Vilas, Guillermo

1970-1976

Guillermo Vilas has been playing for the Argentine national team in the Davis Cup since 1970 , when he was not yet 18 years old, but for the first time he seriously attracted attention outside Argentina, defeating the reigning champion Andres Jimeno in the second round of the French Open. He ended the season with a double victory - singles and doubles - in the South American Open . The following year, he won seven professional tournaments, ending the year with a victory in Melbourne at the Masters - the final tournament of the Grand Prix tour. Vilas’s victory at Masters is notable for the fact that the Argentinean, who preferred clay courts , rarely won on the grass during his career, but it was this Melbourne stadium that became happy for him - later he will win the Australian Open twice. At the group stage of the final tournament of 1974, Vilas defeated Björn Borg and John Newcomb , and in the final he defeated Ilie Nastase , who had won the Masters three times in a row, and in the traditional annual hierarchy of the newspaper Daily Telegraph took second place among the strongest tennis players in the world. He won four more doubles (three of them with Spaniard Manuel Orantes ).

In 1975, Vilas rose to second place in the world and in the official ATP ranking . After that, at the French Open, he first made it to the final of the Grand Slam tournament , but failed to confront the Borg. At the Wimbledon tournament , on the grass lawn he did not like, he reached the quarter finals, at the US Open and the next Masters draw - to the semifinals, and in five less prestigious tournaments he won five titles and lost twice in the finals. The following year, he had six titles and three defeats in the finals (including the Italian Open , where he lost in the final to the local star Adriano Panatte , and the final tournament of the WCT in Dallas , where he was defeated by the Borg), at the US Open and the Masters he reached the semi-finals, and at the French Open and Wimbledon - to the quarter-finals. This season, for the first time in four years, he did not win a single doubles tournament, but at the end of the year, Romanian veteran Ion Ciriak became his partner on the court and permanent coach.

1977-1979

Collaboration with Tsiriak the next year paid off. Together they won four tournaments, but Vilas achieved the main successes in singles. For a year, he set several records of the Open Era at once: he won 17 tournaments ^[1] , repeating the record of Rod Laver , won 145 matches in a year and held a win-win series of 46 matches in a row. These three records have not been broken so far. Another record set by Vilas in 1977 - 53 consecutive victories on clay courts - was broken almost 30 years later by Rafael Nadal . The 17 titles won by Vilas for the season included victories at the French and US Open Championships - both tournaments this year were held on the ground. After his winning streak of 46 matches was interrupted in the final of the tournament in Aix-en-Provence , where he refused to continue the match, losing the first two sets to Ilie Nastase, who played with a non-standard double-string racket (soon forbidden by APR rules), Vilas won another 28 games in a row - before losing to the Borg Masters semi-final. He became the highest paid tennis player in 1977, earning more than 800 thousand dollars, including a prize of 300 thousand dollars for the best performance in Grand Prix tournaments. Despite the outstanding result, Vilas, however, was not the clear leader of the season. This year, world tennis was led, along with it, by the Borg, who did not participate in the French Open, but won at Wimbledon, and in total won 13 tournaments with 92% of wins in a year (81 wins and 7 losses), and Jimmy Connors , Loser to Borg at Wimbledon, and Vilasu to the U.S. Open. As a result, Connors, having defeated Dick Stockton in the final tournament of the WCT in the first half of the season, and at the end of the Borg in the final of the Masters, retained the first line in the ATP ranking; Borg, who had previously counted both opponents in meetings for the season, took first place in the world in the Daily Telegraph ranking following the season; and Vilas became the first in the hierarchy compiled by World Tennis magazine ^[2] . Interestingly, in 2010, Filippo Radicchi, the author of an article in the online journal PLoS ONE , who performed a mathematical analysis of all the 1977 matches, came to the conclusion that Vilas was superior in terms of game to Connors, who officially finished the year in first place in the ranking ^[3] .

In 1978, Vilas won six tournaments - much less than in the previous season. Nevertheless, he reached the final of the French Open for the second time in a row, and then, at the turn of 1978 and the coming 1979, he successfully played in the Australian Open, having won his second career title in a major grass tournament. This victory took place at the same stadium where, four years earlier, Vilas won the Masters tournament. After that, in 1979, Vilas won four singles tournaments, including the second consecutive Australian Open, and lost five times in the final. In addition, in 1978 and in 1979, he won two titles in tandem with Cyriac.

