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San Diego's own Maureen Connolly that is, largely unheard of these days, but the first woman ever to win the grand slam, ie the australian, french, and US opens and Wimbledon, all in a calendar year, and this years before Margaret Court and Steffi Graf did it... but you won't find any specials devoted to Little Mo, as they called her, on the Tennis Channel-they're too busy running features on what hot cars the ATP players drive, also what swanky tennis resorts we should all visit, as if we could even afford to.... what i'm getting at i guess is that i long for the days of the wood racquet, of Tilden and Vines and Budge and Kramer and Gonzalez, before "advances" in racquet and string technology turned the game into a slugging contest- who can hit the hardest serve, the most punishing groundstrokes?.... in the days of wood, things were evenly balanced between offense and defense, more or less, and the pace of the game wasn't extreme like it is now- now you're lucky if you can even return a serve-if i were across the net from the 6-10 Ivo Karlovic, i'd wear body armor.. still i love Federer, and no i won't launch into another top ten list here , but he'd be on mine... and there's lots of great women players i could name, but i won't- for now just take a second to remember Little Mo.
4 comments:
This sounds crazy, and I hate to jump on this tennis thing, a game played largely by wasps at exclusive country clubs, but my mother played with/was friends with Maureen, family lore has it, while I was nestled in the womb. I believe that the site was the old courts in Balboa Park, but will check with her. No memory, frankly.
for sure tennis used to be a wasp country club sport, not now though, or at least not nearly as much...sadly, i think golf falls into that category still, the success of Tiger Woods notwithstanding ...i'd like to talk with your mother sometime about Maureen...
call me for her number.
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