Luckily, California state colleges were still tuition free then. What a godsend. I chose to attend Los Angeles State College (now known as California State University, Los Angeles) because the men’s tennis coach, Cameron “Scotty” Deeds, was from Long Beach. He had known my father since their college years. Scotty used to hang out with my parents at the seaside dance clubs like the Palladium and Balboa when my parents were dating, and they became lifelong friends.
My father didn’t want me living away from home, which was kind of funny since I had already traveled the world for weeks by myself. He wanted to protect his only daughter and keep us living together as a family as long as possible, which I found sweet. I had squirreled away $310 by not spending all of my USLTA per diem money that summer, and I used it to buy a 1950 Ford sedan with a burgundy paint job and a stick shift on the column to commute to school. The car, my first, was eleven years old but having it was a thrill for me.
Scotty introduced me to L.A. State’s terrific women’s tennis coach, Dr. Joan Johnson, a pioneering figure. She had co-coached the school’s men’s team in 1955 and 1956 and founded the women’s program in 1959 as well as the Southern California Women’s Intercollegiate Tennis League that we competed in. When Connie Jaster, Carole Loop, Carol Caldwell, Sue Behlmar, and I were teammates, one publication ranked us the top college team in the world.
Joan and Scotty were remarkably ahead of their time about treating men and women players equally. Scotty recruited male players who won three straight NCAA Division II championships, beginning in 1963. They had all of us practice together from 2 to 5 every afternoon, and the approach helped everybody improve their games. The women learned how to handle the men’s power and speed. The men benefited from having to concentrate on accuracy and consistency.
Years before I arrived at college, I knew that many boys and men hate to lose to a girl or woman. I used to regularly defeat the men at Lakewood Country Club. I knew it wasn’t considered ladylike to be so assertive, and women were encouraged, even expected, to protect male egos. When we walked off the court at Lakewood and someone asked us, “Who won?” I would say, “He did,” though it was often untrue. You wouldn’t believe the grateful looks and words of thanks I got from my playing partners when no one was around. (Unbelievable as it sounds, the same conditioning to defer to men and be less capable than I was reared up in me against Bobby Riggs late in our Battle of the Sexes match. I became distracted thinking about how humiliating it would be for Bobby to lose to a woman, and I briefly felt sorry for him—but I got over it.)
Gary Johnson, who became a two-time singles national champion for L.A. State, practiced with me daily. We were pretty closely matched. There was no hiding it when I defeated him. One time he got so ticked off he sent his racket pinwheeling over the fence and into the swimming pool.
To help me cover my college expenses, I took a couple of part-time jobs—one as the playground director at an elementary school, the other as a women’s locker room attendant at L.A. State, a minimum-wage job that paid $1.15 an hour for folding towels and handing out equipment. In addition to tennis practices and matches and work, I carried a full course load and made the forty-mile round trip to school each day.
I was deeply grateful for Scotty’s help. But I knew that on the other side of town, a young tennis phenomenon named Arthur Ashe had a full ROTC scholarship at UCLA to play tennis while studying business administration. The golden boys of California tennis, Stan Smith and Dennis Ralston, both had full-ride tennis scholarships at the University of Southern California, and the next year, so would Jerry Cromwell.
When I got to college, I was still the unreconstructed straight arrow who carried a Bible on my tennis trips, the kid whose grade school teacher mailed a note home to her parents commending them for rearing a child who conscientiously turned in a dime she found lying on the floor. I loved spending hours picking the brains of professors and teaching assistants around campus, and I logged a lot of time in the library, indulging my love of reading. But much of that time was spent kicking around ideas and searching the stacks for topics that I wanted to read—not necessarily material related to my coursework. I devoured books on history and psychology. All the same, I was frequently on academic probation and often skipped classes, except for my course on the British Empire.
