Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
of her skin. “Miss Lottie Dod, the well-known lady tennis player, and joint champion of England with Mr. J.C. Kay in the mixed doubles, lives near Liverpool,” one anonymous commentator wrote in a tennis guide published in 1891. “She is twenty years of age and weighs one hundred and sixty pounds; is healthy, ruddy, and as strong as a man.” To smooth out the backhanded compliments, the author then felt compelled to add, “But with all her training [she] has not lost a particle of her womanliness.”[20]
It could not have felt good to know that, no matter how extraordinary her athletic achievements, the journalists who dogged her every sporting move would always find some way to explain her successes in terms of the men she was surrounded by. Thirteen years after she had been labeled “ruddy, and as strong as a man,” an article in the Montgomery Advertiser, published in the US state of Alabama after she wrapped up an American golf tour, would couch her myriad triumphs this way: “The champion woman golf player of Great Britain is Miss Charlotte Dod, a slender and very athletic young lady who has been practicing outdoor games and sports of all kinds since her childhood. She had two or three athletic brothers to coach her in her games, which was a great advantage.”[21] Not to be outdone, the Dispatch in Moline, Illinois, informed its readers, “The young lady had advantage over most girls in that she had big brothers devoted to outdoor games. These gentlemen kindly coached their sister in her athletic training. It is a wonderful help when the athletic girl has such brothers.”[22]
None of the articles mentioned Ann, the sibling who had actually been most responsible for her emergence as a sporting superstar. Ann, who had taken her on train trips around England to compete in tennis tournaments, who had been her doubles partner during her first years on the circuit. And Lottie herself, who surely knew all too well the debt she owed the older woman, felt at times compelled in public to pander to this demeaning narrative. In 1899, she went so far as to argue that her brother Tony had been her primary playmate as a child, and that “perhaps it is because I have mostly played with men that I have learned to play such a strong game . . . the average man’s stroke is undoubtedly much more powerful and swift than that of even the most expert women players.”[23] After all, in an era in which women couldn’t vote and had almost no independent property rights, few of the reading public would have been willing to accept that women could, or should, compete on an equal basis with men in any arena of public life. Many would, quite probably, have agreed with the Pastime essayist who, three years before Dod had won her first Wimbledon title, penned a piece essentially arguing that while most women couldn’t play a good game of tennis, they could—and should—flirt with male commentators and officials well enough to convince them to overlook their sporting flaws. They should be judged as adornments rather than on their sporting merits. “Lawn tennis, unlike most popular sports, places the critic in an exceedingly delicate position, inasmuch as he has to deal not only with the successes and failings of men, but also with the merits and mistakes of those of the fair sex who adorn the game by participating in it,” he wrote. “He must, indeed, be a hard-hearted scribe who could resist the soft supplication ‘not to mention that miss’ or to record ‘all those faults,’ and we cannot be surprised that our reporters—faithfully as they usually portray events—occasionally plead ‘extenuating circumstances’ when the stern editor wishes to know why so few remarks have been made on the play.” The author, carried away by his own fantasy, went on to write of how male umpires might get distracted by the “natty little shoes” of female servers, forgiving their foot faults when faced with the “pretty pouts” of female competitors. “Truly, man shows his weakness when he is in possession of the umpire’s chair in a ladies’ match!”[24]
In her heart of hearts, however, while she occasionally pandered to public prejudice, Dod never seemed truly able to accept the inferiority of women in tennis or in anything else. She might not have defended her Wimbledon title in 1889, but she was still entering and winning other tournaments, mostly in northern England, within a relatively easy train ride of Edgeworth. In Liverpool, she trounced Hillyard in the championship match, and also won the ladies’ doubles. In Northumberland, she won in singles and in mixed doubles. Then, as a follow-up, she challenged yet another leading male player, H.G. Pease, to yet another battle of the sexes, this time a one-set exhibition match.
Dod’s handicap against Pease was only a one-point head start in each game. It didn’t matter; she ran away with the set 6–2. Most likely, she would have won even had they played on equal terms. Time and again, she ripped unreturnable crosscourt forehands. “When this movement came off, as it did nine cases out of ten, Pease could do little more than smile, though whether sarcastically at his own inability to return, or at the skill of his fair opponent, one cannot say,” wrote one of the journalists present courtside. “What was most striking, however, was the ease with which Miss Dod played. Without making much show of activity, she seemed always to be just where the ball was returned to.”[25]
* * *
Two years after her second Wimbledon win, and coming off an extended absence from the game, Dod was asked by the editors of The Badminton Library, a series of books devoted to covering the era’s most popular sports, to compile her thoughts about women in tennis. She eagerly accepted the assignment.
The resulting essay, seven pages in length, was a window into Dod’s true thinking on the topic, brilliantly attacking the idea that women couldn’t excel in sports. Not yet nineteen, she wrote with style and emotional force. “For some years after its introduction the game was evidently thought beyond them [ladies] both as regards body and mind. There were piteous moans about the weight of the balls, and pathetic appeals not to spoil it as croquet had been spoiled, by making it too scientific. It was represented, not it may be hoped by ladies, but on their behalf, that no lady could understand tennis scoring.”[26]
The teenage sensation, who had now played four matches against top male players and won three of them, was scathing about these critics. Of the editor of the Field, a journal with an outsize influence over how the sport was viewed, she wrote that “he was invested with the prerogative of an irresponsible despot”; and that, moreover, his narrow ideas about women in tennis had been “conclusively disproved” by the quality of the matches then being played by lady competitors.
“To thee a woman’s services are due,” she announced, as a stand-alone line at the start of her essay, quoting act four of Shakespeare’s play King Lear. She had made her point: Dod wanted to be judged on her own terms. Not as a freak show adjunct to the male contestants at Wimbledon and the other events on the tennis circuit, but as an athlete who would rise or fall based on her own skills and her own ability to compete.
* * *
In 1891, after more than two years of on-again, off-again presence at the major tournaments, the young Bebingtonian returned full-time to the circuit. She promptly took up where she had left off in late 1888, swatting away all her challengers. That year, she won every match she played. She did the same in 1892. The same again in 1893.
She was, by now, far and away the most famous female athlete in England, probably in the world. The well-known London society photographers W. & D. Downey invited her to their studios on Ebury Street, in one of the most tony neighborhoods of central London, to pose for a series of portraits. She showed up in a simple, crenellated white dress, the material from her shoulders up to the top of her neck a doily pattern, held tight with a metal clasp high up on her throat. She wore her signature cricket cap, under which was bunched her wavy brown hair, now somewhat longer than it had been when she first won Wimbledon as a slightly awkward fifteen-year-old. As the photographer took one image after the next, she looked off to the left, her lips, dimpled at the corners, showing just the trace of a quizzical smile.[27]
In early July 1893, Dod played her fifth Wimbledon title match. Yet again, she faced her archrival, Mrs. Hillyard. This time around, on a rainy, windy Sunday afternoon, Hillyard managed to pull out all the stops. She drove balls deep into the court, ran her opponent from side to side. For the first time in a final, Dod seemed to have lost her way. Battling the wind, she struggled to get the ball into court. The defending champion lost the first set 6–8.
Digging deeper than she had ever had to do before, however, Dod put in a bravura performance in the second, pummeling Hillyard and racing to a 6–1 victory. Perhaps