Vitas Gerulaitis, the garrulous New Yorker who rose from the public courts of Brooklyn and Queens to become the third-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, was found dead Sunday at a friend’s home in Southampton. He was 40.
The Southampton village police said that Gerulaitis’ body was found shortly after 3 p.m. A preliminary medical examination indicated that he suffered a heart attack while sleeping, said his sister, Ruta. An autopsy was scheduled today.
Gerulaitis won the Australian Open, his only Grand Slam singles title, in 1977, and the men’s doubles at Wimbledon in 1975 with Sandy Mayer. He reached the No. 3 ranking in 1977, the year of what some considered his greatest match, an epic five-set semifinal loss to Bjorn Borg at Wimbledon. He was never out of the top 10 from 1977 to 1983, and after a yearlong drop, climbed again to No. 4 in 1984, a year before his retirement.
Despite his achievements, his great reflexes and foot speed that made him in his prime perhaps the fastest player in the game, he was overshadowed throughout his career by contemporaries like Borg, Jimmy Connors and his friend, John McEnroe.
A guitar player with long, curly blond hair, a quick wit and a penchant for the night life, Gerulaitis was as well known for his conduct off the court as for his game, and the balance was not always a flattering one. Some of his colleagues said he never quite lived up to his potential. He was treated for substance abuse and he was implicated, though never charged, in a cocaine-dealing conspiracy in 1983.
Born July 26, 1954, in Brooklyn, to Vitas and Alodona Gerulaitis, immigrants from Lithuania, Gerulaitis was raised to play the game. His father, a Lithuanian and Balkan States champion before World War II and a tennis teacher for decades in the United States, died in 1991.
Vitas Gerulaitis started playing tennis on the clay courts of Highland Park, Brooklyn, then progressed to parks in Queens, the West Side Tennis Club, and the Port Washington Tennis Academy on Long Island. He was a ball boy at Forest Hills, for decades the site of the U.S. Open, and he worked the ground crew there as a teen-ager. After a year at Columbia University, he joined the professional tour in 1971.
Over the next 14 years, he won 27 tournaments and almost $2.8 million in prize money. He also played for the New York Apples of World Team Tennis in the late 1970’s. In addition to his Australian Open title, he reached the finals of the U.S. Open in 1979, losing to McEnroe, and the 1980 French Open, where he lost to Borg.
At his peak, in the late 1970s, Gerulaitis frequented Studio 54, the famous disco, and had an enormous collection of cars. Despite his reputation for leading a fast life, he lived for much of his career with his parents, in a home he bought for them in Kings Point.
In 1983, his lawyer, Thomas Puccio, revealed that he expected Gerulaitis to be indicted on a federal charge of conspiring to take part in a cocaine deal.
A man who knew him, and who had been convicted in the case, had told undercover agents in a tape-recorded conversation that Gerulaitis, then the world’s fifth-ranked player, would put up $20,000 to finance a deal. But a few months later, a federal grand jury voted not to indict the tennis star.
