CONNOLLY, Maureen Catherine ("Little Mo")

(b. 17 September 1934 in San Diego, California; d. 21 June 1969 in Dallas, Texas), tennis player who in 1953 was the first woman to win the Grand Slam with victories at the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open and who is considered one of the most powerful and important stars in her sport in the twentieth century.

Connolly rose to tennis prominence from a broken home and an impoverished background. Her father, Martin Connolly, a naval officer, deserted her mother, Jassamine Wood Connolly, when their only daughter was four years old. Her mother's second marriage, to August Berste, and another divorce added to the turbulence of Connolly's youth. Her mother pushed her to become a singer or dancer, without success. Although Connolly's first love was horses, the neighborhood tennis courts provided a more affordable sporting option. Connolly's first coach, Wilbur Folsom, recognized her talent and changed her left-handed stroke into a right-handed style. As she later recalled, "I became Folsom's shadow, a whirling dervish as a ball boy, the most eager pupil he ever had." She then moved on to work with Eleanor "Teach" Tennant, the most famous coach in the 1940s. Tennant instilled in her student the philosophy that a player had to hate her opponents to achieve tennis victories.

Connolly soon emerged as a top player in Southern California and won the national championship for girls eighteen and under in 1949. At age fifteen she was the youngest to accomplish the feat up to that time. She defended her title successfully in 1950. A sportswriter called the five-foot, four-inch athlete "Little Mo" after the famous battleship USS Missouri, labeled "Big Mo." The nickname stuck. In 1951 Connolly, a Roman Catholic, graduated from Cathedral High School in San Diego. With the determination that had become her trademark, she set out to become the best female tennis player in the world.

A few months later Connolly stood at the top of the tennis universe. At the United States National Championships on the grass courts of Forest Hills, New York, she bested Doris Hart, a longtime friend, in the semifinals, then carved out a thrilling victory in the finals, 6–3, 1–6, 6–4, over Shirley Fry. At age sixteen Connolly was the youngest women's champion in the history of the U.S. Open, a record that stood until 1979, when Tracy Austin won the title.

Sportswriters exclaimed over Connolly's ability to hit deadly accurate ground strokes from the baseline. Not blessed with a powerful serve and only adequate with her volleys, Connolly used her fear of losing and her precision off the ground to thwart her opponents. In 1952 she won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open to establish herself as the best woman in the game. At Wimbledon she played through a slight shoulder injury despite the objections of her coach. In a press conference after her first-round match, she announced that Tennant was no longer her coach. The two women were never reconciled. At the end of the year Connolly began working with a new coach, Harry Hopman of Australia. To defeat her rivals, she relied less on the anger that Tennant had instilled in her and more on her natural talent for the game.

No woman had yet won the four major championships in a single year, and Connolly pursued that goal with steely determination throughout 1953. She roared through the Australian Open in January without the loss of a single set. She was almost as dominant in May at the French Open on the red clay of Roland Garros Stadium, dropping only one set en route to the championship. Then, at Wimbledon, she and Doris Hart hooked up in an epic woman's final that Connolly won, 8–6, 7–5. Several months later she completed the Grand Slam by defeating Hart again in the U.S. Open finals, 6–2, 6–4.

Connolly continued her mastery of women's tennis in the first half of 1954 at the French Open and at Wimbledon. She was behind 5–2 in the second set against Louise Brough at Wimbledon when she reeled off five straight games and a 6–2, 7–5 triumph. A long and productive career seemed to lie ahead of her at age twenty. In 1989 veteran tennis reporter Bud Collins called her "possibly the greatest of all female players."

Tragedy ended her playing career on 20 July 1954. Connolly was riding her favorite horse, Colonel Merry Boy, near her home when a passing cement truck hit the animal. Connolly was thrown to the ground, her right leg seriously injured. After a four hour surgery, she embarked on an ambitious program of rehabilitation; however, Connolly realized that she could never regain her old form and retired from competitive tennis. In June 1955 she married Norman Brinker, a former member of the U.S. Equestrian team. They had two daughters, Cindy and Brenda.

In retirement, Connolly remained active in the tennis world. She reported on matches for newspapers and coached the British Wightman Cup team when it played in the United States. Promising young women tennis players often stayed at the Brinker household in Dallas to receive instruction from her. In cooperation with her husband and a friend, Nancy Jeffett, she established the Maureen Connolly Brinker Foundation to help the careers of young tennis players. The Foundation, "one of the largest private tennis foundations of its kind in the world," attests to her long-term legacy to the sport of tennis. Connolly was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1968.

In 1966 Connolly felt the pain of the ovarian cancer that took her life. She fought the disease with her customary courage and the energy she had brought to the tennis court. She died in Dallas at age thirty-four and is buried there in Sparkman-Hillcrest Cemetery.

Although it is difficult to compare tennis players across eras, Connolly remains one of the top five athletes in her sport of all time. Only Steffi Graf in 1988 duplicated Connolly's Grand Slam, and Connolly's record of nine Grand Slam tournament victories in four years attests to her power and skill on the courts. For power, determination, and total commitment to her sport, Connolly had few equals in the world of twentieth-century women's tennis.

Connolly's letters and scrapbooks are in the possession of her family. She wrote two books, Power Tennis (1954) and Forehand Drive (1957), the second of which is more autobiographical. Cindy Brinker Simmons, one of Connolly's daughters, wrote, with Robert Darden, Little Mo ' s Legacy: A Mother ' s Lesson ' s, A Daughter ' s Story (2001), an informative and warm memoir. Doris Hart, Tennis with Hart (1955), offers the recollections of one of Connolly's opponents. Ted Tingling, Love and Faults: Personalities Who Have Changed the History of Tennis in My Lifetime (1979), offers a useful analysis of Connolly's career. Billie Jean King, writing with Cynthia Starr in We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women ' s Tennis (1988), comments perceptively on where Connolly stands in the history of women's tennis. Bud Collins, My Life with the Pros (1989), provides a more recent assessment of her standing in the sport. Allison Danzig, "The Little Girl with the Big Racquet," New York Times (23 Aug. 1953), looks at Connolly at the height of her career. An obituary is in the New York Times (22 June 1969).

Karen Gould