In 1967 the best tennis player in the world could not compete at Wimbledon. Not because he was injured, not because he had failed to qualify, and not because of any competitive inadequacy.
Rod Laver — the reigning world number one, a multiple Grand Slam champion, and by any reasonable measure the finest player of his generation — was barred from competing at the sport’s most prestigious tournament because he was being paid to play tennis.
That prohibition — the rule that excluded professional players from the Grand Slams and all other major amateur events — was the central absurdity of the system that governed professional tennis for the first seven decades of its organized existence.
It was a system that simultaneously celebrated excellence and punished success, that maintained an ideological commitment to amateurism while tolerating widespread financial corruption beneath that ideological surface, and that excluded from its most important competitions the very players whose presence would have made those competitions most meaningful.
The story of how that system was dismantled — how professional tennis became open — is one of the most consequential institutional transformations in the history of sport. It changed who could compete, how players were compensated, what tournaments meant, and ultimately what professional tennis became. Understanding it is essential for understanding the sport as it exists today.
The Amateur Ideal and Its Origins
To understand why the Open Era was necessary, it is essential to understand what it replaced — and why the system it replaced existed in the first place.
The amateur ideal in sport was a product of Victorian England’s class system. In the mid-nineteenth century, the English sporting establishment drew a sharp distinction between gentlemen amateurs — educated, wealthy men who played sport for its own sake, without financial reward — and professionals, who competed for money and were associated with the working class.
This distinction was not simply about money. It was about social status, moral character, and the belief that sport played for financial reward was somehow corrupted — less pure, less honorable, and less admirable than sport played purely for the love of competition.
Tennis, which emerged as an organized sport in the 1870s from exactly the social milieu that produced this ideology, absorbed the amateur ideal from the beginning. The All England Club’s first Wimbledon championship offered no prize money — only a trophy.
The sport’s early governing bodies wrote amateur regulations into their constitutions. And the social world in which lawn tennis first flourished — the private clubs, the country house lawns, the university athletic associations — was precisely the world in which the amateur ideal was most fervently held.
The amateur framework served real purposes in the early decades of tennis’s development. It maintained the sport’s association with social respectability. It prevented the commercial exploitation of the sport’s competitive structure by external promoters. And it ensured that the governing bodies — which were run by volunteers from the sport’s social elite — retained control over a sport that might otherwise have been captured by commercial interests.
What the amateur framework could not survive was the sport’s own growth into a genuinely popular entertainment product with genuine commercial value. As tennis attracted larger audiences, generated greater media interest, and produced players whose competitive excellence was worth paying to watch, the contradiction between the amateur ideal and the commercial reality became progressively more difficult to maintain.
The Rise of Professional Tennis
Professional tennis — players competing for money outside the amateur tournament structure — existed long before the Open Era, and its history illuminates both the limitations of the amateur system and the commercial appetite for professional competition that eventually made the Open Era inevitable.
The first professional tennis tours were organized in the 1920s, built around exhibition matches between players who had turned professional after their amateur careers. The model was borrowed from professional boxing and baseball — a promoter would sign the world’s top amateur player, guarantee them a salary, and organize a tour of exhibition matches against other professionals in cities across the United States and Europe.
The first major star to turn professional was Vincent Richards in 1926, followed by the era’s dominant figure, Bill Tilden, in 1931. Tilden’s professionalism was controversial precisely because of his status — the greatest player of the 1920s, a multiple Wimbledon and US champion, the sport’s first genuine celebrity.
His decision to accept money for playing tennis was treated by the amateur establishment as a betrayal of the sport’s values. It was, in fact, a rational economic decision by a player who had been the sport’s most valuable competitive asset for a decade and was finally being compensated for that value.
The professional tours of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s operated as a parallel circuit entirely separate from the amateur Grand Slams and national championships. Professional players — who by this period included most of the world’s best players, since the best players invariably attracted professional offers after their amateur careers peaked — competed against each other in tours that had no formal relationship to the amateur establishment.
The business model was inherently unstable. Without the prestige and institutional support of the Grand Slams, professional tours depended entirely on the drawing power of their biggest names.
When a new star emerged from the amateur ranks, the professional tours signed them and the previous star’s drawing power diminished. The business was constantly chasing the next great amateur talent, signing them, and watching the previous signing’s commercial value decline.
Shamateurism: The System’s Hidden Corruption
While the amateur establishment maintained its ideological commitment to unpaid competition, the practical reality beneath that ideological surface was one of systematic financial corruption that had a specific name: shamateurism.
Shamateurism — a portmanteau of sham and amateurism — described the widespread practice of nominally amateur players receiving under-the-table payments, inflated expense reimbursements, and other financial arrangements that technically complied with amateur regulations while comprehensively violating their spirit.
Tournament organizers paid appearance fees to star players disguised as travel expenses. National associations provided financial support to their top players through arrangements that were not classified as payment. Players received gifts, accommodations, and other benefits that had clear financial value but were not formally recorded as compensation.
