Pancho Gonzales - Place Among The All-time Great Tennis Players

Place Among The All-time Great Tennis Players

For about 14 years from around 1920 to 1934, Bill Tilden was generally considered the greatest player of all time. From 1934 through 1967, during the Golden Age of Tennis, when Vines, Perry, Budge, Riggs, Kramer, Gonzales, Segura, Sedgman, Trabert, Hoad, Rosewall, and Laver were the top tier players, Gonzales was considered the best of this period. Since 1968, with the first Grand Slam of the Open Era at the French Open, Champions such as Rod Laver, Jimmy Connors, Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, and Roger Federer have been considered by their contemporaries to be greater players than Tilden or Gonzales.

Many people connected with the game, however, consider Gonzales to be the best male player in tennis history, because he was the World No. 1 tennis player for eight years — the status of a few of the earlier years is still unclear. He was possibly No.1 in 1952, but then was probably the World No.1 for seven consecutive years, 1954 through 1960. In the article World number one male tennis player rankings Bill Tilden with Rod Laver are the next closest to Gonzales with seven No.1 ratings, followed by Pete Sampras and Ken Rosewall with six each. 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. Lew Hoad and Allen Fox agree with this assessment. In a 1972 article about an imaginary tournament among the all-time greats, Gene Scott had the fourth-seeded Gonzales upsetting Bill Tilden in the semi-finals and then using his serve to beat Rod Laver in the finals.

Bud Collins, the editor of the massive Total Tennis, The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia, is 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."

In 2005 a tennis historian who visited the International Tennis Hall of Fame interviewed several great Australian players who had toured against Gonzales. Who, they were asked, was the best player they had ever played against?

Mal Anderson named Gonzales, who "was very difficult since if you did get ahead, he had a way to upset you, and he could exploit your weaknesses fast. Though over the hill, he beat Rod until Rod lifted his game." He added, "Lew Hoad, in his day was scary, though Gonzales was best day in and day out." Ashley Cooper also named Gonzales, whom "I never beat on the tour. But I did beat him a couple of times on clay where his serve wasn’t as good." Gonzales's frequent opponent Frank Sedgman said, "I played against probably the greatest of all time, Jack Kramer. He could put his serve on a dime and had a great first volley. The second best was Gonzales. I played him a lot — a great competitor — a great athlete."

Jack Kramer, on the other hand, 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 although Gonzales was better than either Laver or Sampras he was not as good as either Ellsworth Vines or Don Budge. Kramer, who had a long and frequently bitter relationship with Gonzales, rates him only as one of the four players who are second to Budge and Vines in his estimation. Kramer also, perhaps surprisingly, writes that Bobby Riggs would have beaten Gonzales on a regular basis.

Early in 1986 Inside Tennis, a magazine published in Northern California, devoted parts of four issues to a lengthy article called "Tournament of the Century", an imaginary tournament to determine the greatest of all time. They asked 37 tennis notables such as Kramer, Budge, Perry, and Riggs and observers such as Bud Collins to list the 10 greatest players in order.

Twenty-five players in all were named by the 37 experts in their lists of the 10 best. The magazine then ranked them in descending order by total number of points assigned. The top eight players in overall points, with their number of first-place votes, were: Rod Laver (9), John McEnroe (3), Don Budge (4), Jack Kramer (5), Björn Borg (6), Pancho Gonzales (1), Bill Tilden (6), and Lew Hoad (1). Gonzales was ranked the sixth-best player, with only Allan Fox casting a vote for him as the greatest of all time.