Held in Mid-November at Amelia Island Plantation, FL, the tournament consisted of eight of the top nine nationally-ranked teams. The winning team of Mangan and Kingsbury received $2,000, while the runners-up, Steele and Jennings, earned $500.

Highlights of the tournament were shown on the CBS show Sports Spectacular on Sunday February 23, 1975

Even though most of the players on the tour had full-time jobs outside of platform tennis, with the majority of them working in the finance industry, the prize money added another enticement to the game.

Edited by Dick Squires, this was one of a number of books he edited or wrote. Squires was a great promoter of the game.

Squires was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.

In 1974, several letters to the editor of The New York Times surfaced about the name confusion between platform tennis and paddle tennis.

Burling Lowrey of Washington, D.C., and Dick Squires exchanged pecks as proponents for their respective games. The exchange, however, was broader in scope than just the name conflict.

The Mid-Summer edition of the APTA newsletter, Off The Wire, had this to say:

It is not the intent of the APTA to enter the crossfire, but simply to set the record straight for our readers who may have read one or both of the letters, because both gentlemen are guilty of errors of fact.

Mr. Squires, in turn, stated, “the fault lies with the purist platform tennis players as well as the present officials of the APTA. They insist on calling platform tennis paddle tennis, but mainly out of habit rather than any insidious desire to obliterate paddle tennis.” As regards to the public, it is probably true that it will be a long time before typical platform tennis players can be swayed from the conversationally- easy “let’s go play some paddle.” Regarding the APTA, however, all possible stress has been placed on the correct term platform tennis. In responding to telephone calls and written inquiries, and in promotional efforts such as last December’s press luncheon, in interviews and in editing drafts of articles about the game, all APTA officers strive for factual accuracy. Unfortunately, we are not always given the opportunity to review every item about platform tennis, hence the perpetuation of the erroneous name. Some people have suggested that we call our game “screen tennis” or “wire tennis” or “rebound tennis” among other names. What do you think? If you have an opinion on the subject, let us hear from you.

Source: Off The Wire, Vol. 5, Mid-Summer 1974

The APTA named Gloria Dillenbeck as the first full-time Executive Secretary. Raised in Montclair, NJ, Dillenbeck began playing platform tennis in 1966 and had been a star varsity tennis player at Swarthmore College.

With her partner, B.J. Debree, they were the first team to challenge the dynasty of Charlotte Lee and Peggy Stanton (National Champions 1967-1970) and won the Nationals in three successive years—1971, 1972, and 1973.

Gloria Dillenbeck Dodd was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007.

Brendan Byrne had a calendar conflict, a speech to the New Jersey Education Association at their annual conference and a date to play in the National Senior Men’s 50+ at Englewood, NJ. He chose to play paddle, lost his first round match and advanced as far as the semis in the consolation.

A newspaper covering the event characterized his game as “a conservative style bent on returning the ball.”

Source: Off The Wire, Vol. 5, No. 3

The tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973, captivated America and was a triumph for women’s athletics. Platform tennis benefitted with an increase in participation by women.

King entered the Astrodome in Cleopatra style, carried aloft in a chair held by four bare-chested muscle men dressed in the style of ancient slaves. Riggs followed in a rickshaw drawn by a bevy of scantily-clad models. Riggs presented King with a giant lollipop and she gave him a piglet named Larimore Hustle.

Rather than playing her own usual aggressive game, King mostly hugged the baseline, easily handling Riggs’s lobs and soft shots, making Riggs cover the entire court as she ran him from side to side, and beating him at his own defensive game. After quickly falling behind from the baseline, where he had intended to play, King forced Riggs to change to a serve-and-volley game. Even from the net, the result was the same: King defeated him, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3.

Source: Selena Roberts, A ray of progress for women as Battle of the Sexes turns 35, Sports Illustrated, 9/20/2008. Bobby Riggs Vs Billie Jean King, Assortment.com

Corporate sponsorship ended up attracting several professional tennis players to the sport, with Herb S. Fitz Gibbon II, Clark Graebner, and Hank Irvine being the most successful.

Fitz Gibbon ranked among the world’s top tennis players between 1961 and 1973, and became the first amateur to beat a professional in the 1968 Wimbledon.

Graebner, originally from Cleveland, was on the winning U.S. Davis Cup team and ranked seventh in the world in 1968.

Irvine was from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and represented his country on the Davis Cup team in 1968 and 1969, and at Wimbledon from 1970 to 1972. In 1970, he teamed with Helen Gourlay from Australia and made it to the semifinals of the Mixed at Wimbledon.

During the early 1970’s, commercial sponsorship came knocking, raising difficult policy questions for the APTA.

The exposure gained by commercial sponsorship would bring the sport to a much wider audience, but critics argued that money would detract from the game’s social aspects.

Foreseeing the likelihood of company-sponsored “tours,” the APTA formally established its policy on commercial activities and decided to maintain control over all commercial tournament activities.

This decision allowed platform tennis to broaden its horizon. The alternative would have undoubtedly led to the establishment of a separate professional organization.

Up until 1973, all National Championships had been held in or around New York City, primarily at Fox Meadow Tennis Club in Scarsdale, which had the most courts. The other two founding clubs of the APTA—The Field Club in Greenwich, CT, and Manursing Island Club in Rye, NY—also hosted, as did the Englewood Club, in Englewood, NJ.

In the fall of 1971, the Cleveland Committee, headed by Carrington Clark, submitted a comprehensive proposal to the APTA Board to host the Men’s National Championship. After some consideration, the Board approved the plan to move the Nationals. The 1973 Men’s Nationals in Cleveland were highly successful, and it signified the start of an era when the Nationals moved to a different location each year. It returned to Fox Meadow from 1974 to 1979; Montclair, New Jersey, from 1980 to 1982; New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1983; and Cleveland, Ohio, in 1984.

That same year, a group of Midwest men, including Carrington Clark, John Bernet, Dave Dickenson, and Will McFarlane founded Cleveland Tournaments Inc., a non-profit organization to support major platform tennis events in Northeast Ohio.

The logistics for the event required considerable discussion between the APTA and the Nationals organizers as reflected in the APTA Executive Committee Minutes of July 1972 and others