Before Naomi Osaka, before Serena Williams, before Billie Jean King, there was French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen. When she died in 1938At the age of 39, she was declared “the greatest tennis player of all time” by Reuters.
She was born on May 24, 1899 in Paris, although her family moved shortly afterwards to the provincial town of Compiègne. She came from a well-to-do family—her father inherited a comprehensive horse-drawn business—and she loved tennis. Her father bought her her first racket from a toy store when she was 11, and she played on a makeshift court in their backyard. The children of the house staff were called upon to compete against Susan when no one else was available. She was so obviously talented that her father bought her a new professional racket within the month.
People often claim that her father, Charles, deliberately tried to raise a prodigy on the court, a role that might bring to mind the Williams sisters today. People claimed that Charles Lenglen developed extensive training programs, locating the court in specific squares and demanding that Suzanne serve the ball to the section he named; She was deprived of sweets if she did not reach the squares. This was a story he objected to. Charles agreed that he gave her advice regarding her playing and would watch opponents train and report back on their playing style. But he also claimed that “women, not athleticism,” were his concern as a father.
He met his competitive match very early in Susan’s life. The newspapers noted that although the whole family enjoyed tennis, “Charles Lenglen is a very bad player. He has long since stopped facing his daughter on the courts, after being beaten mercilessly in a match.” [Suzanne’s] Hands.” At the time of this cruel defeat, Susan had three months of experience.
Susan continued to defeat others with the same ease as she did her father. When she was just 15 years old in 1914, she became the youngest Grand Slam champion, winning the World Hard Court Singles Championship (precursor to the French Open) in Paris. During the war years, she was an inspiration to the French people, playing on the Riviera in matches for the French Red Cross.
After the war ended, in 1919, she won her first women’s singles title at Wimbledon, defeating England’s Dorothea Lambert Chambers. The British press claimed that the people were “for a moment filled with grief at the fall of their hero, but there followed a full and generous recognition of the boldness and grace of this young foreign girl… Suzanne Lenglen’s popularity was unprecedented and universal.”
Part of this victory may have been her desire to avoid the dress restrictions that female players had to deal with. In 1919, for example, the topic of conversation was that she chose not to wear a corset or a long skirt. Doing so allowed her to jump gracefully to reach the ball in a way that clothing-impaired players cannot. Designer Teddy Tinling, who designed Susan’s clothes, recalls, “Before she wore tennis, it was starched cottons, trousers, and misshapen corsets. She wore pleated silk dresses, which astonished the whole world. She always understood the power of sex appeal—men had orgasms by the hour, women spit blood.”
Another feature was her bandeau headgear. Seeing her in court was a vision of what a new, more liberated physical woman might look like.
Her star only continued to rise. In 1920, she won gold medals in singles and mixed doubles at the Olympic Games in Antwerp. Between matches, she was seen “taking swigs of brandy from a flask.” Her success here and at other tournaments has inspired many young women. It seems noteworthy that she made playing tennis look, well, cool. amazing, Or at least like something a fun, energetic person would do. the Daily Telegraph She noted that “Suzanne Lenglen’s success and the popularity she enjoyed had an extraordinary development in women’s tennis in Europe.” Other players from this period, such as Kitty McCain, would try to follow Lenglen’s example.
while telegraph Claiming in 1928 that England loved her more than anyone else (because “England is the nation most devoted to sport”), in the French press, she was called “La Divine”.
In 1921, when she was only 22 years old, she came to America. the New York Herald She declared it to be “Comet of France – a female comet, and therefore the most dazzling of all comets.” To the surprise of the reporter, and probably anyone who has seen any tennis movie where players improve their game long into the night, she mentioned that she had not been practicing much. She claimed that she played for 30 minutes every day. She devoted 10 minutes a day to calisthenics, usually jumping rope. She also made sure to stretch for five minutes before going out to the field.
This is questionable. The reporter who asked earlier believed that “the competition for world supremacy can only be won after serving a long sentence of hard labor,” which certainly seems to be the modern sentiment. For example, Venus Williams spends about three hours a day on the court followed by two hours in the gym. Perhaps Linglin was lying so that her opponents were more inclined to underestimate her.
Whether that was lying or if she really had a relatively casual approach to practice, this strategy worked. She was No. 1 player in the world from 1921 to 1926. She won six Wimbledon titles, five in a row from 1919 to 1923. Her most notable defeat came in 1921, shortly after the infamous match. She was so ill at the US National Championships in Forest Hills, New York, that she lost the first set to Moola Mallory. When she had a coughing fit, she started crying, then withdrew. People might claim that she did it because she didn’t think she could win the match. The phrase “cough and quit Lenglen” was often ridiculed. This would be the only time she lost a singles match after World War I. She competed against Mallory again in 1922 at Wimbledon, defeating her (6-2, 6-0) in the shortest final ever, just 26 minutes. “I could have said something to her, but instead I decided to cough a little,” she said after the match.
Although this was a good joke, illness was an issue throughout Lenglen’s career. Often, tragically, these diseases would not have struck her as severely had she lived a hundred years later. She developed jaundice in 1924. She consequently withdrew from Wimbledon and was unable to attend the Olympic Games.
1926 would be her last year playing amateur tennis, and by then it was clear that her star was at least somewhat fading. She played in the “Match of the Century” against Helen Wills. She won, but barely. Then, at Wimbledon, she tried to reschedule the match, which meant that the Queen of England, who was excited to see her play, was kept waiting for an hour and a half. When the match officials confronted Lenglin about this, she said brusquely that she would not play at all.
After that year, she signed a $50,000 contract to play professionally for four months in the United States. Even then, she claimed to have never earned more than $5,000 in her life. People complained that she had given up on the amateur world, but she accurately pointed out that even being the best amateur athlete in the world could make someone destitute unless they were from a wealthy family.
In 1936, she founded a tennis school where she coached. As always, she seemed to adopt a somewhat nonchalant tone, declaring: “I am not aiming to create champions. Rather, I am primarily trying to see thousands of children entertaining themselves, and at the same time getting a taste for sports and learning self-discipline.” She was appointed inaugural director of the French National School of Tennis in Paris in 1938.
But her health, which had always been difficult, was severely deteriorating. In mid-June 1938, Lenglen became extremely weak. She died less than a month later, in what was said to be a reaction to anemia resulting from a neglected case of measles. Today, it is largely understood that she had leukemia. Until the day she died, she was following reports of the play at Wimbledon. Upon her death, the president of the French Tennis Federation declared that “Mademoiselle Lenglen was the greatest player who ever lived.”
She won eight Grand Slam titles in singles and 21 titles in total, including doubles play. She was posthumously inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The second court at the French Open at Roland Garros is named after her. Whether she is the greatest female player of all time may not be true anymore. But between the brandy, half an hour of rehearsal and the costumes, she was definitely one of the most stylish.
