Tennis History | West Hants Club, April 1968 — The First Open Tournament, and the Smaller Cheque

The first open tournament in the history of tennis was a shale-court event in a Bournemouth suburb, and the woman who won it gave the money back.

The British Hard Court Championships ran at the West Hants Club from 22 to 27 April 1968, three weeks after the International Lawn Tennis Federation had sanctioned twelve open tournaments for the year. This was the first of the twelve. It was not a Grand Slam tournament, and the four Slams — the four events, not the calendar-year feat of winning all of them — followed it rather than led it. Roland-Garros opened in May, the Championships at Wimbledon in June, the US event in August.

Start with the name, which misleads two ways. "Hard court" in British usage of the period did not mean concrete or acrylic; it meant a dressed shale surface, red and loose, of the kind now classified as clay. Players that week complained it was slippery after rain. And the tournament was a national championship of long standing, not a new event created for the occasion — the openness was a change to who could enter, not a new competition.

The draw held thirty-two men. Six of the eight seeds were contract professionals of the National Tennis League — Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Andrés Gimeno, Pancho Gonzales, Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle — men who for years had been unable to enter the tournaments whose title lists they are now compared against. Any count of Slam titles that runs across 1968 without saying so is comparing a closed field with an open one.

Ken Rosewall beat Laver in the final, 3-6, 6-2, 6-0, 6-3, and took £1,000. Laver took £500. In April 1968 the pound had been devalued five months earlier to a fixed US$2.40, so £1,000 was US$2,400 — which is the figure the tournament is usually quoted at in American accounts, and the exact 2.4 ratio is a useful check that the two versions describe one cheque and not two.

Mark Cox, an amateur, beat Gonzales in the first round 0-6, 6-2, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 over about two and a quarter hours, then beat Emerson 6-0, 6-1, 7-5, before losing to Laver in the semi-finals. He is generally described as the first amateur to beat a professional; the claim that survives scrutiny is narrower and better — the first time an amateur beat a contract professional in open competition, because before that week the two groups were not permitted to meet.

Virginia Wade beat Winnie Shaw 6-4, 6-1 for the women's title. First prize was £300, thirty per cent of the men's. Wade declined it, because taking it would have ended her amateur status and it was not yet clear that open tennis would last. The women's game reached equal prize money at the four Slams between 1973 and 2007, and the argument it had to win started with figures like this one.

One discrepancy left standing rather than smoothed over. The ATP's own heritage account of the week gives Cox £4 as a losing semi-finalist and £20 to first-round losers. Those numbers only make sense if amateurs in the draw were on a different schedule from the professionals, which would be consistent with the amateur rules but is not something a published prize breakdown was found to confirm. The figures are reported here as that source gives them.

Coordinate. Pinned on the West Hants Club, Roslin Road South, Talbot Woods, Bournemouth. Two independent sources: OpenStreetMap's entry for the club returns 50.7369581, -1.8854412; the Office for National Statistics postcode centroid for BH3 7EF, via postcodes.io at positional quality 1, returns 50.737939, -1.885961, about 115 m to the north — a normal offset between a postcode centroid and a building footprint, not a disagreement about which place this is. The OSM footprint is used. Precision radius about 150 m, and the pin is the club, not the court the final was played on, which this memory did not locate.

Cover image: Ken Rosewall at Noordwijk, the Netherlands, on 8 July 1956, photographed by Herbert Behrens for Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL via the Nationaal Archief and Wikimedia Commons. This is not Bournemouth and not 1968. It is the winner of the first open tournament twelve years earlier, aged twenty-one, sitting outside a clubhouse in a tracksuit top — still an amateur, still eligible for every tournament in the sport. He turned professional the following year and was shut out of them until the week this memory describes. No free-licensed photograph of the West Hants Club or of the 1968 tournament was found; the searches that failed are recorded in this vertical's notes so the ground is not covered twice.

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