They were precious years, years in which Manuel Santana opened our eyes to a new sport. A sport then degraded in common language as “the sport of the rich” that he redeemed because, not being rich, but poor, he was the best of all.
The son of a union electrician imprisoned after the war, raised by a mother who made a thousand efforts to get her offspring, he discovered tennis one day when his brother, a ball boy at the Velázquez Club, had left his lunch and had to take it with him. The succession of tennis courts fascinated him and he soon made his own racket from the remains of the back of an oval mesh chair.
We heard about him when he had already won Roland Garros twice, which only deserved a small space in the newspaper that we all skipped. So until a decisive novelty, television, entered the houses. Looking for news, some audacious decided to give a Spain-United States Davis Cup tie from Barcelona.
A previous information shook the tribe: the Americans brought their own food, vacuum packed, and their own drink, because they distrusted what could be eaten here. Those of us who did not have a TV yet, we looked for the house of a neighbor or a relative where to see it. That first day we learned that in tennis you don’t count 1-2-3…, but 15-30-… (Why not 45, we wondered?). The second day, with the double, we learned what the side corridors were for. The third day we embraced euphoric because those arrogant people had bitten the dust, they ate it with their bread. On the fourth day the rackets were sold out in the sports stores and ropes came out of the houses with which to link two in two trees in the nearby park and practice that new and beautiful sport, of which Santana was the ideal interpreter.
He played with exquisite technique, making even more beautiful a sport that was, in itself, and that at the same time was a school of good manners: scrupulous silence from the public, the players in pristine white, the winner jumping the net after the game to congratulate- hug-comfort the defeated.
Leader of a silent revolution
Precious years, yes, following the winning series of Davis Cup playoffs, up to two finals in Australia where (the Davis Cup was like that) the champion waited calmly for everyone to beat each other to receive the winner on his grass court.
It was late at dawn and I dream. We did not win the Davis Cup, but Santana did win Wimbledon and produced that nice image trying to kiss the hand of Princess Margaret, who withdrew it because with the ladies of the British royal family, protocol does not allow that form of courtesy.
He opened our sports landscape, until then closed to football, boxing and cycling. From the hand of television, like himself, other pioneers were arriving: Emiliano, Nieto, Perramón, Paquito, Ballesteros … He was the first, the leader of that silent revolution that made our sport broader and more complete.
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