Roy Emerson

Biography

Born on 3 November 1936 in Queensland, Australia, Roy Emerson is an Australian tennis player and one of the greatest champions of the era before the Open Era. With twelve Grand Slam titles in singles and sixteen in doubles, twenty-eight in all, he holds a men's record. He is also the only man to have won each of the four Grand Slam tournaments in both singles and doubles.

A right-hander with a one-handed backhand, he played his first tournaments in the 1950s and won his first title in 1953. He remained an amateur until 1968. A member of the Australian Davis Cup team from 1959, he won his first two major titles that year, in doubles, at Wimbledon and the US Championships, with his compatriot Neale Fraser.

His first singles titles came in 1961, at the Australian Championships and then at the US Championships. In 1962 he lost all three finals he reached (Australia, France, the United States) to Rod Laver, who completed the Grand Slam that year. He then took the upper hand: Australian champion five times in a row from 1963 to 1967, he also won the French Open in 1963 and 1967, Wimbledon in 1964 and 1965, and the US Championships in 1964. His victory at Wimbledon in 1964 completed his career Grand Slam in singles; that year he won three of the four majors and was ranked world No. 1. In doubles he ruled the French Open from 1960 to 1965 with five different partners: Neale Fraser, Rod Laver, Manuel Santana, Ken Fletcher and Fred Stolle.

In April 1968 he signed a professional contract with the National Tennis League, on the eve of the Open Era. He still won two Grand Slam doubles titles with Rod Laver, the Australian Open in 1969 and Wimbledon in 1971, his last major success. With the Australian team he won the Davis Cup eight times, from 1959 to 1962 and from 1964 to 1967, with a record of 34 wins and 4 defeats. He last appeared among the world's top twenty in 1973 and ended his career in 1983. In the late 1970s he was player-coach of the Boston Lobsters in World Team Tennis.

He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1982, then the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1986. His twelve singles titles remained a men's record until Pete Sampras surpassed it in 2000, and his six Australian Open victories were beaten only in 2019, by Novak Djokovic. His name remains tied to the golden age of Australian tennis.