Check out these old greats on vid

King_olaf_the_hairy said:
Found this on the John McEnroe Channel on Youtube: a doubles match from 1988 between JMac & his brother Patrick versus teenagers Michael Chang (16 yo) & Pete Sampras (17 yo).


It was during the Michelin Challenge, an exho held in December 1988. Pretty low resolution and audio quality's a bit iffy too, but still funny to see them all, especially Sampras who looks about 12 years old.

I found a couple of news articles covering the event:
Click to expand...
Cool. You could already see that Pete had his huge serve... and a few months after, Chang would win the French Open. They all look so young... nice video thanks.
 
Found another unusual video, from the 1984 EC Championships in Antwerp. This is of course the non-Grand Prix tournament famous for its amazing trophy, a solid gold racket inlaid with 1000+ diamonds and worth about $700,000 at the time.

The source is here: https://reuters.screenocean.com/record/1039410


The first two minutes is your usual brief highlights; Ivan Lendl beats Joakim Nystrom and Anders Jarryd to win the event. But the really interesting bit is the last third of the clip, showing the two guys who actually manufactured the trophy.

aS94zNa.png
 
CyBorg said:
How often does one come upon a set of highlights, or a full match, from this era on Youtube where you can hear the ball come off the racket this crisply?

I just wanted to share this, knowing that many of us have seen this match, just to point this out. This is just a pleasure to watch largely due to the sound quality.

By the way, Gottfried is hitting the ball really hard - often in a flat line drive. You don't fully appreciate this until you hear the impact.

Click to expand...
How could he hit the ball hard with those old wood racquets? I thought that those old guys just patted the ball around.
 
keithchircop said:
Ilie Nastase
From Wikipedia:
In his recent book, Năstase claimed that he slept with around 2,500 women. After hearing this, his wife said that she was happy to have conquered such a man.
Click to expand...

I believe he started with the number of 1,000. He later admitted that it was all hyperbole.

"conquered"!?
Well, It certainly sounds like he and his wife deserve each other, if she believes that marrying someone is "conquering" them.


Nastase was a great and supremely talented player in his time, but at times he could be his own worst enemy when he thought his antics were better than his game. Today, he is an irrelevant, old racist homophobic clown-jerk yearning for attention.
www.romania-insider.com

Romania’s tennis legend Ilie Nastase banned from Wimbledon

The security staff at Wimbledon, one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments of the year, have been shown pictures of Romanian tennis legend Ilie Nastase to make sure they don’t let him into the grounds, reports The Telegraph. A spokeswoman for the All England Lawn Tennis Club confirmed that...
www.romania-insider.com www.romania-insider.com
www.romania-insider.com

Romanian tennis legend starts scandal after derogatory comment about Serena Williams

Former Romanian tennis champion Ilie Nastase, who’s currently Romania’s Fed Cup team captain, was heard making a derogatory comment about Serena Williams’ unborn child, at a press conference on Friday. As Romanian player Simona Halep was answering a question in English about Williams'...
www.romania-insider.com www.romania-insider.com
 
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hoodjem said:
I believe he started with the number of 1,000. He later admitted that it was all hyperbole.

"conquered"!?
Well, It certainly sounds like he and his wife deserve each other, if she believes that marrying someone is "conquering" them.

Nastase was a great and supremely talented player in his time, but at times he could be his own worst enemy when he thought his antics were better than his game. Today, he is an irrelevant, old racist homophobic clown-jerk yearning for attention.
www.romania-insider.com

Romania’s tennis legend Ilie Nastase banned from Wimbledon

The security staff at Wimbledon, one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments of the year, have been shown pictures of Romanian tennis legend Ilie Nastase to make sure they don’t let him into the grounds, reports The Telegraph. A spokeswoman for the All England Lawn Tennis Club confirmed that...
www.romania-insider.com www.romania-insider.com
www.romania-insider.com

Romanian tennis legend starts scandal after derogatory comment about Serena Williams

Former Romanian tennis champion Ilie Nastase, who’s currently Romania’s Fed Cup team captain, was heard making a derogatory comment about Serena Williams’ unborn child, at a press conference on Friday. As Romanian player Simona Halep was answering a question in English about Williams'...
www.romania-insider.com www.romania-insider.com
Click to expand...

Nastase was imo one of the most talented players ever. Could have been a top 20-ish all time great if he wasn't a mental midget.
 
Another slightly oddball vid from me, this time of Andre Agassi. Not on court, but being interviewed in a studio by an Austrian journalist/TV presenter, and at 5'22" he starts asking some very tricky questions about AA's hair. Is he losing it? Would he take his cap off for the audience? Helpfully the uploader has translated the interviewer's questions into English in the video description.

I'd assume this is October 1994; since he won Vienna then, and since his Nike clothes/colours (USO '94 line) match that period. Only a couple of months later, the hair came off for good...

 
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NicoMK said:
Just came across this one and thought it was well worth a shot. One of the GOATs (if not the GOAT) in action.

Click to expand...
I always felt his ground game was undervalued. It usually took the very best baseliners on the Globe to stop him anywhere but red clay. That's because he could hang with them long enough to hit a winner or take his spot in the forecourt frequently enough to threaten to break.
 
Sampras Vs Bruguera RG 1993 QF First Set.

To the following question asked by the well-known "Voo de Mar" to Martin H.S. (who uploaded the clip) two weeks ago: "

Will you upload this match in full?", the latter answered: " I will try to do it."

I hope there is luck and Martin H.S. can upload the match in its entirety.
 
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Lucky to stumble upon this only a few hours after it was uploaded. I guess Youtube's algorithm really can read my soul...

Video of an exhibition between Andre Agassi and Ivan Lendl in 2011, intercut with shots of their first meeting in 1987 (the one where Ivan referred to Andre as a "haircut and a forehand" afterwards). My favourite players from the '80s and the '90s. Gotta say, while their footwork has suffered, those forehands are still... ooof! :
 
Since there's a Wimbledon Centenary celebration going on just now (GPPD thread here), here's the Parade of Champions from 2000. That one includes a lot of the folks missing today, e.g. Sampras, Becker, and Navratilova.

A bit melancholy, since we lost a few of these folks in the past year or two... :cry:

 
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Don't know how long this will remain available on YT, but here's 1979 Hollywood tennis movie 'Players', starring Ali McGraw and Dean Paul Martin, and a host of contemporary tennis stars as themselves: Guillermo Vilas, Pancho Gonzales, Ion Tiriac, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, John Lloyd, Ilie Nastase, Vijay Amritraj, etc...

 
borg number one said:
This is old footage of Jimmy Connors playing as a kid with his mother. A friend converted the old tape for Gloria Connors.

Click to expand...
He threw his entire weight into his strokes just as he did on the tour. As Billie Jean used to put it , Jimmy 'commits' to the shot. Jimmy played fearless tennis. Somehow I never pictured him as having a crew cut.
 
Thanks for the weird tennis film. The opening scene with Willie and Dino looks very much like the scene of the famous Western Once upon a time in the West by Sergio Leone, where some villains at a railway station are waiting for Charles Bronson, to kill him in the shootout.. Only the fly on the rugged face of Jack Elam is missing. Music by Morricone was much better though. Here the sounds are pretty weird, are they farting?
 
The tennis in this film was remarkably good. Especially in comparison to othe films. DPM was solid on court and a credible lead. Enjoyed all the cameos. Generally quite a bad film--but not because of the tennis!
 
Another weird one from me. ;)

Two of my absolute favourite players of the 1950s, Frank Sedgman and Jaroslav Drobny, battling at the Italian Open in 1952. (I'm a total junkie for 1950s tennis.)

