Media Guide - North Carolina

Carolina History
Geoffrey Black won the 1959 ACC doubles title
with partner Ben Keys.
semifinalists in the Southern Conference Tennis
Championships’ singles competition.
Henderson, a native Chapel Hillian, swept
the singles titles of four of the six tournaments in
which he played during the 1940 season and in
the process beat all of the top American players
of the time with the exception of the legendary
Jack Kramer. In 1940, Everett won the Southern
Conference singles championship. A year later,
he won the league doubles crown while teaming
with M.P. Anthony.
Everett, who was also a native of Chapel Hill,
improved his national ranking to 11th in 1940
after he beat both German Davis Cup star Henner
Henkle and Welby Van Horn at the Forest
Hills United States National Championships. In
1941, Carver gave up his Tar Heel football career
to concentrate solely on tennis. He beat out
Everett for the number one spot on the Carolina
team and then downed his teammate Everett for
the Southern Conference singles title. That
same season, Carver lost a tough three-set
match (7-5 in the third) to Joe Hunt, who would
go on to claim the singles title that year at the
U.S. Open in Forest Hills.
Seixas Becomes a Tennis Legend
Near the end of his coaching tenure, Kenfield
was asked to pick the all-time Carolina tennis
team up to that point. The veteran mentor
chose Grant No. 1, Hines No. 3, Henderson No.
4, Carver No. 5 and Everett No. 6. The man in
the second spot was the legendary Vic Seixas,
an All-America selection in 1948. Seixas had a
storybook career at Carolina, winning the Southern
Conference singles title in 1948, finishing as
the runnerup in both 1947 and 1949 and teaming
with Clark Taylor to capture the league doubles
crown in 1949. Seixas, a Philadelphia, Pa.
native, came to the University after four years of
Joe Frierson was one of the captains of the 1992
Tar Heel team which reached the NCAA quarterfinals.
2008 UNC MEN’S TENNIS • PAGE 36
Sean Steinour played on Allen Morris’ ACC
championship teams in 1990 and 1992.
Army Air Force duty during World War II. In
1948, Seixas entered the NCAA Tournament as
the top seed. He won five matches in the tournament
before dropping the championship match
6-4, 1-6, 7-5, 6-1 to Harry Likas of the University
of San Francisco, who was then No. 1 in the national
singles rankings, one spot ahead of
Seixas. Seixas advanced farther in NCAA singles
action than any other Tar Heel in history.
The same year at the NCAA Championships,
Seixas and Clark Taylor were seeded third in the
doubles tournament despite their less impressive
seventh-place standing in the national doubles
rankings. The duo won a pair of matches
before losing to the brother team of Evert and
Evert from Notre Dame, 6-3, 6-8, 3-6, 6-4, 6-3 in
the quarterfinals. During his senior year in 1949,
Seixas was the seventh-ranked men’s singles
player in the U.S. amateur ranks.
Seixas went on to have a star-studded career
after graduating from Carolina. By 1952, he
had attained the No. 1 singles ranking among
Americans and he won the Wimbledon singles
championship in 1953 and the U.S. Open title in
1954. The 55 Davis Cup singles matches he
played in were more than any American player
in history and that record stood for decades. His
75 U.S. Open men’s singles victories were a
record that stood until broken by Jimmy Connors
in 1985, almost 30 years after Seixas’ heyday
in the sport.
Skakle Leads UNC To Unequaled Success in
the ACC
Carolina continued to have great teams during
the 1950s. In the summer of 1953, UNC became
a member of the Atlantic Coast
Conference, joining six other schools as founding
members in a league that grew from the original
seven teams in 1953 to 12 teams in 2005.
Thomas Tanner started on UNC’s 1990 ACC
championship squad.
Tar Heel Archie Henderson at Wimbledon in
1945 with Queen Mary, wife of King George V
and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.
From 1955-1959, four different men piloted
the Tar Heel program as head coach. Kenfield
retired after the 1955 season with Ham Strayhorn
serving as the head coach in 1956 and
Vladimir Cernik tapped as the head man in 1957
and 1958.
With Don Skakle’s arrival as UNC’s head
coach in 1959, the second great era in North
Carolina tennis began. A collegiate contemporary
of Seixas who also played on UNC teams in
the late 1940s, Skakle led his teams to total
domination of the Atlantic Coast Conference
during his 22 seasons as head coach. His teams
won a total of 18 ACC titles, including 16 crowns
outright. On nine occasions the Tar Heels finished
among the nation’s Top 25 teams. Overall,
Skakle’s teams had a 418-55 dual-match record
in 22 seasons, including a 132-14 mark in the
ACC.
Among Skakle’s great players were George
Sokol, who won a trio of ACC singles titles from
1962-64, while being named an All-America in
his junior year; Freddie McNair, Carolina’s only
four-time first-team All-America selection, who
won three ACC No. 1 doubles crowns and three
ACC singles titles (two at No. 1 and one at No.
2); Rich McKee, McNair’s doubles partner who
was an All-America selection three times and
the winner of two ACC singles championships
and two league doubles crowns; and Billy Brock,
a 1976 All-America who won a pair of conference
crowns in both singles and doubles.
McNair probably ranks as Carolina’s finest
player since Seixas left campus in 1949 and before
Roland Thornqvist and David Caldwell’s arrival
in the ’90s. While at Carolina, McNair
combined with McKee to reach the NCAA doubles
finals in 1973 at Princeton, N.J., even
though the duo had been upset in the finals of
the ACC Tournament the same year. McNair
UNC’s 2006 Senior Class of Raian Luchici, Brad
Pomeroy, Derek Porter and Aly Mandour