Manuel Santana, who popularized the sport of tennis in Spain and became a national hero as the first person from his country to win Grand Slam tournament championships, including the 1966 Wimbledon men’s singles title, died Dec. 11 in Marbella, Spain. He was 83.
Mr. Santana, who was known as Manolo in his country, learned the sport while working at a Madrid tennis club as a boy. He began competing in tournaments in his teens and soon became known as one of Europe’s finest players, particularly on the clay courts he played on in Spain.
He won his first major title in 1961 at the French Championships played on clay at Roland Garros stadium in Paris. (The tournament is now called the French Open.)
After defeating the two-time defending champion, Italy’s Nicola Pietrangeli, in five sets, he collapsed in tears of joy. Mr. Santana prevailed over Pietrangeli again at Roland Garros in 1964, winning a four-set match.
It was an era in which the major tournaments were restricted to amateur players only. (Professionals were permitted at the major tournaments beginning in 1968.) Rackets were made of wood, and tennis was defined more by finesse and inventive shot-making than sheer power.
Mr. Santana, who was 5-foot-8 and about 150 pounds, did not have a dominating serve, but he was quick on his feet and could make any shot from any spot on the court. He approached the game with the tactical precision of a military campaign.
He led Spain’s Davis Cup teams to prominence in the 1960s, once knocking the U.S. team out of the international team competition and twice finishing second in the finals. In 1965, even as Spain lost the team title to Australia, Mr. Santana reclaimed a measure of national respect by beating his friend and rival Roy Emerson in a four-set singles match that culminated in an epic 15-13 final set. Spanish fans rushed the court in Sydney and carried Mr. Santana off on their shoulders.
As strong as he was on clay surfaces and in team play, Mr. Santana knew that the true test of tennis came on the faster grass courts, which were then the surfaces used at both the U.S. Championships (now the U.S. Open) in Forest Hills, Queens, and at Wimbledon in England.
He skipped the French Championships in 1965 and 1966 to prepare for both tournaments. At Forest Hills in 1965, Mr. Santana defeated Arthur Ashe of the United States in four sets in the semifinals, then met the strapping South African Cliff Drysdale in the finals.
He handily defeated Drysdale, 6-2, 7-9, 7-5, 6-1, leading New York Times tennis writer Allison Danzig to call Mr. Santana “the complete tennis player" and one of the "cleverest tacticians in the game.”
“Prior to his performances at Forest Hills ... he was just a name — a guy who had somehow managed to trip up American Davis Cup hopes,” Christian Science Monitor sportswriter Alan Grayson noted. But after his victory, tennis fans would "know him as a little man ... who can spin, flick, cut, cajole a tennis ball into all sorts of antics, who can lay it dead on a blade of grass. A man who can lure his opponents into a web of subtlety he weaves around them.”
In 1966, Mr. Santana arrived in England five weeks before the Wimbledon tournament to polish the skills he would need in the world’s most renowned tennis competition.
“I came here for the first time in 1958 and I did very badly my first three years,” Mr. Santana told the Sunday Times of London in 2006. “Many players would not have come back, but I knew this was something special, so I worked hard and began to play better.”
He won two five-set matches to advance to the finals against American Dennis Ralston. The players were a study in contrasts, with the short, dark-haired Mr. Santana facing the lanky, 6-foot-2 Californian.
But it was no contest, as Mr. Santana dispatched Ralston in straight sets, 6-4, 11-9, 6-4, playing impeccably with almost no mistakes. The Wimbledon championship made Mr. Santana the No. 1 player in the world and a hero in his homeland.
“When I returned to Spain, it was remarkable,” he recalled in 2007. “General Franco” — the country’s longtime military dictator — "wanted to see me, the people were rejoicing, it was on national TV. Spain had come awake to tennis.”
Manuel Martínez Santana was born May 10, 1938, in Madrid. His father was an electrician, and his mother was a homemaker.
He left school at 10 to work at a tennis club, where he became devoted to the sport. He was 16 when his father died. He then became the temporary ward of a family at the club who provided tennis lessons and academic tutoring.
Mr. Santana attempted to defend his Wimbledon title in 1967, but he was slowed by an ankle injury and did not reach the finals. In 1968, he won the men’s singles championship at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where tennis was a demonstration sport. It is now a regular component of the Olympic Games.
As many of his fellow players were turning professional in the late 1960s, Mr. Santana resisted the urge at first.
“I feel if I turn pro, tennis will be gone forever in Spain,” he said in 1968. “In Spain I don’t know if I’m a hero or not, but money is not everything for me.”
Before eventually joining the professional ranks, he worked in marketing for the Philip Morris tobacco company. Mr. Santana retired from competition in 1980, with four Grand Slam singles titles and a men’s double championship (with Emerson) at the 1963 French Championships.
Mr. Santana was married four times and had five children and five grandchildren.
After his playing career, he became a coach and was captain of Spain’s Davis Cup teams in the 1980s and 1990s. He was an informal mentor to younger players, including Rafael Nadal, who in 2006 and again in 2008 became the second Spanish man to win the Wimbledon title. (Spanish women Conchita Martínez and Garbiñe Muguruza won the women’s championship in 1994 and 2017, respectively.)
Mr. Santana was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1984, owned a tennis club in Marbella, was the director of the Madrid Open and attended the Wimbledon championships every year.
“So I am still very much involved in the game," he said in 2006, on the 50th anniversary of his Wimbledon victory. "People still say, ‘Santana is tennis and tennis is Santana.’ I think my success in those days is one of the big reasons we have so many good players in Spain since then.”

