Pancho Gonzales

Ricardo Alonso Gonzáles was the dominant male tennis player in the world during the late 1950s and early 1960s, under the name Pancho Gonzales. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island in 1968.

Gonzales' parents, Manuel Antonio González and Carmen Alire, migrated from Chihuahua, Mexico to the US in the early 1900s. Gonzales was born in Los Angeles, the eldest of 7 children. He had a troubled adolescence and taught himself to play tennis with no encouragement from the exclusively white, and predominantly upper-class, tennis establishment of 1940s Los Angeles.

As an unknown 20-year-old, Gonzales unexpectedly won the United States Championships at Forest Hills in 1948. He repeated this feat the next year, and then turned professional. He was badly beaten in his first year on the professional tour by the reigning king of professional tennis, Jack Kramer, and withdrew from the public eye. He won some professional tournaments, however, defeating his old nemesis Kramer in the process, and by 1953 he was the dominant player in the professional ranks.

Gonzales was a dominant player for about a dozen years, beating tennis greats such as Frank Sedgman, Ken Rosewall, Lew Hoad, Tony Trabert, Mal Anderson, and Ashley Cooper on a regular basis. In that 12-year period, he won the United States Professional Championship 8 times and the Wembley professional title in London 4 times; and beat, in head-to-head tours, all of the best amateurs who turned pro.

Gonzales played as a professional before the Open era of tennis began in 1968 and was therefore ineligible to compete at the Grand Slam events between 1949 (when he turned pro) and 1968. When Open tennis began, Gonzales was in his 40s, but continued to win the occasional tournament, beating the best players in the world, including Rod Laver, Stan Smith, John Newcombe, Roy Emerson, and Jimmy Connors, all of whom were 15 to 20 years younger. He is the oldest player to have ever won a professional tournament, winning the Des Moines Open over 24-year-old Georges Goven when he was three months shy of his 44th birthday.

He was known for his fiery will to win, his cannonball serve, and his all-conquering net game, a combination so potent that the rules on the professional tour were briefly changed in the 1950s to prohibit him from advancing to the net immediately after serving. He won even so, and the rules were changed back. In 1971, when he was 43 and Jimmy Connors was 19, he beat the young baseliner by playing from the baseline at the Pacific Southwest Open.

Gonzales married six times (twice to actress Madelyn Darrow), and had seven children. His last wife, Rita, is the sister of tennis great Andre Agassi. Gonzales died, nearly broke and almost friendless, in a tiny house near the Las Vegas airport. Andre Agassi paid for his funeral.