The practice was universal at the higher levels of amateur tennis by the 1950s and 1960s. Everyone involved — the players, the tournament organizers, the national associations, and the international governing bodies — knew that the amateur system as publicly described was not the amateur system as actually practiced.
The fiction was maintained because it served the interests of the governing bodies, who retained control over the sport through the amateur framework, and because no individual player or organization had sufficient incentive to challenge it publicly.
The moral absurdity of the system was transparent. Amateur players were being paid for competing in a sport that prohibited payment. The prohibition was maintained as a public commitment to values that the sport’s own institutions were violating in private.
And the best players — those whose competitive excellence generated the most commercial value — were being paid the most while the ideological framework insisted they were being paid nothing.
Rod Laver and the Cost of Professionalism
The human cost of the amateur-professional divide was illustrated most dramatically by the career of Rod Laver — the Australian left-hander who was the dominant player of his era and who paid the highest competitive price for the system’s contradictions.
Laver won the amateur Grand Slam in 1962 — all four major championships in a single calendar year — establishing himself beyond any reasonable doubt as the best player in the world. Having achieved that level of success, he received and accepted a professional offer, as virtually every top player of the era did when their amateur credentials were fully established.
The professional offer represented financial security. Turning it down would have been economically irrational.The consequences were immediate and severe. By turning professional, Laver became ineligible to compete at any Grand Slam tournament.
The player who had just won all four majors in a single year was barred from defending his titles, from competing at Wimbledon or the French Open or the Australian Open or the US Championships, from any of the events that constituted the highest level of competitive tennis.
Laver spent six years competing on the professional circuit — winning consistently, maintaining his status as the world’s best player, and watching the amateur Grand Slams without being able to participate in them. The events that defined tennis’s competitive hierarchy were being contested without their most important competitor.
When the Open Era began in 1968 and Laver was finally able to return to Grand Slam competition, he was twenty-nine years old. He had missed six years of Grand Slam competition at the peak of his powers. He won the Open Era Grand Slam in 1969 — all four majors in a single calendar year, for the second time — but the titles lost to his professional exile can never be recovered. The system’s cost, measured in Laver’s career, was six Grand Slams he should have been able to contest and almost certainly would have won.
The Pressures That Built Toward Change
The movement toward the Open Era was not driven by a single cause or a single moment. It was the product of multiple converging pressures that made the amateur system progressively more difficult to maintain through the 1950s and 1960s.
The quality gap. By the early 1960s, the professional circuit contained virtually all of the world’s best players — Laver, Ken Rosewall, Lew Hoad, Pancho Gonzales, and others had all turned professional after their amateur peaks. The Grand Slams, theoretically the sport’s most important events, were being won by players who were demonstrably not the world’s best. The competitive integrity of the amateur Grand Slams was increasingly fictional.
Television
The growth of sports television in the 1950s and 1960s created commercial pressure for high-quality professional competition that the amateur system could not provide. Broadcasters wanted the best players.
The best players were professionals who could not compete in the televised Grand Slams. The mismatch between television’s commercial requirements and the amateur structure’s competitive restrictions was becoming economically unsustainable.
The financial reality
The amateur system’s financial hypocrisy — widespread under-the-table payments that everyone knew about and nobody acknowledged — was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as journalism about sports became more financially sophisticated. The gap between the official fiction of amateurism and the practical reality of payment was too large to be indefinitely sustained.
Player advocacy
Players themselves — most vocally Jack Kramer, who had turned professional in 1947 and become the most prominent promoter of professional tennis — were increasingly organized in their advocacy for an open system.
Kramer’s argument was straightforward: if the best players in the world were professionals, and the Grand Slams excluded professionals, then the Grand Slams were not actually the most important events in the sport. The open system was the only logical conclusion.
Britain Moves First
The decisive institutional move toward the Open Era came from an unexpected direction — the British Lawn Tennis Association, which announced in December 1967 that Wimbledon would be open to professional players beginning in 1968.
The British decision was driven by a combination of competitive integrity concerns and institutional frustration with the International Lawn Tennis Federation’s refusal to address the amateur-professional divide.
Herman David, the chairman of the All England Club, had been publicly critical of the amateur system for years, arguing that Wimbledon’s status as the world’s most prestigious tournament was undermined by its inability to field the world’s best players. His advocacy for an open Wimbledon was the most prominent institutional voice for change in the sport’s establishment.
The British move created immediate pressure on the other Grand Slams and the international federation. The ILTF — which had resisted open tennis for years — was forced to respond when the sport’s most historically significant institution declared its intention to proceed with or without federation approval.
An emergency meeting of the ILTF in March 1968 voted to allow national associations to sanction open tournaments, effectively authorizing the Open Era.
The 1968 French Open — held in May and June of that year — became the first Open Era Grand Slam. The field included both professionals and amateurs competing together for prize money for the first time. Ken Rosewall, competing in his first Grand Slam since turning professional fourteen years earlier, reached the final before losing to Ken Rosewall — the symbolism of the sport’s returning exiles was immediately visible in the results.
