Tennis History | Centre Court, August 1967 — The BBC Paid the Professionals First

For four days in August 1967 the All England Club let eight professionals play on Centre Court, and a television company paid them to do it.

The event ran from 25 to 28 August 1967: an eight-man singles draw and a four-team doubles draw, every entrant a professional. Most of them had won titles at the Championships as amateurs and had forfeited the right to enter the moment they were paid to play. Rod Laver won the singles. Andrés Gimeno and Pancho Gonzales took the doubles. More than thirty thousand people came.

It was not a tennis initiative. The BBC put up the money and wanted the tournament because BBC2 was launching colour television and needed something green, fast and continuous to launch it with. Bryan Cowgill, the corporation's man, proposed it to Herman David, the All England Club's chairman, who had been arguing for years that the amateur rule was a fiction. The prize fund was about US$45,000, of which US$35,000 was for the singles; Laver's share was £3,000, and the event was reported at the time as the richest in the sport's history.

The consequence came four months later. In December 1967 the Lawn Tennis Association voted to stop distinguishing between amateurs and professionals in British tournaments, including the Championships, and did it knowing the International Lawn Tennis Federation could expel Britain for it. The 1967 professional tournament is the reason that vote was winnable: the club had already seen the pros fill Centre Court and had already been paid for it.

Here is the figure that makes the point without any help. The Championships opened to professionals in 1968, running from 24 June to 6 July, with a total prize fund of £26,150. Laver won the men's singles and received £2,000. He had been paid £3,000 by a broadcaster for a four-day exhibition on the same court ten months earlier. Opening the tournament did not, in its first year, pay the best player in the world as well as television already had.

The women's champion in 1968, Billie Jean King, received £750 — 37.5 per cent of the men's figure. That gap is the starting point of a separate argument that took the four Grand Slam tournaments — meaning the four events, not the four-in-one-year feat — thirty-four years to finish settling.

A note on names, because it is the fastest way to spot an account nobody checked: this event is The Championships, Wimbledon. It is not, and has never been, the Wimbledon Open.

Coordinate. Pinned on the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club grounds, Church Road. Wikidata P625 gives 51.434494, -0.214447; the English Wikipedia article's own coordinate gives 51.43417, -0.21444, about 9 m to the south. Two readings of the same site that close confirm identity rather than raising a question. Precision radius about 120 m, covering the Centre Court structure rather than a point on the court itself.

Cover image: Centre Court photographed on 17 March 2016 by Paul Gillett, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph Britain and Ireland. This is deliberately an out-of-season picture and it is not the 1967 court. The grass is unmarked, there is no net, the seats are under green covers, and the retractable roof trusses overhead were not built until 2009. What it does show honestly is the shape of the bowl the professionals played in, and how ordinary a lawn looks with nothing on it.

Status note, 3 September 2026: this memory describes events of 1967 and 1968 and makes no claim about the present circumstances of anyone who took part.