The Rocket's Slam

In a half century of amateur tennis, only one man has achieved a grand slam of the game's four major tournaments--Don Budge, who in 1938 swept the Australian, French, Wimbledon and U.S. championships. Last week another name went into the record book beside Budge's. At Forest Hills, N.Y., Rod ("Rocket") Laver, a deceptively small (5 ft. 9 in.), bowlegged Australian, scored a smashing victory in the U.S. championships to complete his own remarkable sweep and match Budge's 24-year-old record. Laver did it by defeating Fellow Aussie Roy Emerson, the player who had beat him for the U.S. title last year.

Knocking Knees. A star of Australia's Davis Cup team for two years, Laver had never before managed to put two of the four top titles together. But this season he has been all but unbeatable. He won the Italian, Netherlands, Norwegian and Swiss championships, commenced his pursuit of the slam with victories over Emerson in Australia and France. In July he won at Wimbledon with such astonishing ferocity that Martin Mulligan, another countryman whom he dispatched in barely 53 minutes, gasped: "I must have offended him." By the time he got to Forest Hills, says Laver, "I was so nervous I could hear my knees knocking all right, and the strain may have affected my game a little." If it did, he was the only one who noticed it. He breezed through his six preliminary matches with the loss of only one set. In the finals, he ran away with the first two sets 6-2 and 6-4, then grew momentarily careless and let Emerson come back 7-5 to take the third. But in the final set he broke service in the first game, and from then on everything was his.

Wrist & Spin. Until this year, few experts rated Laver as a serious threat to Budge's lonely eminence. One of the "tennis babies" that Australia seems to breed as profusely as kangaroos, he was one of four children, all tennis players, brought up by a father who was an avid player and a mother who sometimes skipped kitchen duties to bat tennis balls around with her brood. At 15 he quit school to play tennis fulltime under the eye of Harry Hopman, the genius of Australian tennis. His booming serve and volley are impressively hard for a little man; but his greatest strength is his vicious ground game and the cunning way he masks his shots. With the unique ability to shift his racket at the last moment, he can hit a baseline drive flat, give it high-bouncing top spin or grass-skidding underspin. Yet for all his skills, he still seemed too small, too temperamental, too easily unsettled by pressure to achieve a slam. He lost twice in the finals at Wimbledon ('59 and '60); Forest Hills, where he lost in '60 and '61, also seemed to have him jinxed--until last week.

After Laver's victory, there were the inevitable comparisons with Budge. Granting the general dolor of tennis today, Coach Mercer Beasley, at 80 the judge-historian of amateur tennis, says: "Laver has more equipment than Budge ever had. He would have beaten Budge." Professional Promoter Jack Kramer, who as an amateur got halfway to a grand slam in 1947, takes a somewhat cooler view: "Right now he's not in Budge's class. Sedgman, Gonzales, Hoad, Rosewall, Segura, even Trabert, who's 32, could beat Laver. When Laver turns pro, he's going to get beaten just like every other amateur champion who turned pro. I think I was the last guy who turned pro and won right away." At Forest Hills the word was that tennis buffs would get their answer this winter, that Laver would sign with the pros right after Australia's 1962 Davis Cup defense. But Rocket Rod himself was toying with the idea of remaining an amateur for at least one more year.

"There's always a second time," he said.

"No one has brought that off yet."

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