Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
idea that backhands and forehands merited different grips; and her ability to shift how she held her cumbersome wooden racket paid huge dividends against her less dexterous opponents. Despite the inelegant, heavy structure of her racket, and the rigidity of the catgut strings, she hit her strokes with sheer ferocity.
The young girl ran down balls that most of her female contemporaries—who played while wearing ornate, skin-concealing outfits that wrapped their torsos tightly, and swaddled their bodies from the top of the neck down to just above the feet in layers of underclothes, bodices, dresses, blouses—could not, or would not, chase down. Dod, far younger than most of her opponents, could get away with wearing dresses that stopped a few inches above the ankles. As a result, in her first few years on the circuit she had a built-in advantage, her clothing not constricting her mobility quite as much as did the couture of her opponents. But none of that would have mattered a whit had she not also possessed vast wells of talent. The teenage sensation knew how to work the angles, when to hit a drop shot, when to rush the net for a devastating volley, when to pound a ball into the far corner of the court. She played not like a “garden party” player, the society hobbyists for whom she showed considerable contempt in her spoken and written comments on the game, but like an athlete. And she competed to win. “People have frequently asked me if I consider lawn tennis an athletic game,” she wrote in 1897, long after she had retired from the sport, in a gold-embossed, hefty tome, The Encyclopaedia of Sport, volume 1, edited by the aristocratic sports enthusiast the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire. “I presume my questioners have never witnessed a hard five-set match between two first-class men, played under a broiling sun. It is doubtful if any game is a severer test of endurance. For ladies, too, it is decidedly a very athletic exercise, always supposing that they go in for it heartily, and do not merely frivol at garden parties.”[15]
In her first outing at Wimbledon, in 1887, she faced a sparsely populated field. That year, there were only four other female competitors in the main draw, plus the 1886 champion, Blanche Bingley, waiting to meet the winner of these earlier rounds in the championship match. Crushing her other opponents, the fifteen-year-old Dod easily reached that last round. There, she routed Bingley 6–2, 6–0. Even the fact that Bingley served overarm, her legs and back straight, the low toss-up allowing only a gentle patting of the ball into play,[16] didn’t help her against her underarm-serving adversary. The second set lasted a grand total of ten minutes. A reporter on the scene, stunned by the quality of the play he had seen from Dod, her chestnut-brown wavy hair[17] bunched up under her cap as she swung away at the ball, found the new champion so dominating that “in the last set she did almost as she pleased.”[18]
Afterward, the two players, Bingley several inches the taller and wearing a dark dress with ornate crepe laced around the waist, shook hands decorously at the net. Bingley’s racket was awkwardly stuffed under her left arm; the champion Dod, with just the hint of a smile on her young face, let hers dangle loosely, casually, pointed down toward the court.[19]
Captivated by her youth and her sheer confidence, the sports journalists of the day, in densely printed, triple-columned publications such as Pastime, now took to calling Dod “the Little Wonder.”
In addition to publishing lengthy reports on football and tennis, those journals also carried pictorial adverts for rackets with quixotic names like the Smasher, the Never Slack Tennis Bat, the Tête-à-tête, and tennis accoutrements like Jefferies Patent Screw Lawn Tennis Poles and Murston’s Patent Star Racket Press. Soon they would be advertising rackets variously called the Dod and the Dod Lawn-Tennis Bat. These bats, raced into production after the Little Wonder’s win, were manufactured by Jefferies & Co., a concern based in the East End of London. Their manufacturers claimed that they employed a dense new stringing technique that allowed for the crisscrossed catgut strings to produce as many as 1,200 squares on the face of the racket head.[20]
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For the next half decade, Blanche Bingley, who soon after her 1887 loss got married and resumed playing under the name Mrs. Hillyard, was not able to get a handle on her rival’s game. No one else could either. A leading tennis historian, writing decades later, could find only one explanation for Dod’s startling success—a most jarring explanation to the modern ear. “Miss Lottie Dod, who was lady champion thirty years ago, and almost as versatile as the present champion,” he wrote, “learnt her game, as she learnt other games, in the company of men.”[21] Whatever the reason for her success, that she was the best was beyond dispute. In his profile of nine leading players on the circuit, W. Methven Brownlee included eight men and one woman. The woman was, of course, Miss Lottie Dod.[22]
In the seven years that she would play on the embryonic women’s circuit—mainly matches around England and Ireland—she would win forty-one singles tournaments; seven of these garnered Dod championship trophies from the biggest events. She came second in eleven, and third in one. Most of her losses occurred before she turned fifteen.[23] Indeed, from 1887 onward, she lost only one tournament match to another woman. She also won twenty more tournaments in ladies and mixed doubles. It was an astonishing record, as near to perfection as any achieved in the long annals of lawn tennis.
Mrs. Hillyard eventually won more Wimbledons than did Dod—six to Dod’s five. But she only did so during the years Dod wasn’t playing: before the Little Wonder came on the scene; again in 1889, the first of two years, in the middle of her tennis-playing career, in which Dod decided not to compete; and several times after Dod’s sudden retirement from the game in the mid-1890s, at an age when many up-and-coming players still haven’t made their first real mark on the sport. Hillyard didn’t stop playing at Wimbledon until she was forty-nine years old, in 1913. Truly, if prizes were awarded for tennis longevity, she would have won them all. Yet when Lottie Dod was competing, there might as well have been a chasm separating the ladies’ number one player from the number two. Hillyard simply couldn’t keep up with the girl from Lower Bebington. In four of the five championship matches Dod played, Blanche Bingley Hillyard was her opponent; all four matches went to Dod, three of them in straight sets.
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In those years, the Little Wonder traveled to the three-and-a-half-acre complex of courts on Worple Road. It was a low-key affair, its clubhouse a small, two-story brick villa, which players would enter through French doors. In the bathroom on the second floor, four washbasins set on marble slabs stood, where tournament participants could rinse the sweat off their faces after a closely fought match.[24]
Around the grass courts at Worple Road, noted A. Wallis Myers, the first great chronicler of the game, at times the spectators were jammed in so tightly that “not even a ferret could squeeze through the centre court crowd.” In the early days of the tournament, before the large stadiums were constructed, before women had been admitted to play, people would pay two shillings and sixpence simply to sit or stand wherever they could around the roped-off courts, some perched on chairs they had brought with them, others on piles of heated bricks they rented from hawkers on the grounds.[25] During the rains, they would unfurl huge umbrellas, under which they would shiver while the male players gamely continued. More recently, some semblance of order had been created by the building of the tiered seating, the boxes, the standing areas rising up around the courts. By the thousands, ticket holders, many of them dropped off by London and South Western Railway trains originating from Waterloo, which stopped at the Wimbledon station by the grounds, came to watch the games during the championship week.[26] Each year, it seemed, the sport grew more popular.
In 1922, after years of discussions, the championships finally moved to larger grounds on Church Road, a few miles from the original location, where the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and its famous tournament have remained ever since.
Dod was always welcomed back to tennis’s self-proclaimed cathedral. After all, she had won the prestigious tournament five times before retiring at the age of twenty-one and moving on to other triumphs. To play hockey for the English team. To become the British ladies’ golf champion. To train in Switzerland as one of Europe’s top ice-skaters, reaching a level never before achieved by a woman. To master the most dangerous of toboggan runs, including the Swiss town of St. Moritz’s notorious Cresta Run. To summit a number of Norway’s toughest mountains. And finally to win a silver medal for England in archery at the 1908 London Olympics.