It’s a paradox, I know. I value education. I’ve always had a huge appetite for learning that persists to this day. I’ve always loved drilling down to the details, meaning, and origin of things. In hindsight, I guess the best way I can explain that time is that I was one of those restless students who wasn’t on a quest for a framed degree I could hang on the wall as much as for insights and information that dovetailed with what I hoped to do with my life, which was tennis. Tennis always seemed to dominate. My thoughts were consumed with how we were going to make tennis a pro sport, and how to ensure that women wouldn’t be left out. If I came along in the sport today, I’d have skipped college and gone straight from high school to the pros. But back then, I was trying to figure out a path and a world that didn’t exist yet for women, a world you couldn’t find in any college course catalog or structured march to a degree. There was this gap between what I thought I was capable of and the world as it was. I saw that gulf clearly. I was less sure how to breach it.
What was revealing about that time is what did resonate with me. During my first year of college, for example, I became fascinated with the work of Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who wrote about the mind-body connection. A cornerstone of Maltz’s work was his observation that superficial changes in a patient’s outward appearance were meaningless if the interior way patients saw themselves was unchanged.
Maltz wanted to create a way to help patients improve their self-image. He came up with a process he called Psycho-Cybernetics, a system of ideas that he claimed could help people lead a more fulfilling life. Maltz believed we can literally condition our minds for success. One of the techniques he advocated was visualization—seeing yourself doing something correctly so you can master it. Boy, did that strike a chord with me. It’s basically what I had been doing all along, especially as I studied Althea Gibson and the many great players who came through Los Angeles, or when I peppered Clyde Walker, Alice Marble, and Darlene Hard with questions. As I said earlier, I truly believed that if you can see something, you can be it. Maltz cited the science behind that. He explained how our nervous systems can’t distinguish between real and imagined experiences, and how each of us has an inner mechanism we can program to achieve results automatically.
It made a lot of sense to me, and the idea is accepted practice today. You often see world-class athletes in sports like gymnastics, diving, and aerial skiing pause before they start and close their eyes to visualize their routines; sometimes they’ll pantomime entire sequences of moves before they begin.
Even before I discovered Maltz I would often visualize how I should play my matches from three vantage points: my side of the court, my opponent’s side of the court, and an aerial view. In my mind I’d imagine myself on the baseline hitting the ball, then switch to how the person receiving the ball might behave. I’d construct imaginary points, sometimes even entire games as if I were hovering over the court watching myself and my opponent react to each ball that was struck.
It was all very real to me, and I felt that my game improved because of it. If you can anticipate or dictate things in tennis, you’re a step ahead of your opponent. You have a better chance of controlling points.
The longer I went to L.A. State, the more I became convinced that being No. 1 in the world was going to require full-time devotion to the sport. I felt that I wasn’t practicing or competing enough anymore. We played a modest schedule each spring and then I’d put my racket away for weeks in the fall and winter, shaking off the cobwebs again when Wimbledon and the summer grass court season came back around. I was a part-time player now, and my uneven results showed it. When I
ventured back out into tournament play at the close of my freshman year I lost a disheartening match to Karen Hantze in straight sets at the Southern California Championships in May 1962, which felt like a serious step backward. Afterward, I retreated to the parking lot and cried my eyes out in my car. I had played her deuce after deuce, advantage point after advantage point, but I was unable to finish her off. Now my gut ached, my head hurt and I was berating myself: You could have had that match and you lost it! Why can’t you finish? If you keep losing at this level, how are you ever going to be No. 1? So many people have put so much into you, and you’re letting them down!
I don’t think I had ever felt such doubt or felt so sad and sorry for myself about a tennis match. But there were times I had come close. That’s another paradox many people don’t understand about athletes, especially the best ones. As great as winning is, the spike of elation comes and goes quickly. The prevailing emotion is often relief, not undiluted joy. But losing? Losing is forever. Results are literally carved in stone, written in ink, engraved on the silver chalices they hand out to champions. Losing eats at you.
