Having jumped over the net to shake hands with his opponent after winning the Wimbledon singles title in 1953, Vic Seixas won a £25 certificate to spend at a shop in Piccadilly Circus. On a windy and overcast early July day the cheerful American duly bought himself a sweater. Seventy-one years later the British summer is depressingly familiar but this year’s Wimbledon singles champions will be picking up cheques for £2.7 million.
The oldest living grand slam singles champion before his death, Seixas looked back on that year as his annus mirabilis. Earlier that summer he had lost in the final of the French national championships (later the French Open) to 17-year-old Ken Rosewall. He moved on to Wimbledon a few weeks later as second seed, but travelled a perilous route to the final.
In the quarter-finals, playing the dynamic Australian Lew Hoad, Seixas was 0-40 down at 6-6 in the fifth before winning the set 9-7 and booking his place in the semi-final. Down by two sets to one and struggling in the fourth against the aggressive left-handed Australian Mervyn Rose, Seixas rallied to win in five.
Another formidable obstacle, his Paris nemesis Rosewall, had been removed by the Dane Kurt Nielsen, whom Seixas met in the final — which in the event was an anticlimax. Seixas was a sharp serve-volleyer, while Nielsen, he recalled, “stood way behind the baseline to receive serve, and I just felt there was no way I could lose to this guy because I could always get to the net in plenty of time and he would have a hard time passing me. And that is exactly what happened.” Seixas was the comfortable winner in straight sets, 9-7, 6-3, 6-4.
A year later Seixas won the United States championships (later the US Open), recovering from losing the first set of the final against yet another Australian, Rex Hartwig, but winning the next three. While he was never, by his own admission, the most talented player of his era, he was proud of the grit and determination that brought him two major titles.
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Of Portuguese Jewish ancestry, he was born Elias Victor Seixas, in Philadelphia, in 1923. His father, Victor, ran a plumbing business; his mother was Anna Victoria (née Moon). Seixas grew up in Philadelphia near a local club where his father was “a mediocre club player”. Vix started playing at the age of five and emerged as a child tennis star at William Penn Charter School.
His early career was interrupted by the Second World War, in which he served as a pilot in the US Army Air Forces. After the war he attended the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1949, by which time he had already made several appearances in the US National Championships. In 1951, ranked US No 1, he reached the final but lost to the Australian Frank Sedgman, 6-4, 6-1, 6-1. In 1952, Seixas lost in a five-set fourth round match at the US National Championships to Rosewall, and later in the year Ken McGregor beat him in the decisive last match of the Davis Cup final to retain the trophy for Australia.
By the 1954 Davis Cup final against Australia in Sydney, young Rosewall had beaten Seixas eight times in a row. Tony Trabert got the Americans off to a winning start by beating Lew Hoad before Seixas met Rosewall. Although he was 6ft 1in and exceptionally fit, Seixas did not have the best serve, while his ground strokes were seldom strong enough to put his opponent on the defensive. But when his spins and baseline strokes failed to take the edge off his rival’s game, he would break a cardinal rule by trying to get to the net behind his own less-than-forceful shots. So remarkable was his court coverage and reflexes as a volleyer, and such was his redoubtable spirit, that he could sometimes overcome an opponent possessing a superior repertoire of shots.
And so it was, by relentlessly pounding away at Rosewall’s one relative weakness, his forehand, that Seixas beat him in four sets. The Americans went on to win their doubles before a crowd of 25,000 and end Australia’s four-year hold on the trophy. Until John McEnroe beat his record, Seixas had played more Davis Cup matches than any American, winning 38 of his 55 Davis Cup singles and doubles clashes and captaining his country three times.
Seixas also chalked up 13 victories in doubles majors, including his 1952 US win with Mervyn Rose, the French championships in 1954 and 1955 and the Australian doubles title in 1955, all with his fellow Davis Cup victor, Tony Trabert. Seixas had even more success in mixed doubles with Doris Hart, claiming the French title in 1953, a hat-trick of US wins and four consecutive mixed doubles crowns at Wimbledon from 1953 to 1956, the first three with Hart and the fourth with Shirley Fry.
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He retired from full-time competition in 1957 after losing to his nemesis Rosewall 7-5 in the fifth set of the Wimbledon semi-final. Back in Philadelphia he became a stockbroker for Goldman Sachs, but in 1966, at the age of 43, he was still able to topple the 19-year-old future Wimbledon champion Stan Smith in a five-set match in New York. “His game was a little bit wristy, with this nice slice backhand, but the thing I remember the most is how well he moved,” recalled Smith, who would himself become world No 1.
Seixas wrote a book on tennis for the over-forties, and from the early Seventies worked as a director of tennis at resorts in West Virginia and New Orleans and was the prime mover in establishing a tennis programme at the Harbor Point Racquet and Beach Club in San Francisco.
He was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971 and in his fifties joined the professional Grand Masters circuit.
If the Open era had arrived earlier, Seixas would have been wealthy — “Gives you a sort of sick feeling”, he said cheerfully in 2005. Instead, divorce from his first wife, Dolly-Ann, whom he had married in 1949, took care of a large share of his modest earnings, while the end of his second marriage, to a tennis instructor, and paying child support for his daughter, Tori, accounted for much of the rest. His daughter survives him.
Nearing his eighties, living in a one-bedroom apartment at the Harbor Point club where 50 trophies in an antique cabinet filled one wall, the congenial Seixas found an unlikely new niche, as a barman, serving cocktails with a smile rather than tennis balls. “People ask, ‘Why are you bartending at this age?’ ” he said. “I like to eat. Bartending, you get pretty good tips.”
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Vic Seixas, tennis player, was born on August 30, 1923. He died on July 5, 2024, aged 100