2023-07-28 17:36:36
WILLIAM VILAS He is the most outstanding tennis player in the history of Argentina. But internationally he represented much more than that: He was part of the generation of players who promoted the birth of tennis as it is known in these times.
The Open Era began in 1968 and the Poet began to exploit all his potential in the early years of the ’70s. He had his heyday between 1977 and 1979, when he won his four Grand Slam crowns, but he remained among the best in the world until 1983.
He was the exclusive protagonist of a different era, when everything was more handmade. Today’s elite players did not exist they arrive at the clubs with a retinue of ten people. Vilas maintained a friendship with other great champions such as Björn Borg or Vitas Gerulaitis, but his only path was the Romanian Ion Tiriacwho officiated everything: manager, coach, friend, partner, tour operator.
Therefore, as you can imagine, there was room for events that were impossible to foresee in these times. Some tournaments were played in unusual tournaments like the one in North Conway, for example.
That town, which 40 years ago had no more than ten thousand inhabitants, was surrounded by mountains and forests. In that place a Grand Prix tournament was played, on brick dust in the open air, which distributed 200 thousand dollars of the time.
Getting to that site was little short of an adventure. You had to stop at the Newark airport, in New Jersey, to then take a small flight to the city of Portland, the closest to North Conway. But to arrive 300 kilometers to go.
Vilas played that tournament in 1983, in July, the last year of splendor of his career, in which he won his last crown in the Austrian city of Kitzbühelcoincidentally a week before.
The double field of the stadium, with tubular stands.
To get to North Conway, then, one last step had to be taken: rent one of the old Cessna four-seater planes. The curiosity is that that aircraft was piloted by a man named Frank Heller, who also owned the small airport where you had to land. These planes were in charge of transporting the tennis players of the tournament. It was a forty minute flight over the white mountains of the New Hampshire State.
In that Vilas tournament, overwhelmed by the case guarantees -That year he was accused by the Professional Tennis Council for having collected guarantees, the money from the tournaments to ensure the figures that at that time was prohibited, in the Rotterdam tournament, in March-, suffered the siege of American journalism that was only concerned regarding the probable suspension –would be lifted in January 1984-.
The Argentine would lose in the quarterfinals 6-4, 6-4 once morest the Ecuadorian Andrés Gómez. The most incredible thing regarding that tournament, anyway, was even the way to get to the stadium, which had two courts with the same shared tubular grandstand.
Vilas, as he used to do in some other tournaments with “impossible” accesses, had rented a helicopter by management of Tiriac to arrive in a very unusual way to the games he had to play. The site chosen for the stadium had an income that marked a difficulty to enter the road. The romantic tennis of another life.
Vilas, with his coach Tiriac, on arrival at the club in North Conway.
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