Manolo Santana (Madrid, 1938), one of the great Spanish athletes of all time, died in Marbella at the age of 83. The Madrid tennis player won four Grand Slam, but in one of them, at Wimbledon, he wore the Real Madrid crest. Why? Manolo Santana entered the tennis section of the Madrid team at the beginning of the 60s (he would be until the beginning of the 70s). As a member of that section he competed in numerous tournaments. On the same day as the final of the English grass tournament, July 1, 1966, and with the Madrilenian already qualified to play the final against the American Dennis Ralston (curiously he had previously defeated him in the Queen’s final), Raimundo Saporta, Bernabéu’s right hand and a keen eye to everything that surrounded the white team, caught a flight to the English capital. Once there, he went to the hotel where the Madrid tennis player was staying and presented him with the shield of the Madrid team. It was Santana himself who asked a hotel employee to sew the shield on the pole with which he would play the final. So it was.
“I knew I was playing it because at the All England Club they are very strict with protocol and could have penalized me for wearing it, but they must have liked how I played and they didn’t tell me anything,” Santana himself explained later. The truth is that he defeated Ralston (6-4, 11-9 and 6-4) in a huge game, which had its crumb: Santana himself had given up participating in Roland Garros to try to conquer the prestigious grass tournament. He was in London acclimatizing to the weather and the surface. All that dark work had its well-deserved reward … and a new anecdote in the delivery of trophies with the Duchess of Kent: not knowing the protocol, he took her hand before the frightened partners. “She was shooting up and I was shooting down! But then she invited me to have five o’clock tea with her family and told me she liked my game.”
Subsequently Madrid would be grateful for his enormous madridismo by naming him an Honorary Member (as are other great Spanish athletes, the case of Pedro Ferrándiz, Rafa Nadal, Del Bosque, Fernando Alonso or Sergio García, among others) and awarding him the club’s gold and diamond insignia. “It is the tournament that everyone wants to win. When I got it, I felt totally fulfilled,” he said whenever he could. And he did it with the Madrid crest sewn on his dress polo shirt.