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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Louise Brough [USA]Born: 11 March 1923
Died: 3 February 2014
Career: 1940-57
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1955)
Peak Elo rating: 2,254 (1st place, 1949)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 57
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In one article celebrating the Wimbledon centennial in 1977, the author admitted that he had forgotten about Louise Brough, a four-time singles champion between 1948 and 1955. It’s a recurring theme when you start talking about Brough, who also won nine doubles titles at the All-England Club. Everyone has seen her name on the honor roll; few modern-day fans have given her a second thought.
Ask a hundred spectators at this year’s US Open, and you won’t even find many who are sure how to pronounce her name. It’s “bruff.” As the New Yorker explained in 1942 after she scored a memorable win over Pauline Betz, it rhymes “with stuff, of which she has plenty, and with enough, which Miss Betz had more than.” Louise and her long-time doubles partner Margaret Osborne duPont were, uncreatively, “Broughie” and “Ozzie.”
Even during her heyday, Brough was often the forgotten woman. She couldn’t compete with the pizzazz and personality of Betz in the mid-1940s. In 1948, she won all three events at Wimbledon, and the New York Times reported on how well Doris Hart played in defeat. When Maureen Connolly came along in the early 1950s, Little Mo pushed Louise out of both the headlines and the winner’s circle. A half-decade later, when fans might have celebrated Brough’s remarkable staying power, they were instead drawn to the powerful, history-making Althea Gibson.
There was a generous stretch between the Betz and Connolly years when Louise should’ve held center stage. From 1947 to 1950, she won five major singles championships and another 16 in doubles. In one run of 111 grass-court matches, Brough won 102, losing only to Hart and Osborne duPont. She beat her doubles partner in eight of ten meetings in that span, but most tennis writers preferred to give the year-end number one ranking to Margaret.
The same newsmen were also thoroughly distracted by Gussie Moran, a far inferior player. Moran and Brough had competed as juniors in Southern California a decade earlier, but Gussie never developed into a star as an adult. Her fame came from a pair of lace panties designed by Ted Tinling to be worn at Wimbledon in 1949. The women’s game typically got the short shrift in news coverage anyway; now, Louise remembered, “[T]hey didn’t write up the tennis.” You could be sure to read about what “Gorgeous Gussie” was wearing under her skirt, though.
For the most part, though, Brough didn’t mind staying out of the spotlight. The pressure of big moments–especially at Forest Hills–had a tendency to get to her. More attention would’ve made it worse.
She also agreed with the pundits who thought that she could’ve played better. Decades after retirement, she could still say of her missed opportunities, “What a waste!” Any player who spends a decade and a half at the top of the game will lose some matches they should have won. Most players would agree, though, that 35 major titles hardly qualify as a waste.
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The pressure that Brough felt came from high expectations. Her mother was a demanding tennis parent, at least by the more relaxed standards of the 1930s. “She was so supportive,” Louise said. “But she didn’t understand sports at all. She didn’t understand that you could lose.” Life was easier for the teenager if she won, and she usually did.
In 1942, the 19-year-old collected her first adult tournament trophies on the Eastern grass court circuit. She won five straight titles in July and August, beating both Osborne and Betz multiple times. She came within a set of the national title, losing the Forest Hills final to the more experienced Pauline.
After a season like that, it wasn’t just Louise and her mother. Now everyone had high expectations of the young star. She had come so close to the most prestigious title on offer during World War II, and many spectators thought she should’ve won it. Even her opponent recognized how close it was. Betz challenged the fearsome Brough smash, repeatedly lobbing into the sun. “I think her nerves finally got to her,” she said.
Brough, at her best, was untouchable. She built her game around a big American twist kick serve, the best of its kind in the women’s game since Alice Marble. Former champion Helen Jacobs observed just how devastating a weapon it could be. At the Longwood Bowl in 1942, the kicker sometimes pushed Osborne “twenty to thirty feet out of court, opening the way for severe drives to the opposite side.”
