ITF

22 ITFWorld // SPRING 2018 feared losing control over their prestigious tournaments if tennis went open (not just the four Slams but other established events across Europe, America, Australia and South Africa), the ILTF was effectively the guardian of the amateur era. The build-up of commercial interests, as post-war austerity gave way to the global economic boom of the 1960s, created a pressure that was always going to burst the dam, but the trigger event for open tennis came from an unlikely source. Wimbledon was considered the most traditional of tennis's tournaments, yet it broke ranks with the amateur world in August 1967 when it invited eight professionals to play an exhibition tournament on its hallowed grass. The impetus had come from Wimbledon's television partner, the BBC, whose head of sport complained that Wimbledon may be the most prestigious tournament but the Wimbledon champion couldn't claim to be the world's best player. That prompted Wimbledon's act of rebellion, and for a while in late 1967 there was the theoretical possibility that it would be thrown off the official tournament schedule. But the tennis world relented, and in April 1968 at the Bournemouth tournament on the British south coast, tennis finally went open. The first open Grand Slam tournament was the French championships of 1968, which had something of a carnival atmosphere. That had less to do with the end of tennis's 40-year-long family feud, and more with the general strike that took place that day, all part of the Paris student riots of 1968 that made headlines around the world. But it did give Roland Garros a buzz about the new era that was dawning. So was that the end of the story? Not at all. In many ways, tennis going open was just the first step on a journey that took another quarter-century to complete. Even though there hadn't been a women's pro circuit Serena Williams holds the open era record of 23 Grand Slam women's singles titles, one behind Margaret Court's all-time mark of 24 A N N I V E R S A R Y Wimbledon staged the World Professional Lawn Tennis Championships in 1967, won by Rod Laver Roger Federer's 20 Grand Slam titles are an all-time record Virginia Wade won the Bournemouth tournament and fellow Brit Winnie Shaw was runner-up

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