Mary Bensen was best known as the wife of Rod Laver.
Mary Bensen was born on Jan. 23, 1928. Laver and Mary met at the Jack Kramer Club in the Los Angeles area and they married on June 20, 1966, in San Rafael, California.
Born Mary Shelby Peterson in Illinois, she was a divorcee with three children before she met Rod Laver.
The couple married for 46 years and had one son, Rick, who was born three weeks after Laver won the Grand Slam in 1969. Laver, an Australian tennis great, is the only person to have won the Grand Slam twice, the first coming in 1962.
Mary Laver died on November 12, 2012. She was 84 years old at the time of her death. Rod Laver on Tuesday said Mary Laver died Monday morning at their home in Carlsbad in northern San Diego County.
“We had a wonderful life together,” Laver said. “We did a lot of traveling, a lot of tennis tournaments, tennis events.”