Italian tennis player Nicola Pietrangeli, who has died aged 92, played more Davis Cup matches than anyone in the history of a competition dating back to 1900. At a time when the leading tennis nations were playing more Davis Cup matches each year than under the current system, Pietrangeli played 66 matches in 18 years, with a proud record of having won 120 rubbers and losing just 44. Seventy-eight of those victories came in singles and he was assisted in his 42 doubles victories by his regular partner, Orlando Sirola.
Even in the current era of exceptional Italian success in tennis, led by reigning Wimbledon champion Jannik Sinner, Pietrangeli will be remembered as one of his country’s most elegant and admired athletes.
His game was based on fielding and one of the most beautiful and effective backhands the game has ever seen. Most of his success came on European clay courts, but he was good enough on grass to reach the Wimbledon semi-finals in 1960 when, after beating No. 2 seed Barry MacKay of the USA in the quarter-finals, he lost to Rod Laver 6–4 in the fifth set, having led by two sets to one.
Three weeks earlier, Pietrangeli had established himself as the master of the clay, having retained the French title he won the year before with a five-set victory over one of the best South Americans of the time, Chile’s Luis Ayala. However, it is the way he lost his French crown in 1961 that lingers in the memory. Pietrangeli faced a young Spaniard named Manuel Santana, whose father had been a gardener at a club in Madrid.
It turned out to be the perfect match: the classic Italian backhand battling for supremacy over Santana’s explosive forehand, enhanced by the Spaniard’s feather-light touch on the drop shot. The match kept the attention of the center court crowd at Roland Garros, punctuated by bursts of wild applause as the crowd responded to the celebration of the great clay tennis presented to them.
Pietrangeli led by two sets to one but could not prevent the younger man from taking control of the match in the latter stages with a great display of aggression and when Santana wrapped up the match 4-6, 6-1, 3-6, 6-0, 6-2, the one-time ball boy fell in tears on the shoulders of the vanquished champion. Suddenly, Pietrangeli found himself consoling the player who had just stripped him of his title.
Pietrangeli, known to his friends as Nikki, was born in Tunis, the son of Anna (née von Yourgens) and Giulio Pietrangeli. When his family moved to Rome, Pietrangeli began playing much of his tennis at one of the city’s leading clubs, the Circolo Canottieri. Pietrangeli quickly established himself as a top junior and quickly became an integral part of the Italian Davis Cup team in the mid-1950s. As players like Fausto Gardini and Beppe Merlo began to wind down their careers, this languid, almost statuesque performer became Italy’s new sporting heartthrob.
Pietrangeli’s partnership with the 6ft tall Sirola meant that Italy could often claim the all-important doubles point, and the potential of this combination enabled Pietrangeli to lead his country to their first ever Davis Cup final in 1960. They repeated the feat a year later, but unfortunately for all countries with a natural clay surface, the Davis Cup Challenge Round, as it was then known, was almost always played on grass, for the simple reason that the defending country did not have to play. Through. So Australia, with Laver and Roy Emerson in their ranks, had a huge lead at White City Stadium in Sydney in 1960 and at Kooyong in Melbourne twelve months later. The Italians failed to win a live rubber in either final.
The Challenge Rounds system had allowed Australia and the US to pass the Cup between themselves since 1937. Incredibly, these two countries enjoyed a lockout from that date until the Challenge Round was abolished in 1972 and even then the US held on to the Cup for another two years until the stranglehold was broken when India refused to play South Africa in the 1974 final due to apartheid.
But Pietrangeli wasn’t done with his favorite match yet. He was appointed team captain of Italy in the mid-1970s and eventually achieved his goal when he guided Adriano Panatta, Corrado Barazzutti and Paolo Bertolucci to the final in 1976. Once again Italy had to play the final on the other side of the world, but this time it didn’t matter as their opponents were Chile, the surface was clay and they won 4-1. Panatta was the new hero, but the reflected glory rightly shone on Pietrangeli too.
Never one to shy away from controversy, Pietrangeli was a central figure in the late 1960s when the battle for control of the game raged between the growing professional ranks and the old amateur establishment. Britain led the push to open tennis to professionals – which finally happened in 1968 – but just before that the reactionary president of the Italian federation, Giorgio de Stefani, himself a former Italian No. 1, had threatened to have Britain thrown out of the international federation for promoting ‘illegal’ plans to allow professionals into the regular game.
Pietrangeli had told me things in private conversations, and when I called him in 1967 to ask him to put the salient facts on paper, he did so, admitting that De Stefani had paid him, on behalf of the Italian Federation, to remain an amateur. “Yes, they paid me money,” Pietrangeli admitted, exposing the level of hypocrisy and “shamateurism” rife in the amateur game at the time. Pietrangeli’s revelation only helped to hasten the collapse of the old order.
Multilingual, witty and charming, Pietrangeli remained an important figure in European tennis and was at various times involved in organizing the Italian Open. In 2006, one of the stadium courts at Rome’s Foro Italico sports complex, with marble levels and surrounded by gigantic statues, was renamed Stadio Nicola Pietrangeli in his honor.
In 1960 he married Susanna Artero, a model, with whom he had three sons, and after their divorce in the mid-1970s he subsequently had a seven-year relationship with the TV presenter Licia Colò. He is survived by two sons, Marco and Filippo; the third, Giorgio, died earlier this year.
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