The American Invasion

Fifty years ago this summer, Open tennis came to Wimbledon, and the sport changed hands for good

- Stephen Tignor

In the summer of 1968, Abe Segal drove to London’s Heathrow Airport to pick up friends from his native South Africa. Big Abie, as he was known, had been one of the most flamboyant characters on tennis’ amateur circuit, and at 37 he had lost none of his irreverent joie de vivre. He showed up in a Rolls Royce and greeted his compatriots, as one of them recalled, “wearing a pair of pink trousers and the kind of wide eternal grin which suggests champagne for lunch and the prospect of a thousand hearty laughs.”

Segal, in truth, was only keeping up with the times, and the place. This was the Swinging London of the late-’60s, home to mods, miniskirts and supermodels; hippies, gurus, the Beatles and the Stones. During that decade, as post-war austerity gave way to baby-boom hedonism, England’s capital had undergone a metamorphosis. The land of Churchill was now the land of Twiggy.

“Place has gone mad,” Segal said, climbing back into the Rolls.

Segal gave his friends a taste of the delirium in London’s streets, which were drenched in psychedelic hues and blaring acid-rock. While other Western cities had been rocked by rebellions that summer, London was having a party—the Youthquake, it was called. The song that topped England’s charts in June wasn’t a protest anthem; it was the Rolling Stones’ pulverizing hymn to liberation, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Mick Jagger’s exuberant howl—It’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas—was inescapable as Segal passed those teeming arteries of trendiness, Carnaby Street and King’s Road.

“There’s madness here, a sort of happy irresponsible insanity,” said Segal’s doubles partner, Gordon Forbes. “A bomb attack on the mind.”