Connolly, Maureen (1934–1969)

views updated

Connolly, Maureen (1934–1969)

Teenage tennis sensation and first woman to complete the Grand Slam, winning all four major tournaments in the same calendar year, whose life was cut short by cancer. Name variations: (nickname) "Little Mo"; Maureen Connolly Brinker. Born Maureen Catherine Connolly on September 17, 1934, in San Diego, California; died on June 21, 1969, in Dallas, Texas; daughter of Martin and Jessamine Connolly; married Norman Brinker, in 1955; children: Brenda Lee Brinker (b. 1957); Cynthia Anne Brinker (b. 1960).

Named female athlete of the year three times by the Associated Press; won the Wightman Cup nine times; was Wimbledon singles champion (1952, 1953, 1954); won the singles championship in U.S. Open (1951, 1952, 1953); won the singles title in the French Open (1953, 1954); won the singles title in the Australian Open (1953); with N. Hopman, won the French Open women's doubles (1954); with Julia Sampson, won the Australian women's doubles (1953); youngest national junior champion, youngest male or female to make the national top ten professional rankings, first and youngest to complete the Grand Slam at the age of 18 (1953).

"Tennis has been the most important thing in my life ever since I first picked up a racquet at the tender age of ten," wrote Maureen Connolly, but her real love was horseback riding. She played tennis partially because her mother couldn't afford riding lessons or the horse Maureen dreamed about. At the beginning of her career, when her mother attempted to finance a small ranch, Connolly offered to trade her increasing fame on the courts for the opportunity to ride and be around horses. Luckily for tennis fans, the ranch deal fell through. Instead of moving to the country, Maureen Connolly competed at country clubs, rising as high as it is possible to rise, faster than any woman had ever risen in women's tennis. Ironically, the sensational tennis career, once nearly traded for the chance to be around horses, ended because of a tragic horseback riding accident.

Nobody will ever know how many more tennis championships Connolly would have won or whether the teenage superstar would have matured into the greatest player in the history of the sport, just as nobody can guess what she might have accomplished on the equestrian circuit if she had started riding horses at a young age. What the record books show is that a teenager, playing professionally for three years, accomplished enough to rank as one of the all-time best in women's tennis.

Born and raised in San Diego, California, Maureen Connolly lived with her mother Jessamine and an aunt. Her father, a sailor, left the family when Maureen was three or four. Her mother, who had once dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, worked as a piano player and church organist. An active, brown-eyed, light-haired, only child, Maureen attended ballet class, took singing lessons, learned to draw, and liked to write. Her writing eventually helped her meet her future husband, and, though the ballet training never led to the stage, Connolly later displayed great footwork and graceful movements in another arena.

On her way to play tag with friends among the sand piles at San Diego's University Heights playground, Connolly stopped to watch the tennis players on the three municipal courts. Befriended by Wilbur Folsom, the park's instructor, she started working for pocket money as a ball girl, picking up tennis balls during Folsom's lessons. Eventually, Folsom invited her to join in. Connolly, who quickly learned the basic strokes, began helping the instructor by returning balls to his pupils.

Some reports claim that a leg prosthesis limited Folsom's mobility, forcing him to learn terrific ground strokes and passing shots, which in turn became his legacy to Connolly. Maureen wrote that she was naturally left-handed but switched because Folsom convinced her that there had never been a left-handed tennis champion. Playing right handed, she quickly absorbed Folsom's instructions and thrived on his encouragement. As a ten-year old, she developed solid ground strokes and learned how to scramble from side to side on the court.

Armed with a $1.50 racquet purchased by her mother, ten-year-old Connolly entered her first tournament, the La Jolla playground's 13- and-under division. Reaching the finals, she hung tough in the first set before being decisively beaten by Anne Bissell in the second set to lose the match, 8–6, 6–2. Connolly never forgot the name of her opponent, or the thrills and the jangled nerves she experienced during her first competition. Disappointed by defeat, she channeled her frustration into desire. Aspiring to be a champion, convinced that practice and determination were the routes to attaining her goals, she dedicated herself to long, regular workouts.

Connolly began to win every tournament she entered, even though she was almost always the youngest competitor in her age group. Her enormous talent was soon noticed, and she received encouragement. When the Balboa Tennis Club presented 11-year-old Connolly with a complimentary membership in their junior development program, she continued to improve, playing against both women and men in the program, practicing with and getting advice from older club members.

