player – Tennisarchives.com

General First nameKarel
LastnameKozeluh (Koželuh)
GenderMale
CountryCzechoslovakia
Date of birth1895-03-07
Place of birthPraha, Czechoslovakia
Date of death1950-04-27
Place of deathKlanovice, Czechoslovakia

About

The following piece was translated from the original article in Czech, which can be accessed here: https://sport.aktualne.cz/tenis/zahadna-nehoda-vzala-zivot-legendarnimu-ceskemu-vseumelovi-u/r~af500e9e884811eab1110cc47ab5f122/

In 1950, a mysterious accident took the life of the legendary Czech jack-of-all-trades. 70 years have passed since then.

The interwar years were blessed with multi-talented athletes who mastered several disciplines at the highest level. The most brilliant example was Karel Koželuh, who died tragically in a car accident on April 27, 1950.

He scored goals as a member of the football team “iron” Sparta, won the title of European champions with a hockey stick in his hands, and was even one of the best in the world in tennis. Karel Koželuh was born in 1895 in Prague, into a large and poor family of bakers. Almost all of his siblings had athletic talent.

At the age of fourteen, he was already working for an apartment and food as a tennis coach in Munich, where he went after Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk himself interceded for him with his parents, (perhaps because he and the later president shared the same date of birth: March 7.

Koželuh drew significant attention to himself for the first time in 1914, when, as a nineteen-year-old youth, he started in attack for Sparta, where he met, for example, the king of comedians, Vlasta Burian, who at that time was defending the goal for Letenská. Although he played only 46 games for Sparta, Koželuh scored 34 goals.

He later put the perfect physical condition he had acquired from playing football and hockey to excellent use on the tennis courts. He destroyed his opponents in professional tournaments with shots from the baseline, which he distributed tirelessly to the sidelines.

In 1925, Koželuh became world professional tennis champion for the first time, after which he was welcomed in Prague by several tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters. He won the world professional tennis championships tournament, later called the Bristol Cup, six more times. Earlier in the same year, he had helped Czechoslovakia win gold at the European Championships in Strbské Pleso and Staré Smokovec, when the match against Switzerland was decided by a single goal.

Although Koželuh could not participate in amateur tennis tournaments, including the majors, because he made a living from tennis, he gained increasing admiration. During his tennis career, he won three U.S. professional championships (1929, 1932 and 1937) and a similar tournament in France in 1930.

“The faster the ball goes to Koželuh’s side of the court, the faster it comes back,” the press proclaimed in his heyday. American tennis player Vinnie Richards, in turn, declared that Koželuh was: “The Fred Astaire of the tennis court, on which he dances while sending flawless shots over the net.”

In New York, Koželuh played in front of spectators at a sold-out Madison Square Garden; in Los Angeles his art was admired by stars like Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo; he taught the basics of tennis to a little boy named George Walker Bush, who later became the U.S. president.

After the end of his tennis career, Koželuh remained loyal to the white sport as a coach. Don Budge, winner of the Grand Slam in 1938, also passed through his hands. Between 1947 and 1949, Koželuh was captain of the Czechoslovakian Davis Cup team.

When the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, Koželuh’s sports goods store on Wenceslas Square in Prague was confiscated, so he began to work as a physical education officer at a company called Stavobet. On April 27, 1950, Koželuh was travelling by car with a colleague after a company party. On a completely clear stretch of road in Újezd nad Lesy, near Prague, they ran into a truck. Koželuh and the driver succumbed to their injuries, so there was no one to explain the mysterious accident.

In addition, Koželuh’s wife Miroslava ended up behind bars for three years after the communists sentenced her for keeping unregistered jewelry if the form of gold trophies and prizes.

In July 2006, Karel Koželuh was posthumously inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. He thus joined Jan Kodeš, Hana Mandlíková, Jaroslav Drobný, Ivan Lendl, Martina Navrátilová and Jana Novotná. Koželuh's great-niece Miroslava Bendlová was part of the Czechoslovakian team that won the Federation Cup in 1975 and also reached the quarter-finals of the women’s singles event at the French Open in 1978.

Media

Leave a Reply Cancel reply