The effectiveness of Louise’s game lies in her driving power and the decisiveness of her net game. When she hits out, planning her strategy around the net attack, using her twisting service initially to open the court, there is little answer to her game and the opponent, to win, must wait for errors.
Alas, the wait often paid off. Jacobs thought that Brough played the 1942 Forest Hills final “without a vestige of confidence.” With the finish line in sight, Louise would give up her aggressive game in favor of baseline retrieving. Many women could compete with her on those terms. Against a fighter like Betz, a defensive strategy was suicidal.
Brough wouldn’t win at Forest Hills until her ninth attempt, in 1947. Even with that monkey off her back, she continued to struggle at her national championship. She held the women’s doubles title for a whopping nine consecutive years, twelve overall. She reached six singles finals in 19 tries, getting to championship point in three of them. But she took the singles trophy only once.
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Louise came of age just as World War II put a halt to tennis in Europe. It feels wrong to say that she suffered too much from the conflict, since American women were able to play an almost-normal schedule in those years. Brough won 19 career singles titles before V-J day.
But as it turned out, the Californian would feel most at home on Centre Court at Wimbledon. She made her first trip to the hallowed grounds in 1946, getting a taste of the atmosphere at the All-England Club during the Wightman Cup. The Americans dominated the US-versus-Britain competition in those years, led by “Amazons” Louise and Margaret. In her debut Wightman Cup appearance, Brough made quick work of both her singles and doubles matches. They were the first two of 22 contests she’d win in the competition without suffering a single loss.
She was nearly as good at Wimbledon itself. She reached the singles final, defeating Osborne in a close semi-final before losing to Betz. She collected the best consolation prizes on offer, winning the doubles with Osborne and the mixed with fellow American Tom Brown.
The championship match against Pauline was one of only seven defeats Louise would ever concede at Wimbledon. In eleven appearances between 1946 and 1957, she amassed a record of 56-7, including four titles and another three finals. In 1948 and 1950, she won the triple crown, taking the singles, women’s doubles, and mixed.
She missed a triple-triple by only the narrowest of margins, losing a marathon mixed doubles final in 1949 with John Bromwich. We can forgive her that one. All three finals were played on the same day, and she began by winning the singles final by the all-time-great score of 10-8, 1-6, 10-8. By the time the 9-7, 11-9, 7-5 mixed doubles clash reached its conclusion, she had spent five and a half hours on court.
The secret to Brough’s success was, paradoxically, the peace she found on the sport’s biggest stage. Billie Jean King and Cynthia Starr wrote in their history of women’s tennis, We’ve Come a Long Way:
Enclosed by the dark green walls of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, despite the thousands looking down on her, Louise Brough was comforted by feelings of solitude and individuality that she found nowhere else on earth. She could not wait to go onto the Centre Court, she once said, so that she could be alone.
At Forest Hills, by contrast, the corridors were narrow and the paths between courts unprotected. The crush of the crowds and other indignities were half the challenge of winning a US national title. As a result, Louise enjoyed her greatest triumphs abroad.
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From 1947 to 1950, Brough was probably the best player in the world. My Elo ratings give her the year-end number one ranking in 1948 and 1949. Pauline Betz had beaten her eleven times in a row, but Betz turned pro early in the 1947 season. That left only Doris Hart and Margaret Osborne duPont as serious rivals.
While Louise failed to defend her Forest Hills crown in 1948, it could’ve gone either way. She and Margaret fought it out to 15-13 in the deciding set, battling through rain delays and a noisy crowd that was impatient for the men’s final. The near-miss is more impressive in retrospect, as she wasn’t playing at full strength. A month later, she spent six weeks in bed after a cyst-removal operation.
Jacobs thought that she had the operation “to correct a condition that explains the tendency she had to tire in long matches.” That’s not my understanding of what a cyst removal is capable of, nor was it likely to have been a long-standing condition. But it is my policy never to question Helen Jacobs. In any case, the recovered Brough was nearly unbeatable in 1949. Her only losses came at Roland Garros, where the clay never suited her game, and twice on the Eastern grass to Hart.