1980-1983

In 1980 , in addition to Vilas, another player of a comparable level, Jose Luis Clerk, already appeared under the Argentine flag. The two Argentine leading players did not like each other, but performed shoulder to shoulder in international team tournaments. This collaboration included the co-play of left-hander Vilas and right-hander Clerk in doubles. Their cooperation bore fruit already in 1980, when the Argentine national team first defeated the US team in the Davis Cup inter-zone American final, and then won the Nations Cup in Dusseldorf , including defeating the teams of Czechoslovakia and Sweden. In the Davis Cup semifinal, however, the Czechs took revenge by defeating the Argentines 3-2. Vilas lost his match to the young Ivan Lendl , and then, together with the Clerk, he was unable to compete on equal terms with Lendl and Tomasz Schmid , and as a result, his final match was an empty formality. On an individual level, Vilas won only three titles, but played four more finals, including the prestigious dirt tournaments in Monte Carlo , Hamburg and Barcelona , reached the quarter finals at the French Open, and the semi-finals at the Australian Open.

In 1981, the Argentine national team achieved new success. Having defeated the teams of Germany , Romania and the UK , the Argentines for the first time in history reached the final of the Davis Cup. In the final, they again opposed the Americans and this time, on the carpet of Cincinnati , the US team did not allow the South Americans to prevail. Nevertheless, the fight was extremely sharp: even in the doubles game, where John Fleet and Peter Fleming , the best pair of the world, were confronted rarely by Vilas and Clerk, the Argentines had a chance of winning, losing only in the fifth set with a score of 11-9, and Vilas filed match-ball in the fifth set with a score of 7-6 in favor of the Argentine couple. On an individual level, Vilas’s success was similar to last year’s: he won only three tournaments and this time did not reach the last laps in Grand Slam tournaments, but he played seven more times in finals of a lower rank, including Monte Carlo and Barcelona.

1982 was more successful for Vilas on an individual level: he won seven tournaments and played five times in the finals, including the French Open, where he lost to the young and more hardy Mats Wilander . At the US Open and the final Masters tournament, he reached the semifinals, where he was stopped by Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, respectively, and finished the year in fourth place in the ATP ranking. The following year, however, was his last in the Top 10 of world tennis: he won only three tournaments and lost the same number of times in the finals, ending the season in 11th place in the ranking. In the Davis Cup, however, he flashed again, inflicting together with Clerk the third defeat in seven years of the US national team, which in addition to these two matches did not lose to anyone during this time, four times winning the main team trophy of the world ^[4] . The Argentines reached the semifinals, where they lost to the Swedish national team led by Mats Wilander.

Retirement

In 1984, Vilas spent his last match for the national team in the Davis Cup and helped the Argentine team beat the German national team. This season was the first in 12 years in which Vilas did not win a single tournament, and his best results were reaching the semifinals in Hamburg and Washington . In 1985, there was already one such entry into the semifinals - at the US Championship on clay courts in Boston . Nevertheless, Vilas remained a dangerous rival for tennis players of any level, which he proved this year by defeating the twelfth racket of the world Aaron Kriksteyna , and the next, when he reached the finals of the Grand Prix tournament in New York , defeating Joakim Nyustrem ranked eighth. In 1986, he also managed to reach the quarterfinals of the French Open.

The final in New York was the last for Vilas in the Grand Prix tournaments. However, he continued to play actively for several more years, only in 1989, having finally switched to tournaments of the Challenger series . He played in the Challengers until the age of 40 and finished his professional tournaments only at the end of 1992 , already in the rank of a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame , where he was introduced in 1991 - the first representative of South America.

Called "the bull from the pampas, " Guillermo Vilas had a powerful physique. On the court, he was distinguished by endurance and patience, exhausting opponents with his powerful and reliable game from the back line, sending one twisted ball after another with constancy, according to tennis historian Bud Collins , “a destructive metronome” ^[5] . Nevertheless, he did not neglect the game at the net, thanks to it, in particular, turning the tide of the final match of the 1977 US Open against Jimmy Connors.

Although on occasion Vilas could win on a grass lawn (in particular, having won 16 victories in a row in the Australian Open), the soil remained his favorite coating. He won almost 3/4 of his titles on clay courts. Moreover, he was not the absolute world leader on the ground - the balance of meetings on this surface between him and his two main rivals, Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg, was not in his favor, which is especially pronounced in the case of the Borg: on the clay courts, Vilas lost Borg had 11 matches, winning only two, while on other coverings the score was 6-3 in favor of Borg. Even in triumphant 1977, Vilas twice lost to Borg on the ground - in Nice and Monte Carlo ^[6] .

Singles (8)

Victories (4)

Lost (4)

1. ↑ January 1977

Singles (1)

Victory (1)

Singles (62)

Doubles (16)

Team Tournament Finals (2)

• Guillermo Vilas // Bud Collins' Tennis Encyclopedia / Bud Collins & Zander Hollander (Eds.). — Visible Ink Press, 1997. — P. 502—503. — ISBN 1-57859-007-8 .

• Profile on ATP website

• Profile on the Davis Cup website

• Гильермо Вилас на сайте Международного зала теннисной славы (англ.)