Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans

Written by: Staff on 18th September 2016

Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans |

Editors Note -We pulled this From The Vault-

Thank you Jimmy Connors for reminding us of Vitas Birthday yesterday. He would have been 62 this year. Early retirement for him? Doubtful…. He was a busy guy 24/7.

If he was here we would have his fabulous sense of humor and tennis brilliance in the commentating Box and coaching the “puppies” and he’d probably be the “UN Official Mayor of Flushing or Brooklyn or Manhattan.”

He would probably play golf daily and he would still have that glorious mane of hair. His pops had his full beautiful head of hair. Wow imagine Vitas at 62…

He is missed by all that knew him and Loved him. Tennis was more fun when it had personalities like Vitas. Yes he was Wild but rarely in trouble and always helping others and doing clinics to get kids inspired. (LJ)

10sBalls_com editors note: Thanks to Brett and Jimmy Connors for reminding us and remembering VITAS. So we went thru our archives and found this great story on Vitas. Bravo Richard Evans for such a great piece.

Editors Note :

Brett Connors brought it to our attention that today would have been a big birthday for Vitas, he would be 60 years old.

“Geezer” our favorite old timer around here played same eastern section tennis and is the same age as Vitas. We heard all about how one year Vitas and a local talented New Yorker Steve Geller played the opening Exo @Madison Square Garden. I think they were 16. Vitas basically arrived big time then and there and never looked back. The life of the party. The best buddy. The guy who always had a smile. A kind word. A joke. Some even clean. But rarely. Vitas was “Broadway Vitas”.

To our buddy Brett Connors, Vitas was his favorite of his dads friends. They were buddies too.

Geezer bitched about turning 60…. ( A new age group awaits. 60 and over/ 30 and over was last tourney played ) Poor Vitas wasn’t as lucky. so many don’t realize how much tennis broadcasting needed his personality. The sport needed it. The world needs more people like him. He loved life. It was short. But it was sweet.

“He’s a One Off.” It’s said about many people with varying degrees of accuracy. But if you spent any time in the company of Vitas Gerulaitis, it did not take long for you to realize that he was an original. Not just the hair and the name and the talent. It was the hyper, funny, intense, smart, super-charged personality that swept you up and carried you off – frequently into a night of non-stop revelry, bouncing from club to club across Manhattan or Paris or LA.

Sometimes fueled by substances he shouldn‘t have been using, Vitas had more vitality and energy and enthusiasm for life than just about anyone I have known. And that went for the player on court as well as the man off court.

After playing one of the greatest matches in Wimbledon history against his great pal Bjorn Borg in the 1977 semi-final, some of us repaired to Tramp, London’s legendary discotheque. I gave up at 4.00 am. The man who had just spent hours on the Centre Court was still on the dance floor. He was the flame to which we moths gravitated and if the gravitational pull worked best on pretty girls, that was fine by him. In truth he probably had fewer flings than a lot of the players of that era.

His great love and fiancée for three years, Janet Jones, ended up marrying Wayne Gretsky and there was always the hint of the party man who went home alone. Capable of great introspection beneath the Broadway Vitas public persona, he tried to come to terms with an addictive personality that helped him thrive at tennis in his pomp and, later, work hard to become a good golfer. But socially it led him into temptation.

He survived largely through the indulgence of his friends, a network of true pals and hangers-on who were always there to do his bidding and, occasionally, even take the heat if the law started asking too many questions. His life was the stuff on which novels and movie scripts are made and we actually talked about writing a novel based on his life and exploits.

It was over a dinner at an airport hotel in Zurich, I seem to remember, that we sat down to map out a story line – a session that continued in his suite at the Plaza Athenee in Paris. The leap from two star to five star accommodation was typical of the tour in those days and sort of mirrored his life. With his Lithuanian heritage and Queens upbringing, he learned on his feet and moved easily through all stratas of society, knowing exactly how to operate. Concierges, like those at the Plaza Athenee who sprang to attention when he swept into the lobby, bellhops and maître d’s were the foot soldiers he sent out foraging for him to find whatever was necessary to make the night good.

And the nights were often very good. And very long. But, amazingly, they did not seem to take a terrible toll on how he trained or how he played. Fred Stolle, who was his coach during the period that saw Vitas win the Italian title in Rome, did not attempt to keep up with Vitas during the nocturnal hours, except for the occasional dinner, and never found the need to ask questions.

“Whatever he got up to, he was never late for training the next morning,” Stolle told me recently. “He’d work as hard as he needed to work and if he’d been able to produce his practice form at big moments in matches he would he would have won a lot more titles. (25 in all). He’d hit 200 perfect serves in practice and then go into a match and not be able to get his second ball in court. The muscle memory kicked in and failed him.”

That was true in a fateful moment that sticks in my mind when Vitas had match point against Ivan Lendl in the 1981 Masters at Madison Square Garden. He and Fred had practiced the chip and charge tactics that suited his fleet-footed game so well a thousand times and he had been doing it effectively against Lendl. Lendl was serving at 5-6 in the breaker, two sets down. Ivan missed his first serve and Vitas took a step forward. As he played the return on the backhand he moved forward again, poised from three feet inside his baseline to charge the net; to follow the route that had got him into that winning position; to force Lendl to pass him at match point down. And then something inside the Gerulaitis brain hit the panic button and he took two steps back. Lendl’s eyes lit up and after cracking a forehand, he put away the smash, grabbed the breaker 8-6 and won in five.

