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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Ann Jones [GBR]Born: 17 October 1938
Career: 1956-71
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1967)
Peak Elo rating: 2,288 (2nd place, 1960)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 130
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Ann Jones played a lot of tennis. That sounds like a banal observation, and I suppose it is. Still, for a woman who wasn’t fully committed to the sport until her early 20s, and who mostly hung up her racket when her first child was born at age 33, the sheer volume of competition she put herself through is remarkable.
My records credit her with 1,067 singles wins (including a few from juniors) and over 1,300 total matches played. That may actually be an undercount, since we haven’t yet catalogued the early rounds of every amateur-era event. Most sources give Jones 113 singles titles. My records list 130, counting all of her local tournaments and the small pro events she played in 1968-69.
Those four-digit tallies aren’t all-time records, but they aren’t far off. Martina Navratilova and Virginia Wade both played over 1,600 matches, and Chris Evert topped 1,400. Among Jones’s direct contemporaries, only Billie Jean King is in the same league, with her career total (by my unofficial count) of 1,369 matches. There aren’t many women in tennis history who have played 1,000 singles matches, let alone amassed that many wins.
Jones’s work ethic was second to none, and she rarely let an opportunity pass if more tennis could be played. Throughout her 1971 memoir, A Game To Love, she refers to long absences from the circuit, or she explains a poor performance as the result of rustiness. Cross-referenced with her career records, those breaks were rarely longer than a month or two. With winter events in South Africa and the Caribbean and indoor championships in Europe, a woman who wanted to keep herself match-fit could play a schedule even more punishing than today’s WTA calendar.
By the time Jones won her signature Wimbledon title in 1969, she had been criss-crossing the globe for a decade, racking up titles on all surfaces, usually ranking among the top five players in the world.
Not bad for a second career!
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Before Ann Jones became Britain’s best tennis player, she was Ann Haydon, one of Britain’s top table tennis players. She came from a table tennis family, and she competed at elite-level events around the world throughout her teens. At the 1957 World Championships in Stockholm, when Haydon was 18, she reached the finals in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles.
Haydon receives a table tennis medal in Stockholm
At first, lawn tennis was just something to do in the summer. Table tennis was a winter pursuit, and plenty of women played both sports. Teenage Ann tried to play lawn tennis the way she did the smaller-scale game, by keeping herself in points until she could end them with a big forehand. She eventually developed a somewhat more well-rounded game, and she won the Wimbledon girls’ title in 1956.
Promising as she was with the bigger racket, it took a few more years before Haydon left table tennis behind. She split her time between the two pursuits until 1959, when table tennis politics and rule changes made the game less appealing. She had reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon and the semis at Forest Hills that year, so there was little doubt she could compete at the highest level of both sports.
Her first winter without table tennis was a success. She began on the European indoor circuit, reaching finals in Cologne, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Paris, and winning two of the three title matches she played against Angela Mortimer. From there, she headed to Florida and the Caribbean, where she held her own against two of the best players in the world, Maria Bueno and Darlene Hard. She beat Hard four times in the sunshine, and won one of three matches with Bueno. She would beat both of them later that year to win the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles.
The 18-year-old Haydon wouldn’t slow down until November. She played 30 singles events, winning 15 and splitting the title with Hard in a 16th when the final couldn’t be held. She swung the racket in 13 different countries, from Brazil to Finland, and picked up multiple titles on all four major surfaces. In 10 months, she won over 100 matches.
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Even after such an astonishing full-season debut, questions remained. Lance Tingay placed Haydon sixth in his year-end rankings, behind (among others) fellow Brit Christine Truman.
Experts had a hard time imagining how Haydon’s left-handed baseline game would overcome the power and serve-and-volleying prowess of the likes of Bueno, Hard, and Truman, especially at Wimbledon. Haydon already had a reputation as a grinder: In the 1960 Sutton final, she took two hours to beat Shirley Brasher, 6-2, 6-2. One of the rallies reached 120 shots.
She summed up her own early-career limitations in her memoir a decade later:
My main weakness was that I did not possess one really outstanding stroke with which to dictate the pace of a match. … I had no power game with which to hit back and relied instead on my steadiness and a willingness to work hard. This paid dividends on clay but was insufficient on grass.
Or as Virginia Wade put it:
Though Ann reached the semifinals of Wimbledon each year, her game was like a cake without the final layer of icing. … Mine had too much icing and not enough cake.
Fortunately for Haydon, icing wasn’t always necessary. She won her first major title at Roland Garros in 1961, advancing past the young Margaret Smith (later Court) in the quarters and 1958 champion Zsuzsa Körmöczy in the semis. Her opponent in the final, the Mexican Yola Ramírez, struggled with both the occasion and the inclement weather, and Haydon ran away with it, 6-2, 6-1.
