Rod Laver: The Only Man to Do It Twice
In 1962 a red-headed Queenslander won all four Grand Slam singles titles in a calendar year, the first man to manage it since Don Budge in 1938. Then he turned professional, which under the rules of the time barred him from every one of those tournaments. Five years later the sport changed its rules, and in 1969 he did the whole thing again. No man has repeated it since. Tony Trabert's summary is hard to improve on: Laver "won the Grand Slam as an amateur and he won the Grand Slam as a pro."
Rockhampton
Rodney George Laver was born on August 9, 1938, in Rockhampton, Queensland, a cattle town on the Tropic of Capricorn. The Australian Davis Cup coach Harry Hopman, who supplied nicknames with heavy irony, called the slight, unpromising boy "Rocket." The name outlived the joke.
The Amateur
Laver won his first major at the 1960 Australian Championships, beating his compatriot Neale Fraser in five sets after going two sets down, a scoreline that established the pattern of his career: he did not lose interest when losing. He was ranked the world's No. 1 amateur in 1961 and 1962.
Then came 1962. He took all four majors and twenty-two titles in the season, defeating Roy Emerson in multiple finals along the way. Less famous but more revealing, he completed the clay court triple of Paris, Rome and Hamburg, a sweep achieved before him only by Lew Hoad in 1956. A left-hander built for grass had gone to the slowest surface in the sport and cleaned it out.
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In December 1962, having just won the Davis Cup, he turned professional. In the tennis of that era this meant exile: professionals were excluded from Wimbledon, the US, French and Australian championships, and played instead a punishing barnstorming circuit against a small group of the best players alive. Laver's first years on it were an education rather than a coronation. Not until 1965 was he clearly the No. 1 professional. In 1967 he won all three professional majors in a single year, the Pro Slam, taking nineteen titles that season. Nobody has done it since, and almost nobody outside tennis has heard of it.
1969
The Open era began in 1968, dissolving the amateur-professional divide and restoring the majors to the best players in the world. In 1969, at thirty-one, against a field that finally contained everyone, Laver won the Australian, French, Wimbledon and US titles: eighteen titles that year and a 106-16 record, closing with a four-set win over Tony Roche at Flushing Meadows. It remains the only calendar-year Grand Slam by a man in the Open era.
How He Played
He was left-handed with a one-handed backhand and a forearm out of proportion to the rest of him. The English commentator Dan Maskell called him "technically faultless." He was among the developers of modern serve-and-volley tennis, pairing the net rush with aggressive groundstrokes and a topspin lob used as an attacking weapon rather than a defensive escape, a shot that forced opponents off the net and effectively expanded the court he could play on.
For Australia he contributed to five Davis Cup titles, from 1959 to 1962 and again in 1973, winning sixteen of twenty singles rubbers and all four of his doubles. Across his career he won 200 singles titles, the most won by any tennis player, alongside his records of twenty-two titles in a season as an amateur, nineteen as a professional and eighteen in the Open era.
Why Rod Is Called a Genius
Unlike most people the label is attached to, Laver has the testimony on the record. Bud Collins wrote in 1989: "I remain unconvinced that there ever was a better player than Rod Laver." Trabert called him "the best player who ever played the game." Roger Federer, who has some standing on the question, declared in 2017 that Laver is the greatest of all time.
The quality involved is adaptive intelligence rather than raw power. Consider the shape of his career: he won a Grand Slam in the amateur game, then spent five years on a professional circuit contested by a handful of ruthless specialists, and needed until 1965 to reach the top of it. That interval is the interesting part. It shows a player who was not simply the most gifted man in the room, but one who could be beaten repeatedly, rebuild, and come back capable of beating everybody. The clay court triple in 1962 and the Pro Slam in 1967 are the evidence: the same left-hander optimising for wildly different surfaces, ball speeds and opponents, in an era with none of the modern apparatus of coaching, video or sports science. Maskell's "technically faultless" describes the tool; the 1969 season describes the mind operating it, at thirty-one, against a field that had spent a decade waiting for him.
The honest counter-case is that the eras flatter him. His 1962 Grand Slam was won against amateurs, with the strongest players in the world locked outside the gate as professionals, and by his own subsequent record he was not yet the best of them. The figure of 200 titles is drawn from a fragmented calendar in which events varied enormously in strength. Take away 1969 and the case is merely excellent rather than singular. But 1969 happened.
Legacy
Laver retired in 1979 and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1981. In 1998 he suffered a stroke during a live ESPN interview and spent the following year recovering. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2016. His name is now attached to the Australian Open's centre court and to the Laver Cup, which means that every January several million people say it without necessarily knowing that the man it belongs to did something twice that nobody else has managed once.
