Before there was Martina Hingis, tennis had another teenaged, horseback-riding Grand Slam champion who left the game too soon. Her name was Maureen Connolly, and she dominated women’s tennis for three years, until a 1954 riding accident ended her career at age 19.
By then Connolly had become the second player to complete tennis’ Grand Slam, following in the footsteps of fellow Californian Don Budge by sweeping the Australian championships, French championships, Wimbledon and the U.S. championships in 1953.
She dropped just one set in the four tournaments, and her 8-6, 7-5 victory over Doris Hart in the Wimbledon final was declared one of the best women’s matches ever played. But Connolly’s Grand Slam-clinching victory in Forest Hills was anti-climatic. Though her quest for the final trophy began with requisite fanfare, even the New York Times gave her eventual triumph second billing to the lackluster men’s final.
Perhaps the paper was taking its cue from Connolly herself, who just two weeks earlier had given a blunt assessment of the women’s game.
“An average male tournament player could beat the top woman 6-0, 6-0,” she told the Times’ famed tennis writer, Allison Danzig. “I was annihilated myself yesterday by a pro no one has ever heard of.”
Nevertheless, Connolly took her own game seriously, even if her description of her training regimen now seems antiquated.
“You have to go to bed early and be careful about what you eat – cut down on pastries but have plenty of sugar and steak,” she said in 1953. “And you have to avoid dancing too much and going to the movies too often, and swimming is out completely.”
Connolly also believed that female players were improving just as rapidly as their male counterparts, and her game was an example of that trend. Only 5-foot-4, her cannon-fire groundstrokes and relentless competitiveness awed spectators and earned her the nickname “Little Mo,” after the U.S. battleship Missouri, known as “Big Mo.” Her exploits attracted a level of interest in tennis not seen since Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills held sway in the 1920s, and Little Mo’s baseline-oriented game was considered a modernized version of Wills’.
Maureen took up tennis as a young girl when her family couldn’t afford riding lessons. Her game was developed under the supervision of one of the most famous coaches of the day – Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, who also molded pre-World War II champ Alice Marble. Tennant could not get her precocious new student to adopt Marble’s net-rushing style, but drilled into Connolly the belief that she had to hate her opponents to win.
“I was a strange little girl, armed with hope, fear, and a Golden Racket,” Connolly said later about her early training.
By 14, she was already making an impact on the national tennis scene. At 16, she won her first major title at the 1951 U.S. Championships. Then in 1952, Tennant advised her pupil not to play Wimbledon because of a shoulder injury. But after seeking her own medical advice, Connolly insisted on taking part.
After her first-round victory, the 17-year-old caused a scandal by calling a press conference and publicly firing Tennant. She survived a close call in the fourth round and went on to win the tournament, her first of three straight Wimbledon titles.
“Little Mo’s” next mentor was legendary Australian coach Harry Hopman, who in 1953 brought her for the first time to Australia, where she completed the first leg of her Grand Slam. In addition to being the first woman ever to achieve that feat, Connolly never lost a Grand Slam singles match after her Wimbledon win in 1951, claiming a career total of nine Grand Slam singles titles.
The last of those was Wimbledon in 1954. Soon afterwards, she was out riding when a truck passed too close to her horse, mauling her right leg and throwing her to the ground. Some felt she could have eventually made a comeback, but a sizeable lawsuit settlement and an admitted loss of motivation meant Connolly never played competitive tennis again.
She married equestrian rider Norman Brinker and had two daughters before dying of stomach cancer at 34.
The year after her death, Margaret Court – who like, Connolly, played right-handed despite being a natural leftie – became the second female player to win the Grand Slam. This time, the feat did get top billing in the New York Times.
Less than two weeks later, another headline appeared in the paper: “Women net rebels planning own tour.” One era had passed in women's tennis, and another was about to begin.
Sources for this article include Billie Jean King and Cynthia Starr’s “We Have Come a Long Way: The History of Women’s Tennis”; an article by Gianna Clerci in “The Fireside Book of Tennis”; and New York Times stories by Allison Danzig (1953) and Neil Amdur (1970).