By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
The Grand Slam… It’s a term often mis-used in tennis, but in 2015 there is a chance Serena Williams will be able to achieve the ultimate achievement in the sport of tennis.
The Grand Slam is the term used for sweeping all four major titles in a calendar year, which has only been achieved by five people – Don Budge in 1938, Maureen Connolly in 1953, Rod Laver in 1962 and 1969, Margaret Court in 1970 and Steffi Graf in 1988.
Many people in tennis refer to each major tournament as a Grand Slam, which is false. Wimbledon is a “major” not a “Grand Slam” – just like you don’t call every home run in baseball a “Grand Slam” – just the ones that have players on every base and sweep in four runs. When Serena won the Australian Open in January, she won a “major” championship. When she won at Roland Garros in June, she won her 20th major championship. People will say that Novak Djokovic won eight Grand Slams, but this is wrong. He has won eight “major” championships.
There is a lot of talk about “Career Grand Slams” – winning all four majors in a career, recently completed by Roger Federer at the 2009 French Open, Rafael Nadal at the 2010 U.S. Open and Maria Sharapova at the 2012 French Open. Back in 2002-03, there was a “Serena Slam,” where Serena Williams won all four major titles in succession, but not within a single calendar year. Martina Navratilova did the same in 1983-84, but tennis writers, publicists and marketers didn’t’ provide it with a catchy name. In some advance publicity for Wimbledon, there was marketing material that referred to Serena Williams going for the “True Grand Slam” – which means that all of the other references to Grand Slam are false, which is technically true. A “Calendar-Year Grand Slam” is another specific term you may hear.
When did the term “Grand Slam” first get coined and invented?
The first use of the term started with golf in 1930, when Bobby Jones swept all four of the major titles in golf at the time – the Open Championship, the British Amateur, the U.S. Open and the U.S. Amateur – capped with his win at the U.S. Amateur at Merion Golf Club in Philadelphia.
O.B. Keeler, the golf writer for the Atlanta Journal who covered everything related to the Georgia native son Jones, first used Grand Slam in the context of the Jones accomplishment, taking the phrase from the card game of bridge, where one sweeps all tricks in a hand. George Trevor of the New York Sun wrote that Jones had “stormed the impregnable quadrilateral of golf,” which is a term, not surprisingly, that didn’t catch on.
In 1933, three years after the Bobby Jones feat, Australian tennis player Jack Crawford had a chance to sweep the four titles in tennis when he reached the final of the U.S. Championships at Forest Hills, after winning the Australian Championships, the French Championships and Wimbledon earlier in the year. In the New York Times, John Kieran wrote in his column, “If Crawford wins, that would be something like scoring a grand slam on the courts.” As Bud Collins writes in his book “The Bud Collins History of Tennis,” a reporter with the less known Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania named Alan Gould also referred to a potential Crawford sweep as a Grand Slam just after Crawford won Wimbledon in July, but since his paper was not as prominent as the New York Times, Kiernan generally received the credit for first coining the term in tennis.
Unlike Jones in golf, Crawford was unable to complete the sweep in tennis, losing in five sets in the U.S. final to Fred Perry of Great Britain. Allison Danzig, the famed New York Times tennis reporter, wrote in his match story that “Crawford’s quest of the Grand Slam was frustrated.”
Five years later in 1938, when Budge became the first player to achieve the Grand Slam, there was no reference to the specific term. Wrote Budge in his autobiography, “If you look back upon press accounts at the time when I won Forest Hills to complete this far-flung cycle you will find no reference whatsoever to my having won a Grand Slam. Indeed, there was only a passing note made of the fact that I had also won three other major national titles that year.” This was also the case when Connolly in 1953, when news outlets referred to her sweep of all the major national titles, but also noting her loss in the Italian final.
In 1960 in golf, the Grand Slam term began to take hold again when Arnold Palmer won the first two major titles – the Masters, the event founded by Jones that quickly rose in stature in the pro game, and the U.S. Open. Bob Drum, the golf writer at the Pittsburgh Press, wrote after Palmer won the U.S. Open that it “moved him over the second hurdle in his bid for present-day golf’s Grand Slam.” As golf had become more of a professional game than the amateur era of Jones, the PGA Championship and the Masters were considered the two other major championships joining the Open Championship and the U.S. Open, replacing the U.S. and British amateurs.
When Laver won his Grand Slam in 1962, news wire reports do reference him becoming the first man to win the Grand Slam since 1938, so the concept of a Grand Slam and the terminology as such had become part of the tennis lexicon, perhaps due to Palmer and Drum increasing familiarity with the concept and term in golf.
After Laver closed out Tony Roche to win the 1969 U.S. Open to cap off his second Grand Slam, Bud Collins declared on CBS television of Laver and his victory, “He’s the Slammer. The Grand Slammer. It’s undoubtedly the finest achievement in the history of this game.”
In awarding Laver the championship trophy and first-prize check of $16,000 in 1969, Alastair Martin, the President of the modern-day U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), said to Laver, “This is your second Grand Slam. You are undoubtedly the best player in the entire world and you might very well be the best player we have ever seen.”
To read more about Rod Laver’s unprecedented second Grand Slam – and more history about the Grand Slam, read the book “The Education of a Tennis Player” voiced with fellow Tennis Hall of Famer Bud Collins here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0942257626/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_JFaJvb1SMXN7T