In 1947, while playing in the Southern California Invitational Tennis Championship tournament, the 12-year-old met the controversial coach Eleanor "Teach" Tennant at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. Though admittedly nervous during the tryout, Connolly impressed the coach and began a relationship that lasted six years. Tennant, who worked with tennis greats Bobby Riggs, Alice Marble and Pauline Betz , had an enormous influence on every aspect of Connolly's tennis game and considered her the best player she'd ever drilled. She concentrated on Connolly's ground strokes, taught her young student game strategy, and challenged her to concentrate on footwork. Tennant also put Connolly through strength exercise drills but avoided developing a spectacular serve because her student was still growing.

Connolly quickly became more than a curiosity. Maintaining average grades in high school, she began a serious tournament career in 1949. She collected 50 junior trophies, traveling to dozens of tournaments. At 14, she was the youngest player to win the national girls' championship. At 15, she ranked tenth among U.S. women's players, making her the youngest woman to ever break the women's top-ten rankings. "She was way ahead of her time, she had a cockiness, or overbearing, that always gave you the feeling that she was in charge and you were just the onlooker," said tennis legend Jack Kramer, surprised by the power of her game while facing her in a social game of doubles. Under Tennant's tutelage, Connolly played a base-line game based on superb ground strokes and her ability to cover the entire court. She had strong passing shots. Her devastating lobs and drop shots made up for her limitations at the net. Ultimately her biggest weapon was her willpower and her ability to concentrate.

Tennant didn't limit herself to the physical side of Connolly's game. Perhaps her strongest, though highly questionable influence, involved her psychological approach. Coach Tennant convinced Connolly that her game required she be a little nervous before a match. Connolly wrote that Tennant started "keying me up" before big matches. She wanted Maureen protected from distractions, cocooned in a private exclusion zone. As Connolly matured and her confidence grew, Tennant became convinced that she was becoming more social, consequently less competitive and less ruthless against her competition, particularly when it came to Doris Hart , one of the highest-ranked players in the country.

Tennant, Eleanor (fl. 1920–1940)

American tennis coach. Name variations: Teach Tennant.

Often called "Hollywood's best-known coach," Eleanor Tennant ranked third among American women tennis players in 1920, before becoming a highly regarded professional tennis coach. Her pupils included champions Maureen Connolly, Alice Marble, Pauline Betz , and Bobby Riggs, as well as such non-champions as Clark Gable and Carole Lombard . Tennant was innovative and tough, pushing Marble to practice five sets a day, rather than the usual three, because she felt that five sets in practice equaled three in a match. When Marble came down with what was thought to be tuberculosis, Tennant put her in a sanatorium for five months and worked overtime to pay the bills. When her winning protege Maureen Connolly called a press conference and publicly fired Tennant, it is said that Tennant never fully recovered from the shock.

As a child, Connolly idolized Hart, who was ten years her senior. Eventually, Hart took the newcomer under her wing, and Connolly took great pride in their friendship. Convinced Connolly would not have the heart to beat someone she revered, Tennant duped Connolly into thinking

that Hart perceived her to be a spoiled brat. Connolly was devastated. "No idol fell faster or with a more shattering crash than Doris Hart," she wrote. "I was shocked, stunned, then I saw blinding red. This was no passing dislike, but a virulent, powerful and consuming hate…. I believed I could not win without hate, and win I must because I was afraid to lose. So, tragically, this hate, this fear became the fuel of my obsession to win." Hart and Connolly did not communicate for two years. Programmed to win and thoroughly practiced, Connolly won and won.

By the time she turned 16 and graduated from Cathedral Catholic High School, Maureen Connolly had become good enough not only to compete at the professional level but to dominate international competition. In September 1951, she won the U.S. title at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, her first major championship, and ruled the women's tennis tour for three tumultuous years. She never lost a singles match in major competitions.

There is nothing like competition. It teaches you early in life to win and lose, and, when you lose, to put your chin out instead of dropping it.
—Maureen Connolly

Allison Danzig , a tennis reporter for The New York Times, said of the 5′5″, 130-pound teenager: "Maureen, with her perfect timing, fluency, balance and confidence, has developed the most overpowering stroke of its kind the game has known." The world wasn't quite ready for Connolly's meteoric rise. The public respected her talent and liked her color and panache, but her youth made her somewhat a freak of nature. Connolly's three main American opponents were roughly ten years her senior. The image of a bubbling teenager off the court, and a cold, powerful, emotionless assassin on the courts, didn't mesh. The teenage tennis star sported a nickname more suitable for a linebacker or home-run hitter: "Little Mo," stemmed from "Big Mo," short for the U.S.S. Missouri battleship based in San Diego.