It wasn’t always that way with Vitas. He knew how to win and did so when he seized his only Grand Slam singles title at the Australian Open in 1977, beating Britain’s John Lloyd 6-2 in the fifth set. A year later he won the prestigious WCT Finals in Dallas and won decisive rubbers for the winning US Davis Cup team in 1979. He had to win big matches as well to get to the US Open final in ’79, losing to his New York buddy John McEnroe and at the French Open the following year when, inevitably, Borg dictated the outcome.

But he probably never played better than in that 1977 Wimbledon semi-final. People who saw it are still in awe of the speed and quality of a duel between two players who remain amongst the fastest ever to play the game. They anticipated the other man’s shots so frequently that rallies studded with impossible gets became common place. There were 132 clean winners in the match and Vitas hit 74 of them to Bjorn’s 58. When it was all over this stat stood out: Borg had won 177 points and Gerulaitis 176.

Apart from his family, the three people who had the biggest impact on Gerulaitis, primarily but not exclusively, as a tennis player were Gene Scott, Harry Hopman and Fred Stolle. Fred, as we have seen, helped Vitas to some of his greatest triumphs and when he came off court at the Foro Italico clutching that Italian title, he said, “I owe it to you coach.”

Much earlier in his career, he had trained at the Port Washington Academy where Hopman, the legendary Australian Davis Cup captain, had taken up residence. McEnroe was another pupil and Hop obviously made a huge impact on the rambunctious youngsters. As you can imagine, Vitas was not a man who doffed his cap to many people but such was the respect in which he held Hopman that I never heard him to refer to the Australian as anything other than Mr Hopman. Amazingly that went for McEnroe, too.

Gene Scott, the publisher of Tennis Week and Forest Hills semi-finalist, first came across Gerulaitis driving to the Meadows Club on Long Island when the blond teenager, out for a jog, emerged from the mist like some ethereal creature. Scott soon became a mentor on and off the court and it was he, in September 1994 — less than two weeks after I had seen Gerulaitis at the US Open — who called me in France to say, “Vitas is dead.”

Like so many other people, I jumped to the entirely erroneous conclusion that Vitas had died of an overdose. In fact, he had opted to stay in the pool house of one of his greatest friends at Southampton so that he could watch some golf on television. The maid brought him a sandwich and left before feeling the effects of the Carbon Monoxide gas that was being sucked into the room by the air conditioners from the water heater attached to the swimming pool. It was odorless and deadly. Vitas died before he touched the sandwich. At the enquiry it was revealed that an extra length of pipe, costing $1.44, would have diverted the gas away from the guest house and saved Vitas’ life.

So Vitas Gerulaitis blazed across the tennis firmament like some shooting star for 40 short but unforgettable years. He had tasted much of what life has to offer; played a difficult game extremely well and made a lot of people laugh. It was a life we should have written but, in the end, we never had the chance.

Jimmy & Brett Connors on Vitas Gerulaitis:

____

Topics: Bjorn Borg, Fred Stolle, Gene Scott, Harry Hopman, Ivan Lendl, John Lloyd, Sports, Tennis News, Vitas Gerulaitis, Wayne Gretzky

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10sBalls.com says:

June 9, 2013 at 11:00 am

Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans – https://archive.10sballs.com/?p=88004
Brett_Connors says:

June 9, 2013 at 10:54 pm

Good article on my friend Vitas Gerulaitis. #tennis #legend #PutHiminTheHallofFame http://t.co/tNHeTDIv7e
USAcracker says:

June 9, 2013 at 11:13 pm

RT @Brett_Connors: Good article on my friend Vitas Gerulaitis. #tennis #legend #PutHiminTheHallofFame http://t.co/tNHeTDIv7e
10sBalls_com says:

July 26, 2014 at 2:39 pm

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10sBalls_com says:

August 30, 2014 at 1:03 pm

Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans- http://t.co/vi7RO5ZX0i #tennis #VitasGerulaitis
Ringham7 says:

August 30, 2014 at 1:42 pm

@10sBalls_com Appropriate timing for a re-post of a story I did on a man who was so much part of @USOpen — the one & only Vitas Gerulaitis
10sBalls_com says:

September 17, 2014 at 8:13 am

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ParentingAces says:

September 17, 2014 at 8:15 am

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HELENLANGLEY3 says:

June 5, 2015 at 10:39 pm

“@TennisNewsOne: Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans http://t.co/Ed0bgrx5HD #tennis”One of my absolute heroes as a child.
RayBundell says:

June 5, 2015 at 11:05 pm

RT @HELENLANGLEY3: “@TennisNewsOne: Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans http://t.co/Ed0bgrx5HD #tennis”One of my absolute heroes as a child.
AndresGomezGogo says:

June 6, 2015 at 1:38 am

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10sBalls_com says:

September 17, 2015 at 9:34 pm

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10sBalls_com says:

September 18, 2016 at 11:35 am

RT @10sBalls_com: Vitas Gerulaitis by Richard Evans
https://t.co/vi7RO5ZX0i

@Ringham7 @10sBalls_com #VitasGerulaitis #Tennis https://t.co/…