No one talks about John Newcombe anymore.
This is odd, right? One of the great things about tennis fans is that they appreciate history. This leads to fun, unanswerable debates like, "Who's the greatest player ever?" (I said Pete Sampras two years ago, then Roger Federer a year ago, and now ...) and "Could Rod Laver have beaten Novak Djokovic?" (playing with wood rackets, yes). It also means the past is never dead in tennis, it's prologue -- or something like that.
Yet Newcombe seems to have slipped through the cracks. He was the first TV star of tennis' Open era. His disco mustache smiled out from ads in Time and Esquire, making the knees of housewives across the country go weak. And he was a very good tennis player, winning three Wimbledon titles ('67, '70, '71) and two Forest Hills trophies ('67, '73). It was the 30-year-old Newcombe at the Australian Open in 1975, not the 31-year-old Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon later in the year, who stopped the Jimmy Connors Grand Slam juggernaut. He won 26 majors in singles, doubles and mixed in his career.
So why don't we ever talk about him? Other than that brief blip during the 2000 presidential campaign -- Newcombe, it turned out, was George Bush's drinking buddy the night Dubya got caught driving under the influence in 1976 -- when was the last time the big Aussie was in the news?
View full sizeAmateur Era Newk, sans mustache.
View full sizeNewcombe on his way to his second Wimbledon title.
View full sizeNewcombe after besting Jan Kodes for the 1973 U.S. Open championship.
View full sizeNewk at 30, outclassing a teenaged Bjorn Borg in the 1974 WCT Finals.
View full sizeNewcombe won a $25,000 bonus (paid out in one-dollar bills) after taking that '74 WCT title. Some players viewed the lucrative WCT championship as more important than the Grand Slam events.