The newly-minted French champion had a hard time sustaining her form. She lost twice to Smith on grass, then took an early exit at Wimbledon in the fourth round to Renee Schuurman. Haydon beat Mortimer to reach the Forest Hills final, but failed to put up much of a fight against Hard. It was another 30-tournament season, and by Wimbledon the following year, she was “emotionally exhausted.” Still, the pair of major finals meant that she ended her 1961 campaign as the consensus third-best player in the world.
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By September of 1962, Haydon had played another 87 matches, including two major semi-finals and a 25-match winning streak in the winter that spanned South Africa, Norway, France, and Britain.
Finally, she took a break, prompted by her marriage to Philip “Pip” Jones. Gossips clucked, as Jones was 31 years her elder. The relationship proved beneficial for both Ann and her tennis career, as Pip encouraged her to continue whenever she wavered in her commitment to the game. He even traveled full-time with the professional troupe his wife joined for 1968 and 1969.
At first, Mrs. Jones shifted her priorities, writing later that, “For the next two or three years, I was essentially a housewife who played tennis when it didn’t involve too much inconvenience.” Of course, this is Ann Haydon Jones we’re talking about, so tennis was sufficiently convenient to the tune of 99 matches in 1963 and another 95 in 1964.
Still, savvy observers recognized Ann’s wavering commitment, even as she reached another Roland Garros final in 1963. In 1964, Maureen Connolly coached the British Wightman Cup team, and she told Jones that she “should either give it my all or not bother to compete.” The two women became friends, and Connolly helped her develop the more aggressive game that she sorely needed.
Jones got another boost after the 1966 season, when she again reached the French final. A businessman named Ernest Butten, better known for his support of British golfers, arranged for her to spend the offseason doing serious physical training for the first time. She developed her right side for better balance, and strengthened her neck to counteract the effects of a long-lingering injury.
Nearly 900 matches into her lawn tennis career, Jones was finally ready to turn a corner.
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At the 1967 Kent Championships in Beckenham, Ann drew Billie Jean King in the semi-finals. King had beaten her 11 of 16 times, including 8 of their last 10 meetings. Jones struggled with the the American’s topspin, and Billie Jean was particularly skilled at exposing the Brit’s weak backhand.
There was nothing to lose in trying something new:
Tired of baseline duels, I was determined to go to the net, so I chipped and rushed in on everything. These tactics paid off handsomely against [quarter-final opponent] Kerry [Melville] and I decided to employ them for my semi-final with Billie Jean. For the first time for ages, I beat her on grass.
Jones defeated King in three sets, and went on to win the tournament in another three-setter against Virginia Wade. She followed up the success at Wimbledon, where she reached her first final. With the pressure on, in front of a packed Centre Court crowd, Billie Jean was in her element, and Jones lost in straights.
Connolly had showed her how to use better judgment when coming in behind approach shots. Later in 1967, they shifted focus to the serve, lowering her toss and adjusting her foot position to make it easier to follow serves to the net.
Ann (left) had 50,000 reasons to be smiling in this picture
Jones faced Billie Jean once again in the Forest Hills final that year, and while the result was the same, the score was closer, with Ann matching her opponent up to 9-9 in the first set. Both women joined George MacCall’s four-woman professional group in 1968, so Jones had constant opportunities to test herself against the American. They played an epic three-setter at a Wembley pro event in May, then went another three sets in the Wimbledon semi-final. Billie Jean usually came out on top–she won 38 of their 49 career meetings–but the gap was narrowing.
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The professional game agreed with Ann Jones. Years of table tennis had prepared her for pro-style scheduling, when most matches were held in the evening. In 1969, the first full season for the women of MacCall’s troupe, Jones would pile up another 100-plus matches, and the workload wouldn’t faze her at all.
She lost a tight French Open final to Margaret Court, so when she drew the top-seeded Court again in the Wimbledon semi-finals, she didn’t expect to win. She surprised herself by pushing Margaret to a 12-10 first set, then shifted the momentum by winning a marathon game to open the second set. She won the second, 6-3, playing what Jones called “the best tennis of my whole career.” Court cramped and faded, and the Brit pressed home her advantage to reach the Wimbledon final once again.
Billie Jean King was waiting, but this time, Jones was prepared for the occasion. She ignored the mountains of telegrams and focused on the challenge ahead. In three sets, she beat Billie Jean at her own game. Connolly had taught her that she should be coming in behind three-quarters of her first serves and half of her seconds. On the day, she advanced behind 85% of firsts and 58% of seconds. The Wimbledon crown was hers, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2.
Jones would continue playing for another two years, until she was pregnant with her daughter. But she didn’t defend her Wimbledon title, opting for a chair in the commentary booth instead. With three singles majors, six runner-up finishes, and another five doubles majors to her name, she had nothing left to prove. The 1957 table tennis runner-up could finally retire on top.