During her 18-year career, Australian tennis player Margaret Smith Court (born 1942) won more major championships than any other player, male or fe male, has ever won. She won 62 major titles in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, including a Grand Slam (the Australian Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open) in 1970.
Born Margaret Jean Smith on July 16, 1942, in the rural town of Albury, Victoria, Australia, Smith Court was one of four siblings. Her father worked in a cheese and butter factory. Neither Smith Court's parents nor her siblings had any interest in tennis, but she was drawn to the game, and she began playing by herself on the road between her house and the nearby Albury tennis courts, using balls that had been hit past the club's hedges. For a racquet, she used a long, thin board she had found; when she was eight, a friend of her mother gave her an old one with a square head, no leather on the grip, and a number of broken strings., and she began using that instead of the board.
In addition to playing in the road, Smith Court and three boys who were her age often sneaked through a hole in the fence at a nearby country club to play when the courts were unoccupied. The courts were partially hidden from the clubhouse by a thick hedge, but if a ball hit the backstop, it would be visible, so she learned to play while standing at the net and letting the others hit the ball at her from the baseline, cutting off shots so the ball would not hit the backstop. Later, when she became a world-class player and observers praised her volleying, she said it was the first stroke she ever learned.
When she was between the ages of eight and ten, the club owner, Wally Rutter, threw her out so many times that he and his wife eventually decided it would be easier to give her a membership and pay for her to take lessons. The Rutters did not have children, and they took Smith Court under their wing and gave her coaching that her parents could not afford.
Rising Worldwide Star
When Smith Court was a teenager, she moved to Melbourne, where she trained at a club owned by former world champion Frank Sedgman, who told her that he believed she could be the first Australian woman to win a Wimbledon title. To pay for some of the costs of her training, she worked in Sedgman's office as a receptionist. By the time she was 18, she won the Australian Open championship. It was the first of her seven consecutive Australian Open titles and 11 overall.
In 1961, after her second Australian Open win, Smith Court joined the international tour. Her youth and relative inexperience made her nervous on the court and shy when she was not playing, but she won the Kent All-Comers Championship and made it to the semifinals in the Italian Open and the quarterfinals at Wimbledon and the French Open.
In 1962, Smith Court decided to travel and play independently of the Australian national team. She was more confident and self-reliant, and she won the French and American championships. At Wimbledon, she played newcomer Billie Jean King in the first round and lost in a difficult match. "I had to fight back tears of humiliation," she later said, according to Trent Fayne in Famous Women Tennis Players. "That was the start of the personal rivalry between Billie Jean and myself … and [it] plunged me into the deepest despondency of my life." Despite this loss, and her emotional reaction to it, she was ranked first in the world at the end of the year. She also received encouragement from huge numbers of fans, as well as from other tennis players.
In 1963, Smith Court played against King again in the finals at Wimbledon. This time she won. In 1964, however, tired from constant play and travel, she had an off year. She won the U.S. Open and made it to the finals at Wimbledon in 1965, and in 1966, feeling that she had missed out on much of the fun she should have had during her teenage years, she decided to retire from tennis.
Grand Slam Winner
Smith Court went back to western Australia, where she opened a boutique. In October 1967 she married wool broker Barry Michael Court. He encouraged her to return to playing tennis, and in 1968 she was back on the courts.
In 1969, she won every Grand Slam tournament except Wimbledon. In 1970, she won all the Grand Slam tournaments, even though she played Wimbledon with a sprained ankle. Playing against King in the Wimbledon finals, Smith Court battled for hours in a record 46 games. Smith Court eventually won 14-12, 11-9. It was only the second time in tennis history that a woman had completed a Grand Slam. About the match, Rex Bellamy wrote in the Times of London, "Here were two gloriously gifted players at their best, or so close to it that the margin was irrelevant. They gave us a marvellous blend of athleticism and skill, courage and concentration. They moved each other about with remorseless haste and hit a flashing stream of lovely shots. The match was punctuated throughout by rallies of wondrously varied patterns."
In 1971, Smith Court defended her Wimbledon title and lost to Evonne Goolagong, a rising star. Two weeks later, she played in another tournament and did poorly. After going to her doctor for tests, she found that she was pregnant. Although she continued to play tennis for fun until the seventh month of her pregnancy, she immediately stopped competing. "I would never have played at Wimbledon if I'd known I was pregnant," she told Richard Yallop in the Australian. "If anything had happened to the child, I would have regretted it forever." She noted that playing tennis for recreation was far different from playing in international competition, where "The pressure is so great and you drive yourself very hard."
