For a short while one summer day out of nowhere in my life she flashed like a comet across my sky.
My first competitive game of tennis was played in the Trinidad and Tobago Junior Championships when I was 12 – and my last at the age of 52, when Roy Dookun and I, combined more than a hundred years old, won the Guyana National Doubles title for the last time. I hugely enjoyed my forty-year career in tennis – the excitement and honey-sweet of victory and the gall of disappointment in defeat, the stress and exhilaration of intense competition which is a sort of addictive drug, the “fellowship of the playing field,” the tremendous honour of representing and leading your country, the rivalries so sharp in memory and the countless friendships, the poetry of the game at its best suddenly encountered.
Over the years I had a measure of success – captain of Cambridge University and later of the Guyana national team in the Brandon Trophy regional tournament and of the West Indies team in Davis Cup play. I played at Wimbledon in the 1950s. There were no official world rankings then but when I was playing my best tennis, about 1952 to 1956, I immodestly think I may have ranked as high as number 40. But the closest I ever got to winning a major Championship was not in my own right but as a kind of assistant or acolyte to an extraordinary champion. Vicariously, I feel I won a tiny bit of one Wimbledon Singles title.
In 1952 at a pre-Wimbledon garden party for players at the Hurlingham Club, I met Maureen Connolly and we got on well. She was only seventeen but had won the US Ladies Singles title the year before. I found her fame, and her form, very attractive. I was surprised to learn that her first love had been riding horses but her parents couldn’t afford to give her a pony so they gave her a tennis racket instead. Fate turns on such small hinges. I think I caught her attention more than I probably would have done by speaking about the horse my mother loved when she was a little girl – its name was Beaucaillou and it took my mother trotting in a buggy everywhere in Trinidad long ago.
Towards the end of the party she said she wanted a practice partner during the Wimbledon fortnight – she never practiced against other women and hoped I was good enough to beat her. Early the next morning we practiced on the grass courts at the Queens Club. I was good enough to beat her. (In those days it was said that the worst man in the Wimbledon draw should be able to beat the Ladies Champion. I don’t know if that applies today). As a result, she was happy to continue our practice sessions. On the fast grass courts of Wimbledon she felt that Louise Brough, a good volleyer, would be her main rival so she asked me to come to net as much as possible – which I did and was a little worried to observe that her passing shots were not very effective. We would meet to practice in the mornings during Wimbledon whether or not she had a tournament game in the afternoon. So when Maureen Connolly won the Championship, the first of her three Wimbledon Singles titles, I naturally took credit. It was the closest I ever came to tennis greatness, in more senses than one.
When she won the final – quite easily against Louise Brough – I sent flowers to her dressing room and suggested we meet for a celebratory drink later. She replied that she would like that but, this is something that still astounds me, first she had to go to the Queens Club and practice her serve, which she thought had been very poor in the final that afternoon. How could she be serious, having just won Wimbledon? But she was. Summoned, I went but couldn’t help feeling that this was taking things a little far.
But perhaps that is what genus is. I have read that anyone who practices anything – writing, composing, furniture-making, painting, any musical instrument, any game or sport – for 10,000 hours will become good enough to be considered a genius at that activity. Repeating again and again and again and again the moves and combinations and calculations which yield the best possible result makes instinctive what starts out being laboriously considered and weakly performed. The brain connecting with the body-circuits becomes hard-wired to achieve perfection. I did not know about this theory when I met Maureen Connolly but I think now she may be a confirmation of that theory’s truth. Certainly she was a practice fanatic. In our morning sessions, long after I had had more than enough and was fed up, she wanted to hit and hit and hit and hit. She was seventeen but she had been playing since she was ten so perhaps she had already reached her 10,000 hour quota. And then again there was that business of going out to practice her serve after winning Wimbledon!
Maureen Connolly went on to win 9 major singles championships including the grand slam in 1953 – the only woman to win all four major singles titles in the same year. In 1954, two weeks after winning her third Wimbledon singles title, while riding one of her beloved horses she had an accident and her right leg was crushed beyond repair, thus ending her tennis career at the age of nineteen. She died of stomach cancer in 1969. I thought back to that summer time when our paths crossed and I felt very sad.
