World Tennis Magazine

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andres gimeno

Halfway To A Grand Slam, It’s Not If Rafa Nadal Will Win Wimbledon, But Will He PLAY Wimbledon

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By Randy Walker

@TennisPublisher

Playing in the final of Roland Garros 17 years to the day from when he won his first title in Paris and his major title, Rafael Nadal won his 14th French title and his 22nd major title with a decisive 6-3, 6-3, 6-0 win over Casper Ruud.

With Nadal at age 36 and troubled with severe pain his foot, the question immediately arouse is if this Roland Garros title would be a career book-end on this anniversary day?

Following his final-round victory, Nadal revealed in post-match interviews that he needed pain-killer injections in his left foot for the Muller Weiss condition that he has suffered from for most of his career. He said he played with his “foot asleep” and numb.

“I don’t know what can happen in the future but I’m going to keep fighting to try to keep going,” Nadal said after his victory.

For the first time in his unprecedented career, Nadal has won the first two major singles titles – halfway to a potential Grand Slam. However, the question is not whether Nadal will win Wimbledon but will he even PLAY Wimbledon?

“I can’t imagine him going,” said Mary Carillo on NBC television of Nadal after John McEnroe said he could not see Nadal not playing at the All England Club with a chance now to win.

Nadal will work with doctors and foot specialist and his team and will no doubt try his best to play at Wimbledon to try to win the third leg of the Grand Slam. One year ago, Novak Djokovic won the first three legs of the Grand Slam before falling in the final hurdle in the U.S. Open final, where he was looking to be only the second man to complete the Grand Slam sweep of all four major titles in a calendar year, joining Rod Laver (who won it twice in 1962 and 1969) and Don Budge in 1938.

Nadal extended his legacy in history with his 22nd major, moving him another major away from both Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, who still stand at 20 majors each. Nadal’s 14 singles titles in Paris is now eight better than Bjorn Borg’s six titles and seven more than Chris Evert’s seven.

Nadal grabbed another slice of Roland Garros history with the win. At two days past his 36th birthday, he passed fellow Spaniard Andres Gimeno as the oldest Roland Garros men’s singles champion in history. Gimeno, at age 35 years and 10 months, set the record exactly 50 years and one day earlier in 1973 when he defeated Patrick Proisy of France in the 1972 final.

Rafael Nadal
Rafael Nadal

THE DAY ROD LAVER BEGAN HIS MARCH TO HISTORY

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On this day in tennis history, Rod Laver began his march to history. It was on this day, January 27, in 1969 that Laver won the first leg of his historic second Grand Slam title, defeating Andres Gimeno in the Australian final played in Brisbane as excerpted below from the book ON THIS DAY IN TENNIS HISTORY ($19.95, New Chapter Press, www.TennisHistoryBook.com).

1969 – Rod Laver defeats Andres Gimeno of Spain 6-3, 6-4, 7-5 to win the men’s singles title at the Australian Open in Brisbane – the first leg of his eventual 1969 Grand Slam. Laver’s toughest test of the championship comes in the semifinals against Tony Roche, who beat him earlier in the month of the New South Wales Open in Sydney. Roche and Laver battle for more than four hours in 105-degree heat before Laver prevails 7-5, 22-20, 9-11, 1-6, 6-3. Writes Bud Collins in The Bud Collins History of Tennis of the Laver-Roche semifinal match, “Both players got groggy in the brutal sun, even though they employed an old Aussie trick of putting wet cabbage leaves in their hats to help stay cool. It was so close that it could easily have gone either way, and a controversial line call helped Laver grasp the final set.” Before Laver’s win over Gimeno, Margaret Court beats Billie Jean King 6-4, 6-1 to win the women’s singles title for an eighth time.

Laver, more or less, “won” the tournament with his semifinal epic with Roche. In his updated memoir THE EDUCATION OF A TENNIS PLAYER ($19.95, New Chapter Press, www.NewChapterMedia.com), written with Bud Collins and already in stock at www.amazon.com, Laver accounts the not-so-epic ending of his 1969 Australian Open championship campaign;

The championship match in which I met Andres Gimeno was an anticlimax. Andres wasn’t spirited, not strutting the way he usually does. He dislikes grass and extreme heat. Few Spaniards brought up on clay, care for grass, and for Andres, bad grass is more agonizing than eating dinner before 10:00 p.m. Nevertheless he’d had a good tournament, beating Kenny Rosewall, Butch Buchholz, and the amateur Ray Ruffels, without losing a set.

I think he felt he’d done enough, and he seemed pretty much resigned to defeat when he played me. I hadn’t lost to Andres in a long time, and though he had several chances to break my serve in the third set, I took him pretty much as I knew I should, 6-3, 6-4, 7-5. I got my $5,000 although the tournament went broke, and now the Grand Slam was a definite possibility. I hoped my troublesome elbow would hold up, and I was pretty sure that there’d be no more 100-degree days along the way. Emerson and I won the doubles over Rosewall and Stolle, so we had a chance for a Grand Slam there, too. Only three teams have completed doubles Grand Slams: Aussies Frank Sedgman and Ken McGregor in 1951; Americans Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver in 1984; Aussies Margaret Court and Ken Fletcher in 1963 (mixed).

I was so disgusted with the mismanagement of the tournament that I wanted to get out of Brisbane before I said some things I’d regret. The best part of it was seeing my family. We stayed together in a motel. Though it was pleasant, a reunion like that is spent mostly in talking about old times. You’re not really a part of the family anymore, and you aren’t planning any future as a group. You talk about things you’ve done together, a lot of good times, but you know there won’t be a lot of time together in the future. My life just isn’t built that way.