Wheelchair Tennis legend Nick Taylor calls time on career
While the 2021 UNIQLO Wheelchair Doubles Masters came to an end over the weekend, the completion of the event also signalled the retirement of one of wheelchair tennis’s most popular and iconic athletes as USA’s Nick Taylor called time on a playing career that spans three decades.
Forty-one-year-old Taylor, a former world No. 1 in quad singles and quad doubles, took up wheelchair tennis at the age of 14 as he searched for a sport he could play (in his power chair) in high school ‘due to the fact that I drive around in a 300lb piece of metal that eliminated most sports right off the bat because it would be too dangerous’.
“It was either tennis or golf and to this day I can’t tell you why I chose tennis but I went out, I started and I realised that I honestly couldn’t really do it,” recalls Taylor.
“I figured out that the only way I was going to get stronger and get enough practice was just hitting against a wall, because nobody wanted to play with me. I couldn’t hit the ball more than 10 feet, so I really didn’t really need to go on a tennis court. And so I hit the ball against the wall and for hours and hours and hours and hours.
“I remember when I finally got strong enough to hit the ball over the house into the back yard, it was so cool,” he added.
From those humble beginnings Taylor has gone on to become one of the sport’s most celebrated and recognisable players, winning 27 singles titles and 120 doubles titles on the UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Tour and ending his career over the weekend with a total of 813 wins combined in singles (383) and doubles (430).
His biggest wins as a singles player came at the US Open USTA Wheelchair Championships – one of the sport’s Super Series tournaments, the highest tier of standalone wheelchair events outside of the Grand Slams. He won the US Open USTA Championships three times, while arguably his biggest achievement as a singles player was to win the quad singles bronze medal at the London 2012 Paralympics.
However, it was as a doubles player that Taylor won the majority of his titles – 120 doubles titles in total and the majority of those with fellow American David Wagner as his partner. Taylor and Wagner would win 11 UNIQLO Wheelchair Doubles Masters titles and reached the final of the year-end championship for the last time last weekend.
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They also won 11 Grand Slam titles together, four at the Australian Open and seven at the US Open, while between them they were cornerstones of the majority of USA’s record nine quad titles at the BNP Paribas World Team Cup.
However, it was the three Paralympic quad doubles gold medals that mean most to Taylor, along with his singles bronze medal at London 2012.
Taylor and Wagner made history in Athens in 2004 as the first-ever squad doubles gold medallists at a Paralympic Tennis Event and they went on to add the gold medals at Beijing 2008 and in London before their last Paralympics together at Rio 2016 yielded a silver medal.
Taylor will always be known for his serve – referred to several times in tennis circles as the best ‘kick’ serve in the world. It’s a technique he has perfected over years of playing, in which the left-hander tosses the ball up using his foot while swinging the racket attached to his wrist via a loop on the racket handle.
As much as Taylor accomplished on the court, the same can be said for his career off the court. A double alumnus of Wichita State University, Taylor has been involved with the school’s varsity men’s tennis team, the Shockers, for more than 15 years – first as an intern, later as a volunteer assistant coach, and now as its director of operations.
In recent years, he has also been a mentor to young wheelchair players, including Casey Ratzlaff, a fellow Wichita native who picked up tennis at age 12 at a tennis camp hosted by Wichita Adaptive Sports – a non-profit organisation co-founded by Taylor. Ratzlaff qualified for his first Paralympic Games this year at age 23 and was among Taylor’s fellow players competing at this year’s UNIQLO Wheelchair Doubles Masters.
A measure of the man so hugely respected on court and off is that Taylor was named as the recipient of the UNIQLO Spirit Award in 2018 – an award launched by the ITF’s major wheelchair tennis sponsor UNIQLO to recognise a personality involved in wheelchair tennis that epitomises its core company values.
