What happened to all the great Australian and American tennis players?

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” or so Lord Tennyson declared. No doubt he is right, in the long run anyway. All the same, when you consider the Men’s singles at Wimbledon, the old order is taking a hell of a long time to yield. 

Since Roger Federer won his first Wimbledon in 2003, it has been a closed shop. Federer himself has won the title eight times, Novak Djokovic five times, Rafa Nadal and Andy Murray twice each. They have all lost to each other in the final as well, and though five other players have reached the final in this time, only one of them, Andy Roddick, came close to winning it. That was in 2009, his third final against Federer. It went the five-set distance, and Roddick yielded only 12-14 in the fifth. None of the others – Tomas Berdych, Milos Raonic, Marin Cilic, Kevin Anderson – even won a single set.

Even more remarkable, and proving, that Lord Tennyson had a point, is the decline of American and Australian tennis players. The last Australian man to win Wimbledon was Lleyton Hewitt in 2002 and the last of the American tennis players to win was Pete Sampras in 2000. Since then the unlucky Roddick is the only American tennis player to have reached the final. Yet from the resumption of play after the Second World War to the end of the century, Australia and the USA dominated Men’s tennis, with the only sizeable interruption coming in the Seventies when Bjorn Borg won five Wimbledons. Actually, Australian Men’s tennis faded some years before the Federer & Co era, Hewitt being the first Australian to win the title since Pat Cash in 1987, and the last before Cash was John Newcombe in 1971. American tennis players were more successful, Pete Sampras with seven titles, John McEnroe with three, Jimmy Connors with two; Arthur Ashe and Andre Agassi with one each, between 1975-2000.

The Golden Years for Australia at Wimbledon were the last twenty of the amateur era, which ended in 1968 and the first few years after Wimbledon was open to professionals. In that time Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Ashley Cooper, Neale Fraser, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe won the title, quite often beating another Australians in the final. Laver, who would go on to win the first two Open Wimbledons, lost his first two finals there before winning twice as an amateur. Fred Stolle lost three consecutive finals, twice to a compatriot, while Ken Rosewall lost four, two as an amateur against Hoad, two in the Open era against Laver. If none of these Australians ran up a record to match Federer’s eight Wimbledons or Sampras’s seven, it was because they turned professional after winning once or twice when they were still very young men.

In fact, the young Australians in the last twenty years of amateur exclusiveness were as close to being full-time tennis players as was possible without infringing their amateur status. This was because Harry Hopman, the Australian Davis Cup coach and captain for thirty years, though a firm supporter of the amateur game and said to hate professionalism, persuaded the Australian Federation to generously pay the expenses of his young stars, to enable them to play tournaments all the year round in Europe and the USA, as well as at home. Nevertheless, however generous the expenses, they weren’t enough to persuade the players to remain in the amateur game. The best all turned pro.

So, of course, did several of the American tennis players who won Wimbledon. The fashion had been set before the war. Britain’s Fred Perry and the two Americans who won Wimbledon after him, Donald Budge and Bobby Riggs, became pros, and the 1947 champion, Jack Kramer, turned pro at once. He soon became so important as organiser, manager and tempter that when a young player left the amateur game he was said to be joining “Jack Kramer’s Circus”. The brilliant young Pancho Gonzales did so at the age of nineteen or twenty. He had already won the American title at Forest Hills but would be thirty-eight when the game went open. He is probably the greatest American player to never have won Wimbledon.

Not every American tennis player who won Wimbledon took Kramer’s dollar. His closest friend Ted Schroeder preferred a business career and turned down his invitation to join the circus, even though he and Kramer shared ownership of several racehorses. Schroeder indeed found time to play Wimbledon only once. He won. The 1948 champion Bob Falkenburg was already a millionaire. The elegant Budge Patty, who won at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 1950 was, I think, comfortably off. He lived in Paris, never played the Australian championship and not always the American one, but he returned to Wimbledon for years, winning the Doubles once in partnership with Gardner Mulloy, always identified in the Press as “the Miami lawyer”, (to borrow a somewhat similar response to Philip Marlowe’s upon such a description, I thought they had more than one lawyer in that city, even then).

So back to the Present. Djokovic is the holder, having beaten Federer in an epic five-set final in 2019. Covid succeeded in having Wimbledon cancelled last year, just as the Kaiser and Hitler did in their time. Federer is back again, but he is now within a few weeks of his fortieth birthday, has had a long lie-off after an operation, lost early in Paris and, more surprisingly, last week in Halle, the German grasscourt tournament which he has won ten times in preparation for Wimbledon. He looked rusty in his first match and was fortunate to win when his opponent injured himself. He has, however, reached the last 32 by beating Richard Gasquet in straight sets. Gasquet is a delightful player, one of my favourites, but Federer has been beating him for fifteen years. Next up is Britain’s Cameron Norrie, having the best season of his life. He played well against Rafa Nadal in Paris. Can he do still better against Federer on grass? But if Federer wins to reach the last 16, how far can he go? His adoring fans will answer “all the way”, but it’s hard to believe. 

Nevertheless, on the Wimbledon grass anything – well, almost anything, could happen. Nadal is giving Wimbledon a miss and his battered body a rest, but since he hasn’t reached the final since 2011, he would have been at long odds anyway. Andy Murray is making a tentative return from operations and injuries. He was well beaten in the second round at Queen’s, and even though no one doubts his spirit and he has been named in the British Olympic team for Tokyo – it’s very hard to envisage him going deep in a 5-sets a match tournament. Still, he has, at the moment of writing, won his first two rounds, with moments of brilliance, alongside moments of lost concentration, but the will to win seemed as strong as ever. By the time this article is posted, we will know whether he has beaten the talented young Canadian Denis Shapovalov, ranked 10 in the world.

So, Djokovic would seem to be the last man of the Old Order left standing. For many, he has been the least regarded of them, a player more admired than loved. Yet it now seems likely that he will end his career with more Slam titles than either Federer or Nadal. Having already won in Melbourne and Paris this year, he also has the chance of the elusive Grand Slam this year.

There has been a succession of successors touted for years now, and most have fallen away, flattering only to disappoint. The young Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas took Novak to five sets in the French final, but lost after winning the first two sets; it’s hard to recover from that, and indeed he hasn’t done so, losing to an unseeded player in the first round. Could the 26-year-old Italian, Matteo Berrettini, who took a set off Djokovic in Paris and beat Murray at Queen’s, have a chance? He has a terrific serve, always an advantage on grass. Or maybe it will be the Russian Daniil Medvedev, currently ranked number 2 in the World? That means something, even though Covid has somewhat skewed the rankings. The Austrian Dominic Thiem won the American title in the autumn, Djokovic having been disqualified earlier for hitting someone with a ball struck in anger. But Thiem has scarcely won a match since and withdrew injured before the draw. Then there is the lanky Alexander Zverev… perhaps, perhaps. And there are young Canadians and other young Italians, for whom it may be a year or two too soon.

But the fact is, it’s been “a year too soon” for many recently, and the year passes and next year is too soon, and so it goes until eventually it’s too late rather than too soon, and the Old Order is refusing to yield to the New.

So, Novak is still the man to beat, and my guess is that no one will do so in SW19. That’s just a guess, of course, but you are likely to lose money if you bet on Australian or American tennis players taking the Crown. That Old Order yielded place a long time ago. Nowadays Novak’s most likely challengers are all European.