MIGHTY MAGGIE, SHE GATHERED TITLES LIKE PLUCKING GRAPES
That would be Margaret Court, the No. 1 guest at a celebratory Melbourne Park luncheon on the day of the female final, an occasion she graced many times.
You might say she crawled into tennis anonymously, yet departed upright, draped in headlines and stardust and all the right stuff that could flow from a racket.
Much more than Margaret Smith Court could have imagined when, as the 9-year-old ringleader of the otherwise all-boys hole-in-the-fence gang, she launched her tennis career by crashing the local club. They would sneak in through that opening in the fence and play until caught and thrown out.
This was decades ago in an Australian country town called Albury in New South Wales. “I was a tall tomboy,” she says. “My mother wasn’t too happy when I played cricket, football, basketball with the boys. But tennis and running were OK.” Soon enough she had made friends at the tennis club, no longer a trespasser, and looked like a prospect to the local coaches.
Some prospect. If you started counting the matches and championships Margaret won in singles and doubles across the planet, as an amateur and professional, you’d feel like Specs O’Keefe, a member of the infamous Brinks gang of Boston bank robbers. When asked in federal court how much they’d stolen, Specs shrugged, “I ain’t no ‘mathmagician.’ ”
But tennis court “mathmagicians” have pretty much determined that Mighty Maggie is the winningest person (male or female) ever to inhabit a tournament rectangle. At least in the modern post-World War II era. Over 14 campaigns (1959 – 75, missing three seasons), she carried off a record 62 major titles – 24 singles, 19 doubles, 19 mixed. Those were the biggest of the big. All her singles titles added up to 197.
Although her career winnings amounted to only about a quarter of the $2.5 million the Brinks mob heisted in 1950, hers was an era of no prize money until 1968, and thereafter chump change compared with the present day. Her biggest score was $ 25,000 as U.S. Open champ of 1973, the first, and at the time, only tournament, compensating men and women equally. Last year at Flushing Meadows, the triumphant Kim Clijsters and Juan Marin Del Potro raked in $ 1.6 million apiece, making tennis seem more appealing than robbing banks.
“I don’t think women should get as much money as men,” Margaret said in 1973. Her husband, Barry Court, laughed, “But you can bet she’ll cash the check.”
You could bet, too, that she would become the first Australian woman tapped for the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island. That happened in 1979, the end result of a push given by another Aussie Hall of Famer, Frank Sedgman, 20 years before.
“I was the original country bumpkin,” she remembers. “Shy, skinny, awkward, but willing to work and learn.” And realizing she had to get out of Albury to progress. Sedgman, at the forefront of the great Australian wave that inundated the world during the 1950s, invited her to work in his office and work out at his gym in Melbourne. Receiving expert coaching and physical training, one of the first women to stress extreme fitness, she developed rapidly and took her initial major title surprisingly at 17 in 1960. That was the Australian Championship, which she embraced possessively for seven straight years, and 11 times altogether.
After the Australian breakthrough on her second try, Sedgman told her she would be the first Australian female to win Wimbledon. “That gave me tremendous confidence,” she says. “That above all was the title I wanted.” It came to pass in 1963 at the expense of her chief rival, Billie Jean Moffitt King, 6-3, 6-4, avenging an opening round loss to B.J. a year before.
By then, a shade under 6 feet, Margaret joined American Althea Gibson (U.S. and Wimbledon champ in 1957-58) as the tallest women to win majors until 6-foot-2 Venus Williams and 6-foot-3 Lindsay Davenport succeeded. Court added Wimbledon conquests of 1965 and 1970 to her five French and five U.S. singles prizes.
She doesn’t have to think about it. If she had to pick a year out of the grand collage of memories and accomplishments unlikely to be approached by anyone – it would be 1970.
Can you even envision such a year? Glittering and well out of reach, it will be saluted throughout 2010, especially at the majors, as the 40th anniversary of her Grand Slam. A Slamapalooza stretch, it stacked up to 21 victorious tournaments out of 27 played, and a 112-6 match record. That’s a .948 batting average, the best ever for anyone playing more than 100 matches.
