Before the 1987 Wimbledon gentlemen’s singles final, in which Ivan Lendl played an Australian opponent, Bud Collins — the great tennis historian, journalist, and television commentator — asked a simple question on the live NBC Sports broadcast: “Cash or Czech?”
Pat Cash would go on to beat Ivan Lendl for the Wimbledon title. Lendl still had Czech citizenship back then. He became a United States citizen in 1992.
Lendl was not cut from typical Czech cloth at Wimbledon. Martina Navratilova was the classic Czech serve-and-volley artist with the fluid game who dominated at The All-England Club in the 1980s. Lendl’s baseline game was out of step with the times at SW19 in that era. Yet, by force of will, he made two Wimbledon finals.
Czechs are a big part of the story of Wimbledon. Martina is the foremost icon, but Hana Mandlikova made the final of the tournament. Petra Kvitova won the tournament twice. Jana Novotna, a three-time participant in the final, eventually won the tournament in 1998, five years after creating one of the most enduring (albeit sad) memories in Wimbledon history with her tears on the Duchess of Kent’s shoulder in 1993.
Beyond Wimbledon, the reach of Czech tennis is considerable as well. Recent years have shown that while no Czech has dominated the tennis landscape for an enduring amount of time, there’s a Czech waiting to cash in at a major tournament somewhere in the tennis world.
In 2015, Lucie Safarova made the Roland Garros final one year after reaching the 2014 Wimbledon semis in a year when Kvitova won the title.
In 2016, Karolina Pliskova narrowly lost the U.S. Open final to Angelique Kerber.
In 2019, Kvitova reached the Australian Open final. Months later, Marketa Vondrousova came out of nowhere to reach the Roland Garros final.
In 2021, Barbora Krejcikova captured the French Open months after Karolina Muchova reached the Australian Open semifinals. Later in 2021, Pliskova reached the Wimbledon final and took Ash Barty into a contentious third set before falling short.
Here we are in 2023, and the Czechs are still cashing in. Muchova reached her first major final at the French, and now Vondrousova — four years after her first major final — has notched a second major final appearance with her Wimbledon semifinal victory over Elina Svitolina.
No one had Vondrousova making the final before the tournament. She’s the first unseeded Wimbledon women’s singles finalist since 1963. Vondrousova had only a handful of grass match wins heading into 2023 (5). In her previous four Wimbledons, Vondrousova had won ONE main-draw match.
Vondrousova’s career is strange. Her 2019 Roland Garros runner-up finish was her only previous quarterfinal-or-better result at a major. Her regular ceiling has been the fourth round, and she has frequently failed to get out of the second rounds of majors. Yet, it always means something — and says something — when a tennis player replicates a high-level achievement, even if it takes a long time to do so.
Transcending the label of “one-hit wonder,” such as Iva Majoli at Roland Garros in 1997, confers a substantial new measure of stature on a professional tennis player. Vondrousova has dramatically elevated the way her career is — and will be — perceived.
This run to the 2023 Wimbledon final parallels Pliskova’s 2021 run at SW19, in that it represented a return to a major final after several years of struggle. This achievement, forged just one month after Muchova’s pleasure tour in Paris, reaffirms just how deep Czech women’s tennis truly is. There’s always someone waiting to make a run, and every one to two years, someone catches fire at a huge tournament.
The Czechs keep cashing in at tennis’s most important events. We will see if there’s a Czech surprise waiting for us at the U.S. Open.
Tennis with an Accent 