Stefanie Graf once told me she used to pace the floors for days after she lost. Chrissie Evert told Bud she trashed her London hotel room and stayed in her bathrobe for three days eating junk food after her 1977 Wimbledon semifinal loss to Britain’s Virginia Wade. Something vital snapped in Bjorn Borg after John McEnroe defeated him at the 1981 U.S. Open and took away his No. 1 ranking. Borg, who was famously and meticulously driven, walked right out to the parking lot without showering, took a car to the airport, and boarded a flight. Three months later, he retired at the age of twenty-six. “When you’re No. 2 or 3, you’re nobody,” Borg told the stunned McEnroe, who couldn’t talk him into returning.
All tennis players who make it to the very top, including me, would probably tell you they hate losing more than they love winning—except maybe Roger Federer. You can certainly see the agony on Roger’s face when he loses. He and Rafael Nadal have wept openly after some of their Grand Slam finals defeats. Then again, Roger cries unashamedly when he wins, too, so who knows? He’s such a positive role model for boys, especially, who are afraid to show their emotions. He gets an immediate release as soon as the match is over, and then he moves on.
I wish I could have done that more. No one ever saw me sobbing in public after a match, even though I often felt like crying. But here’s the deal: You have to realize in tennis everybody fails by the end of each tournament except one player. It’s single-elimination, a zero-sum game. One bad day and you’re a tomato can being kicked down the road, on to the next city. It can kill your spirit if you let it.
Champions adjust. Champions are masters at being resilient. To succeed, you have to find a way to reconcile everything—chasing goals, believing you will succeed but absorbing failure, and the loneliness of knowing that no one can help you on the court but you. You have to somehow use all of it as motivation, because when that aversion to losing and your drive to win goes—especially in a one-on-one sport like tennis—you’re cooked. Matches not only test your skill but reveal who you are, how hard you’re willing to work or fight. Chrissie’s dad and coach, Jimmy Evert, used to say, “You’re going to get out there and look at that big green rectangle and decide.”
I probably tapped into that fear and loathing of losing more than the good times in my career. I was always scared to death I’d never make it to No. 1. Nothing was ever good enough to me. It’s what drove me even after I started winning Grand Slam titles, when I walked out to play Bobby Riggs, when I had to keep playing for financial security long after six surgeries left me with centipede-like scars curling around both knees.
I obviously had no way of knowing that any of that lay ahead for me as I put my car in gear and drove away after that loss to Karen Hantze in the spring of 1962. I did know that Wimbledon was only eight weeks away, and I told myself if I wanted to stay in the game—let alone ever be No. 1—I had to get a lot better, right away.
Playing again on the U.S. Wightman Cup team was an encouraging start. We beat the Brits four matches to three, on their home turf. Then it was time to return to the All England Club. I was still ranked third in the U.S. and went into my second Wimbledon unseeded again in singles. For my first match I drew Margaret Smith, by now the most formidable player in women’s tennis and the No. 1 seed after winning the Australian, Italian, and Roland-Garros singles titles that year while I was handing out towels at L.A. State.
Months earlier, I had told my parents I had a strong premonition that Margaret and I would play each other in our opening match at Wimbledon. They just chuckled. Now, here we were. The press nicknamed her “the Aussie Amazon.” Nobody gave me a chance.
* * *
—
Margaret seemed to have a wingspan that stretched from net post to net post. Rosie Casals would later nickname her “the Arm.” As it turned out, it wasn’t just Rosie’s colorful imagination. When some university researchers in England measured Margaret for a study on athletes, they found that her arms were three inches longer than average for a woman her size.
Margaret’s revolutionary trainer at the time was Stan Nicholls, who worked with Olympic athletes and Australia’s Davis Cup team. Margaret was the first woman tennis player to lift weights and do full-body circuit training. She was a powerful player. She developed her legs and superb cardio fitness by running over sand hills back home. Her shots had sting. Her fitness and court coverage were terrific.
