Manuel Santana did not hold the hallowed lawns of the All England Club in high regard. “Grass is for cows,” the tennis star sniffed. It was an opinion influenced by a succession of early-round exits and later echoed by many frustrated clay-court specialists, but one he came to revise after winning the Wimbledon men’s singles title in 1966, cementing his status as an icon in his native Spain and one of the top players in the last years of the amateur era.
Santana, the first Spaniard to win a Grand Slam tournament, also won at Roland-Garros in 1961 and 1964 and in 1965 at what is now called the US Open. His feats inspired a wave of enthusiasm for tennis in Spain, earning him the nickname “Supermanuel”.
After his Wimbledon victory The Times reported: “Schoolboys with battered racquets began overnight hitting tennis balls instead of kicking footballs on the concrete apron outside Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium.” A decade later, the number of courts and clubs under the auspices of the Spanish tennis federation had trebled.
The 28-year-old Santana, known as Manolo, ended an 11-year streak of American and Australian wins in the men’s singles at Wimbledon with a 6-4, 11-9, 6-4 victory over the American Dennis Ralston. Santana had become the favourite after the hotly tipped Australian Roy Emerson injured himself crashing into an umpire’s chair. He was the only Spanish man to claim the Wimbledon singles title until Rafael Nadal accomplished the feat in 2008 and again in 2010.
Resolving to beat the “Anglo-Saxons”, Santana trained hard to improve his grass-court game and reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 1963, losing to Fred Stolle of Australia. He led Spain past the US on clay in Barcelona to reach the nation’s first Davis Cup final in 1965 and was awarded a civilian honour by General Franco, who invited him to play on the court at his summer palace. Spain lost to Australia in the final, but joy among the Spaniards in the crowd when Santana beat Emerson in Sydney was so great that he suffered bruising as they carried him off the court on their shoulders in celebration.
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His 1965 victory at Forest Hills over the South African Cliff Drysdale was the first win by a European man in the US national championships since Fred Perry overcame Don Budge in 1936. Another Davis Cup final loss to Australia followed in 1967.
Santana was victorious in all four of his Grand Slam final appearances and won a demonstration tournament at the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968. “Manuel is so good under pressure it is a disadvantage to lead 40-0. You have a better chance leading 30-0 or 30-15. But 40-0 is very dangerous,” Torben Ulrich, the Danish former player, once said. Santana was also renowned for his control and power, as well as being credited with inventing the backhand topspin lob. Gordon Forbes, the writer and former player, observed in the Seventies that “Manuel selects his strokes like a surgeon selecting his instruments”.
Before the open era ushered in professionalism, Santana combined tournaments with an office job in Madrid, working as a brand ambassador for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Polite off the court, he was an effusive greeter. He cupped the cheeks of friends in his palms rather than shaking hands and kissed the royal hand of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, when she presented him with the Wimbledon trophy in 1966.
He had skipped the French Open and spent five weeks in England to prepare for the tournament. Later in the day he danced at the champions’ ball with Billie Jean King, the winner of the women’s singles, and Princess Margaret congratulated him, declaring his triumph “muy bueno”.
Hampered by an ankle injury, he was knocked out in the first round the following year, not that the upset dented his popularity. “No athlete in the world is so revered by his countrymen, and no defeat will alter that feeling,” asserted an article in Sports Illustrated. “He is, in fact, the nation’s leading hero by any measure, and by the personal decree of Generalissimo Franco, he is known as Ilustrísimo.”
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Manuel Santana Martínez was born in Madrid in 1938 and grew up in poverty in a building where a dozen families shared a bathroom. His father, Braulio, was an electrician who was imprisoned for fighting on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and died when Manuel was 16.
To support his mother, Mercedes, Manuel gave up school at age ten to become a ball boy at a tennis club and his talent for hitting balls as well as fetching them soon became clear. A family who belonged to the club took him under their wing and reintroduced him to schoolwork, and he became disciplined and determined to pursue a tennis career. Despite the disadvantage of his modest background in a then elitist sport, he won the Spanish championship in 1958 and joined a tennis team linked to the Real Madrid football club, wearing their shirt at Wimbledon. “These were difficult times in my country,” he recalled in 2008. “Tennis was only for a few, but I said to myself, ‘My God, this sport is perfect for the Spanish people because we are a very individualistic people’.”
Santana married regularly. Unions with María Fernanda González Dopeso, who ran a restaurant, Mila Ximénez, a writer and journalist, and Otti Glanzelius, a Swedish model, ended in divorce. In 2013 he married his fourth wife, Claudia Rodriguez, a South American 20 years his junior. His first marriage produced three children: Manuel, Borja and Beatriz, an actress and screenwriter. He also had a daughter, Alba, with his second wife, and another, Bárbara, from a relationship with Bárbara Oltra, a flight attendant.
After retirement from playing he captained the Spanish Davis Cup team from 1980 to 1985 and 1995 to 1999, ran a tennis club in Marbella and was tournament director of the Madrid Open. There he gave a then unknown Nadal a wild-card entry. “A thousand thanks for what you did for our country and for opening the way for others,” Nadal wrote on social media. “You were always my role model.”
Manuel Santana, tennis champion, was born on May 10, 1938. He died from heart failure on December 11, 2021, aged 83