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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Kitty McKane Godfree [GBR]Born: 7 May 1896
Died: 19 June 1993
Career: 1919-34
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1923)
Peak Elo rating: 2,173 (2nd place, 1922)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 43
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In 1919, the 23-year-old Kitty McKane played her first Wimbledon. She was only a couple months into her tournament tennis career, and she had picked up the sport less than a year before. Still, her first competitive results were so strong that she was invited to make her debut at Worple Road.
She proved herself worthy, winning three straight-set matches to reach the quarterfinals. In the round of eight, she drew Suzanne Lenglen. The Frenchwoman calmly dispatched the newcomer, 6-0, 6-1.
Even for a more experienced player, this would be nothing to be ashamed of. At tournaments in France that Spring, Lenglen had won 16 straight matches, dropping a total of nine games. She won three of her Wimbledon matches that year by the same score by which she beat McKane, and she secured the championship with a 6-1, 6-1 dismantling of Phyllis Satterthwaite.
Years later, Kitty McKane Godfree (she became Mrs. Godfree in early 1926) would point out that she won both of her Wimbledon titles in years when Lenglen withdrew. She told her biographer, Geoffrey Green, that Suzanne “was too good for me and for everybody else as well.”
It’s true–Kitty probably wouldn’t have won the championship in 1924 had Lenglen not withdrawn before their semi-final meeting. Yet she was far more than just another pebble that the Frenchwomen kicked aside in the years that she ruled the tennis world. McKane not only challenged her as few others did, she even sought out the opportunity to do so.
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When she heard that Lenglen had entered the 1922 World Hard Court Championships in Brussels*, McKane made sure to be there. The pair hadn’t met since the lopsided encounter three years earlier. Kitty may have felt she missed an opportunity at the 1920 Olympics, when she withdrew from her singles semi-final against countrywoman Dorothy Holman in order to save her energy for the doubles. Holman advanced to the final against Suzanne, where she lost 6-3, 6-0.
* Back then, “hard court” meant clay.
In the Brussels semi-final in 1922, McKane very nearly toppled the queen. She reached set point the first set at 5-4 before losing 10-8. She even recovered well enough to earn a 2-1 edge in the second before Lenglen ran away with the last five games.
It was the beginning of a 14-month span in which Kitty kept hammering away at the best player in the game, even if she never won a set. Here are the results of their five meetings in 1922 and 1923:
Year Event Round Score 1922 Brussels SF 10-8 6-2 1922 Wimbledon R32 6-1 7-5 1923 Menton F 6-2 7-5 1923 Paris F 6-3 6-3 1923 Wimbledon F 6-2 6-2
If I showed you those scores out of context, you probably wouldn’t be all that impressed. But against peak Suzanne, they represent one triumph after another.
Kitty with husband Leslie Godfree in 1928
Before the Brussels semi-final, Lenglen had played seven matches in 1922. She hadn’t lost a single game. In her entire season, she lost only five sets by scores closer than 6-2: two of them to McKane, two to Elizabeth Ryan, and one to Irene Peacock*.
* Poor Irene Peacock: The best tennis of her life earned her a 6-4 6-1 defeat in the Wimbledon semi-finals. One competitive set, and then, goodnight, Irene.
Suzanne was even more dominant in 1923. She played 65 singles matches and won them all. 37 of them were double bagels, and another 10 involved the loss of only one game. McKane’s 6-2, 7-5 loss in the Menton final was the closest anyone got to her that year. Lenglen lost six or more games only six times–once each to Ryan, Satterthwaite, and Germaine Golding, and thrice to McKane.
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There’s plenty more to Kitty McKane Godfree than some respectable showings against Lenglen. She won five medals in the six events she entered at the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. The only medal she missed was in the 1924 mixed doubles event, when she and partner Brian Gilbert withdrew from the bronze match. No one equaled her total tennis medal tally until Venus Williams won her fifth in 2016.
The medal count is just the beginning of her list of doubles achievements. She traveled to the United States to play Wightman Cup in odd-numbered years, and the Brits stayed on to play the US National Championships. In 1923, 1925, and 1927, McKane won either women’s doubles or mixed doubles at Forest Hills. Twice in her career, she beat Lenglen on the doubles court, nearly as rare a feat as a singles upset.
Most impressive was Kitty’s overall athleticism, which allowed her to shine regardless of the sport. Her family bicycled to Berlin when she was nine years old, and she earned national recognition as a child for her ice skating prowess. She was a standout lacrosse player at school, and had World War I not intervened, she and her sister Margaret probably would’ve been selected for international lacrosse matches.
McKane had no signature shot, but her all-around skills made her good at everything. Dan Maskell wrote, “Mrs. Godfree was one of the first British players to develop an all-court game, completing a deep ground stroke approach shot with a finishing volley.” There were great volleyers, like Elizabeth Ryan, but few players who could compete both at the net and from the baseline.
A. Wallis Myers sketched his early impressions of the star:
I remember seeing her first play in 1919 at Chiswick Park–a pretty, merry volleyer, with a long vaulting stride, a natural hitter if there ever was one. She did not wear, and has never worn, the solemn mien of some players of her sex, and doubtless it has been this air of joyous abandon, index of an unaffected nature, which has made her so popular with crowds wherever she has played.
All this, and with minimal coaching. Lenglen had an overbearing father who helped develop her game, but McKane did not:
I was never coached. What ability I may have had was natural and instinctive. In any case there was little or no coaching in my day and I imagine none at all before the first war in the days when women served underarm.
The only advice–not coaching–I got was from uncles and cousins when I first picked up a racket at the age, I suppose of ten. “Use your right hand” they used to urge. “Tennis is played with the right hand.”
Kitty was naturally left-handed.
