Athletes - Pancho Gonzales

Home > Listing Index > Athletes > Pancho Gonzales

	Athletes - Pancho Gonzales

Ricardo Alonso González (May 9, 1928 – July 3, 1995), who was generally known as Pancho Gonzales, was the dominant male tennis player in the world for most of the 1950s and early-1960s. During that period, he played as a professional. Completely self-taught, he was also a successful amateur player in the late-1940s, twice winning the United States Championships. The tempestuous Gonzales is widely considered to be one of the all-time great tennis players. Prior to the Open era, he was considered by many observers to be the greatest player in the history of the game. A 1999 Sports Illustrated article about the magazine's 20 favorite athletes of the 20th century said about Gonzales (their number 15 pick): "If earth was on the line in a tennis match, the man you want serving to save humankind would be Ricardo Alonzo Gonzalez."

Career

As an amateur

As a mostly unknown 20-year-old, Gonzales had a national ranking of number 17 when he went to his first United States Championships at Forest Hills in 1948. He was seeded 8th in the tournament but won it fairly easily with his powerful serve-and-volley game. The following year he did badly at Wimbledon and was derided for his performance by some of the press. A British sportswriter called him a "cheese champion" and, because of his name, his doubles partner of the time, Frank Parker, began to call him "Gorgonzales", after Gorgonzola, the Italian cheese. This was eventually shortened to "Gorgo", the nickname by which he was later known by his colleagues on the professional tour.

In 1949, Gonzales returned to the American championships and, to the surprise of many observers, repeated his victory of the previous year, beating Ted Schroeder, the #1 seed, in a five-set final. Finishing both 1948 and 1949 as the number-one ranked U.S. amateur, Gonzales also won both his singles matches in the Davis Cup finals against Australia. He then turned professional.

As a professional

Gonzales was badly beaten in his first year on the professional tour by the reigning king of professional tennis, Jack Kramer, and then mostly disappeared from public view. He continued to win occasional professional tournaments, however, defeating his old nemesis Kramer several times in the process. In 1953, Kramer, by now also a promoter, organized a tour of Australia featuring himself, Frank Sedgman, Ken McGregor, and Pancho Segura. Troubled by a bad back, however, Kramer signed Gonzales to replace him. In the subsequent matches Gonzales handily beat Sedgman, a 7-time Grand Slam singles winner, and annihilated McGregor, the 1952 Australian Open champion. Playing to dwindling audiences because of Gonzales's clear superiority, Kramer then enlisted yet another a former Australian champion, Dinny Pails to play Gonzales. Gonzales beat him 47 matches to 7 and by the end of 1954 had clearly established himself as the top player in the world.

Gonzales was now the dominant player in the men's game for about the next ten years, beating such tennis greats as Sedgman, Tony Trabert, Ken Rosewall, Lew Hoad, Mal Anderson, and Ashley Cooper on a regular basis. In that period, he won the United States Professional Championship eight times and the Wembley professional title in London four times, plus beating, in head-to-head tours, all of the best amateurs who turned pro. During this time Gonzales was known for his fiery will to win, his cannonball serve, and his all-conquering net game, a combination so potent that the rules on the professional tour were briefly changed in the 1950s to prohibit him from advancing to the net immediately after serving. He won even so, and the rules were changed back. So great was his ability to raise his game to the highest possible level, particularly in the fifth set of long matches, that Allen Fox has said that he never once saw Gonzales lose service when serving for the set or the match.

The most difficult challenge that Gonzales faced during those years came from Lew Hoad, the very powerful young Australian who had won five Grand Slam titles as an amateur. In the 1958 tour, Gonzales and Hoad played head-to-head 87 times. Hoad won 18 of the first 27 matches and it appeared that he was about to displace Gonzales as the best in the world. Gonzales, however, revamped and improved his backhand during the course of these first matches, just as Bill Tilden had had to do in 1920 in order to become the best in the world, and then won 42 of the next 60 matches to maintain his superiority by a margin of 51 to 36.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Pancho Gonzales ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Pancho Gonzales; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay