Stan Smith’s 1972 Wimbledon cup sits alongside his 1971 United States Open winner’s prize in a trophy case inside his Hilton Head Island, S.C., home. Smith had hoped to defend his title in ’73.
“I was playing the best tennis of my life,” said Smith, who had lost in the Wimbledon final in 1971 to John Newcombe in five sets and then went on to beat Ilie Nastase in the 1972 final, also in five sets. “Once you’ve won it you always want to win it again.”
But in 1973, Smith decided not to play. Instead, he and 80 other players voted to boycott the tournament just before the first matches in support of the player Nikola Pilic. Pilic had been barred from the tournament by the International Lawn Tennis Federation, now the I.T.F., the world governing body of tennis that runs all the Grand Slam tournaments, for refusing to play a Davis Cup match for his native Yugoslavia a month earlier. “It was really difficult,” said Smith in a phone interview.
This year, as the Women’s Tennis Association celebrates the momentous meeting at Wimbledon 50 years ago in which Billie Jean King encouraged her fellow players to form that organization, the Association of Tennis Professionals is also remembering a watershed moment in its own history. It was when its members banded together,…
