Guillermo Vilas He began his professional tennis career back in 1969. But it was at the age of 22, closer to 1974, that the man from Mar del Plata began to rub shoulders with the best in the world and write his last name in the highest echelons of the ranking. In 1975 he reached his first Grand Slam final, at Roland Garros (lost to Bjorn Borg 6-2, 6-3, 6-4) and reached 2nd place. And it was in that same year, months later, when, through meticulous investigations and years of analysis, it can be said that Guillermo Vilas reached the top of ranking ATP. In reality, the association never confirmed it. It is the conclusion of a long work led by Eduardo Puppo, an Argentine journalist who became obsessed with proving that Great Willy had been the best tennis player in the world. But did he achieve it? And what did the ATP about?
In 1975 and 1976 Guillermo Vilas He was already one of the best tennis players in the world. Along with Illie Nastase, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, among others, the left-hander animated the tennis circuit on a par with the legends. But it was in 1977 when he dominated tennis from beginning to end. That year, Vilas He won 16 titles, a record that to this day no one in history has surpassed. He remained undefeated in 46 matches on all surfaces, a period in which he was champion six consecutive times; another record that neither Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, nor anyone else has been able to surpass. And he won two of the four Grand Slams of the season (Roland Garros and the US Open), in addition to losing the final of the Australian Open against Roscoe Tanner. And another detail: he won 136 games, more than any player in history in a calendar year. Precisely for all this it is incredible to accept that a player who has won more matches on clay than Nadal himself has not been No. 1 in the world. But the surprise is double, because he didn’t deserve to have been in 1977 either.
Vilas won 681 matches on clay; Nadal, 478. (Photo: Argentine Sports Confederation)
The investigation that changed history?
Own Vilasdecades after his retirement and obsessed with the fact that the ATP recognized him as number 1, he had already asked the entity to reconstruct the ranking (which had become official in 1990) from the previous years, that is, from the 70s, which was important to him. But they had given him little attention and had never fulfilled his wish. Although Vilas I wouldn’t fight this battle alone. In 2007, an event occurred that both excited and angered the people from Mar del Plata. The WTA, the governing body of women’s tennis, recognized an error in its scoring system and accepted, more than thirty years later, that the Australian Evonne Goolagong had been number 1 in 1976, for two weeks. “Why does she and I don’t?” Willy must have thought. As a result of that news and the emphatic request of the protagonist of this story, an Argentine journalist specialized in tennis, Eduardo Puppo, began an investigation of more than a decade whose purpose was to corroborate that Vilas deserved to have been the best in the ranking.
Puppo teamed up with a Romanian mathematician named Marian Ciulpan and together they began to review each and every game of Vilas in a period that went from 1973 to 1978. And those of its competitors: the results of Arthur Ashe, Connors, Borg, etc. And after an investigation of 16 years, 22,545 matches, 542 tournaments, 1,100 pages and 1,200 tests they concluded that indeed, yes, Guillermo Vilas He had reached first place in the ATP ranking. But not in 1977, as anyone would have thought, but in September 1975. Why? And why the ATP never said it? Numerous irregularities must be mentioned and the fact that, at that time, the accounting system was more rustic, untidy and less attended to.
Vilas and Eduardo Puppo, the person responsible for the discovery. (Photo: @puppotenis)
The thing is that the ATP ranking was not official until 1990 and the ITF ranking (which was the one taken into account until 1990), was created in 1978. A year after the rise of Guillermo Vilas. For this reason, during the 1970s there were several weeks in which positions were not published with proper updates. Between September and October 1975, for example, there was a period of 43 days without news in which, as Puppo and Ciulpan confirmed, Vilas It was No. 1. But, in the records, the first place continued to belong to Jimmy Connors. On the other hand, at that time there were three parallel circuits that gave different amounts of points to the ranking. While Vilas prioritized the Grand Prix, Connors competed more in World Championship Tennis or World Team Tennis; nuances that could not be conceived today. Furthermore, the scoring system privileged the percentage between games won and those played and not the number of successes itself, as is currently the case. That is to say, Vilas was a victim of having played more and that is why he was not number 1 either in 1977. He won 16 of 28 tournaments and Connors, 7 of 15. But the ratio in their duels of 59.80 for the American against that of 57.50 for the Argentine weighed , for the ATPmore than the titles.
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The result of Puppo’s long work, which was crystallized in the Netflix series Vilas: you will be what you should be or you will be nothingwas sent to the ATP, with the hope that the entity chaired by Andrea Gaudenzi would finally address the claim. But again, the answer was negative. “You can’t change history,” they argued. The fight that can no longer be fought today Vilas and its devotees continue, it is still standing and has more than solid arguments for the ATP, someday, accept the undeniable. He is the best Latin American tennis player in history, although the Chilean Marcelo Ríos and the Brazilian Gustavo Kuerten have been, less controversially, the best in the classification in their respective eras. But, for now, Argentine tennis will have to continue to accept that, officially, Guillermo Vilas has been “only” number 2 in the world. It is insisted… for now. “Vilas He was number one in the world and it is proven. We estimate that the resolution has to come out this year. After seven years of comings and goings with the ATP, we believe it will be this year,” said Puppo in 2023, after a new attempt. And hope is the last thing that is lost.