Teenage tennis stars were not the norm in Connolly's time. In the early 1950s, women's sports rarely received attention, even the major men's events were not yet televised. Connolly paved the way and left headlines in her wake. The prodigy's powerful game intrigued the international press. However, the confidence, concentration and willpower that made her a champion, also made her a media target. Her unsmiling, unrelenting and seemingly unforgiving court demeanor resulted in her being depicted by cartoonists as a grim-faced automaton.

Coach Tennant's greatest student also showed a soft, but no less confident, side. Embroidered kittens and puppies or butterfly wings adorned her knee-length outfits. After Connolly helped the U.S. to victory in her first Wightman Cup competition, she brazenly informed Ted Tinling, the famed clothing designer for women's tennis stars, that he should begin making outfits for her on the tour. Tinling recalled, "She just marched in and said: 'I like your clothes; I'm going to wear them.'"

Connolly wasn't in it for the money—the women's tour paid little in the early '50s—but privately she craved popularity. Her first great international challenge, Wimbledon, was also her first major welcome in the public arena. The British press surrounded Connolly, and she did not disappoint. Expecting a shy teenager, they found Little Mo willing to answer questions and pose for all picture requests. But Connolly raised eyebrows when she announced plans to go straight from the airport to watch a boxing match. "I don't believe in strict training," she declared. "Bed by eleven o'clock is early enough and an occasional night out until one in the morning is all right too."

Then, Connolly startled the press by publicly firing Coach Tennant after an argument about how to treat a nagging shoulder injury. Tennant had suggested she withdraw from Wimbledon and rest the shoulder in order to prolong her career; Connolly adamantly refused. The press wondered whether she was acting hastily and precociously, but in hindsight perhaps Connolly somehow sensed her limited time. (Connolly, who later learned of Tennant's fabrication regarding Doris Hart, apologized to Hart, putting their friendship back on track.)

Without her coach and with her liberal training habits, the cocky American nearly needed an early return ticket from her first visit to Wimbledon. In a fourth-round match against British favorite Susan Partridge , down 4–5 in the third set, trailing 15–30, and serving her second serve, Connolly was one point away from match point and defeat. She won the next point. "At 30-all," she wrote, "suddenly piercing the tense silence, a young voice rang out clear and bold: 'Give 'em hell, Mo!' … I stood stunned, paused, looked and saw a U.S. Air Force boy. His face was a flash of youth, shining, glowing." The voice from home helped Connolly turn the tide. The final score read 6–3, 5–7, 7–5, and she went on to the semifinals where she bested Shirley Fry . By defeating Louise Brough in the finals, Connolly became the youngest Wimbledon champion in more than 60 years.

During a civic ceremony celebrating her return, the San Diego Jaycees presented Connolly with Colonel Merryboy, a Tennessee Walker horse. "I thought it was a contentious, ill-tempered beast myself, and so did a lot of others," said Ted Tinling. "But Mo loved that horse, and no one could tell her anything about it." Now ranked number one, Connolly began to collect her trophies. Her game improved under the coaching of tennis greats Harry ("Hop") Hopman, an Australian Davis Cup champion, and Lester Stoefen, a former men's doubles world champion. She considered Hop and his wife Nell , who traveled with her as a business manager and chaperon, her two closest friends on the tour. She credited Stoefen with improving her serve.

Connolly worked hard to improve her game and to maintain her mental sharpness. She practiced three hours a day, five days a week. She dedicated herself to physical conditioning but also recommended an easy day "off" every so often, concentrating on the ball and on having fun, instead of the score, so as not to become "overplayed." Her age, her success, and her unorthodox habits—she often practiced only with men—alienated some of the American women on the tour. At times, she also distanced herself from members of the press, earning a reputation as a snob. Frustrated by bad press, at one point she wrote an editorial headlined: "I Am No Swell Head."

By the summer of 1953, top seeded at Wimbledon, Connolly lost only eight games in five matches on her way to the finals. At Centre Court, she defeated American Doris Hart 8–6, 7–5, in a match still regarded to be one of the greatest women's finals ever played. On September 7, 1953, she again defeated Hart to win the U.S. Championship at Forest Hills, making her, at age 18, the youngest player, and the first player to complete the Grand Slam of all four major tennis titles in a calendar year: a feat matched only by Margaret Court (1970) and Steffi Graf (1988). The only humiliating loss in Connolly's Grand Slam year was a 6–0, 6–0 beating from Hart and Fry, shared with partner Julie Sampson in the women's doubles final.

