Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations
I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.
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Maureen Connolly [USA]Born: 17 September 1934
Died: 21 June 1969
Career: 1948-54
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1952)
Peak Elo rating: 2,348 (1st place, 1954)
Major singles titles: 9
Total singles titles: 46
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By 1951, San Diego knew it had something special on its hands. Maureen Connolly, a five-foot, four-inch sparkplug with murderous groundstrokes, was climbing the tennis ladder at record speed. Only 16 years old, she had already won the national junior championship two years running.
Connolly’s first coach, Wilbur Folsom, thought in terms of a five-year plan. He figured that Maureen needed one more year of seasoning on the Eastern circuit. In 1950, she had picked up a minor title in Pennsylvania but fallen short at the season’s premier events. Grass-court tennis took some getting used to for youngsters trained on California cement. Opponents such as Doris Hart and Pat Todd had a several-year head start.
One man was more optimistic. Nelson Fisher, a sportswriter for the San Diego Union, had followed every step of Connolly’s progress. He couldn’t help but notice that in 1951, she simply stopped losing. When she secured the title at the Southern California Championships in May, it was her fifth consecutive trophy on the adult circuit.
At Palm Springs in February, she dethroned top seed Helen Perez, who had beaten her twice the previous year. At Pebble Beach in April, she upset another top seed, Nancy Chaffee. The two women met again for the title at both Ojai and the Southern California event–only now, Maureen was the favorite. The 21-year-old Chaffee, once a junior standout herself, had spun the rivalry into something of a feud. But the controversy didn’t have much in the way of legs. The younger player always won, and their final meeting in 1951 was the last time Chaffee took so much as a set.
Fisher had seen enough. Sure, Hart was a perennial favorite, and three-time Wimbledon champion Louise Brough ranked up there with her. But the local youngster brought even greater names to mind. Her groundstrokes recalled those of 19-time major champion Helen Wills Moody.
The sportswriter made his prediction. Folsom could stick to his five-year plan, but Fisher decided that 1951 was Connolly’s year.
Maureen continued to be flummoxed by veterans such as Hart and Todd on the East Coast grass, losing at Manchester and Maidstone. Those were just warm-ups, though. At Forest Hills, she handled the turf like an old hand. The 16-year-old progressed to the final without the loss of a set. She defeated Althea Gibson in the round of 16 and Hart in the semis. After falling to 0-4 in the first set against Doris, she found the range and won 11 of the next 12 games.
Fisher couldn’t rely on wire reports for this one. He ponied up the airfare himself and flew to New York for the final. “I’ve got to see her win with my own eyes,” he said.
He witnessed a championship match that heralded a new era in women’s tennis. In the semis, Connolly had pinned the normally attacking Hart to the backcourt. Shirley Fry, her opponent in the final, was a more natural defender. She took up her position well behind the baseline, better to handle Maureen’s drives once they had lost a bit of pace.
It was “strictly a battle of attrition,” according to the New York Times. “Both girls might as well have left the volley at home.” Connolly, with her net-skimming backhands, took the first set, 6-3. When the Californian lost some of her control, Fry seized the second, 6-1. The lapse, however, was temporary.
Maureen “could play five games missing the baseline by one inch,” Fry said, “but [she would] keep going for the lines and eventually find her range again.” With the crowd behind her, the 16-year-old took the final set, 6-4. The United States had its youngest champion since May Sutton in 1904.
Even Nelson Fisher, watching his city’s darling become a national heroine, had no idea how many records the San Diego teenager would set.
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In the wake of Connolly’s breakthrough, the New Yorker captured the two sides of the appealing new champion. On the one hand, she looked like “a pretty, animated doll.” She gained the cutesy nickname “Little Mo,” a tag that emphasized both her petite stature and the weaponry that made her the equal of “Big Mo”–the USS Missouri, a Navy battleship.
There was nothing cute about the way she won tennis matches. “To judge from the exhibition of nerve control she put on after dropping the second set in the final,” the magazine continued, “she ought to remain a champion for a good many years.”
