University of Georgia Athletics
NCAA Moments: First In Athens
May 22, 2017 | Men's Tennis
By John Frierson
UGAAA Staff Writer
Before there was McEnroe at the NCAA Tennis Championships in Athens, before there was Mayotte, Pernfors, O'Brien, the Bryan brothers, Boeker, Isner or Johnson, before all of the greats, there were Gottfried and Stockton of the Trinity Tigers in 1972.
It will be 45 years ago next month that the NCAAs first arrived in Athens, brought here by legendary Georgia men's tennis coach Dan Magill, a Hall-of-Fame coach and equally accomplished promoter, who had the vision to see what a tennis championships in his hometown could become.
"As typical of Dan, he did a great job promoting it," former Stanford coach Dick Gould said. "Nobody could do that better and the local crowd responded, not just in Athens but the community around Athens, all the way to Atlanta.
"I remember the woofs were prevalent, the barking, and it was just a great atmosphere. The crowd was there the whole week, they stayed good throughout even though Georgia didn't have guys in the finals. It was a really nice tournament that way."
The tournament as we know it now is not what it was then. Since 1977, the NCAAs have consisted of a team tournament followed by singles and doubles tournaments. Before then, teams — any and all NCAA schools — could supply as many as four singles players and two doubles teams to the two draws, and the school that produced the most wins at the end was the national champion.
In 1972 that school was little Trinity University in San Antonio, little-known now but a powerhouse in the 1970s. Leading the way 45 years ago were Brian Gottfried and Dick Stockton, who met in the finals of the singles tournament — Stockton bested his roommate for the title, in four sets.
Trinity, the NCAA runner-up the previous two years, had won 36 dual matches in a row before the tournament, and three players from the '72 team — Stockton, Gottfried and Bob McKinley — are now in the ITA Hall of Fame, as is their coach, Clarence Mabry.
The guys from "Tennis Tech" finished with 36 points, while an ascending Stanford program, not yet the monster it would become, placed second with 30. Gould led the Cardinal to the first of his 17 NCAA titles the following spring.
According to a Sports Illustrated article from the NCAAs that year, titled "Hail the Trinity twosome," there were 185 players from 58 schools competing. Four of them were Georgia Bulldogs, including a freshman named Manuel Diaz who didn't really know what was coming when the tournament began.
"Coach Magill was so well connected with the newspaper editors and sportswriters and everybody he needed to be," Diaz said recently, "and the event was covered like it should have been, like it was the greatest thing to come to Athens since Saturday football games. I'd never seen anything like it."
Diaz had played No. 6 for the Dogs that spring but earned the right to play in the NCAA singles draw by winning team challenge matches against the Nos. 4 and 5 players.
"I was allowed to challenge No. 5 and I won two out of three, and then I challenged No. 4 and I snuck that one out," he said. "I don't know how, but I was lucky enough to get into the NCAA Championships by virtue of challenge matches.
"And the first thing I did when I became head coach was do away with challenge matches."
Diaz recalled that he won a couple of matches in the big draw, but he didn't challenge for the title. Trinity, which had four 1971 All-Americans in action, did get a challenge from Stanford, however. The semifinals featured Trinity's Stockton and Gottfried and Stanford's Roscoe Tanner and Alex Mayer — all future Hall of Famers.
In the doubles final, Tanner and Mayer beat Trinity's Gottfried and Paul Gerken, the Tigers' No. 4 player. How good was Trinity in 1972? A year later Gerken reached the round of 16 at the French Open. Green began his collegiate career at Stanford before transferring to Trinity.
"That was the missing piece that gave them four really great players and made it a little bit too big of an obstacle for us to overcome," Gould said.
Stanford won its first NCAA title in 1973, at Princeton, and won it again the following year in Los Angeles. The Cardinal were then off and running. When the NCAAs returned to Athens in 1977, the first of 13 in a row here, Stanford beat Trinity, 5-4, in the finals of the inaugural team tournament.
John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.
