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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Angela Mortimer [GBR]Born: 21 April 1932
Career: 1949-62
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Peak Elo rating: 2,105 (1st place, 1959)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 108
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130 pages into her 1962 autobiography, My Waiting Game, Angela Mortimer delivers what could have been the book’s subtitle: “Stolidly I persevered.” It doesn’t quite have the ring of the Elizabeth Warren-inspired feminist rallying cry, and Mortimer was describing only a single comeback at a middling tournament. Yet the phrase neatly represents her entire career.
Mortimer didn’t start playing tennis seriously until her mid-teens. In 1954, she was beginning to establish a reputation as one of the leading players in Britain, only to battle sinus troubles that left her unable to compete at all. The treatment led to the discovery that she was steadily growing deaf, and that she could completely lose her hearing at any time. On a 1955 tour of the Middle East, she contracted amoebic dysentery that would recur, undiagnosed, for two years. The eventual cure left her so weak that in her first tournament back, she retired from a match one game away from victory, unaware of the score and barely able to see.
As she rose through the ranks, the British press saw her potential as that of a second-tier player at best. It’s barely necessary to add that the commentariat counted her out each time her health betrayed her and she struggled to regain her fitness.
Her peers knew better. They learned something early on that fans and reporters took a decade to discover. Her husband, Davis Cup veteran and long-time tennis writer John Barrett, said she was “bloody-minded and refused to give up.” Mortimer could hardly take offense at his choice of phrase. In 2011, she expressed her relief that she won Wimbledon in her second crack at the title match: “[I]f I’d lost again, I’d have gone on trying and trying until I was about 86 because I was so bloody-minded.”
The words changed depending on who was at the typewriter–“gritty,” “tenacious,” “steady,” “tactical,” “stubborn”–but the story did not. An unassuming girl from Devon without any apparent physical gifts transformed herself into the best player in Britain and the 1961 Wimbledon champion. Stolidly, she persevered.
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Angela Mortimer remains remarkably unheralded for a British Wimbledon champion. She was the first women’s singles titlist from the host country since 1937–Americans had won every edition from 1938 to 1958–and only the third since World War I. Ann Jones and Virginia Wade are the only Brits to have matched the feat since.
She’s lost out on some acclaim because she never embraced the press. Her hearing troubles made crowded gatherings unpleasant. Combine the chatter of press scrums with reporters’ constant skepticism about her ability, and you can understand why she would, as she put it, “avoid them like mad.” The stringer assigned to profile her after the Wimbledon victory barely knew what to write about. Mort was “shy and lonely” and “quiet-spoken and retiring” in back-to-back sentences.
Another factor is the field at the 1961 tournament that she won. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of transition in women’s tennis. After Doris Hart and Louise Brough retired, Althea Gibson picked up the slack for a couple of years, then quit to pursue more lucrative opportunities. Maria Bueno took over the top spot in 1959, but she was sidelined by an attack of jaundice in early 1961 that knocked her off the circuit for a year. Future champions Margaret Smith (later Court) and Billie Jean Moffitt (later King) made their Wimbledon debuts in 1961, but neither advanced past the quarter-finals.
Mortimer’s path to a signature title, then, was wide-open. She lost only two games in her first three matches, and finished her fortnight with wins over Vera Sukova, top seed Sandra Reynolds, and fellow Brit Christine Truman. Only Truman had won a major, and none of them would go on to win another.
In the final, Truman won the first set and had four break points for 5-3 in the second. Instead of converting and serving for the match, she slipped and fell on a cramping leg. She was both rattled and slightly hobbled, and by the time she recovered, Mort had taken the second set and grabbed an early break in the third. Truman put herself back together and evened the decider, but Mortimer broke for 6-5 and delivered one of her most confident service games of the match to win it, 7-5.
As the new champion put it, Chris got the sympathy, and Angela got the title. Wimbledon championships don’t come with asterisks, but the combination of the weak field, the timely injury, and Mortimer’s standoffishness kept the resulting level of patriotic fervor manageable, both at the time and in the six decades since.
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It’s true: Angela Mortimer’s run to the 1961 Wimbledon title is not one of the more impressive in the tournament’s history. 18-year-old Margaret Smith was the best player in the field, and it was Christine Truman who ousted her in the quarters.
But it’s a mistake to judge any player by one tournament, even if it’s the one she’s best known for. Mortimer won 108 titles in a 12-year span, adding at least five new trophies to her collection every season, even when sinus troubles kept her off the court and dysentery laid her low. She could handle a physically uncompromised Truman just fine: Mortimer won 10 of their 13 meetings.
Mortimer (left) and Anne Shilcock
won the 1955 Wimbledon doubles title.
Mort dominated everywhere except for the United States, and she was particularly deadly at home. One ten-month stretch from August of 1958 to June of 1959 almost defies belief. Two months removed from her first run to the Wimbledon final, where she fought Althea Gibson to a 8-6 opening set, she headed for the continent. After losing in the semifinals in Munich, she won four tournaments in a row, then came home and won a hometown event in Torquay, capped with a final round win over Ann Haydon (later Jones).
