Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
later, hold the champion’s trophy aloft on Centre Court.
Much later, in the gathering dusk, the power player MacKay lost to the Italian in four sets when his serve, which had been unreturnable in the first week of the championships, abandoned him. Seemingly succumbing to stage fright, he hit one double fault after another. His opponent, by contrast, ran down everything, playing, the Associated Press reporter courtside noted approvingly, like a “jungle cat.”[4] When the final shot was hit and Pietrangeli had won, the Italian ran to the net to shake his defeated opponent’s hand. As he ran, he threw his racket high into the air in glee. The two men leaned in for the handshake, the heavy wooden racket arced downward through the air, and, in one of the tournament’s more bizarre accidents, crashed down on their heads, temporarily dazing both players.[5]
In the other two men’s matches, Emerson won in four sets, the last one being 9–7. And Ayala defeated his Swedish opponent in an uneven five-set match that waxed and waned in intensity over the course of several hours.
Meanwhile, in the one women’s contest of the day, to the delight of the home crowd Truman won in straight sets. Maria Bueno, the Brazilian sensation who had won Wimbledon in 1959 and who would go on to win the championships again the following weekend, wasn’t playing that Monday afternoon.
* * *
Year in, year out, since she had won her first ladies’ championship, back in Queen Victoria’s jubilee year of 1887, at the ludicrously young age of fifteen years and 285 days, Lottie Dod had made the journey out to the Wimbledon suburbs. First as a player, dubbed by the press “Little Wonder,” then as a fan.
She won in 1887 and again in 1888. She took a break from the tournament for the following two years, but when she returned, still a teenager, she was once more unbeatable. The championship was hers in 1891. In 1892. And once more in 1893. In these years, Lottie Dod, who would bicycle over to the courts from the nearby houses in which she stayed during the competition, quite simply made ladies’ tennis a one-woman show. “Though young in years, she is ripe in judgement,” wrote the commentator W. Methven Brownlee in 1889, in his sweeping overview of the state of tennis. The Little Wonder exhibited, he continued, “the temperament that is best described as ‘that sweet calm which is just between.’”[6]
Frequently, in the decades after she retired, Dod would bring her young nephews and nieces with her to sit in the front-row seats the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club allotted her, just behind the umpire’s chair.[7] When the weather heated up, she would take out her fan—black crenellated paper topping a metal skeleton, decorated with gold floral arrangements and slightly racy portraits of three fleshy women, a bearded man with two devil-like horns watching them from off to their left—and gently fan herself.[8]
The ladies’ championships had only begun in 1884, seven years after the first men’s competition. A mere three years before that inaugural men’s championship, one Major Walter Clopton Wingfield had filed a patent for the portable equipment used to play a game that had some relation in concept to the ancient indoor game of tennis played by Europe’s aristocracies since at least the thirteenth century. His patent referenced a design for a “new and improved portable court,” in the middle of which a “large oblong net is stretched,” with a series of triangular nets, fixed to pegs driven into the ground, arranged alongside the court as side netting to catch wayward balls. The lines of the courts were to be marked out “by paint, coloured cord, or tape.” Wingfield was exuberant about the possibilities of his new game. “By this simple apparatus a portable court is obtained,” he wrote in his patent application, “by means of which the old game of tennis, which has always been an indoor amusement, and which few can enjoy on account of the great expense of building a brick court, may be made an outdoor one, and played within the reach of all.”[9]
The word itself, “tennis,” was thought to have originated from the French verb tenir, “to hold,” a word cried out by the server before he threw the ball up into the air and batted it into play. Over the centuries, it vied with jeu de paume, or “game of the palm of the hand,” as the name of the game in the Parisian popular imagination. Wingfield called his modified game both lawn tennis and sphairistike—the latter being an ancient Greek word meaning something like “skill at playing ball.” Others translated it simply as “sphere and stick.”[10]
Initially, the military-man-cum-sports-inventor envisioned hourglass-shaped courts, narrowing at the net—which he saw as being about as high as a modern badminton net—and widening out toward the baseline. As for scoring, in a rule book he published in 1874 he advocated that each game be played to fifteen points, making the game a sort of set unto itself, much like it is in the sport of squash today; and averred that only the server could win a point. Lose a point while serving and the ball shifted to the opponent, for him to try his hand at scoring. The following year, however, with the tennis craze spreading like wildfire, the Marylebone Cricket Club, at the time the leading sports authority in England, took over its rulemaking. The MCC adopted the shorter, quicker, 15, 30, 40, game scoring method of the more venerable, ancient royal tennis. It allowed the person not serving to also win points; grouped games into longer first-to-six-game sets; and simplified the court structure into the rectangular shape that it has kept ever since. So, too, the wise men of Marylebone lowered the net height down from upward of five feet to its modern level of three and a half feet at the posts, slightly lower toward the middle of the court.
Those basic parameters of the game have survived down the ages. Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Venus and Serena Williams . . . all have played, and play, a game structurally almost identical to that codified by the MCC nearly one and a half centuries ago.
Maud Watson, the daughter of a vicar from the London borough of Harrow, won the first two ladies’ championships at Wimbledon, in 1884 and 1885. She took home as her prize a silver flower basket valued at twenty guineas.[11] Watson’s two-year reign was followed by Blanche Bingley’s victory in 1886. Both women were considerably older than Lottie Dod, and both had firmly established themselves as the players to beat on the growing ladies’ circuit, the tournaments of which were now dotted around the British Isles: in Dublin, Bath, Cheltenham, London, and elsewhere.
A year before Watson’s first Wimbledon win, the schoolgirl Dod had started entering doubles tournaments around England. Lottie had learned the game on courts that her parents, Joseph and Margaret, erected on the grounds of Edgeworth House—their sprawling estate, a few miles outside of Liverpool, bought with the profits from Joseph’s cotton brokerage business. In those early tournaments, Lottie partnered with her older sister, Ann, nearly nine years her senior.
Ann was good; but her kid sister, only eleven years old when they entered their first competitions, was in another league entirely. Newspapers reported on the child sensation in tones of amazement. “Miss L. Dod, who is only eleven years old, played from the back of the court with both skill and judgement,” wrote one reporter after watching Ann and Lottie reach the ladies’ doubles final in Manchester in 1883, an achievement that won them two pounds and ten shillings in prize money. Another journalist predicted that “Miss L. Dod should be heard of in the future, as though only eleven years old, she showed really good form, and not only served well but displayed tactics worthy of much older players.”[12]
When the younger Dod sister began playing, she was like a tornado, whisking up all her opponents, disorientating them, demoralizing them, leaving their tennis in tatters. Her one weakness was that she served underarm, as did most women at the time—though even that fact was partially mitigated by her hitting it fast and low over the net. She would hold two of the “Wimbledon balls,” made of rubber and covered with white melton cloth, which the Ayres company sold to the tournaments for twelve pence per dozen, in her open left palm as she leaned her back forward slightly from the waist and prepared to swing her right arm upward.[13] That relatively weak serve notwithstanding, the rest of her game was fierce, fast. She was a power player decades before power playing became the norm. In an age when tennis was too often played with the delicacy of croquet—“the rallies at that period were very tedious; indeed, it was possible to take a country walk after one began and get back in time to see the end of it,” a satirical writer for the Athenaeum reminisced in 1909[14]—Dod aimed