For a decade she had been thinking, hoping, praying about the ultimate – a Grand Slam — practically as rare as climbing Everest in a bikini. Thrice she had tripled, missing the fourth link at Wimbledon in 1962 and 1969, and the French in 1965.
Margaret knew that only one woman had preceded her to a Slam: Californian Maureen Connolly in 1953. But she was confident that 1970 was her year to join the exclusive club whose only other members were Californian Don Budge (1938) and countryman Rod Laver (1962 and 1969).
Pretty much pieces of cake were the first two, the Australian over compatriot Kerry Melville, 6-1, 6-3, and the French over slim 6-foot German Helga Niessen Masthoff, 6-2, 6-4 – although Margaret considered herself “lucky” to beat Russian Olga Morozova, and cramps, in the second round, 3-6, 8-6, 6-1. A Slammer needs a little luck here and there.
She needed resolve and brilliance (and disregard for pain) in the piece de resistance of the Slam, the Wimbledon climax against her most dangerous foe, Billie Jean King. Billie Jean very nearly matched those qualities in a mammoth battle that may have been the finest women’s final in the Big W’s annals. As they fought incessantly for almost 2 ½ hours, these two remarkable volleyers went for each other’s jugular up close.
It was a phenomenal clash of Nos. 1 and 2, going back and forth until the foremost, Court, prevailed, 14-12, 11-9 – even though King served for the second set at 5-4, 7-6, and 8-7, and rescued four match points before the end. Forty-six games, a record for the final, the tie-breaker not yet in use.
Few knew that both women were gamely playing hurt, but never gave any indication. Margaret’s sprained left ankle called for a pain-killing injection that wore off in the second set. Billie Jean’s gimpy knee required surgery, finishing the year for her.
Theirs was an enthralling joust whose time has gone: wooden rackets and serve-and-volleyers when the Grand Slam route was a three-quarters test on quick, capricious grass. Paris was, and remains, the lone clay exam while pavement has replaced lawns in Melbourne and New York. Margaret’s five French titles set her apart as a knockout anywhere on any footing.
This time, 1970, on the New York lawn at Forest Hills, with four U.S. titles already in her satchel, but never so close to the quintessential quadrilateral, she fully believed she would at last embrace Slamhood.
That belief lasted until the concluding set of the final. Margaret had lost merely 13 games on the way to the potential spoiler, tiny Californian Rosie Casal, who forced a third set by winning the second, 6-2.
“We called Margaret ‘The Arm,’ Rosie remembers. “It was like her right arm was a mile long when you tried to pass her.” Casals, more than most, felt that way because Margaret towered almost a foot above her. But a quick shotmaking wizard, Rosie, a future Hall of Famer herself, wasn’t awed.
While Margaret feels the elongated Wimbledon final, over Billie Jean, was the match of her life, she was now up against the set of her life – “wanting to win it more than any set I’d ever played.”
Whatever nerves might have rattled her, they were overcome by the need to win that “last crucial set.” She said she prayed for help – and got it – winning driving, as they say at the racetrack. Overpoweringly, on the gallop, it was Grand, 6-2, 2-6, 6-1. Margaret had swept the Big Four titles, 23 matches on the loss of three sets. Thus she stands alone as the possessor of a doubles Slam as well, the 1963 mixed alongside Aussie Ken Fletcher.
She had never stopped. Involved in a maternal slam, the raising of their four children, and warmly counseling as an ordained Christian minister, this modest, caring woman has been a champion beyond sport.
Only one has followed her elevated path through the game. In 1988 German Steffi Graf (eventually Mrs. Andre Agassi) became the fifth Grand Slammer, earning $ 877,724 for the four championships.
Margaret’s take was $ 14,800, but she will tell you her faith is more enriching than money.
Tags: Grand Slam, Margaret Court
January 29 2010 04:28 am | Grand Slam
