Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations
In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Anita Lizana [CHI]Born: 19 November 1915
Died: 21 August 1994
Career: 1931-47
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1937)
Peak Elo rating: 2,244 (2nd place, 1937)
Major singles titles: 1 (1937 US Nationals)
Total singles titles: 52
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When I started digging up contemporary accounts of Anita Lizana, I didn’t expect to see quite so many people dropping the S-word in their evaluation of the greatest player ever to emerge from Chile.
A. Wallis Myers of the Daily Telegraph, after Lizana won the 1937 US Championships: “[S]he revealed a standard of play that, for variety of stroke, speed of foot and sagacity has rarely been equaled. Santiago has provided ‘Suzanne’s’ successor.”
Five-time major winner Helen Jacobs: “[Lizana] fascinated the Wimbledon spectators for much the same reason that Suzanne Lenglen did. Her strokes were graceful, her footwork as delightful as a ballet-dancer’s. Every return she made, successful or not, showed nerve and imagination.”
Veteran journo Ned Potter: “Lizana has, it is true, much of the French woman’s grace and agility.”
The British publication, Lawn Tennis and Badminton, in 1936: “Those who visualised for Señorita Lizana a sort of Mlle Lenglen or Mrs Moody future … may be approaching respect for their foresight.”
Lizana merited a chapter of Jacobs’s 1949 book, Gallery of Champions, which closed by acknowledging that, at Anita’s peak, the same question found itself on everyone’s lips: “Was Lizana really a second Lenglen?”
Jacobs won both of her meetings with the Chilean star, including one in a Wimbledon quarter-final. But she cautiously answered her own question in the affirmative. “I still think that a possible second Suzanne Lenglen was lost to the tennis world when Anita Lizana married Ronald Ellis.”
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Many of the competitors, writers, and fans watching Anita Lizana play in the late 1930s would have also seen Suzanne Lenglen, the hard-hitting, balletic Frenchwoman who didn’t lose a single match between 1922 and the end of her amateur career four years later. A comparison with Lenglen was just about the highest conceivable praise that an up-and-comer could receive.
A mere five feet tall, Lizana was probably the fastest player of her era. She loved her drop shot and hit more of them than anyone else–we’ll come back to that–but it was a mistake to underestimate the rest of her game. Her topspin backhand was a weapon in its own right. “One of the most surprising things about her game was that it could carry the pace it did,” wrote Jacobs. “[S]he could hit harder than players thirty pounds heavier than she.”
And unlike Lenglen, Lizana brought a joy to everything she did, win or lose. Lawn Tennis and Badminton called her “one of the best living losers and, now [that] she seldom loses … one of the best-mannered winners.” She was so sportsmanlike at the end of a match that she is responsible for introducing the custom of post-match handshakes with the chair umpire. She even acknowledged linesmen the same way.
Her combination of skill and charm won over British fans immediately. A teen prodigy in Chile, her abilities were so apparent that the national tennis federation put together the money to send her abroad. As a 19-year-old on her first trip to Europe in 1935, she won seven titles and lost only six matches, a stunning debut for a newcomer who didn’t speak the language (she traveled with a translator who doubled as chaperone) and faced unfamiliar conditions and opponents every week.
She returned in 1936 with an even more fearsome game, having spent the offseason slimming down and shoring up a weak second serve. She tallied 83 wins against only 4 losses that year, beating every British player of note, including Dorothy Round in two out of three tries. She was seeded eighth in her second trip to Wimbledon, and she reached the quarter-final round before losing a tight three-setter to Jacobs.
Then, the banner year of 1937. Lizana opened her season on the clay courts of the French Riviera, where she struggled against the steady baseline game of Simonne Mathieu, but lost only one more match–to Round–between March and another meeting with Mathieu at Wimbledon. In her first and only appearance at the US Championships in September, she swept the field in straight sets. After dismissing five Americans, she made easy work of the heavy-hitting Polish star Jadwiga Jedrzejowska. It was the tournament that launched a thousand Lenglen comparisons, and it inspired A. Wallis Myers to place the Chilean atop his year-end rankings list.
Ten months later, Lizana was married. Another year after that, and her career was essentially over.
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The most remarkable thing about Lizana’s rise to the top of the women’s game is how fast she developed as a player. Her signature move from the moment she arrived in Europe was the drop shot, but she overused it. When she came back for her second season in Britain, she had already built better tactics around the dropper, constructing points to generate openings and deploying her pet weapon less often.
Late in 1936, she played her first tournaments on covered courts–lightning-fast wood surfaces that she had never before encountered. The wood rendered her drop shots harmless, and at the National Covered Court Championships in London, she lost the first set of her first-round match to an otherwise unthreatening player named Vere King. Lizana learned quickly. She came back to win that match, and didn’t lose another set at the tournament. She won her first four matches at the next tournament in straight sets as well, before needing three to defeat Dorothy Round for the season-ending title at the Torquay Palace Hotel.