Smith Court took time off to have her baby, but in 1972 she came back to win six tournaments, earning $22,662 in prizes. She then won 16 of the next 18 tournaments she played in, adding $40,000. Confidently, she accepted a challenge from Bobby Riggs to play a singles match and, if she won, to donate the winnings to charity. Smith Court lost that match, but it did not mar her 1973 season. She won 18 of 25 tournaments, including the Australian, French, and U.S. Opens.
Retired from Tennis
Between 1962 and 1973, Smith Court was ranked number one seven times. In 1960 she won her first major championship, and she won her last, the U.S. Open, in 1975. She continued to play until 1977, then quit in order to have more time with her children. In 1979, Smith Court was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame. During her career, she also won two ABC Sports Personality of the Year Awards and was made a Member of the British Empire for her services to sport and international relations
Smith Court's life began undergoing a change in 1973, when a friend gave her a religious book. Although she had been raised Catholic, she didn't find that religion touched her very deeply. She decided to become a born-again Christian. After retiring from tennis, she studied at the Word of Faith Bible College in Perth, Australia. She later wrote on the Johnny Lee Clary International website, "The next few years were a real struggle for me dealing with a heart condition, depression and insomnia but what got me through was total devotion to God and … the Bible." Smith Court told Louise Perry in the Australian that she believed her faith healed her heart condition, and she commented to Jane Cunningham in ABC Online, "They said I'd be on medication for the rest of my life and I've never had medication since and been totally healed."
Became a Minister
In 1991, Smith Court was ordained as a minister, and with the help of two other pastors, she founded Margaret Court Ministries, Inc. She turned an abandoned carpet warehouse in an industrial section of Perth, Australia into a church, Victory Life Church, where she preached a Pentacostal ministry. In an interview on ABC Online, she told George Negus, "To me, people go to a football match and yell and scream when they're excited about something, or go to a tennis match and enjoy it, and, I mean, that's how church should be." By 2003, 1,500 people were attending the church, where Smith Court often laid hands on members to heal them, and where she usually preached the sermon during the two-hour service. One of her daughters, Marika, worked with her. In 2001, Smith Court announced plans to buy an old hospital and turn it into a home for people with incurable illnesses, drug addicts, unwed mothers, abuse victims, and "any other shipwrecked ship which needs to be fixed," she told Louise Perry in the Australian.
Although she no longer played, Smith Court still followed tennis, particularly the Grand Slams. She commented that many women players of the 21st century were "robots," according to John Thirsk in the Surry Hills, Australia Sunday Telegraph. She said this was the result of rigid coaching schemes, and also noted that the young women "lacked hunger because many were simply content to play for a comfortable living rather than chase major honors," according to Thirsk.
Smith Court told Vivienne Oakley in the Adelaide, Australia Advertiser that she believed Australia could produce more champions by returning to individual coaching: "I think we put our people into squads too young and champions are very sensitive people. I believe we lose them in the squads at a very early age." She said she never would have become a champion if she had come through the modern coaching system, noting, "I had good mentors. Sometimes I played and won for them, not myself." And, she told Thirsk, "I've seen what happened with some others way back, who had been promising, winning national junior titles. They had individual coaches and because they were good, went into a squad. You've never heard about them again."
Books
Fayne, Trent, Famous Women Tennis Players, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1979.
Great Women in Sports, Visible Ink Press, 1996.
Grimsley, Will, Tennis: Its History, People and Events, Prentice-Hall, 1971.
Periodicals
Advertiser (Adelaide, Australia), September 6, 2003.
Australian (Sydney, Australia), June 20, 2001; March 18, 2002.
Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia), September 8, 2003.
Independent (London), August 23, 2003.
Sunday Telegraph, (Lodnon), January 25, 1998.
Times (London), June 28, 2001, p. 6.
Online
"Court, Margaret Jean," Australian Women,http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/IMP0179b.htm (January 2, 2004).
"Episode 19: Margaret Court," ABC Online,http://www.abc.net.au/ (January 2, 2004).
"Tribute to Margaret Court," Johnn Lee Clary International,http://www.johnnyleeclary.com/margaret_court.htm (January 2, 2004).
