Spinning for a Slam

Pro tennis has been good to Amateur Rod ("The Rocket") Laver: it has lured away everyone who might make the nimble Australian redhead work up a sweat on the courts. For years. Lefthander Laver, 23, labored as a B-team scrub on the great Down Under squads that dominated amateur tennis, taking his lumps regularly from such talented first-stringers as Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall and Ashley Cooper. Even after the varsity turned pro, Laver could not seem to win the big ones: he lost twice in the finals at Wimbledon, twice more at Forest Hills. But this year The Rocket is finally off the pad. He swept the Australian and French singles titles, and on Wimbledon's famed center court last week he needed only 53 min. to crush his unseeded countryman Martin Mulligan, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1, for his third national championship of the year. Only the U.S. championship at Forest Hills in September stands between Laver and a "grand slam" of amateur tennis' four top tournaments, a feat accomplished only once before, in 1938, by the U.S.'s Don Budge.

Short (5 ft. 8 in.) and bowlegged. Rod Laver is not in the same bracket with Don Budge. The son of a Queensland sheepherder, he is temperamental, easily thrown off stride by the bad breaks of a match. He lacks the cannonlike power of a Hoad or the dexterity of a Rosewall. Instead, he relies on craftiness and a unique ability to reset his wrist in mid-stroke--just before contact with the ball --that permits him to hit the ball flat, give it top spin, or impart a low-bouncing underspin. At Wimbledon last week, everything worked, and the ball acted as if it had corners. "No one could have lived with Laver today," said Australian Team Manager Alf Chave, after Laver's victory in the finals. "Mulligan's only chance would have been to go out and buy a rifle."

If Laver's victory was a personal triumph, it was also a national disaster for the U.S., which failed to get a man past the quarterfinals. All four semifinalists at Wimbledon last week were Australians. Only in the ladies' division did the U.S. shine. Unseeded Billie Jean Moffitt knocked off Australia's top-seeded Margaret Smith in the tournament's biggest upset (TIME, July 6), went all the way to the quarter finals before losing to Britain's Ann Haydon. And in the finals, San Antonio's No.8-seeded Karen Hantze Susman, 19 years old and recently married, made short work of Czechoslovakia's Vera Sukova, 6-4, 6-4, while her proud husband, a college student, watched happily from the stands.

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