Sasha Abramsky - Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the Worlds First Female Sports Superstar

This book is dedicated to my grandmother Mim,
our Tiny Dancer,
who traveled the world in her eighties
and never grew bored of lifes adventures.
And to my children, Sofia and Leo,
who hiked up mountains and climbed on glaciers with me,
while I was reporting this book,
with (almost) nary a complaint.

We will stomp to the top
with the wind in our teeth.
George Mallory, mountaineer

INTRODUCTION

Early photograph of tennis champion Lottie Dod, possibly taken at Wimbledon in 1887. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, Inc., is the source and owner of the photograph used in this production.

Charlotte Dod, aged eighty-eight, was lying in her bed, in the Birchy Hill Nursing Home in the sleepy southern English village of Sway. It was a peaceful place, quiet, as good as any other spot to spend ones final years. The village had a cluster of houses ranged along a few main streets, a handful of pubs, one churchSt. Lukestennis and archery clubs, and a community choir, all surrounded by the oaks and other trees of the New Forest, Englands last major acreage of densely wooded land. Carved out of the forest in places was pastureland, on which grazed herds of cattle, horses, and ponies. A few miles to the south were the genteel beach towns, retirement communities and tourist resorts dotting the windswept coast of the English Channel. Towns with names such as Lymington and Milford-on-Sea, Barton-on-Sea and Bournemouth. Their streets were lined with elegant mock-Tudor homes, the fronts cordoned off from prying eyes by tall hedgerows, as well as a fair number of thatched-roof cottages. There were, as well, many guesthouses in these parts, the front porches of which were decorated with hanging baskets of colorful flowers.

Birchy Hill, with its white-painted brick facade and gray-tiled roof, its brick chimneys and elegant curved window bays, had originally been built on a narrow country lane in the mid-1800s as home to three spinster sisters. Its grounds were spacious, the trim, sloping lawns surrounded by trees and thick tangles of blackberry bushes that on one side muffled the street sounds and noises of the village beyond, and on the other served as the outer edge of the New Forest. During World War II it had been requisitioned by the army. When the war ended, a male nurse who had served as a military ambulance driver, and his wife, bought the property, refurnished it with secondhand carpets, beds, and cupboards picked up on the cheap at estate sales, and opened up a retirement home that specialized in caring for elderly people with chronic physical or mental health conditions. Within ten years, the original house had been expanded into a complex of buildings, and it had upward of thirty-five residents.

Universally known as Lottie, the elderly woman, who had had to move into Birchy Hill following a decline in her health over the previous years, was listening to a radio broadcast from the second Monday of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. She had been listening all of the previous week too, through days plagued by squalls of rain and endless delays. It was, for Dod, a sacred ritual. Almost certainly she had tuned in to every year of broadcasts since the BBC first began covering the event, by radio in 1927, by television ten years later, in grainy black and white, available for only a few hours each afternoon.

That day, there were four marquee mens matches: on one side of the draw were two round-of-sixteen battles to settle, the first pitting the rising Australian star Roy Emerson against the Mexican Mario Llamas; the other showcasing the Chilean Luis Ayala against the Swede Jan-Erik Lundqvist. Both matches would be played on Court One. On the other side, a round ahead as the championships schedule had gotten knocked off-kilter by a higher than usual number of rain showers the previous week, two blockbuster quarterfinals to be played on Centre Court: the number one seed, Neale Fraser, against the American Earl Buchholz; and then the Italian Nicola Pietrangeli against the United States up-and-comer Barry MacKay. MacKay was a tall, big-hitting player from Dayton, Ohio, who had risen to number two in the rankings over the past months. There was also one womens round-of-sixteen match still to play, the British star Christine Truman, who had won the French Open the previous year, against the Czech Vra Puejov. It was scheduled as the third match on Court One, likely to be played in the very last hours of daylight; play at Wimbledon in late June could continue until about nine oclock at night.

The tennis began promptly at two p.m.

On Centre Court, Fraser soon found himself in an almighty scrap against Buchholz, losing the first set 46, winning the second 63, losing the third 46, and then having to save five match points in the fourth before pulling back to even the score at 1515. At that point, cramping so badly that he could hardly stand, and with an old ankle injury from a football game played five years earlier flaring up again, Buchholz had to call it a day. Wimbledon had rarely seen a retirement midmatch at a more dramatic moment. Buoyed by this fierce contest, Fraser would, a few days later, hold the champions 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.

In the other two mens matches, Emerson won in four sets, the last one being 97. 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 womens 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, wasnt playing that Monday afternoon.

* * *

Year in, year out, since she had won her first ladies championship, back in Queen Victorias 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.

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 umpires chair.

The ladies championships had only begun in 1884, seven years after the first mens competition. A mere three years before that inaugural mens 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 Europes 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.