Tennis History | West Side Tennis Club, Forest Hills — the men's players' union was founded during a tournament and left no address, September 1972

In July 1972 the reigning men's singles champion was not allowed to defend his title at Wimbledon. John Newcombe had won the Championships the previous summer. He did not lose it on court in 1972. The international federation that sanctioned the tournament refused his entry, and refused Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and Arthur Ashe as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Wimbledon_Championships)

None of them was barred for being a professional. That argument had supposedly been settled four years earlier.

They were barred for being contracted to the wrong promoter. At its annual meeting in July 1971 the International Lawn Tennis Federation voted to exclude every player under contract to World Championship Tennis from ILTF tournaments and facilities from the beginning of 1972. The standard reference chronologies of the sport, following Bud Collins, record the vote and its effect on the 1972 Championships in those terms. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Championship_Tennis)

This is the part of the Open era that the phrase itself conceals. The vote of March 1968 opened the four national championships to players who were paid. It did not decide who controlled entry to them, and within four years the federations had found a second reason to keep the best-paid men out — no longer their professionalism, but their employer.

An agreement between the ILTF and WCT in April 1972 divided the following season between the two circuits and restored the contract players to the sanctioned tournaments. By the end of August the men who had missed Paris and Wimbledon were entered at Forest Hills.

The 1972 US Open ran from 28 August to 10 September on the grass courts of the West Side Tennis Club, the 92nd staging of the American championship. Ilie Nastase beat Arthur Ashe in five sets in the final, 3-6, 6-3, 6-7, 6-4, 6-3. Billie Jean King won the women's singles. The men's doubles went to Cliff Drysdale and Roger Taylor. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_US_Open_(tennis))

Somewhere inside that fortnight, the men formed a union.

The Association of Tennis Professionals was organised by Jack Kramer, Donald Dell and Cliff Drysdale. Drysdale, then 32 and playing for South Africa, became its first president; Kramer became its executive director. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Tennis_Professionals) Writing three years later, D Magazine reported that the association had been formed in 1972 at the national open championships at Forest Hills, that 56 charter members organised it, and that Kramer was still serving as executive director without a salary. By 1975 the same account put the membership at 170 players and gave ATP representatives three of the six voting places on the council that governed the men's tournaments. (https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1975/september/the-association-of-tennis-professionals/)

Now the part that is easy to walk past.

No source consulted for this memory names a room, a building, or a day.

The sport's own retrospectives give the year. D Magazine, which is the only source found here that places the founding anywhere at all, gives a tournament rather than an address. The date is a fortnight long.

Compare the women nine months later. The Women's Tennis Association was founded on 21 June 1973 in a room at the Gloucester Hotel in South Kensington, convened by Billie Jean King, with a slate of officers elected on the day and a building that still stands at the same address. That founding has a floor and a door, and this platform already holds it.

The men's has neither, and the reason is not that the record was lost. It is what the founding was. There was no headquarters to meet in, because the association did not exist yet. There was no membership list to summon, because the membership was being invented. The only place the leading male players of the world were reliably in one city in the same week was a tournament that had accepted all their entries — and in 1972 the supply of such tournaments had just been demonstrated to be conditional. A union of travelling employees, with no premises and no employer in common, is constituted where the travelling puts them. The absence of an address is the evidence, not a gap in it.

The choice of executive director is the second thing worth stopping on.

For roughly two decades Jack Kramer had been the professional game: the promoter who signed the amateur champions away from the federations, ran the tours they played on, set the guarantees and took the receipts. The men who had spent their careers negotiating against him made him the first executive director of their own association, and he took no pay for it. This platform holds his side of that arrangement from a different angle, at a drained swimming pool in Wembley in 1949, where he won a world professional championship that no record book counts.

What the association then built is the reason it outlasted the grievance that produced it. Kramer devised a computer ranking of the players. The first ATP singles list was published on 23 August 1973, and the system it began is still the method by which qualification for entry and seeding are determined at the men's tournaments. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_rankings)

Read that against the summer of 1972. The association was formed by men who had been kept out of tournaments by a body that decided who could enter. Within a year it had built the instrument that decides who can enter.

Nine months after Forest Hills the association proved it could hold its members to a decision, when the leading men withdrew from the 1973 Championships over the suspension of Nikola Pilic and the association fined the three of its members who entered anyway. That night is on this platform too, at a hotel in Mayfair.

And sixteen years after that, on 26 August 1988, the ATP announced at a press conference in a car park during the US Open that it was leaving the council that governed the men's game and would run its own tour from 1990. It is remembered as the Parking Lot Press Conference, and it took place at Flushing Meadows rather than here.

Twice, then, the men's game was refounded during the American championship and out of doors. Neither moment happened in a building the sport has kept, and the second one is named after a car park.

Status note, September 2026: the ATP continues to run the men's professional tour and to publish the ranking begun in 1973. Cliff Drysdale, born in Nelspruit in 1941, retired from playing in 1980 and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2013; reference works record him as living at the time of writing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Drysdale) Jack Kramer died on 12 September 2009.

Sourcing note. The venue of the founding rests on a single source, the D Magazine article of September 1975, and it names a tournament rather than a place within it. That is disclosed rather than smoothed over, and it is also the memory's subject. The 1971 ILTF vote, the 1972 exclusions from the Championships and the April 1972 settlement are taken from the standard reference chronologies, which cite Bud Collins and the federation's own history; no contemporaneous newspaper was reached for them in this session. Accounts of the 1973 boycott differ on how many players honoured it, giving figures between the high seventies and the low nineties; the figure of 81 published in this platform's memory of that night comes from Sports Illustrated, and no attempt is made here to reconcile the others. Nothing in this memory is quoted, because every source for it was read through a summarising fetch rather than as raw text.

Coordinate: 40.71975, -73.84680, precision radius 250 metres. The pin is the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, and it is deliberately the same pin this platform already uses for the club, established from the US Census TIGER geocoder and the GPS tag of an archival photograph of the grounds. The radius covers the club's grounds rather than any one court or room, which is the honest precision available: no source consulted places the founding anywhere more specific than the tournament, and the memory argues that this is a fact about the founding rather than a defect in the record.

Cover: Cliff Drysdale, photographed on 14 May 1966 during the Davis Cup tie between the Netherlands and South Africa, holding three tennis balls. Photograph by Ron Kroon for Anefo; Nationaal Archief, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The archive's own caption identifies him by his competitor number. The photograph is six years older than the founding this memory describes and shows him as a player, not as an association president.

Second image: a male player mid-stroke on a shaded court, a ball boy standing at the fence, a seated line official in a suit, and a Dunlop banner along the boundary, at the METS courts in Scheveningen on 6 July 1969. Anefo, photographer not recorded; Nationaal Archief, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. The archive catalogues this frame as Cliff Drysdale in play. Two adjacent frames in the same reportage carry Drysdale in their Wikimedia Commons filenames while the archive's own descriptions of them name Marty Riessen, so the series mixes the two men and the identification of this frame rests on the archive's caption alone.