The American tennis participant and former Wimbledon champion Vic Seixas, who has died aged 100, didn’t win 15 grand slam titles throughout a 30-year profession by serving his opponents off the courtroom or overpowering them from the bottom. As a substitute Seixas relied on extraordinary conditioning, an indefatigable workrate, hair-trigger reflexes and sheer drive of will to compensate for any technical shortcomings.
Seixas’s fleet-footed athleticism, aggressive net-rushing and excellent volleying had been tailored for the All England Membership, the place the grass courts had been then sown with a seed combine conducive to quicker play. He made a shock run to the semi-finals on his Wimbledon debut in 1950, dropping to the eventual champion Budge Patty, then gained it three years later because the second seed, coming by a five-set quarter-final epic towards Lew Hoad, and one other five-setter towards Australia’s Mervyn Rose within the semis, earlier than a straight-sets destruction of the unseeded Dane Kurt Nielsen within the closing.
In fact this was a long time earlier than the game’s transformation right into a billion-dollar business; whereas this yr’s Wimbledon singles champions will take house £2.7m from a £50m prize fund, Seixas recalled being awarded a £25 voucher for his hassle, which needed to be spent at a Piccadilly sporting items store.
However whereas the Wimbledon title introduced status and private satisfaction, it was Seixas’s memorable exhibiting within the 1954 Davis Cup, probably the most well-known occasions within the sport’s historical past, that introduced him widest acclaim on the time.
Taking part in towards the mighty Australians earlier than a rollicking mass of 25,000 spectators at White Metropolis Stadium in Sydney – mentioned to be the most important crowd in historical past to observe a tennis match on the time – Seixas contributed a gap day singles win over Ken Rosewall, who had dominated every of their six earlier conferences, and a clinching victory within the doubles with Tony Trabert over Rosewall and Hoad to assist America finish the Aussies’ four-year stranglehold on essentially the most cherished trophy in tennis.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Seixas and the US group had been celebrated on their return by a ticker-tape parade in New York Metropolis.
“Rosewall was mechanically a greater participant than Seixas,” Herbert Warren Wind wrote in Sports activities Illustrated in 1958. “So had been many different gamers he defeated. He did it, within the final evaluation, on battle.”
Seixas was born within the Overbrook Park part of west Philadelphia, the one baby of Anna (nee Moon), of Irish origin, and Elias Seixas, a businessman born within the Dominican Republic who owned a wholesale plumbing, heating and roofing firm. His was a middle-class Presbyterian upbringing.
Displaying a proclivity for a number of sports activities from an early age, Seixas took up tennis at six whereas performing as a ballboy for his father’s neighbourhood matches. Earlier than lengthy he was beating far older gamers with regularity and profitable interscholastic titles at Dimner Beeber junior highschool. He emerged as a flexible athlete on the William Penn Constitution college, starring on the baseball, basketball, observe and squash groups, however tennis remained his favorite sport. In 1940, he was nonetheless in highschool when he entered the US Nationwide Championships at Forest Hills, forerunner of the US Open, the primary of a document 28 main-draw appearances.
After enrolling on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1941, the place he performed on the freshman basketball group, Seixas subsequently served three and a half years within the US Military Air Corps within the Pacific theatre of the second world warfare, flying 14 sorts of plane together with P-38 Lightnings, P-40 Warhawks and P-61 Black Widow fighters. He met his first spouse, Dolly Dunaway, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, after returning to Chapel Hill to complete a bachelor’s diploma in commerce in 1949, earlier than turning his consideration to the globetrotting beginner tennis circuit.
His Wimbledon triumph marked each the end result of a long-held dream and the onset of his athletic peak. In 1954, Seixas added a second main singles crown, seeing off the Australian Rex Hartwig to win the US Championships and setting a match document by defeating 5 seeded opponents, a feat since matched solely by Andre Agassi in 1994.
That was one among seven grand slam titles he gained that yr, together with the Australian, French and US doubles in addition to the French, Wimbledon and US blended. Solely twice since has a person pulled off Seixas’ treble of titles on the similar main, however the highest level of his annus mirabilis was but to come back in Sydney.
Persevering with on the circuit lengthy after his contemporaries had retired, Seixas’ closing grand slam singles appearances occurred in 1969, the second yr of the open period when the game’s 4 bedrock occasions allowed professionals to compete with amateurs, earlier than he formally retired in 1970. The next yr Seixas served as match referee of the US Open and was inducted into the Worldwide Tennis Corridor of Fame with Althea Gibson.
Seixas, who in contrast to many high gamers of his period by no means turned skilled, labored as a stockbroker with Goldman Sachs earlier than beginning a profession working tennis golf equipment, first on the the famed Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia (alongside Sam Snead, who marshalled the membership’s golf programme) and later on the Hilton resort in New Orleans.
In 1989, he moved to California to arrange the tennis programme on the Harbor Level Racquet and Seaside Membership in Mill Valley, about 15 miles north of San Francisco.
He labored as a tennis teacher and tended bar on the membership till his mid-80s and lived there all through the final decade of his life, when he was almost blind and compelled right into a wheelchair by hip and knee accidents, however buoyed by an upbeat spirit that left an indelible impression on his pals and neighbours.
He’s survived by Tori, the daughter of his second marriage, to Toinette Alford, which led to divorce, as did his first.
