Grand Masters Tennis : Laver Gets Game Going, Rallies to Defeat Rosewall

The over-45 men’s tennis circuit that is the Grand Masters has a lot of things: Big names, travel, enough fun to keep things enjoyable, enough money to keep things interesting. What the Grand Masters doesn’t have a lot of, for better or worse, are surprises on the court. Nostalgia sells here, not suspense.

Monday night at UCLA’s Los Angeles Tennis Center, Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, who between them have won 18 Grand Slam tournaments during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, met in the championship match of the fourth stop of the 1986 tour.

Rosewall, who has won the last two events, took the first set in the best-of-three match worth $8,000 to the winner, but Laver was at a loss for ideas on how to come back. The memories of these players have not disappeared, even if some of their quickness has.

“After a couple hundred matches, it’s just kind of embedded in you,” Laver said of his mental notebook on Rosewall. “I can wake up in the middle of the night and it would come to me.”

The consistency of play that he lacked in the first set returned to Laver, as did his serve, and the result was a 2-6, 6-3, 6-3 win in the singles championship of the $30,000 tournament, also his second title of the year.

“I just wasn’t allowed to play in the first set,” Laver said. “Ken was playing really tough stuff and I was just trying to keep the ball in play.

“Later on, I felt like I played with a lot more confidence and was putting the pressure on him. Plus, I was getting a few cheap points now and then to keep my confidence going.”

When it came down to the third set, the two Australians traded games until it was 3-3, and that’s when Laver put it away. Rosewall put himself in a hole with a double fault to make the score 0-30 in a game Laver eventually won to make it 5-3.

Overall, Rosewall said, his problem was losing his concentration just as Laver was finding his. Together, they denied Rosewall his third straight Grand Masters tournament win.

“It was more my fault (losing the lead),” he said, “but Rod came back and was hitting with consistency and getting some better serves. . . . I wasn’t serving very well and that kind of affected the rest of my game. I guess I was very up and down.”

Laver, a resident of Newport Beach, and Rosewall later teamed to win the all-Australian doubles title over Mal Anderson and Neale Fraser, 7-6, 6-1. The winners split $4,000 while Anderson and Fraser collected $1,000 each.