Decades later, Louise would still call Doris Hart “that devil.” As Wightman Cup teammates and frequent opponents, they were “friendly enemies.” In 31 career meetings–more than Brough played against anyone save Osborne duPont–Hart got the better of her, 16 to 15. Count a semi-final at the National Girls’ Championship in 1940, and they finished their careers in a dead heat.
The two women traveled together to Australia in 1950. It was Brough’s only trip down under. In one of the least surprising developments in tennis history, the two women plowed through the local opposition at the Australian Championships, neither one dropping a set on the way to the final. Hart had won the year before, but this time, Louise came out on top in three sets. Without Osborne and Doris’s pal Shirley Fry, their usual partners, they joined forces in the doubles and won that too.
The doubles victory completed Brough’s career grand slam in doubles. Despite her ineffectiveness on clay, she and Margaret had won the French three of the previous four years.
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It all went downhill from there. Sort of. The story of Louise’s last seven years on the circuit is one of the stranger narratives I’ve encountered in this tour through a century of tennis history.
She picked up a nasty case of tennis elbow around the time of her trip to Australia. It might have stemmed from an attempt to overcompensate for windy conditions at the tournaments Down Under. Or it may have come from lugging around a heavy suitcase. Whatever the cause, she played a shortened season in 1951, missing Forest Hills entirely.
Around the same time, she began struggling with her service toss. In Louise’s retelling, her ball-toss woes started on the Aussie sojourn, possibly another malady to blame on the wind. It couldn’t have been too bad that first season–after all, she went on to win the triple at Wimbledon six months later–but she occasionally had trouble executing the simplest things. A newsreel of an unnecessarily complicated 1950 Wightman Cup match shows her double faulting and missing an easy smash.
It’s tough to get a sense of just how much errant tosses affected Brough’s results. Between her age-29 campaign in 1952 and her last full season in 1957, she won another Wimbledon crown and reached the title match at four more majors. The toss was a factor in her 1955 Wimbledon final against Beverly Baker Fleitz, but she gutted that one out for a 7-5, 8-6 victory.
She had always been a nervy player, and she felt even more pressure as the years went by. On bad days, it was tough to watch. Shirley Fry told King and Starr that she “was saddened by the sight of Broughie tossing the ball up on her serve with a quivering hand and catching it, again and again.” Osborne duPont said that, on occasion, “she would be so tight or tense that she actually could not throw the ball in the air to serve. Her arm would become palsied.”
For her part, Louise said, “I just played too long.”
Doubles remained a refuge. Broughie and Ozzie won another three straight titles at Forest Hills from 1955 to 1957. The partnership was ideal, as Osborne duPont kept the stress off her partner. Fry thought that Louise was the “crew” to Margaret’s “captain.” It didn’t hurt that they had two of the biggest kick serves in the game. As long as Brough’s toss stayed on track, you could wait all day and never break them.
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It’s odd to hear Brough say that she played too long, because the women with the best reasons to complain were the ones that had to face her.
From 1952 to 1957, Louise won 203 matches against only 38 losses. She added another 16 titles to her career haul. At the 1956 Wightman Cup, her last appearance in the competition, she pulled out three-set wins against two players a decade younger than herself, Angela Buxton and Angela Mortimer. Brough teamed with Fry for a routine doubles victory as well.
She was a refreshing interview after retirement, because her memories of her playing days never became rose-tinted. She told King and Starr:
I try to remember what it was like playing, and all I can think of is how does anyone go through this? The waiting and the weather and the noise and the crowds–I can remember how awful it was. We’d have to wait almost all day for the rain to clear up, and we’d be on pins and needles waiting for that match to happen. It just seems like it would be too much, just not worth it.
Yet in the same conversation, she’d quickly change the subject to her missed opportunities. She played too long, it wasn’t worth it… but if she’d just tried a little harder, she could’ve won even more!