Margaret was a scrappy kid who played every sport in school but gravitated to tennis at an early age. Her father worked in a dairy factory in Albury, their hometown in New South Wales. Margaret started hitting tennis balls with a fence board and won her first tournament with a hand-me-down racket with a square-shaped frame that a kindly neighbor gave her. She became very good, very fast. Her first coach, Wal Rutter, brought her to the attention of former Aussie champion Frank Sedgman, who helped her receive better tennis instruction in Melbourne. A wealthy young businessman there named Bob Mitchell became Margaret’s benefactor.
By the time we met at Wimbledon in 1962, Margaret was nineteen, just a year older than me, but she had already competed in nine Grand Slam tournaments, winning four of them. Nonetheless, parts of her game were still raw or predictable. The night before our match, which was actually a second rounder since Margaret and I had both drawn first-round byes, I spent time strategizing with my friend Carole Caldwell, who had handed Margaret a rare defeat earlier in the month at Manchester. We agreed that the best approach was to target Margaret’s forehand since her backhand was steadier.
I also knew that Margaret was playing under extraordinary pressure. Australia had a rich tradition of men’s tennis champions, but the country had never had a female Wimbledon singles titlist by the time Margaret came along. It was being trumpeted that this was the year.
There was also the inevitable talk of Margaret finishing a Grand Slam sweep of the four majors, since, with her wins at the Australian and Roland-Garros, she was halfway there. The press was fixated on her. The Brits were openly rooting for her. But her own tennis federation had not made it any easier on her. After Margaret declined to travel the circuit with the Australian team that year because she clashed with Nell Hopman, the team’s coach, the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia refused to let Margaret train or even mix with the other Australian players. I later learned that on the morning of our match, the LTAA had sent Margaret a good-luck telegram, in an apparent attempt to break the ice. But by then the tension was already ratcheted up. Margaret had everything to lose, and both of us knew it.
When we walked out onto Centre Court, it was unusually full for a second-round match despite the cool and blustery weather. Margaret started strong and took the first set, 6–1. But I genuinely felt that I was still settling into my game and, anyway, I could see that Margaret was battling the wind. She was having trouble with her timing because of
her long backswing. I pushed hard into her forehand and kept trusting my passing shots when she rushed the net. It finally began to pay off. I took the second set, 6–3. Now the Wimbledon fans, who always love an underdog, were cheering me on. I gave away four inches in height to Margaret but little else. This had become a dogfight.
Margaret came out possessed in the third set and took back control. She was leading 5–3 and serving to me at 30–15, two points from victory. But perhaps that was her problem: The end was in sight and she wanted it too much. When I snapped off a running backhand down the line to even that game at 30-all, the crowd shrieked and Margaret seemed to seize up. I couldn’t tell you exactly what she was gripped by—anxiety, mental fatigue, shock?—but whatever it was, I could feel that something had happened. I stormed back to win that game—and the next one. I broke her serve again, and now I was serving for the match at 40–love. Triple match point.
Margaret saved one with an emphatic overhead smash. I wobbled and double-faulted to squander the next point. The crowd gasped. Two match points erased. Just one left. I ignored the murmuring now and spat a few choice words at myself under my breath. Concentrate! You can do this! On the next point, I followed my serve with a sharp backhand volley and then there was a split second where I heard nothing—Margaret had dumped the ball into the net, she and I looked at each other—and the fans, who were stunned for a split second as well, shot to their feet here and there and roared and roared.
I threw my racket high in the air, and I was told later that I did a bit of a hop, skip, and jump to the net. Honestly, I was numb, completely overcome. Margaret flung her racket to the side of the court and looked like a ghost as we shook hands. Still, she managed to say, “You played well. You deserved to win.” Bless those Aussies, ever gracious in defeat.
Later that day in the Wimbledon tearoom I noticed that many of the Aussie officials looked as white as a sheet when they saw me. I was so naive, someone had to explain to me that it was because they had taken a financial bath with the London bookmakers by betting so heavily on Margaret to win. “You have no idea what you’ve done to some of these people,” I was told.
All In Page 10