By Lindsay Ash
NEXT week sees the start of Wimbledon, the world’s greatest tennis tournament. Or to put it another way, as I never tired of telling my American colleagues, the All England Tennis Championships.
Whether it’s just age or not I don’t know but I think the event has lost something over the years. Well, not the event as such but the competitors have become less interesting, less varied and there are fewer characters.
Long gone are the days of Nastase and McEnroe going berserk and demanding “I want the referee” while slamming their rackets into the umpire’s chair. These outbursts meant tennis attracted a whole new viewing audience because it was pure theatre – and that’s not including the invasion of the teeny boppers to SW19 to scream at their idol, the blonde swede Bjorn Borg.
It is, of course, the time of year when all the public courts fill up as every man wants to be Alcaraz and the women to be err, well you know, that tall one with the ponytail who grunts a lot. And that’s my point. In the old days you could ask anyone and they’d roll off the names of ten current tennis players. People now would struggle to give you a couple.
The players all have the annoying habit of waving their fist at their coaching staff and shouting “c’mon”. Why? What are the people in the box supposed to do? It would make more sense the other way round: “C’mon, stop messing around with your towel every point and concentrate on your first serve!” It’s pure affectation and has stuck.
The women’s game has been hardest hit as it’s churned out a series of clones who look pretty much the same and play pretty much the same. It made me think back to the days when they were all very different – Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Chrissie Evert, Françoise Dürr, Virginia Wade, Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong.
And it’s Evonne that I’d like to tell you about because although many remember her – if only for the splendid name – few may know her journey to holding up the Rosewater Dish on Centre Court.
Evonne was born in 1951 in New South Wales and grew up in the small country town of Barellan. She was born into an Aboriginal family where she was one of eight children. Her father was a sheep shearer and her mother a housewife. Those of you who think that tennis is a fairly middle-class sport now, believe me it was much more so then and the chances of an Aboriginal girl ever playing tennis, let alone reaching the pinnacle were slim indeed.
It’s probably fair to say that she had the most humble upbringing of any professional tennis player. Their home was a single-storey tin shack with dirt floors and no electricity. These were also not great times in Australia when the government’s policy was to forcibly remove indigenous children from their families and relocate them so as they could be properly educated and integrated into Australian society. “Every time there was a shiny car, my mum must have worried if it was the welfare people coming for her kids,” Evonne later recalled.
Not for Evonne, then, a Fred Perry skirt and a Dunlop Maxfli Fort racket and a club with a coach. Not even a second-hand racquet and a public court. No, her first racquet was made from a fruit box that was shaped into a paddle and for hours she would hit a ball against a wall.
However, one man – Bill Kurtzman, the president of the local tennis club, saw a young Evonne peering through the fence of the local court and encouraged her to play. It was a lovely gesture and if he’d not made it we would likely never have seen one of the great players grace the show courts.
She was a natural and word spread, reaching a Sydney tennis pro – Vic Edwards – who travelled the 400 miles to Barellan and persuaded her parents to allow her to move to Sydney where he became her legal guardian, coach and manager. She lived with him and his family and under his tutelage went swiftly through the ranks winning the New South Wales Championship at the age of only 15 and in 1967 competed in the Australian National Championships.
In 1970, she made her first appearance at Wimbledon, losing in the first round to the wonderfully named Peaches Bartkowitz. But she won the plate event (now defunct) for first- and second-round losers. The following year she returned and won the title, beating Margaret Court in the final. The Wimbledon crowd had by now fallen in love with her and she was dubbed the “sunshine girl”.
To say she went from those humble beginnings to success would be an understatement. During the 1970s she played in 17 grand-slam singles finals, winning the Australian open five times, the French once and Wimbledon twice. Although she never won the US Open she reached the final four times. She also won seven grand slam doubles titles.
Sadly, her relationship with Edwards ended badly. She said that he had made sexual advances to her and he had controlled her finances to the extent of refusing to release funds when requested for her father to purchase a new car. Her father died in a car crash shortly after.
When she married Roger Cawley who took over as her coach, manager and hitting partner, Evonne had severed all contact with Edwards and they were no longer on speaking terms.
It was, though, with Cawley by her side that she achieved her greatest moment, winning Wimbledon in 1980, because she became the first mother to win Wimbledon since the war and remains, I believe, the only mother to triumph in the last 103 years.
Like most great players she was much admired by her peers. Martina Navratilova said of Evonne: “She was such a pretty player. She didn’t serve and volley, she would sort of saunter and volley.”
But I’ll leave the last word with the first lady of women’s tennis, Billie Jean King: “She was like a panther compared to me. She had more mobility and she played beautifully. I started watching her and then I’d remember all of a sudden that I had to hit the ball!”
Lindsay Ash was Deputy for St Clement between 2018 and 2022, serving as Assistant Treasury and Home Affairs Minister under Chief Minister John Le Fondré. He worked in the City of London for 15 years as a futures broker before moving to Jersey and working in the Island’s finance industry from 2000. Feedback welcome on Twitter @Getonthelash2.
