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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, 96 matches to 27, by the reigning king of professional tennis, Jack Kramer . During this time, Gonzales's personality apparently changed from that of a friendly, happy-go-lucky youngster to the hard-bitten loner he became known as for the rest of his life. From 1951 to 1953 Gonzales didn't play as often, but when he did he usually won. In 1951 Gonzales beat Kramer in the World Indoor Championships. In 1952 he won the Philadelphia Inquirer Tournament and the International Finals at Wembley, England, both times over Kramer. 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 eight 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, which included every Wimbledon champion for 10 years in a row. 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. Under the new rules, the returned serve had to bounce before the server could make his own first shot, thereby keeping Gonzales from playing his usual Serve-and-volley game. 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. Much of Gonzales's competitive fire during these years derived from the anger he felt at being paid much less than the players he was regularly beating. In 1955 , for instance, he was paid $15,000 while his touring opponent, the recently turned professional Tony Trabert, had a contract for $80,000. He had an often bitter adversarial relationship with most of the other players and generally travelled and lived by himself, showing up only in time to play his match, then moving on alone to the next town. Gonzales and Jack Kramer, the long-time promoter of the tour, were also bitter enemies dating to the days when Kramer had first beaten the youthful Gonzales on his initial tour. Now they fought incessantly about money, while Kramer openly rooted for the other players to beat Gonzales. As much as he disliked Gonzales, however, Kramer knew that Gonzales was the star attraction of the touring professionals and that without him there would be no tour at all. Open tennis Most of Gonzales's career as a professional fell before the start of the Open era of tennis in 1968 , and he was therefore ineligible to compete at the Grand Slam events between 1949 (when he turned pro) and 1967. As has been observed about other great players such as Rod Laver , Gonzales almost certainly would have won a number of additional Grand Slam titles had he been permitted to compete in those tournaments during that 18-year period. Jack Kramer, for instance, has speculated in an article about the theoretical champions of Forest Hills and Wimbledon that Gonzales would have won an additional 11 titles in those two tournaments alone. The first major Open tournament was the French Championships in May of 1968, when Gonzales had just turned 40. In spite of the fact that he had been semi-retired for a number of years and that the tournament was held on slow clay courts that penalize serve-and-volley players, Gonzales beat the 1967 defending champion Roy Emerson in the quarterfinals. He then lost in the semi-finals to Rod Laver. He lost in the third round of Wimbledon but later beat the second-seeded Tony Roche in the fourth round of the United States Open before losing an epic match to Holland's Tom Okker . The most famous match ever played In 1969, however, it was Gonzales's turn to prevail in the longest match ever played till that time, one so long and arduous that it resulted in the advent of Tie Break scoring. As a 41-year-old at Wimbledon, Gonzales met the fine young amateur Charlie Pasarell and beat him in a 5-set match that lasted five hours and 12 minutes and took 2 days to complete. In the fifth set Gonzales won all seven match points that Pasarell had against him, twice coming back from 0-40 deficits. The final score was an improbable 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9. Gonzales went on to the fourth round, where he was beaten in four sets by Arthur Ashe . The match with Pasarell, however, is still remembered as one of the highlights in the history of tennis. Final professional years Later that year Gonzales won the Howard Hughes Open in Las Vegas and the Pacific Southwest Open in Los Angeles, beating, among others, John Newcombe , Ken Rosewall, Stan Smith (twice), Cliff Richie , and Arthur Ashe. He was the top American money-winner for 1969 with $46,288. If the touring professionals had been included in the United States rankings, it is likely he would have been ranked number 1 in the country, just as he had been two decades earlier in 1948 and 1949. He could also beat the clear number-one player in the world, Rod Laver, on an occasional basis. In their most famous meeting, a $10,000 winner-take-all match before 15,000 in Madison Square Garden in February, 1970 , the 41-year-old Gonzales beat Laver in five sets. Gonzales continued to play in the occasional tournament and became the oldest player to have ever won a professional tournament, winning the Des Moines Open over 24-year-old Georges Goven when he was three months shy of his 44th birthday. In spite of the fact that he was still known as a