Footage is from the state-owned Archivo Luce Cinecitta channel.

 
urban said:
Thanks for the weird tennis film. The opening scene with Willie and Dino looks very much like the scene of the famous Western Once upon a time in the West by Sergio Leone, where some villains at a railway station are waiting for Charles Bronson, to kill him in the shootout.. Only the fly on the rugged face of Jack Elam is missing. Music by Morricone was much better though. Here the sounds are pretty weird, are they farting?
Click to expand...


This is unbelievable. If you use Tubedubber.com to overlay the audio from OUATITW, you get the railway station train sounds over the Players opening credits, then the harmonica music starts literally as the dressing room clock fades in. The timing is absolutely perfect!

https://tubedubber.com/?q=fbEbG5T-4fs:LRAK0CTiOX0:0:100:0:0:1
(use the big 'Play' button to sync the two clips)
 
Great overlap and synchronisation, Olaf. Obviously the director of Players built his sequence on the Leone film. Leone himself covered a bit the structure of High Noon. I think, in Leone's film someone is asking: Where is Frank?. Frank Miller was the villain in High Noon..
 
Posted this on my Old School Tennis subreddit yesterday. As a contrast to the hullabaloo on Friday when Federer retired (huge crowd, tears, emotional speeches, gets hoisted up on shoulders, etc), here's the end of Ivan Lendl's final match.


US Open R2 vs Bernd Karbacher. The Czech-American has to retire with a bad back for the fourth time that season. He shakes Karbacher's hand, slings his kit bag over his shoulder, and walks off the court at a half-empty Louis Armstrong Arena. Never plays another pro tour match. He was the three-time champ in NYC, had reached eight straight finals, and at the time held the ATP records for most slam finals (19) and most weeks at #1 (270).
:(

Of course that was the norm back then, for JMac, Wilander, Edberg, and Becker too. No big fanfare, just a wave to the crowd at most. Pistol Pete's ceremony at Flushing Meadows in 2003 was the first formal send-off I remember, followed of course by Agassi and his teary farewell speech after Benji Becker took him out in '06.
 
King_olaf_the_hairy said:
Posted this on my Old School Tennis subreddit yesterday. As a contrast to the hullabaloo on Friday when Federer retired (huge crowd, tears, emotional speeches, gets hoisted up on shoulders, etc), here's the end of Ivan Lendl's final match.


US Open R2 vs Bernd Karbacher. The Czech-American has to retire with a bad back for the fourth time that season. He shakes Karbacher's hand, slings his kit bag over his shoulder, and walks off the court at a half-empty Louis Armstrong Arena. Never plays another pro tour match. He was the three-time champ in NYC, had reached eight straight finals, and at the time held the ATP records for most slam finals (19) and most weeks at #1 (270).
:(
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting. Ivan, a great champ!

King_olaf_the_hairy said:
Of course that was the norm back then, for JMac, Wilander, Edberg, and Becker too. No big fanfare, just a wave to the crowd at most. Pistol Pete's ceremony at Flushing Meadows in 2003 was the first formal send-off I remember, followed of course by Agassi and his teary farewell speech after Benji Becker took him out in '06.
Click to expand...
I was thinking exactly the same the other day, watching on and off Fed's retirement ceremony.
 
Another blast from the past which I stumbled upon while doing some research. I don't think I can embed it directly, but there's a 22-minute documentary on the 1947 Wimbledon Championships, "Centred on Wimbledon", hosted by the British Film Institute. It's got a real Pathé News feel about it, though it was produced by French film company Gaumont:

Centred on Wimbledon | Replay

player.bfi.org.uk player.bfi.org.uk

*** Important note: I couldn't get it to play on Firefox or Chrome, but succeeded using Microsoft Edge ***

Some of the stuff I noticed:
  • Two clips of one-armed Austrian Hans Redl, who was making his debut at The Championships and reached R4 (5m20, 12m45).
  • Coverage of defending champ Yvon Petra (6m15).
  • Eventual finalist Tom Brown's five set R1 marathon against Eric Sturgess (7m05). I don't know much about Brown, but from those few clips he had a hell of a drive backhand.
  • Rare footage of a still-amateur Pancho Segura, losing to Jaroslav Drobny (8m45).
  • A couple of clips of John Bromwich doing his lefty-righty two-handed forehand thang (10m00, 14m25).
  • A young Dan Maskell doing a bit of talent-spotting (12m35).
  • A female umpire (14m55); I had no idea the All England Club were so progressive that far back.
  • A young Lennart Bergelin, decades before his second life as Bjorn Borg's coach (15m10).
 
