Ken Rosewall AM MBE (b. 1934), champion tennis player, won the Australian Open in 1953 and again nineteen years later in 1972 (he remains both the youngest, and oldest, person to win the title). Between 1953 and 1972 Rosewall won four Australian, two French and two US singles championship titles. Coached in Sydney by Harry Hopman, and sardonically nicknamed 'Muscles' on account of his slight stature, he won his first major titles, the Australian and French singles, in 1953 at the age of eighteen. At the close of the 1977 season, aged forty-three, he was still ranked number twelve in the game. Altogether, Rosewall won eighteen major titles in singles, doubles and mixed. He won the US open in 1956 and again in 1970. There were twenty years between the first of his four Wimbledon finals, in 1954, and his last, in 1974. Rosewall turned professional in 1957 and in due course became the second player (after Rod Laver) to earn more than a million dollars from tennis, but the ban on professionals from 1957 to 1967 precluded his participation in many Grand Slam events. Wimbledon was the only big singles title that eluded him, although he won the doubles with Lew Hoad in 1953 and 1956 (in 1968 the Wimbledon men's doubles final was an all-Australian event, with Rosewall and Fred Stolle up against John Newcombe and Tony Roche; the younger men triumphed). In Newcombe's opinion, Rosewall is 'probably the most accurate hitter of the ball that has ever been'. Asked about tennis in 1977 he said 'it's something I enjoy and find I still do well'. Rosewall was inducted into the international Tennis Hall of Fame in 1980, and its Australian counterpart in 1995. In 2008 the centre court of the Sydney Olympic tennis venue was named in his honour.
