He received tennis analysis from his friend, Chuck Pate, but mostly taught himself to play by watching other players on the public courts at nearby Exposition Park in Los Angeles.

He beat the British Davis Cup player Derek Barton and then lost a five-set match to third seed Gardnar Mulloy, despite leading 4–3 with a break in the fifth set.

[12] Following that, in the last major tournament of the year, the Pacific Southwest, played at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, he beat three players that would end their careers with Grand Slam singles titles, Jaroslav Drobný, Bob Falkenburg, and Frank Parker, before losing in the semifinals to Ted Schroeder.

American Lawn Tennis wrote that "the crowd cheered a handsome, dark-skinned Mexican-American youngster who smiled boyishly each time he captured a hard-fought point, kissed the ball prayerfully before a crucial serve, and was human enough to show nervousness as he powered his way to the most coveted crown in the world."

The only time he had beaten Schroeder, Gonzales was playing with a nose that had been broken the day before by his doubles partner's tennis racquet during a misplayed point at the net.

[73] At the Wembley World Pro Indoor Championships in 1956, Gonzales won a classic final with Sedgman in four long sets:[74] "The match lasted almost three hours and ended at 12.35am.

By the time the tour opened in New York in late February, the cyst had shrunk considerably and Gonzales went on to beat Rosewall by a final score of 50 matches to 26.

[85] The most difficult challenge that Gonzales faced during his dominant years came from Lew Hoad, the powerful young Australian who had won four Grand Slam titles as an amateur.

[87][88][89][90][91][92] Also, Hoad suffered back trouble beginning in early March which reduced his ability to play at a high level and contributed and coincided with the turnaround in results on the tour.

[103] Gonzales faced Rosewall, Segura and new pro signing Alex Olmedo on the 1960 World Professional Championship tour (Trabert also played a few matches early on).

[104] In April 1960 it was reported that "Pancho Gonzales, world's pro tennis champ since 1954, confirmed his recent announcement that he would quit Jack Kramer's touring troupe May 1.

[108] Ken Rosewall eventually beat Rod Laver in the finals but neither of them collected a penny: the promoter had failed to obtain a television contract, could not meet his costs and couldn't pay any prize money to any of the players.

In spite of the fact that he had been semi-retired for a number of years and that the tournament was held on slow clay courts that penalize serve-and-volley players, Gonzales beat the 1967 defending champion Roy Emerson in the quarterfinals.

Gonzales finished third in the NTL rankings for 1968, and was selected to enter the season combined professional final at Madison Square Garden together with the top four WCT players in an eight-man field.

[124] Around this time, Gonzales relocated to Las Vegas to be the Tennis Director at Caesars Palace, and he hired Chuck Pate, his childhood friend, to run the Pro Shop.

In 1972, Gonzales became the oldest player to have ever won a professional tournament, winning the 1972 Des Moines Open, which was part of the USLTA Indoor Circuit, over 24-year-old Georges Goven when he was three months shy of his 44th birthday.

[125] In June 1972, Gonzales reached the semifinals of the Queen's Club Championships, at age 44, and was leading by a set against John Paish when he was disqualified by the tournament referee after an argument over the replacement of a linesman.

[126][127] At South Orange in August, Gonzales beat John Lloyd, Sandy Mayer and Paul Gerken (all players more than twenty years younger than himself) before losing in the semifinals to Vijay Amritraj.

"[130] González had a long scar across his left cheek that, according to his autobiography, some members of the mass media of the 1940s attributed to his being a Mexican-American pachuco and hence involved in knife fights.

Gonzales reportedly was "haunted by race issues throughout his life...Six months before he died, he told his brother Ralph that he should have taken the offer of the Mexican government in 1948 to give up his U.S. citizenship and play for Mexico.

[23] As S. L. Price wrote about Gonzales in a 2002 Sports Illustrated article, "There was no more perfect match than Pancho and Vegas: both dark and disreputable, both hard and mean and impossible to ignore."

Following a ten-month battle with stomach cancer, Gonzales died on July 3, 1995, at the Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas at the age of 67, in poverty and estranged from his ex-wives and children except for Rita and their son, Skylar.

As has been observed about other great players such as Rod Laver, Gonzales almost certainly would have won a number of additional Grand Slam titles had he been permitted to compete in those tournaments during that 18-year period.

Jack Kramer, for instance, has speculated in an article about the theoretical champions of Forest Hills and Wimbledon that Gonzales would have won an additional 12 titles in those two tournaments alone.

"[155] In a 1972 article about an imaginary tournament among the all-time greats, Gene Scott had the fourth-seeded Gonzales upsetting Bill Tilden in the semifinals and then using his serve to beat Rod Laver in the finals.

They asked 37 tennis notables such as Kramer, Budge, Perry, and Riggs and observers such as Bud Collins[c] to list the ten greatest players in order.

The top eight players in overall points, with their number of first-place votes, were: Rod Laver (9), John McEnroe (3), Don Budge (4), Jack Kramer (5), Björn Borg (6), Pancho Gonzales (1), Bill Tilden (6), and Lew Hoad (1).

[164] In the early years of the 21st century, Sidney Wood compiled his list of the Greatest Players of All Time (later published posthumously in a memoir "The Wimbledon final that never was and other tennis tales from a bygone era").

In 2014, Frank Sedgman ranked Gonzales number four, behind Jack Kramer, Roger Federer and Rod Laver, in his greatest male tennis players of all-time list in his autobiography 'Game, Sedge and Match'.

[166] After his death, a Sports Illustrated article stated: "If earth was on the line in a tennis match, the man you want serving to save humankind would be Ricardo Alonso Gonzales.