Pancho Gonzalez

Pancho Gonzales

Gonzales practicing in Australia in 1954
Full name	Ricardo Alonso González
Country (sports)	United States
Born	(1928-05-09)May 9, 1928 Los Angeles, CA, USA
Died	July 3, 1995(1995-07-03) (aged 67) Las Vegas, NV, USA
Height	1.88 m (6 ft 2 in)
Turned pro	1949
Retired	1974
Plays	Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Int. Tennis HoF	1968 (member page)
Singles
Career record	1205–540 (69.05%)
Career titles	105
Highest ranking	No. 1 (1952, Joe McCauley)
Grand Slam Singles results
Australian Open	3R (1969)
French Open	SF (1949, 1968)
Wimbledon	4R (1949, 1969)
US Open	W (1948, 1949)
Other tournaments
TOC	W (1956, 1957, 1958)
Professional majors
US Pro	W (1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961)
Wembley Pro	W (1950, 1951, 1952, 1956)
French Pro	F (1956, 1961)
Career record	43–30

Ricardo Alonso González (May 9, 1928 – July 3, 1995), also known as Richard Gonzales, and usually as Pancho Gonzales, was an American tennis player. He was the World No. 1 tennis player for an all-time record eight years from 1952 to 1960. He won 14 Major singles titles, including 12 Pro Slams and 2 Grand Slams.

Largely self-taught, Gonzales was a successful amateur player in the late 1940s, twice winning the United States Championships. He is still widely considered one of the greatest players in the history of the game. A 1999 Sports Illustrated article about the magazine's 20 "favorite athletes" of the 20th century said about Gonzales (their number 15 pick): "If earth was on the line in a tennis match, the man you want serving to save humankind would be Ricardo Alonso Gonzalez." The American tennis commentator Bud Collins echoed this in an August 2006 article for MSNBC.com: "If I had to choose someone to play for my life, it would be Pancho Gonzales."

Gonzales was given a 51-cent racquet by his mother when he was 12 years old. He received tennis analysis from his friend, Chuck Pate, but mostly taught himself to play by watching other players on the public courts at nearby Exposition Park in Los Angeles. Once he discovered tennis, he lost interest in school and began a troubled adolescence in which he was occasionally pursued by truant officers and policemen. He was befriended by Frank Poulain, the owner of the tennis shop at Exposition Park, and sometimes slept there.

Because of his school attendance and occasional minor brushes with the law, he was ostracized by the overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, and predominantly upper-class, tennis establishment of the 1940s. The headquarters for tennis activity was the Los Angeles Tennis Club, which actively trained other top players such as the youthful Jack Kramer. During that time, the head of the Southern California Tennis Association, and the most powerful man in California tennis was Perry T. Jones. Jones was not only the head of California tennis, but much of the country, because the favorable climate gave that region a head start in tennis. He was described as an autocratic leader who embodied much of the exclusionary sensibilities that governed tennis for decades. Although Gonzales was a promising junior, once Jones discovered that the youth was truant from school, Jones banned him from playing tournaments