The first Open Era Wimbledon in 1968 was won by Rod Laver — his first Grand Slam title since 1962, and the beginning of the run that would culminate in his second calendar Grand Slam in 1969. The sport’s greatest active player competing at its most prestigious tournament for the first time in six years was the Open Era’s inaugural symbolic statement.
The First Open Era: Organizational Turbulence
The transition to the Open Era was not administratively smooth. The decision to allow open competition was taken before the organizational structures necessary to support it were in place, and the early years of the Open Era were characterized by significant conflict between different institutions with competing interests.
The amateur national associations and the ILTF retained control over the Grand Slams and the international team competitions. The professional tours, which had operated independently for decades, had their own organizational structures and commercial arrangements. The players — who had formed the ATP in 1972 to represent their collective interests — added a third institutional voice to a conversation that was already complex.
The ATP’s founding was itself a product of Open Era tensions. The professional players who were now competing in Grand Slams found that the transition to open competition had not resolved the fundamental question of who governed the sport and in whose interests.
The amateur establishment retained control over the most prestigious events while professional players provided the competitive quality that made those events commercially valuable. The ATP was formed precisely to address this imbalance — to give players a collective voice in the governance decisions that affected their careers and livelihoods.
The 1973 Wimbledon boycott — organized by the ATP in response to the suspension of Nikola Pilić by the Yugoslav tennis federation — was the first major demonstration of player power in the Open Era. Eighty-one of the world’s top players withdrew from Wimbledon that year, leaving the tournament without most of its best competitors.
The boycott was both a specific protest and a broader assertion of player authority — a statement that the players whose competitive quality made Wimbledon commercially valuable were not simply assets to be managed by the sport’s governing bodies.
The Open Era’s Commercial Transformation
The immediate competitive consequence of the Open Era — the world’s best players competing at the sport’s most prestigious events — was matched by a commercial transformation that changed the financial structure of professional tennis entirely.
Prize money at the Grand Slams grew rapidly from the modest amounts of the early Open Era. The US Open offered $100,000 in total prize money in 1968 — a significant sum by the standards of the amateur era but modest by what would follow.
By the 1980s Grand Slam prize money had reached millions of dollars. Today the four Grand Slams collectively offer prize money measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Television rights fees — the primary commercial driver of prize money growth — expanded as the Open Era established the competitive quality that broadcasters required. With the world’s best players competing at the Grand Slams, the events became commercially viable television products in a way that the amateur Grand Slams — which excluded most of the world’s best players — had never been.
Sponsorship followed television. The commercial infrastructure of modern professional tennis — the apparel deals, the equipment contracts, the title sponsorships, the courtside advertising — was built on the foundation that the Open Era created. Without open competition, the commercial scale of modern professional tennis would have been impossible to develop.
What the Open Era Made Possible
The Open Era’s most important consequence was not any specific competitive result or commercial development. It was the creation of conditions in which the sport’s competitive history could be written coherently — in which the records of the greatest players could be compared across a single unified competitive framework rather than across the fragmented parallel structures of the amateur era.
Roger Federer’s twenty Grand Slam titles, Rafael Nadal’s twenty-two, Novak Djokovic’s twenty-four — these records are Open Era records, achieved in competition that included the world’s best players across the full breadth of the professional game. They can be compared to each other meaningfully because they were achieved within the same competitive framework.
The amateur era’s records — Don Budge’s Grand Slam, Rod Laver’s amateur titles, the achievements of players who competed before 1968 — are genuinely impressive but incomparably different.
They were achieved in a system that excluded professional players from the most important events, that operated under financial rules honored more in the breach than the observance, and that reflected an ideology about sport and money that the Open Era decisively rejected.
The Open Era is, in this sense, the foundation of everything that professional tennis is today. Not simply because it allowed the best players to compete at the best events — though it did that. But because it established the principle that competitive excellence and financial compensation are compatible, that the sport’s greatest events should be contested by its greatest players, and that the artificial separation of those two things was an institutional failure rather than a sporting virtue.
That principle, established in 1968, is the foundation on which everything in modern professional tennis has been built.
The Open Era at Nearly Sixty Years
The Open Era will reach its sixtieth anniversary in 2028 — a milestone that will invite reflection on what the transformation it represented has produced. The professional game that exists today is almost unrecognizable from the amateur tennis of 1967 in commercial scale, global reach, financial structure, and competitive depth.
The transformation has not been without costs — the organizational tensions, the commercial pressures, and the player welfare challenges examined elsewhere in this series are all products of the same forces that the Open Era unleashed.
But the fundamental judgment is clear. A sport in which the world’s best players can compete at the world’s most important events, be fairly compensated for their excellence, and have their achievements recorded in a coherent competitive history is a better sport than the one it replaced. The Open Era created that sport. Everything else followed from there.
Part of the Tennis History series. Previous: The History of the Grand Slams — How the Four Majors Were Founded. Next: The History of the ATP and WTA — How the Professional Tours Were Built.
