Tennis History | The Westbury, Mayfair — seven votes to one emptied the men's draw, June 1973

Two miles west of the Strand, in a Mayfair hotel that still trades under the same name, a board nine months old voted the best male players in the world out of Wimbledon.

The Association of Tennis Professionals had been formed during the 1972 US Open, with Cliff Drysdale as president and Jack Kramer as executive director.

It had never tested whether its members would actually do what it decided.

After the British High Court refused to lift Nikola Pilić's suspension, the ATP board met at the Westbury. Sports Illustrated, reporting on 2 July 1973, recorded the vote as seven to one with two abstentions, which puts ten votes in the room.

Accounts of the night differ. Sports Illustrated places the meeting on the night of the court ruling, and a 2023 Press Association retrospective places it on a Thursday night before the Friday draw, which would be later in the same week.

The decision was made public on 20 June, five days before the championships began.

What made it work was not the vote. Eighty-one members honoured it, including Stan Smith, who was defending the title.

What made the ATP an institution rather than a pressure group is the part that gets left out. Three members entered anyway, and the association fined all three.

Ilie Năstase, Roger Taylor and Ray Keldie played. Năstase appealed on the ground that the Romanian government and army had instructed him to, and lost.

A trade association that can fine its own best-known member is exercising authority, not asking for it.

From 1968 the federations had argued about who counted as an amateur and who as a professional. The question settled in this hotel was a different one, and it outlasted the first: who decides where a professional plays.

The answer after 1973 was increasingly the players themselves.

Venue note: Sports Illustrated names the Westbury without giving a city, and the 2023 Press Association account places it in Mayfair. The pin follows the two together. That account puts the meeting in the hotel basement; no source consulted names the room.

Coordinate: 51.511353, -0.142610, precision radius 100 metres. Two independent sources: the OpenStreetMap hotel feature at 51.511258, -0.142683, recorded there at 38 Conduit Street, and the Office for National Statistics centroid for postcode W1S 2YG at 51.511448, -0.142536, retrieved through postcodes.io. They are 23 metres apart, which on a single building on a narrow Mayfair street reads as agreement rather than one source copied from the other, since the ONS centroid derives from Ordnance Survey addressing and not from OpenStreetMap. The published pin is their midpoint.

Cover: the entrance of the Westbury Mayfair on Conduit Street, 6 May 2018. Photograph by Anthony O'Neil for Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The canopy and frontage are modern, and the photograph shows the hotel as it trades now rather than as it looked in 1973.