In '77 Hoad gave an interview again to Dave Anderson of the New York Times, during the USO. Excerpts below:
Some tennis people have forgotten how good Lew Hoad was; others never knew because a spinal ailment shortened his career.
But many remember the grandeur that was Lew Hoad two decades ago. In those years before open tennis, he won Wimbledon twice with a serve that scorched the grass, then he turned pro and challenged Pancho Gonzalez's reign as no other did. After his first look at Lew Hoad across a net, Pancho Gonzalez was asked what he thought of the rookie's game.
"Every shot," he said, "comes out of a cannon."
And when Pancho Gonzalez was asked years later to select his toughest opponent, he never hesitated.
“Lew Hoad,” he said, “was probably the best and the toughest player when he wanted to be.”
Mostly, that meant when Lew Hoad’s spinal ailment let him be. In a London tournament, he once took a set from Pancho Gonzalez, 6-0, in 13 minutes. And in 1959, when Pancho Gonzalez was as good as ever, Lew Hoad had a 13-2 lead [actually 10-5] on their tour. But then his back slowed him. It had first hurt in 1956, when he won the Australian, French and Wimbledon titles. All he needed for a grand slam was to win at Forest Hills, but he lost the final to Ken Rosewall in a swirling, chilly wind.
“In that wind, I couldn’t toss the ball up high on my serve,” Lew Hoad was saying now in the West Side locker room. “I think I had beaten Kenny about 12 straight times until that match.”
.... In the tennis boom now, it's often forgotten that touring pros once were treated as outlaws.
"At one stage we were banned in Australia, and in England we had to play on cricket pitches and in ice rinks, we couldn't use the tennis stadiums. Over here, we used to drive all night from one city to another and we were lucky to get the result in the paper. Somebody has a sore toe now and it's all over the front page, but we played with sprained ankles, with a pulled shoulder, we had to because if we didn't play, there was no match. What a life it was in those days, but I'd probably do it all over again. The great thing that came out of it is what's happened to tennis now."
Lew Hoad was a teen-age prodigy with Ken Rosewall when Harry Hopman ruled the Australian Davis Cup team.
"It's great that Kenny's still playing so well," Lew Hoad said. "I think he just loves to play bloody tennis. I used to think that it was an ego thing for him, that he wanted to prove he could still handle the up-and-coming guys, but now I think he just enjoys the competitive part of it. Even if my back never bothered me, I never would've played as long as Kenny has. I'm not built that way....
"How would you have done," somebody asked Lew Hoad, "against Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas."
"I think I would've handled them," Lew Hoad said seriously.
Another note on the stats in the interview:
Hoad says that he beat Rosewall 12 straight times before the 1956 final at Forest Hills, but I don't see how that is possible, unless he's including practice matches. Andrew Tas has only 4 straight, with Ken beating Lew at Queens Club in '55 and then losing to him twice in Sydney and in the finals of the Australian Championships and Wimbledon in '56.
I like Hoad's candor about the fact that the players were often injured on the pro tours. Nowadays we know about some specific injuries (like Vines in '39), but these are only the ones that have been reported. The truth seems to be that everyone was hurting from something at some point or another: because as Lew says, they had to play, injured or not; they could not withdraw to rest.
In that light, I think it may be possible that some injuries were never known about or have since been forgotten. Some injuries have been mentioned in memoirs or high-profile interviews and are therefore still remembered today; but there could be others that we'll never know about.
Today I think it's less likely for such things to escape notice: there is a wealth of information, and everything in the sport is covered by the media. As Hoad says, one stubbed toe today will make the front page. Back then, especially on the pro tours, it was a different story.
For me this just means that any single injury we know about needs to be taken in context. We may know that one player was injured here or there; but it's not as if his opponents can be assumed to be healthy. That must be a far safer assumption today than it was in those years, under those circumstances, when the players had much less choice about whether to go out on court and play.