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King_olaf_the_hairy said:
Posted this on my Old School Tennis subreddit yesterday. As a contrast to the hullabaloo on Friday when Federer retired (huge crowd, tears, emotional speeches, gets hoisted up on shoulders, etc), here's the end of Ivan Lendl's final match.


US Open R2 vs Bernd Karbacher. The Czech-American has to retire with a bad back for the fourth time that season. He shakes Karbacher's hand, slings his kit bag over his shoulder, and walks off the court at a half-empty Louis Armstrong Arena. Never plays another pro tour match. He was the three-time champ in NYC, had reached eight straight finals, and at the time held the ATP records for most slam finals (19) and most weeks at #1 (270).
:(

Of course that was the norm back then, for JMac, Wilander, Edberg, and Becker too. No big fanfare, just a wave to the crowd at most. Pistol Pete's ceremony at Flushing Meadows in 2003 was the first formal send-off I remember, followed of course by Agassi and his teary farewell speech after Benji Becker took him out in '06.
Click to expand...

there was an on court ceremony after Edberg’s last match at USO. There was a lot of attention on him that year when he announced that it would be his last season at the beginning of the year.

None of the others - Jmac, Wilander etc made any sort of retirement announcement so of course there was no fanfare. Wilander came back after many absences(he seemed like he was most certainly done at 91 RG). And Mac played some sporadic atp events after 92. Connors never officially retired, kept playing sporadic events in 90s. Becker oddly kept playing small events after “retiring” from Wimbledon in 97. And of course he even came back to Wimbledon in 99.

also there was an insane amount of attention and fanfare on Evert throughout 89. 89 USO was crazy, every one of her matches was packed and had a ton more media coverage than was the norm at the time. It was in mainstream news here in the US, articles in People etc, not just a sports story, I think younger people have no idea how big a deal Evert was. People in the stands(And some reporters) were weeping when she lost.
I attended USO pretty much ever year in the 80s/90s, and have a photographic memory of that time - was pretty obsessed with tennis then.
Martina also got a big send off at 94 YEC in NY, ceremony etc. of course she didn’t stay retired:)

also it’s hard to compare today to then because it was such a different world. There were no video replays at any stadium in the 80s/90s so they couldn’t have video tributes etc on court. And on court interviews didn’t exist(except after finals). So it was hard to have as much fanfare as they have today(and of course no social media to hype things)
 
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Thanks very much. It is indeed an extraordinary document of post- war tennis. You can still see some damage in the stands,, done by the German bombs. Colonel Duncan MacCauley was the Club secretary, i have an old book by him about the Wim history. To see Hans Redl play and serve, is very interesting and touching. Drobny vs. Segura must have been a great battle of two strategical perfect players. The young Segura still is wearing long trousers, Drobny shows great smashes. Segura and Bromwich with their unorthodox doublehanders. If Brom had had a better serve a la Falkenburg, Drobny or Kramer, he would have been awesome in singles, too. Eric Sturgess is also a very stylish player. The tall Bergelin looks very elegant, i think he trained a lot with Gottfried von Cramm, and one can see the result.
Indeed one sees good backhand drives, not only slices, especially by Tom Brown and Doris Hart, who has overall a super clean style of play. Kramers forehand side, on the ground and as volley, is quite devastating. It may be interesting, that two of the British players seen here, Warboys and Mottram, had sons, who played a pros in the 1970s..
 
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