The second decade of the Conde de Godó Trophy coexisted directly, and on the same stage of the Real Club de Tenis Barcelona, with the great explosion of tennis in Spain that occurred with the successes of that legendary Davis Cup team made up of Manolo Santana, Juan Gisbert, José Luis Arilla, Juan Manuel Couder and Jaime Bartrolí as captain, and they were joined two years later by Manuel Orantes.
The tournament maintained its ability to attract the great figures of world tennis during that second decade, being the Australian Roy Emerson who added his second and third titles in Barcelona in 1963 and 1964. But the revolution and the passion for tennis in Spain already he was forcing big changes. In fact, already in 1961, the Real Club de Tenis Barcelona, before the success of the Conde de Godó Trophy, took a step forward with the construction of its new central court, a court that over the years became known as the talisman clue. The inauguration of said track consisted of the dispute of a symbolic point disputed by Manolo Santana, champion of the Conde de Godó Trophy in 1962 and 1970, and finalist in 1961 and 1964, and Juan Gisbert, champion in 1965.
And in 1963, that center court was filled with avid tennis spectators for three consecutive weeks, interspersed with the Davis Cup qualifiers between Spain and Italy and Spain and France. But the most relevant figure related to this coexistence between both competitions is that, during that decade, the organizing team of the Conde de Godó Trophy organized 22 Davis Cup qualifiers between 1963 and 1972. The teams from Italy, France, Brazil, Chile, Federal Republic of Germany, South Africa, India, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Ecuador, Mexico, Great Britain, Sweden, Romania. Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia saw not only the power of the Spanish players on their favorite court, but also the warm reception of a knowledgeable audience.
“In 1963, those two very tough Davis Cup qualifiers, first against Italy and then against France, I remember perfectly with the Conde de Godó Trophy dispute between them. The Spanish Tennis Federation, which was responsible for organizing the Davis Cup qualifiers, did not hesitate to ask the RCTB that the Conde de Godó Trophy team assume these tasks. And the club, which has always had as one of its great objectives to bring the best tennis to Barcelona, did not object to assuming that responsibility”, recalls José Luis Arilla.
“That was the turning point of tennis in Spain. A few days after the victory against the Americans, the rackets were sold out in sports stores in Spain. The images of those days that Spanish television broadcast turned us, especially Manolo Santana, into heroes”, adds Arilla.
In the three following editions of the Conde de Godó Trophy, the Brazilian Thomas Koch in 1966, and the Australian based in Italy, Martin Mulligan, in 1967 and 1968 halted the strength of Spanish tennis. They were years marked by everything that happened off the slopes. The great debate worldwide was how to deal with the problem of fitting professional tennis and amateur tennis into the same path. The RCTB kept a smart stance on the strategies around the return of the professionals, aligning itself with the top-flight European tournaments to seek a common strategy.
In 1969, Manuel Orantes defeated Manolo Santana in the first final among Spaniards of the Conde de Godó Trophy and, in 1970, the tournament played its first edition with the Open category culminating in a final between two great world tennis figures such as Manolo Santana. and Rod Laver. "In this life you have to move forward and take risks, and without a doubt the arrival of the professionals represents a novelty and a risk, but I am convinced that we have made the right decision," said Carlos Godó about the new dimension that the tournament has reached in this new stage.
