PHILADELPHIA — The oldest living Wimbledon champion doesn’t take in much tennis anymore. It bores him. Too much power. Too many booming serves and baseline rallies. When Vic Seixas was learning the sport in Overbrook Park during the dawn of the Great Depression, working as a ball boy at the mediocre neighborhood clubs where his father played, he preferred a slashing, serve-and-volley style. Most players back then did. Get to the net. Challenge and finesse your opponent from there. That was how Seixas won Wimbledon in 1953 and the U.S. National Championship in 1954. That was how he helped the United States win one of the most memorable events in tennis history: the 1954 Davis Cup. That is why, even though Wimbledon’s qualifying rounds have begun and the men’s and women’s tournaments will start this Monday, Seixas will wait until the second week of matches to tune in. “I watch the end,” he said.
In the meantime, he will spend his days as he usually does, as he approaches a pair of remarkable milestones: the 70th anniversary of his Wimbledon victory on Tuesday, July 4, and his 100th birthday on Wednesday, Aug. 30. Wheelchair-bound, Seixas gets around OK inside his apartment at Harbor Point Tennis Club in Simi Valley, Calif.
“I keep pretty busy,” he said over the phone Monday.
At this stage of his life, busy means reading USA Today each morning, thanks to his “beautiful machine,” a visual magnifier that allows him to read the tiny newsprint. It means watching his favorite daytime game shows: Deal or No Deal and 25 Words or Less. “I’m a big fan of Meredith Vieira,” he said. “I’ve been in love with her for a long time.” It means not venturing outside too much.
“I keep running into people I know,” he said, “and I can’t recognize them. That’s a little embarrassing.”
It’s also ironic, because in and around Philadelphia, Seixas doesn’t occupy the same level of fame and prestige that the city’s other longtime sports heroes do. As the writer Allen Hornblum, a close friend of Seixas’, noted in a recent and excellent piece about him for MerionWest.com, Seixas is not nearly as recognizable here as Mike Schmidt, Julius Erving, or Bobby Clarke, but “the mention of Seixas’ name draws nods of recognition from sports fans stretching from New York City, London, and Barcelona to more far-flung outposts such as Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne.”
Maybe it’s the perception of tennis as a pastime of the elite, of the privileged and blinkered, that keeps Seixas out of people’s minds, though that characterization of both him and the sport isn’t accurate. Seixas was a four-sport athlete at Penn Charter. He was a World War II veteran who flew 14 kinds of aircraft — P-38 Lightnings, P-40 Warhawks, Black Widow fighters, three types of bombers — for the Army Air Corps. He was a late bloomer who didn’t play his best tennis until after he’d returned from the war, finished his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina, and turned 27. His father owned a plumbing store. The family was retail middle class, not of the stereotypical Main Line. His was an upbringing fairly typical within tennis.
“The milieu of the game is often very affluent, but the milieu belies the game itself,” tennis historian Joel Drucker, who still covers the sport for The Tennis Channel and Tennis.com, said in a phone interview. “The great champions don’t often come from the background of the private clubs. People think tennis was a Merchant and Ivory movie, like A Room with a View. And it’s more like Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.”
Six-foot-1, trim in his prime, Seixas couldn’t compete playing the style of tennis’ modern giants: Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer. His groundstroke game was weak. He beat his opponents by outworking them, by fighting harder than they did, by planting himself near the net and practically daring them to blast the ball past him — a Philly-style player if there ever were one.
“So amazing were his court coverage and his reflexes as a volleyer,” Herbert Warren Wind wrote of him in Sports Illustrated, “that on occasions he could ‘live’ at midcourt and forecourt when, really, you wouldn’t have thought he had a ghost of a chance.”
He was nearly 30 when he wiped out Kurt Nielsen in straight sets at Wimbledon in ‘53, and he had just turned 31 when he beat Rex Hartwig the following year at Forest Hills. Three months later, more than 25,000 people — reportedly the largest crowd, at the time, to watch any tennis match of any kind — crammed into White City Stadium in Sydney to see the United States’ first Davis Cup victory in five years, a victory over Australia that was assured when Tony Trabert, Seixas’ partner, ripped a forehand winner.
“As the last ball landed six inches inside the baseline,” Adrian Quist of the Melbourne Age wrote the next day, “one could see the expression of delight that crossed the Americans’ faces. They leapt and grasped each other around the shoulders. Trabert said to Seixas, ‘We’ve done it, boy.’ But Seixas was too excited to reply.”
He never made the millions upon millions that today’s stars have. His timing, in that regard, was terrible. He came long before the sport’s Open Era began in 1968. Until then, pros played for the big money but were ineligible for the four major tournaments — the Australian Open, Wimbledon, the French Open, the U.S. Open — and amateurs played for the honor of winning the majors … and for expenses and pocket change.
“I didn’t miss anything by not having the money,” Seixas said. “That was not something I feel like I missed out on or feel sorry for. My wife and I traveled all over the world. We lived like kings and queens, and that was it.”
The oldest living Wimbledon champion does not want pity or a handout. It is enough that he can still be called the oldest living Wimbledon champion.
“The best part about that,” Vic Seixas said, “is that I’m still alive.”
The bittersweet part is that he is an example of the kind of quiet greatness that lives and lasts so long that it is forgotten. It is only when these rare, touchstone occasions arise — an anniversary, a birthday, a reason to remember — that a 99-year-old man with a frisky mind and a fondness for game shows gets to share his story for those who might hear it for the first time, in wonder.
