TENIS

05/03/2023

The inventor of tennis It may be that at some point an Argentine tennis player can surpass Vilas in achievements. However, the legacy of the left-handed man from Mar del Plata will be unmatched, since his greatest success was to popularize a sport that was limited to an elite. From the Mar del Plata Yacht Club, Vilas contributed to an explosion in the sport that can be reflected in thousands of courts built and in the innumerable number of boys who grew up under his footsteps, with the goal of becoming professional tennis players. As much as the world ranking did not show it and even today I still fight for that recognition, Vilas was the best player on the planet between 1977 and 1978, when he won three of his four Grand Slam titles at Roland Garros, the US Open in Forest Hills and Australia. The following year he repeated in Australia. In total he lifted 62 trophies, to be in the top ten of tennis players with the most titles in history. In addition, he owns the best streak of consecutive wins, with 46 in 1997, a series cut by the Romanian Ilie Nastase with a double-strung racket, an element later prohibited by the regulations. In addition to a backhand to a book hand, Vilas left two other patented blows for posterity: the backhand smash, a blow that only the strength of his left arm and wrist could connect, and the "Big Willy", the impact on his back and between his legs that became an icon of his game.