Would have turned 101 next month.
I read somewhere he played a match in 1939? He entered his 1st slam at
1940 USO. Crazy.
The American tennis player and former Wimbledon champion Vic Seixas, who
has died aged 100, did not win 15 grand slam titles during a 30-year
career by serving his opponents off the court or overpowering them from
the ground. Instead Seixas relied on extraordinary conditioning, an indefatigable workrate, hair-trigger reflexes and sheer force of will to compensate for any technical shortcomings.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/jul/14/vic-seixas-obituary
Seixas’s fleet-footed athleticism, aggressive net-rushing and superb volleying were tailor-made for the All England Club, where the grass
courts were then sown with a seed mix conducive to faster play. He made
a surprise run to the semi-finals on his Wimbledon debut in 1950, losing
to the eventual champion Budge Patty, then won it three years later as
the second seed, coming through a five-set quarter-final epic against
Lew Hoad, and another five-setter against Australia’s Mervyn Rose in the semis, before a straight-sets destruction of the unseeded Dane Kurt
Nielsen in the final.
Of course this was decades before the sport’s transformation into a billion-dollar industry; while this year’s Wimbledon singles champions
will take home £2.7m from a £50m prize fund, Seixas recalled being
awarded a £25 voucher for his trouble, which had to be spent at a
Piccadilly sporting goods shop.
But while the Wimbledon title brought prestige and personal
satisfaction, it was Seixas’s memorable showing in the 1954 Davis Cup,
one of the most famous events in the sport’s history, that brought him
widest acclaim at the time.
Playing against the mighty Australians before a rollicking mass of
25,000 spectators at White City Stadium in Sydney – said to be the
largest crowd in history to watch a tennis match at the time – Seixas contributed an opening day singles win over Ken Rosewall, who had
dominated each of their six previous meetings, and a clinching victory
in the doubles with Tony Trabert over Rosewall and Hoad to help America
end the Aussies’ four-year stranglehold on the most cherished trophy in tennis.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Seixas and the US team were
celebrated on their return by a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
“Rosewall was mechanically a better player than Seixas,” Herbert Warren Wind wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1958. “So were many other players he defeated. He did it, in the last analysis, on fight.”
Seixas was born in the Overbrook Park section of west Philadelphia, the
only child of Anna (nee Moon), of Irish origin, and Elias Seixas, a
businessman born in the Dominican Republic who owned a wholesale
plumbing, heating and roofing company. His was a middle-class
Presbyterian upbringing.
Vic Seixas and his wife, Dolly, arriving at the start of Wimbledon in
1955. Photograph: AP
Showing a proclivity for multiple sports from an early age, Seixas took
up tennis at six while acting as a ballboy for his father’s
neighbourhood matches. Before long he was beating far older players with regularity and winning interscholastic titles at Dimner Beeber junior
high school. He emerged as a versatile athlete at the William Penn
Charter school, starring on the baseball, basketball, track and squash
teams, but tennis remained his favourite sport. In 1940, he was still in
high school when he entered the US National Championships at Forest
Hills, forerunner of the US Open, the first of a record 28 main-draw appearances.
After enrolling at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
1941, where he played on the freshman basketball team, Seixas
subsequently served three and a half years in the US Army Air Corps in
the Pacific theatre of the second world war, flying 14 kinds of aircraft including P-38 Lightnings, P-40 Warhawks and P-61 Black Widow fighters.
He met his first wife, Dolly Dunaway, of Spartanburg, South Carolina,
after returning to Chapel Hill to finish a bachelor’s degree in commerce
in 1949, before turning his attention to the globetrotting amateur
tennis circuit.
His Wimbledon triumph marked both the culmination of a long-held dream
and the onset of his athletic peak. In 1954, Seixas added a second major singles crown, seeing off the Australian Rex Hartwig to win the US Championships and setting a tournament record by defeating five seeded opponents, a feat since matched only by Andre Agassi in 1994.
That was one of seven grand slam titles he won that year, including the Australian, French and US doubles as well as the French, Wimbledon and
US mixed. Only twice since has a man pulled off Seixas’ treble of titles
at the same major, but the highest point of his annus mirabilis was yet
to come in Sydney.
Continuing on the circuit long after his contemporaries had retired,
Seixas’ final grand slam singles appearances took place in 1969, the
second year of the open era when the sport’s four bedrock events allowed professionals to compete with amateurs, before he formally retired in
1970. The following year Seixas served as tournament referee of the US
Open and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame with
Althea Gibson.
Seixas, who unlike many top players of his era never turned
professional, worked as a stockbroker with Goldman Sachs before starting
a career running tennis clubs, first at the the famed Greenbrier Resort
in West Virginia (alongside Sam Snead, who marshalled the club’s golf programme) and later at the Hilton hotel in New Orleans.
In 1989, he moved to California to set up the tennis programme at the
Harbor Point Racquet and Beach Club in Mill Valley, about 15 miles north
of San Francisco.
He worked as a tennis instructor and tended bar at the club until his
mid-80s and lived there throughout the last decade of his life, when he
was nearly blind and forced into a wheelchair by hip and knee injuries,
but buoyed by an upbeat spirit that left an indelible impression on his
friends and neighbours.
He is survived by Tori, the daughter of his second marriage, to Toinette Alford, which ended in divorce, as did his first.
Elias Victor Seixas Jr, tennis player, born 30 August 1923; died 5 July
2024
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