Vic Seixas, winner of 15 Grand Slam tennis titles, dies at age 100
Vic Seixas, who won 15 Grand Slam tennis tournaments in the 1950s, died Friday. The oldest living Grand Slam champion, he was 100.
His death was announced by the International Tennis Hall of Famewhere it was not mentioned where he died.
“From 1940 to 1968, Vic Seixas was the face of American tennis,” the Hall of Fame declared when he was inducted in 1971.
At 6’1″ and about 180 pounds, Seixas (pronounced SAY-shuss) was known for his great fitness and stamina and was often ranked among the top 10 players in the United States. Famed Australian tennis player Harry Hopman considered him the world’s best amateur of 1954.
Seixas won two Grand Slam singles championships, eight mixed doubles titles, and five men’s doubles titles. He captured his first men’s singles title when he defeated Kurt Nielsen of Denmark at Wimbledon in 1953 and defeated Rex Hartwig of Australia in the singles final of the 1954 U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills, the precursor to the U.S. Open.
Seixas, who remained an amateur throughout his career, played in 28 U.S. Championships at Forest Hills between 1940 and 1969, missing the event only while serving in the Army during World War II.
“Even when he was out of form, he would win big matches by persevering long after most men had given up, and then, miraculously, he would dig himself out of the mire of despair with a sustained series of brilliant volleys,” said Herbert Warren Wind. wrote in Sports Illustrated from 1958.
In addition to his two Grand Slam singles triumphs, Seixas won eight mixed doubles titles, seven with Doris Hart and one with Shirley Fry. He also won a men’s doubles championship with Mervyn Rose and four more with Tony Trabert.
He won 38 of the 55 Davis Cup singles and doubles matches between 1951 and 1957, teaming with Trabert to defeat Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad to end Australia’s four-year Davis Cup reign in 1954.
In 1966, at age 42, Seixas played 94 games in four hours to defeat 22-year-old Bill Bowrey of Australia at the Philadelphia Grass Championship. Later that year, at the U.S. Nationals, Seixas, the tournament’s oldest competitor, defeated 19-year-old Stan Smith in five sets.
Seixas, who won 56 singles titles in total, retired from regular tournament play in 1970 but continued to play senior matches. His career ended with the creation of the Open, and its enormous prizes, in 1968.
“In 1953, when I won Wimbledon, I got a 25-pound voucher, which was worth about $75 at the time,” Seixas told San Francisco television station KPIX in 2018. “I had to spend it at a shop in Piccadilly that had to do with tennis. I bought a sweater.” When he won the U.S. Nationals in 1954, he added, “I didn’t even get a sweater — nothing.”
Elias Victor Seixas Jr. was born on August 30, 1923, in Philadelphia. His mother, Anna Victoria (Moon) Seixas, was of Irish descent. He told The Philadelphia Inquirer in a 2019 interview that his father’s family left Portugal and emigrated to the Dominican Republic before coming to the United States.
Although Seixas has sometimes been described as Jewish, he told The Inquirer that neither of his parents was “particularly religious,” adding: “It’s entirely possible that my father’s family was Jewish 500 years ago, but I was raised and married in a Presbyterian church.”
Seixas’ father, who owned a plumbing company, played tennis on a local court, and Vic began hitting balls as a boy. He was a tennis star at William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia and played in his first U.S. Nationals at age 17, winning his opening match before being expelled.
He was a pilot in the Army Air Forces in World War II, stationed in the Pacific, and then attended the University of North Carolina, where he was named tennis All-American. He graduated in 1949.
Seixas considered tennis a part-time occupation and had expected to eventually take over his father’s plumbing business. Instead, he worked as a stockbroker in Philadelphia from the 1950s through the early 1970s. He later became tennis director for the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., and at a Hilton hotel in New Orleans.
He moved to the San Francisco area in 1989 and founded a tennis program at a racquetball and beach club in Marin County, now known as the Club at Harbor Point. He taught tennis and bartended there until his mid-80s, when knee problems limited his activities.
When Seixas was in his 90s and needed a full-time caregiver, a GoFundMe page was created to cover his medical expenses.
At Stan Smith’s suggestion, Adidas signed him as an ambassador for about $2,000 a month. “I asked them, ‘How long is this going to take?'” Seixas recalled in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle in September 2022. “They said, ‘Until you die or we go bankrupt.’ As long as I stay alive, I’m good.”
Seixas is survived by a daughter, Tori Seixas. His two marriages ended in divorce.
Seixas drew on his long career in the tennis world in the book “Prime Time Tennis: Tennis for Players Over 40” (1983), which he co-authored with Joel H. Cohen.
In his later years, Seixas was routinely asked by interviewers how he felt about being the oldest living Grand Slam champion and the oldest member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. His usual response: “I’m proud of it, but I’d rather be the youngest.”
