiatek stormed through to the Madrid Open last 16 following a dominant straight-sets victory over Sorana Cirstea.
The world number one dropped just two games as she inflicted a comprehensive 6-1 6-1 rout on her Romanian opponent in the Spanish capital.
Swiatek, who was runner-up to Aryna Sabalenka in last year's event, will play Sara Sorribes Tormo in the round of 16 after the Spaniard defeated two-time Australian Open champion Victoria Azarenka.
The Pole is now 26-4 for the season, in which she has already triumphed at the Qatar Open and Indian Wells Open, as she eyes the ninth WTA 1000 singles title of her career.
Data debrief
Swiatek is through to her sixth round of 16 from seven main-draw appearances in WTA 1000 events on clay (85.7 per cent) - the highest percentage rate among players with at least five such appearances since the format's introduction in 2009.
The three-time French Open champion also boasts the best WTA match win rate of any player since 2000 on clay (87 per cent). Overall, only Chris Evert (94.5 per cent), Margaret Court (89.5 per cent) and Steffi Graf (89.2 per cent) boast a higher percentage in the Open Era.
Alcaraz begins Madrid Open campaign with emphatic win
Carlos Alcaraz continued his fine record at the Madrid Open with an emphatic 6-2 6-1 victory over Alexander Shevchenko on Friday.
The two-time defending champion made it 12 straight wins at his home tournament to ensure he will face Brazilian Thiago Seyboth Wild in the last 32.
Alcaraz was playing his first match on the ATP Tour since March 28 after being unable to compete in the Monte-Carlo Masters and Barcelona Open due to an arm injury.
But he was still able to make a fine start to his clay-court season, breaking serve in the first game and racing to victory in only one hour and eight minutes.
Data Debrief
Sometimes the scoreline can be harsh on a beaten player, but on this occasion Alcaraz was clearly dominant, breaking the Kazakh seven times in the match and forcing 11 break-point opportunities while conceding only three for his opponent.
That allowed the Spaniard to claim a dominant victory despite being broken once in each set. He will now turn his attention to a clash with Seyboth Wild, who battled past Lorenzo Musetti with a 6-4 6-4 win.
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