Still, she had a tendency to opt for entertainment over tactical savvy. Earlier in 1936, Lawn Tennis and Badminton wrote:
Señorita Lizana is so fond of the game for its own sake that her delight in stroke-making, which is obvious, is her primary urge, to the exclusion of the more important object of match winning. … she will sacrifice a tactical advantage for the sake of a momentary thrill shared by the spectators.
A year later, a feature titled “Drop-Shot Lady” suggested that she hadn’t entirely changed her ways. But her signature stroke was now so deadly that it didn’t matter:
Her sheer joy in life makes her deadly drop-shot, the terror of the tennis world of women, a sugar-coated pill. Other people play drop-shots, but Lizana’s are different. It is a kind of anti-climax which stops you dead in your tracks, whether you are playing or looking-on. Bang-bang-bang–and then a sudden, silent, softly-stealing gas attack. The ball comes over the net, but only just, and it dies on you.
Helen Jacobs noticed that the 20-year-old Lizana changed her strategy for each new set of their quarter-final battle at Wimbledon in 1936, ultimately settling on a drop-shot-lob-combo that was nearly good enough for a place in the semis. Jacobs was already one of the smartest players on the circuit, and she acknowledged that facing Anita “sharpened my wits.”
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Chile’s “Smiling Señorita” never did beat Jacobs. They met only one more time, at the Birmingham Priory tournament in 1939, when Lizana was no longer solely focused on her tennis. But the opponent that more frequently stood in Anita’s way was the steady, indefatigable Simonne Mathieu.
Mathieu beat Lizana three times, in consecutive weeks, on the Riviera in 1937. The Chilean won a set and pushed two others to 7-5, but for a woman who had lost only four matches the previous year, it was a wake-up call. Two months later, Lawn Tennis and Badminton warned that Lizana had “yet to prove that she is invulnerable against super-steadiness and speed of shot on grass courts … the type of game exploited so successfully by [Hilde] Sperling or Mme Mathieu.”
Anita got her revenge at Bristol, winning a three-set semi-final over Mathieu two weeks before Wimbledon began. She was seeded third at The Championships, and her victory over the Frenchwoman–followed by a defeat of Sperling in the final the next day–boded well. Even Lizana would say that she thought it was her year. But she ran into Mathieu again in the Wimbledon quarter-finals, and the veteran won in routine style, 6-3, 6-3. Mathieu was “terribly accurate,” and Anita didn’t have the answers.
As we’ve seen, 1937 ended happily. Mathieu spent September on the Continent, leaving the United States open for Lizana to pile up victories. Anita had more to celebrate beyond her Forest Hills title: She became engaged to Scottish player Ronald Ellis, and on her third time of asking, she convinced her parents to allow the marriage.
There was only one condition: The couple would wait until after Wimbledon in 1938. The delay would give Lizana another opportunity to win the coveted trophy for Chile and–incidentally–give herself one hell of a wedding present.
Alas, wedding planning was the only thing that went as intended. When the Smiling Señorita returned home as the US Champion, she was in such demand that she suffered a nervous breakdown. Back in England in April, she twisted her ankle and won only one tournament in four tries, losing at the Middlesex Championships to Mary Hardwick, a player she had beaten in straight sets in all eight of their previous encounters. The only highlight of Lizana’s Wimbledon prep was a pair of wins against Hong Kong native Gem Hoahing, a plucky 17-year-old two inches shorter than Anita herself.
The Wimbledon seeding committee reacted to her mediocre season by leaving her unprotected in the draw. Then came the final insult. Her first opponent would be the fifth seed, her old nemesis, Simonne Mathieu.
This time around, the score was a bit closer–6-4, 6-4 to the Frenchwoman–but the press coverage reads like the death knell for a career. The Daily Mail headline read, “Drop-shot Plan That Was a Failure.” Lizana’s season was a “tragedy.” The match was a “lamentable display.” She went to the drop shot more than ever, and Mathieu chased down nearly all of them. Anita’s nuptials would have to proceed without a Wimbledon trophy.
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When Anita Lizana became Mrs Ronald Ellis, she was still only 22 years old. In a later era, her career would just be beginning. But she skipped the remainder of the 1938 season to get settled in at her new home in Scotland, and she played only a handful of tournaments–including a second-round loss at Wimbledon–in 1939 before becoming pregnant with her first child.
Even if a serious comeback had been in the cards, World War II wiped out British tennis for six years. In 1946, Anita won a pair of titles in Scotland, and in 1947, she returned to Wimbledon, losing again in the second round. She won a title as late as 1955, and she made her last tournament appearance in 1960.
In the end, Chile’s Smiling Señorita was not the second coming of Suzanne Lenglen. But for two magical seasons, she showed British fans just how much fun one could have on the tennis court, and just what one could achieve with a five-foot frame and a deadly drop shot.