Vic Seixas: The fighter pilot who won Wimbledon but became a bartender

“Gorgeous” is the first word that the former BBC commentator Christine Truman comes up with, when I ask her about Vic Seixas – stockbroker, bartender, wartime pilot, and the oldest surviving grand-slam champion at 99 years and 302 days.

“My great memory of Vic is that we went together to MGM Studios in 1958, while I was playing a tournament in Los Angeles,” Truman said. “They were filming a movie called Some Come Running, and we met the stars: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. I remember thinking that Vic looked so much like a matinee idol that he could have been in the film himself.” 

That was five years after Seixas – pronounced Say-shus – had defeated Denmark’s Kurt Nielsen to lift the Wimbledon trophy. His reward was a £25 Lilywhites voucher, which he spent on a new sweater. 

Today, Seixas lives in Harbour Point, near San Francisco, with his daughter Tori. He has had several invitations to visit the majors, especially as this summer represents the 70th anniversary of his big Wimbledon triumph. But when I rang him last month, he admitted that he had no great urge to travel. 

“I did go back to Wimbledon one time recently with Tori,” he explained, “but I’ve been confined to a wheelchair for quite a while. I will be 100 in August, and my eyesight is not so good any more. 

“I have the Tennis Channel here, but I don’t follow it so much now that Roger Federer has retired. He was a great player, and I enjoyed watching him. I don’t enjoy watching it too much any more. Mostly they play from the baseline, and I liked to go to the net. Roger could do both. He could do anything.”

Seixas is still sharp and speaks warmly of his era of tennis, especially the many Australians who dominated the sport in the 1940s and 50s: Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Frank Sedgman. 

I could hear him smiling when he moved on to his tally of grand-slam titles. “Here’s something that might interest you for your article” Seixas said. “There are 12 events at the majors if you count singles, men’s doubles and mixed doubles. I ticked off 11 – because I never entered the mixed at the Australian Open – and I won titles in eight of them. I was thinking the other day, ‘I wonder if anyone has won more than that?’” 

But his life story takes in so much more than fuzzy yellow balls – or, actually, fuzzy white balls as they were when he landed his 15 major titles (two in singles, five in doubles, and eight in mixed). 

Before Seixas even began playing elite tennis, he was shipped off to Papua New Guinea as an 18-year-old recruit in the Army Air Corps. As a flight instructor coordinating missions against Japanese targets, he learnt to fly 14 different aircraft, from the P-51 Mustang (the closest American equivalent to the Spitfire) to the B-24 Liberator Bomber (an inferior version of the Lancaster). 

But while Seixas might have thrown himself enthusiastically into the draft, he dodged the family business – plumbing, heating and roofing – when he returned home in 1946. Instead, he married the glamorous Dolly and set out on the amateur tennis circuit. As he told the tennis historian Allen Hornblum, “I lived pretty well without making money. I got our travel expenses paid, housing accommodations at tournaments were usually pretty good, and Dolly was – like me – excited to see the world.” 

Truman remembers Seixas’s game being less handsome than his person, and Hornblum describes his groundstrokes as “average at best”. But once he reached the net, he was a phenomenal athlete, and – at 6ft 2in – extremely difficult to pass. Hence his inevitable punning nickname: Vexatious. 

As his career progressed, Seixas remained competitive well into his 40s, thanks to a ferocious fitness regimen. He was 43 when he defeated a 19-year-old future Wimbledon champion – Stan Smith (1972) – in a five-setter at the US Championships. By then, he was already combining his tennis with stockbroking. A 17-year spell at industry giant Goldman Sachs should have helped make up for at least some of the prize money (probably some £30 million - £40 million on today’s scale of payments) that had been denied him on the amateur circuit. 

And yet money would still become an issue for him in his later life. The “gorgeousness” that Truman speaks of may have been an issue here. During the 1970s, Seixas divorced Dolly to marry a coach he had hired while running the tennis operation at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. But that second marriage also came to grief.  

Necessity led to yet another career change. Seixas became a bartender in his 70s. According to a profile by the eminent author Reeves Wiedeman, he “moved to the Bay Area in 1989, after his second divorce, and got a job as the ‘morning bartender’ at a café, serving screwdrivers and martinis to anyone getting off the night shift at 6am. Most patrons didn’t know his past, although one of his regulars spilt the beans to a group of cops who came in one summer morning while Seixas had Wimbledon on the café’s TV.” 

When I asked him about this stint as a bartender, Seixas gave a slightly rueful chuckle. “Everybody seems to enjoy knowing that. I don’t know why it seems so unusual for someone to work behind a bar. I liked to have a drink once in a while, I liked spending time there. I guess it’s a good talking point.” 

Seixas seems to be comfortable now at Harbor Club, where some of his trophies are held in a case in the clubhouse.  He was 95 when he picked up an unexpected bonus via the same Stan Smith he once beat in New York. Those interested in trainers will know that Smith made an absolute mint out of the Adidas shoes that carry his name – and he thoughtfully hooked Seixas up with a $2,000-per-month contract. As the new nonagenarian “ambassador” for Adidas put it: “I asked them, ‘How long is this for?’ They said, ‘Until you die or we go bankrupt’.” 

Truman bumped into Seixas on his last visit to Wimbledon in the late 2010s (exact dates are a little hard to pin down on this one). “It was lovely,” she says now. “In the old days, he was so charming, always pleased to see you. And even in his 90s, he seemed just as pleased to see me as he did when we were both players.”

This article was first published on June 28 2023 and is kept updated with the latest information.