After the Grand Slam victory, still only 19, Connolly won a third successive Wimbledon crown. She loved everything about Centre Court at Wimbledon and only lost five sets on the way to winning 18 consecutive matches at the All-English club. "Here was the realm of my hopes, my fears, my dreams," she wrote, "and, as long as I live, I shall be there in spirit, savoring the glory, tasting the heartbreak." But her straight-set demolition of Louise Brough at Wimbledon that summer of 1954 would be her last public appearance on a tennis court.

Back in San Diego, while she was riding Colonel Merryboy alongside another equestrian, a speeding cement truck swerved to avoid hitting them. Both the horses and the other rider were unharmed, but the cement chute swung wide of the truck and cut into Connolly's right leg just above the ankle, digging into the bone. While waiting for an ambulance, a nurse happened by and kept Connolly from using her blouse as a tourniquet, a move that probably saved the leg.

The wound eventually healed but arterial damage lessened the flow of blood to her lower leg, and Connolly's quickness never returned. Rehabilitation programs for the leg, even ballet classes, failed. With her movement-based game severely restricted, Connolly attempted several comebacks but never again played professional tennis. She announced her retirement in February 1955.

For a while, she lingered in the spotlight. In a pioneering move, unheard of for a female athlete in the 1950s, she joined Jack Kramer as a representative for the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. She also received a payment of $110,734 from the truck driver's insurance company. Tennis experts conjecture that Connolly would have dominated the tennis circuit for years. None of the three American women—Doris Hart, Louis Brough, and Shirley Fry—who ruled the tour for the two years following Connolly's retirement had ever been able to handle Connolly.

For Connolly, the year 1955 had its consolation. Beginning in 1951, to help earn spending money, she had filed a series of "Letters from Little Mo," for publication in the San Diego Union, during her tennis travels. Then, her aunt suggested she write a story about the 1952 Olympic equestrian team. Always eager to be near horses, Connolly arranged to interview Norman Brinker, an Olympic equestrian team member and San Diego entrepreneur, at the stable where he kept his horses. Finding Brinker appealing, Connolly "kind of dragged" out the interview. The press followed the romance, and the stories added to her public appeal. When Connolly asked Ted Tinling to design a wedding dress for her marriage, Trans World Airlines scored free publicity by flying the gown from England in a package marked "special cargo," placed across three first-class seats.

Maureen Connolly and Norman Brinker married in 1955 and settled in San Diego. Two years later, in 1957, they had their first child, a daughter named Brenda Lee Brinker . Cynthia Anne Brinker , a second daughter, completed the family in 1960. In the early 1960s, the Brinkers moved to Dallas where Norman directed the Steak 'N Ale restaurant chain and owned Brink's Coffee Shop. The family lived in a house on three acres outside Dallas, with a swimming pool, pond, and stable, and a barn large enough to shelter seven polo ponies. Connolly lived a private, though active life. She occasionally assisted her husband, finding decorations for the coffee shop. She worked as a columnist and feature writer, studied history at Southern Methodist University, and devoted time to the Texas Junior Wightman Cup team. Friends and acquaintances knew her to be a warm and generous, far from the grim competitor portrayed by the media.

But in 1965, at age 31, Connolly experienced another abrupt turn. Doctors discovered a malignancy in her stomach. She battled disease with the same determination she displayed on the court, and the struggle lasted nearly as long as her professional career. Over a three-year period, Connolly endured three major stomach operations. "My sister and I never knew she was dying," said Cindy Brinker, Connolly's youngest daughter who was only six at the time of her mother's diagnosis. "Being the champion she was, she thought she could beat it." Cindy remembers that on the day of her death, Maureen Connolly was practicing an acceptance speech for one more award that she was scheduled to give later that summer. She died on June 21, 1969, at the age of 34.

A few months earlier, in December of 1968, the Maureen Connolly Brinker Tennis Foundation had been co-founded by Mo and Nancy Jeffett , with Norman Brinker, Jeffett, and Robert C. Taylor as trustees. The foundation, incorporating a number of tennis activities that had been started by Connolly and her associates in the 1960s, officially launched a myriad of programs, all created to promote women's tennis. With the backing of a large endowment via fund-raising by the Virginia Slims of Dallas, the non-profit foundation has assisted hundreds of players around the world.