serve-and-volley player, in 1971 , when he was 43 and Jimmy Connors was 19, he beat the great young baseliner by playing him from the baseline at the Pacific Southwest Open. Roy Emerson , the fine Australian player who won a dozen Grand Slam titles during the 1960s as an amateur when most of the best players in the world were professionals, turned pro in 1968 at the age of 32, having won the French Open the year before. Gonzales, 8 years older, immediately beat him in the quarter-finals of the French championships. In the following years, Gonzales beat Emerson another 11 times, never losing a match to him. Another great Australian player was Ken Rosewall, who won 8 Grand Slam titles during his long career, first as an amateur, then as a professional in the early years of Open tennis. Gonzales played 160 matches against Rosewall, winning 101 and losing 59. PERSONAL AND FAMILY LIFE Gonzales' parents, Manuel Antonio González and Carmen Alire, migrated from Chihuahua , Mexico to the U.S. in the early 1900s . Gonzales was born in Los Angeles , the eldest of seven children. Although his name was properly spelled "Gonzalez", during most of his playing career he was known as "Gonzales". It was only towards the end of his life that the proper spelling began to be used. The young Gonzales had a troubled adolescence and taught himself to play tennis with no encouragement from the exclusively white, and predominantly upper-class, tennis establishment of 1940s Los Angeles. He had brushes with the law and joined the Navy at the age of 16, serving for two years. Gonzales married six times (twice to actress Madelyn Darrow), and had seven children. His last wife, Rita, is the sister of tennis great Andre Agassi . Gonzales died, nearly broke and almost friendless, in a tiny house near the Las Vegas airport in 1995. Andre Agassi paid for his funeral. PLACE AMONG THE ALL-TIME GREAT TENNIS PLAYERS For about 35 years from around 1920 to 1955 , Bill Tilden was generally considered the greatest player of all time. From the mid- 1950s to about 1970 , many people thought that Gonzales had claimed that title. Since then, champions of the Open era such as Rod Laver , Björn Borg , and Pete Sampras were considered by many of their contemporaries to be greater players than either Tilden or Gonzales. However, some people connected with the game still consider Gonzales to be the best male player in tennis history, primarily because of the fact that he was the World No. 1 Tennis player for 8 to 10 consecutive years (the status of a few of the earlier years is still disputed). Jack Kramer, for instance, who became a world-class player in 1940 and then beat Gonzales badly in the latter's first year as a professional, has stated that he believes that Gonzales was better than either Laver or Sampras -- but not as good as either Ellsworth Vines or Don Budge . Pancho Segura , who played, and frequently beat, all of the great players from the 1930s through the 1960s has said that he believes that Gonzales was the best player of all time. Other tennis greats such as Lew Hoad, and Allen Fox have agreed with this assessment. In a 1972 article about an imaginary tournament between the all-time greats, Gene Scott had the fourth-seeded Gonzales upsetting Bill Tilden in the semi-finals and then using his serve to destroy Rod Laver in the finals. Kramer, however, who had a long and frequently bitter relationship with Gonzales, refuses to rate him any higher than one of the four players who are second to Budge and Vines in his estimation.In his 1979 autobiography Kramer considered the best ever to have been either Don Budge (for consistent play) or Ellsworth Vines (at the height of his game). The next four best were, chronologically, Bill Tilden , Fred Perry , Bobby Riggs , and Pancho Gonzales . After these six came the "second echelon" of Rod Laver , Lew Hoad , Ken Rosewall , Gottfried Von Cramm , Ted Schroeder , Jack Crawford , Pancho Segura , Frank Sedgman , Tony Trabert , John Newcombe , Arthur Ashe , Smith, Bjorn Borg , and Jimmy Connors . He felt unable to rank Henri Cochet and René Lacoste accurately but felt they were among the very best. Kramer also, perhaps surprisingly, writes that Bobby Riggs would have beaten Gonzales on a regular basis. Bud Collins , the editor of the massive Total Tennis, The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia , is also guarded. He writes on page 673 that Gonzales was "probably as good as anyone who ever played the game, if not better." On page 693, however, he writes that Rod Laver would "be known as possibly the greatest player ever." And on page 749 he calls Bill Tilden "perhaps the greatest player of them all." GONZALES'S VIEWS OF OTHER PLAYERS AS OF 1995
:All quotations are from a New York Times article of 12 March 1995 . Gonzales died four months later. Gonzales was inducted into the International Tennis Hall Of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island in 1968 . NOTES MOST SIGNIFICANT RESULTS Grand Slam Tournament wins:
Professional World Singles Tournament wins:
Professional Tour Results:
Davis Cup :
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