Little Mo was rarely spotted off-court without a smile on her face. Between the white lines, though, she was barely recognizable. Her focus was legendary. “You could set off dynamite in the next court and I wouldn’t notice,” she once said.*
* A construction crew across the street set off some dynamite as I was writing this. I noticed.
She learned her determination from the best. After Folsom taught her the rudiments of the game, Connolly passed into the care of Eleanor “Teach” Tennant. Tennant had guided the careers of Alice Marble and Bobby Riggs, and she proposed to do the same with Maureen.
Connolly and Tennant in 1952
Tennant was known for taking full control of her students’ lives, but she was remarkably flexible about their style of play. Marble had ridden a big-serving net attack to the top of the women’s game. Riggs was a brainy junkballer. Teach helped Little Mo become a better version of herself, “developing the dainty little baseliner into a hard-driving attacker,” in the words of Time magazine.
The veteran coach was less flexible about mental preparation. She took the notion of a killer instinct almost literally. She wanted her charges to be fueled by pure hatred. “You have to be mean to be a champion,” Tennant said. Before one big match against Hart, Teach concocted a story about Doris trash-talking Connolly behind her back. It was entirely invented, but it did the trick.
Even more than Marble had, Maureen internalized the Tennant approach. “This was no passing dislike, but a blazing, virulent, powerful and consuming hate,” she said. “I believed I could not win without hatred. And win I must because I was afraid to lose.”
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Losing was never much of a problem. Connolly won her first adult title at age 13, at the tail end of a summer trip through the Northwest. In 1950, she scored victories over leading Californians Beverly Baker and Helen Perez.
After securing the national title in 1951, she hardly ever lost again. She went home to Southern California and picked up the title at the Pacific Southwest. In 1952, she reigned over the field. She won thirteen titles, including a championship in her debut at Wimbledon and a second straight victory at Forest Hills. Over the entire season, she lost just two matches, one apiece to Hart and Brough.
The Connolly attack was relentless. Her forehand was the best on the circuit. Her backhand was even better. She was a natural left-hander, but Folsom had demanded she play right-handed. As a result, there was no weak side of her baseline game.
Maureen’s foes settled on a plan to stop her. It just didn’t work very often. She could handle pace, and she would end all but the strongest forays to the net with a precise passing shot. Occasionally, though, she would lose her timing for a few games. The solution was to softball her from the back of the court, to make her play until she started missing.
The woman who came closest to executing this style of off-speed upset was Susan Partridge, a journeywoman Brit who played Mo in the fourth round at Wimbledon. Connolly was coping with a sore shoulder and reeling from a quarrel with Tennant that would end their relationship. Partridge, who had pushed the champion to 6-4, 7-5 at a match in the States two years before, hit one moonball after another down the middle of the court. It was all Maureen could do to advance, 6-3, 5-7, 7-5.
But even junkballing would trip up Connolly only on an off-day. Mo was known as “Twinkle Toes” for the constant motion of her feet. One of Tennant’s first tasks was to fix the young woman’s “atrocious footwork.” Maureen was sent to tap-dancing class, and her feet barely stopped moving for the next five years. She got herself in position for every ball–fast or slow–and usually sent it back within a few inches of the baseline.
A few days after the close call against Partridge, Little Mo drew Shirley Fry in the Wimbledon semis. Fry knew the book on Connolly, and she was as patient as anyone on the circuit. But the young American regained her focus and dispatched Shirley, 6-4, 6-3.
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Little Mo was even better in 1953. She became the first woman to win a Grand Slam, dropping only one set en route to the four major titles. (The woman who pushed her to a decider was, once again, the pesky Partridge.) As in 1952, she allowed just two defeats to mar her season. Against twelve tournament wins, she lost once to Hart and once to Fry. After Doris beat her at the Italian, Connolly exacted her revenge in both the French and Wimbledon finals.
Hart felt that the 1953 Wimbledon final was her own peak: the best match she ever played. It just wasn’t good enough for Connolly, who beat her, 8-6, 7-5.