That four-tournament, 17-match winning streak was just the start. She began 1959 at the Scandinavian Indoors (where, against Truman in the final, she dropped the first set, then stolidly persevered) and then played two events in France before coming home. She lost only one set on the whole trip. She secured ten more titles before Maria Bueno finally stopped her in a three-set semi-final at Birmingham. All told, the 1958-59 streak totaled at least 62 straight match wins* and 14 titles. Oh, and for good measure, she bounced back to beat Bueno the next time they met, on the American swing in August.
* Some of these events had relatively small draws, and Mortimer often received byes. Still, existing records may not be complete, especially for tournaments outside of Britain.
Mortimer was just as good in the first half of 1961. She went 42-2 in 10 tournaments, beating everyone except for the West German #1, Edda Buding. Both losses came as a prolonged bout with tennis elbow weakened her game and nearly kept her from entering Wimbledon at all. She had beaten Buding in six previous meetings.
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Descriptions of Angela Mortimer’s game–even apart from the less-complimentary connotations of “stubborn” and all its synonyms–imply that she had no business beating top players. When she lost early at the 1955 US National Championships to Darlene Hard, a reporter wrote that her serve “invited and received punishment.” She was reluctant to come to net, “plugging steadily away” at the baseline.
Yet the British star held her own against every major player of her generation, and she often got the better of matchups with more outwardly talented players. I’ve mentioned her 10-3 record against Truman, and she won 19 of 29 against Ann Haydon. Her most frequent opponents were fellow Brits, and few of them stood a chance against her. From 1952 until her retirement a decade later, her record against countrywomen amounted to at least 297 wins against 21 losses–almost half of those against Haydon.
Amid the backhanded compliments, glimpses of Mortimer’s game creep in. She “covered court splendidly” in a Wightman Cup win, and in 1960, Allison Danzig gave her credit for a “flow of heady tennis.” She owed the 1961 Wimbledon title to an “impeccable ground game” that she planned “thoughtfully.” Lance Tingay praised her unusual “tactical skill.” Fireworks weren’t necessary.
Nearly everyone she faced, she figured out how to beat. She played multiple matches against 127 different opponents, and she turned in at least one victory against 120 of them. The exceptions are limited to all-time greats (Maureen Connolly, Louise Brough) and Brits she met early in her career (Jean Walker Smith). She upset Bueno, Darlene Hard, Shirley Fry, and Margaret Osborne duPont, and scored a point for team Britain with a 1955 Wightman Cup win over Doris Hart.
At Wimbledon in 1959
Most impressive is her oft-forgotten record against 1957 and 1958 Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson. A Wikipedia-level overview of Mortimer’s career points out that Gibson beat her twice in major finals: at the French Championships in 1956, and at Wimbledon two years later. Both times, the American won one easy set and needed to dig deep for the other. Althea needed 22 games before she finally put away the second set of the title match at Roland Garros, 12-10.
What the executive summary doesn’t tell you is that Mortimer and Gibson met six times, not just two. Their travels coincided in the winter of 1955-56, and they lined up for four more clashes, three of them in finals. In Mexico City, Stockholm, and twice in Egypt, Mort won them all, all but one in straight sets.
Yes, Mortimer would’ve traded all four wins for one more major. And sure, Gibson wasn’t yet at her peak. But 1955 Althea was already fearsome. She lost only three matches to other opponents that season, and took a set from Wimbledon champion Brough in one of them. In his 2005 book The Match, about Gibson and Angela Buxton, Bruce Schoenfeld explains:
Mortimer was stubborn enough to disregard the aggressiveness in Althea’s manner that intimidated so many other players. ‘It gave me more reason to want to show her that I could beat her,’ Mortimer says.
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1961 had been Angela Mortimer’s 12th shot at Wimbledon, and with the trophy secured, she was finally ready to move on. She played through the 1962 season with a typically dominant British spring. She won five of the seven tournaments she entered, losing only to South African star Renee Schuurman, who beat her twice.
Somehow, the Wimbledon seeding committee reviewed the defending champion’s record and placed her 6th, behind Margaret Smith, 1961 absentees Darlene Hard and Maria Bueno, Schuurman, and even fellow Brit Ann Haydon. This time, he wasn’t stubborn enough to make the committee look bad, falling in the fourth round to an in-form Vera Sukova, who reached the final.
Mortimer retired at the end of the season, leaving little doubt that there was more Wimbledon-worthy tennis in her racket bag. She tacked on five more titles to her career haul between August and November, getting some last-minute revenge on Schuurman and beating Haydon a whopping five more times.
In her book, she recalled her mindset the night before the 1961 Wimbledon final. She knew she had worked as hard as anyone: “Every stroke I ever mastered had been the result of hours of slogging against the brick wall.” Most opponents didn’t have a chance against her, and even the greats had their work cut out for them. In the end, she became the brick wall.