22 new york | august 19–september 1, 2019
intelligencer1968—and why Seixas’s dream year
didn’t make him rich. Novak Djokovic
and Simona Halep each received
$2.9 million for winning Wimbledon
this year. When Seixas won, he got £25
to spend at a shop in Piccadilly Circus.
He bought a sweater.
“You could travel the world and live like
a king,” Seixas says from his Bay Area
apartment. “And you didn’t make any
money.” Seixas, who is now 95, looks and
sounds 15 years younger, deploying jokes
he’s been honing for decades: He is the
oldest living Grand Slam champ and the
oldest living member of the Tennis Hall of
Fame, but neither designation appeals to
him. “I’d rather be the youngest,” he says.
Seixas grew up in Philadelphia near a
local club where his father was “a medio-
cre club player.” Vic picked up a racket at
5 or 6, and when asked how long it took
for him to beat his dad, he says, “I think
about two weeks.” In 1940, at 17, he
played in his first U.S. Championship,
winning his opening match and going up
two sets to none against Frank Kovacs.
“Everybody said, ‘Who’s this kid from
Philly with a funny name who’s beating
Frank Kovacs?,’ ” says Seixas, which is
pronounced Say-shus. He blew the
match but played in the tournament a
remarkable 27 more times, winning the
singles title in 1954. (He missed two
years while stationed in New Guinea and
Tokyo during World War II.) Seixas
didn’t dominate like some of the era’s
more famous names—Pancho Gonzales,
Ken Rosewall, Althea Gibson—but he
played a scrappy serve-and-volley game
and covered the court with a Djokovician
athleticism that kept him near the top for
years: Roger Federer would need to play
ten more U.S. Opens—here’s hoping!—to
match Seixas’s nearly three decades of
appearances. “His game was a little bit
wristy, with this nice slice backhand, but
the thing I remember the most is how
well he moved,” says Stan Smith, the for-
mer world No. 1 and current sneaker
icon. Seixas beat Smith in Queens in
1966, when Smith was 19 and Seixas was
- (Years later, Seixas published a book
called Prime Time Tennis: Tennis for
Players Over 40.)
For Seixas’s generation, tennis was a
part-time job, and he spent much of his
time off the court learning his father’s
business—plumbing supplies—in prepa-
ration for one day taking it over. A hand-
ful of top players became pros, but just as
money started to flow into the game,
Sei xas’s body stopped keeping up. Toward
the end of his tennis career, he started
working as a stockbroker at Goldman
Sachs. He then got a job as the tennis
director at the Greenbrier, a luxury resort
in West Virginia, where he and Sam
Snead, the golf legend, were tasked with
traveling around to sales meetings and
drumming up business. (More recently,
Pete Sampras was the resort’s “Tennis Pro
Emeritus.”) Seixas says he was tapped to
be the head pro at the new Caesars Palace
in Atlantic City in the ’70s, but construc-
tion got delayed so he ended up at a hotel
in New Orleans instead.
Like many top athletes who played
before being good at sports meant
becoming rich, Seixas occasionally strug-
gled financially. In the late ’70s, when the
price of silver soared, he sold some of his
trophies for cash. (It didn’t help his
financial situation that he had divorced
his first wife to marry a tennis instructor
he hired at the Greenbrier, whom he also
later divorced.) Seixas moved to the Bay
Area in 1989, after his second divorce,
and got a job as the “morning bartender”
at a café, serving screwdrivers and mar-
tinis to anyone getting off the night shift
at 6 a.m. Most patrons didn’t know his
past, although one of his regulars spilled
the beans to a group of cops who came in
one summer morning while Seixas had
Wimbledon on the café’s TV.
Seixas still keeps up with the modern
game, and for years he came to the Open
even after moving to California, when
the tournament was an excuse to meet
up with his then-girlfriend, a former PanAm flight attendant living in Boston. But
Seixas is now largely confined to a wheel-
chair (he will turn 96 in the middle of this
year’s tournament), so traveling is diffi-
cult and he hasn’t been back to Queens
in years. He lives in an apartment next
to a tennis club in Marin County, where
he tended bar and taught tennis until
2005, when, in his early 80s, the physi-
cal strain ended both careers. “I’m very
lucky in that I have a great many wonder-
ful friends where I live,” Seixas says. “One
of them is on the line with us right now.”
He was referring to Terry McGovern,
a financial adviser to tech companies,
who befriended Seixas at the club.
Seixas, whose only daughter lives in
San Francisco, is in relatively good
health but needs a full-time caregiver,
so McGovern started a GoFundMe to
help cover his expenses. Thus far, 135
people had donated a total of $31,335,
with an additional $20,000 coming in
from other donors. Some of his bene-
factors remember seeing Seixas play in
Forest Hills, or Puerto Rico, or Austra-
lia, or on small black-and-white TVs
at home. Pam Shriver, a Tennis Hall of
Famer who is now a tennis commentator
for ESPN, met Seixas in the ’70s when
her coach took her to the Greenbrier for
a few training sessions. Shriver works
with the Women’s Tennis Association to
administer a “hardship fund” for players
who suffer financial setbacks, and she
donated to Seixas’s GoFundMe. “Some-
one like Vic, if they came along 30 years
later, would have been so comfortable,”
Shriver says. “Whether it’s golf, tennis,
or baseball, each sport has to figure out
how to take care of their pioneers. I don’t
think we do enough.”
Seixas isn’t one to gripe about his situ-
ation, and he’d recently gotten some
good news. At 95, he was offered his first
apparel deal. Last year, Stan Smith was
having dinner with the CEO of Adidas and
mentioned Seixas; the CEO liked the idea
of having a nonagenarian on the com-
pany’s roster and decided to make Seixas
its most elderly endorser. “I’m an ‘ambas-
sador,’ ” Seixas says. “I don’t know what an
ambassador does.” The deal isn’t quite the
$300 million Federer got from Uniqlo in
2018, but it’s more than Seixas ever made
for winning a tournament—$2,000 a
month for two years, with an option to
renew if Seixas is still kicking after that.
“The only reason it will stop is if Adidas
goes bankrupt or I die,” Seixas jokes.
Smith says there is no immediate plan
for Adidas to put out a signature Seixas
sneaker, at least for now: “That’ll have to
wait until he’s 100.” ■“You could travel
the world and
live like a king.
And you didn’t
make any money.”