Never being world’s No.1 still rankles with 70s star

THE TALE of Argentina tennis great Guillermo Vilas and the fight to right a perceived sporting wrong is the story behind Settling The Score, the latest documentary to hit our screens from the folks over at Netflix.

Good of looks, curly of hair and brutal of backhand, Vilas was a king of the court in the mid to late 1970s. He spent nine consecutive years in the world’s top ten, won 62 tour titles, four of them grand slams and was regarded by his peers as one of the finest players ever to grace a court. In 1977 alone, his most prolific year, he won 16 official titles, still a record, including both the French and US Opens. He won the Australian Open in 1978 and again in 1979.

Vilas’ admirers are many and the film features a who’s who of tennis greats – Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Boris Becker, Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer are just some of the legends past and present expressing just what an influence on the game the Argentine was.

However, for all his success and adulation

Good of looks, curly of hair and brutal of backhand, Vilas was one of the finest players to grace a court

Vilas was never granted the one title he coveted more than any other – that of ATP ranked world No.1. It is one he has challenged and fought for over many years, and a battle taken up by respected Argentine tennis journalist Eduardo Puppo, whose story forms the basis of this film.

Puppo set about his herculean task by studying every tournament from August 1973 – when the ATP official rankings were first published – to December 1978, a time span when his compatriot was most likely to have reached the top of the pile.

Buoyed by the fact Australian women’s star Evonne Goolagong Cawley had been retrospectively granted world No.1 status by the WTA almost 30 years after the event, Puppo enlisted a Romanian mathematical genius, Marian Ciulpan, to aid his research in an endeavour that would take him 12 years and almost cost him his marriage and his sanity.

Their intensive findings showed that for a period of seven weeks in late 1975 and early ‘76 Vilas would have indeed reached the summit of the men’s game but the problem of convincing the ATP, who back then did not update rankings weekly as it does today, still remained.

The story of Vilas’ rise from humble beginnings in Buenos Aires to master of his art is told alongside Puppo’s quest for recognition for his countryman and both are absorbing, remarkable and, ultimately, heartbreaking.