Shirley got the same treatment. Two weeks after Fry beat Connolly at the Pacific Southwest, they met again at the Pacific Coast Championships in Berkeley. Mo won the first set at love. The youngster beat her twice in a month.
“No one can duel with her at the baseline,” Shirley said. “Go up to the net against her? Ridiculous.”
The only remaining weakness in the Connolly game was her serve. At five-feet, four-inches tall, there was only so much she could do. And with so many other weapons in her arsenal, it didn’t really matter. Still, she hooked up with Les Stoefen, a towering former doubles champion, to give her opening salvos a bit more punch.
After losing a match to Beverly Baker in early 1954, Mo ascended to another level entirely. She won her next 41 matches, dropping only a single set at an exhibition-style team event in Germany. The streak included title defenses at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Brough, in the Wimbledon final, was the only woman at either event to reach 5-all. At the US Clay Court Championships in July, Maureen stomped Karol Fageros in the semi-finals, 6-0, 6-0, then allowed Hart only four games in the final.
“She was so quick, accurate and competitive,” said Doris. “I know I never played anybody as good. You might be ahead 40-0, but she made you feel like it was 0-40.”
In 1978, Hart added, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Mo was the greatest player who ever lived.”
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The 1954 US Clay final was the last competitive match Connolly ever played. Still only 19 years old, she suffered a nasty fall when a cement truck spooked the horse she was riding. Her right leg was severely injured. She recovered well enough to play a casual game and work as a coach, but no more than that.
At the time of the accident, Little Mo had won nine major singles titles–every one she entered since her initial triumph at Forest Hills in 1951. She ended her career with almost twice as many tournament victories (46) as match losses (27), even counting her first venture onto the circuit as a 13-year-old.
It is impossible not to speculate what might have been. Connolly intended to enter the US Championships in 1954, then defend her title at Wimbledon the following year. If there’s ever an instance in which we can say an absent player would have won a title, it’s this one. Hart won at Forest Hills in 1954 and 1955; Brough won the first Mo-less Wimbledon. Maureen had established her dominance over both of them.
After that, the plan was to turn professional. Some of the details emerged when Connolly sued the company that owned the offending cement truck. After all, it would’ve been difficult to assert a loss of income for an amateur tennis player, no matter how exceptional.
Maureen would’ve taken on the reigning champion, Pauline Betz, as part of the tour promoted by Jack Kramer. This is where history might really have taken a different turn. After the lopsided Betz-Gussie Moran tour in the early 1950s, there was virtually no women’s professional tennis. Little Mo had the celebrity cachet to draw crowds, and Betz might have been able to keep things competitive. Had a women’s pro tour proved financially viable, Connolly or Betz might have gone on to face Althea Gibson. Instead, Gibson’s pro career consisted of opening for the Harlem Globetrotters against an opponent chosen more for her face than her forehand.
We can only dream. Connolly was just two months older than Ken Rosewall, who turned pro in 1956 and was still contesting major finals in the 1970s.
On the other hand, Little Mo would have quickly exhausted the challenges in front of her. Arguably, she didn’t have anything left to accomplish when she was forced to quit at 19. It is unlikely she would have hung on as a part-time player. However easy her victories looked, her grim game face disguised a strenuous effort.
Connolly occasionally coached the British Wightman Cup team in the 1960s, and her influence was particularly valuable to 1969 Wimbledon champ Ann Jones. Jones struggled to remain motivated during long stretches away from home. “If you want to play tennis, play tennis,” Maureen told her. “If you want to go home and have kids, do that. But make up your mind and do one or the other and put your heart into it.”
The coach’s words carried extra weight because she had so clearly lived them. As a teenage champion, Connolly wasn’t forced to choose between tennis and family life. But unlike so many athletic prodigies, her focus never wavered. She could have coasted after winning the 1951 national title. She certainly could have rested on her laurels after securing the 1953 Grand Slam.
A careening cement truck may have deprived Little Mo of another half-dozen–or more–major titles. But her place in history doesn’t depend on mere what-ifs. Even at age 19, it was clear that she had the game of an all-timer and the mind of a champion.