She played badminton right-handed as well. Indoor tennis was rare, so many tennis players of the era kept fit during the winter on the badminton court. No one crossed over as effectively as McKane did. She won the All England Championships (the unofficial badminton world championships of the day) four times in singles, twice in doubles with sister Margaret, and twice in mixed doubles. In 1924, she won all three events, just four months before claiming her first Wimbledon title.
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Lenglen was the prime obstacle standing in the way of McKane and major singles championships. The other stumbling block was the powerful American, Helen Wills.
Suzanne won Wimbledon every year from 1919 to 1923, then again in 1925. Wills was six years younger than Lenglen (and nine years younger than Kitty), so her arrival was well-timed to dominate the game after the Frenchwoman went professional in 1926. The American was particularly deadly at Wimbledon, where she finished her career with a 54-1 record. She won the tournament eight times between 1927 and 1938.
Her one loss was to Kitty McKane.
When the pair met in the 1924 Wimbledon final, Wills was not yet the unstoppable force that she would become. But she had already ascended to the top ranks of the game. In 1923, she won 26 of 28 matches, including two wins against McKane. The victories carry a bit of an asterisk, as the first battle was in the inaugural Wightman Cup, when the Brits had little time to find their land legs and prepare for the unfamiliar conditions. But after another week passed and Kitty advanced to the quarter-finals of the US National Championships, Helen beat her again, this time in a 2-6, 6-2, 7-5 nail-biter.
When Wills arrived in England in 1924, the situation was reversed and conditions favored McKane. Helen lost both of her Wightman Cup matches, including a routine 6-2, 6-2 defeat to Kitty. But like McKane had at Forest Hills the year before, Wills quickly adjusted. Wimbledon followed immediately after the Wightman Cup, and Helen blitzed through five rounds, reaching the final with the loss of only 11 games.
Kitty acknowledged that it took some luck for her to become champion. Lenglen eliminated two of the best players in the draw–Hazel Wightman and Elizabeth Ryan–before withdrawing from the semi-final. As usual, she had a legitimate illness to justify her exit, but the timing came suspiciously after a weak performance. In this case, the cause of Suzanne’s nerves was a narrow three-set win over Ryan in the quarter-finals.
Even with good fortune on her side, McKane barely won her title. She said in retrospect, “I had a reputation for being a strong finisher. But equally true was the fact I was a weak starter.” In the final, she almost waited too long to turn the tables.
Wills won the first set 6-4, despite dropping 12 points in a row. In her newspaper column, Lenglen described it as “an exciting spectacle but not great lawn tennis.” Helen rode her momentum to a 4-1 advantage in the second, and what A. Wallis Myers called the “palpitating conflict for the sixth game” ran to five deuces and three game points for the American. Kitty saved them all, then sent the score careening in the other direction. She won the second set, 6-4, and sealed the title with another 6-4 score in the decider.
The British crowd was thrilled by their new champion, but journalists could hardly wait to appoint Wills as the inheritor to Lenglen’s throne. Two days after the final, the New York Times wrote:
[Wills] is a better stroke maker than her conqueror, Miss McKane, and probably hits harder than any other woman player at Wimbledon. … The experts find it difficult to decide exactly what gave the British woman the victory, some attributing it to her speedier footwork and others to Miss Wills’s occasional lapses from her best.
Helen would go on to justify even the most outlandish forecasts of her future greatness, but in the summer of 1924, she wasn’t quite good enough to get past Kitty McKane.
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Most onlookers in 1924 would’ve predicted that Wills’s first Wimbledon title would come before McKane’s second. Helen was undefeated for the rest of the season, picking up Olympic gold as well as her second title at Forest Hills.
But in 1926, the draw once again opened up for Kitty. Now married to Davis Cupper Leslie Godfree, she watched as an appendectomy sidelined Wills and a spat with tournament organizers sent Lenglen packing. Her toughest match came in the third round against Elizabeth Ryan, who she beat after dropping a 6-1 first set. She reeled off 11 games in a row to eliminate Diddie Vlasto in the semis, and she secured the title by winning the last five games of a three-set final against Lili de Alvarez.
As if that wasn’t enough, she and Leslie won the mixed doubles. Their title is best remembered as the only one by a married couple, but it was no mere historical curiosity. It was certainly no walk in the park for the newlyweds. In the two final rounds, they beat two strong American teams: first Ryan and Vinnie Richards, then Mary Browne and Howard Kinsey.
For the perennial number two, the pair of Wimbledon trophies represented a final hurrah. She won four titles in five tournaments in the remainder of 1926, then lost to Wills and Ryan in an abbreviated 1927 schedule. She started a family and never returned full-time to the circuit.
Yet she still had one more great performance for her British fans. A key part of the 1924 and 1925 Wightman Cup-winning teams, she was drafted to play doubles again in 1930. In the deciding rubber of the seven-match series, Kitty paired Phoebe Holcroft Watson to upset a truly imposing duo, Helen Wills (now Wills Moody) and Helen Jacobs. With the Cup on the line, the Brits pulled out the victory, 7-5, 1-6, 6-4.
Kitty (right) with Pam Shriver in 1986
The Americans would retake the Wightman Cup in 1931 and hold on to it until 1958. Kitty’s Wimbledon titles wouldn’t loom quite so historically large, as Dorothy Round picked up two singles wins for the Brits in the 1930s.
Still, Kitty McKane Godfree herself wouldn’t soon be forgotten. She lived to the great age of 96, and she continued to play–occasionally with Jean Borotra–into her nineties. When the Wimbledon centenary arrived in 1986, she was drafted to present the trophy to that year’s women’s singles champion, Martina Navratilova. Navratilova was more like a Lenglen or a Wills than a McKane, but then again, Martina’s coaches let her play left-handed.