Jaroslav Drobny

Jaroslav Drobny (October 12, 1921 - September 13, 2001) was a Czechoslovak hockey player. He played for the Czechoslovak National Team at the World Championships in 1939 and 1947, and at the 1948 Winter Olympics.

Drobny was a high-scoring right winger. He potted 14 goals at the 1947 World Championship, including a hat-trick in the decisive victory over USA which gave his country its first ever World Championships title. He spent his entire club career with I. CLTK Praha.

In 1997, Drobný was inducted in the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Hall of Fame. Drobný could have become the first ever European player to start in the National Hockey League when the Boston Bruins put him on their reserve in 1949. Apparently, he was offered $20,000 to come over to play for Boston but he refused, preferring to remain playing amateur ice hockey and retain the flexibility to play tennis during the summers.

Drobny was a very good tennis player. He left Czechoslovakia in 1949 and travelled as an Egyptian citizen before becoming a citizen of Great Britain in 1959, where he died in 2001. In 1954, he became the first and, to date, only player with African citizenship to win the Wimbledon Championships.

He began playing tennis at age five and, as a ball-boy, watched world-class players including compatriot (who, like Drobny, also played ice hockey) Karel Kozeluh. He played in his first Wimbledon Championship in 1938, losing in the first round to Alejandro Russell. After World War II Drobný was good enough to be able to beat Jack Kramer in the fourth round of the 1946 Wimbledon Championship before losing in the semi-finals.[4] In 1951 and 1952 he won the French Open, defeating in the final Eric Sturgess and then retaining the title the following year against Frank Sedgman. Drobný was the losing finalist at Wimbledon in both 1949 and 1952 before finally winning it in 1954 by beating Ken Rosewall for the title, the first left-hander to capture Wimbledon since Norman Brookes.

He won three singles titles at the Italian Championships (1950, 1951 and 1953).

Drobný was ranked World No. 1 in 1954 by Lance Tingay of the Daily Telegraph. He has also won the French Open doubles title in 1948, playing with Lennart Bergelin, and he won the mixed doubles title paired with Patricia Canning Todd at 1948 French Open.

Drobný held the distinction of having competed at Wimbledon under four different national identities. In 1938, at the age of 16, he started for his native Czechoslovakia. A year later, following the German invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was officially representing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After World War II, he started at Wimbledon yet again as Czechoslovakian but chose to defect from the communist regime in 1949 – he left Czechoslovakia for good on 11 July 1949.

After the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, Drobný became increasingly dissatisfied with the way the communist propaganda used him for its purposes. At the time, he was Czechoslovakia's most renowned athlete together with the phenomenal long-distance runner Emil Zátopek. Increasingly, it was becoming apparent to Drobný that he was no longer able to travel freely to tournaments and he grew dissatisfied with the new regime. This ultimately resulted in his defection from his native land.

Drobný defected from Czechoslovakia together with a fellow Czech Davis Cup player Vladimír Černík while playing at a tennis tournament in Gstaad, Switzerland in July 1949. "All I had," he wrote later, "was a couple of shirts, the proverbial toothbrush and $50." Drobný and Černík were the core of the Czechoslovakian Davis Cup team. Twice, the two of them had carried their country to the Davis Cup semifinals, losing to Australia in 1947 and in 1948. Drobný won 37 of his 43 Davis Cup matches.

Becoming stateless, Drobný attempted to gain Swiss, US and Australian papers until finally Egypt offered him citizenship. He represented Egypt at Wimbledon from 1950 through 1959, including his title winning run in 1954. He is the only Egyptian citizen ever to win a Grand Slam tennis tournament. At the time of his Wimbledon win in 1954 Drobný was already living in the United Kingdom but only in his final appearance at Wimbledon in 1960, at the age of 38, did he represent his new homeland Great Britain.

During his amateur career, Drobný won over 130 singles titles, and was world ranked in the top 10 from 1946–55. Drobný was inducted in the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island in 1983. He is the only person to win the rare combination of Wimbledon in tennis and a world championship title in ice hockey.

In total, Drobný started in Wimbledon 17 times, always sporting his trademark tinted prescription glasses as an old hockey injury affected his eyesight. Drobný is the only male tennis player who ever won a Wimbledon singles title while wearing glasses.