JUST FOR THE LOVE OF IT
Fifty years ago a young Evonne Goolagong first dazzled the courts of Wimbledon
EVONNE Goolagong was in a “trance”. She had whipped backhands to beat Billie Jean King and go into the 1971 Wimbledon final. Yet King didn’t think Goolagong could win; she was too young, too loose. Nor did Goolagong.
The “part Aboriginal”, as the press called her at the time, was to play Margaret Court, the older Australian champion in the final.
The pair was a study in contrasts. Court zipped with energy, good and bad, on court. The master and mother would retire at the end of 1971 with a record 24 singles grand slam wins. An opponent, Virginia Wade, called Court a “rangy thoroughbred with the long, slim limbs and speed of foot … and the nervy, finely balanced temperament”.
Court nursed crises of on-court confidence. Slightly aloof, she shunned the crowd and social fripperies of Wimbledon.
Court destroyed opponents. Goolagong, the newbie, dazzled them.
Since the age of 11, Goolagong had prized a photo of her staring in shy awe at an adult Court.
Goolagong was now 19, at her first Wimbledon, and relishing the ivied bubble she had imagined as a child. Hers had been an unusual journey from a small NSW wheat town, Barellan, and perhaps the most humble of any Wimbledon star.
This first chapter of her Wimbledon story was 50 years ago next week. It would be fashioned as a defining moment in Indigenous relations, a pivot for political change. But her performance stands alone for other reasons. No player since has matched Goolagong’s lightness of being.
As John Newcombe, who won the men’s Wimbledon title that same year, said: “She just kept the same attitude. She played a match and said, ‘Oh, goodness me, I won’. Or, ‘Goodness me, I lost’. That was a little baffling for her opponents.”
Goolagong herself describes a kind of detached content. “I didn’t want tennis to be everything,” she said a few years ago. “I just enjoyed life. I liked to smell the flowers on the way.”
Armed with an unexpected array of lobs and drop shots, she looked so relaxed. She would sometimes lose track of the score. That she occasionally went “walkabout” added to her charm. Unforced errors would accumulate. Yet there were no shows of frustration or anger. She beguiled opponents because she seemed so at ease with herself.
Martina Navratilova would describe her “saunter and volley” game. Chris Evert alluded to Goolagong’s innocent care that transcended oncourt battle. “You couldn’t hate her,” Evert said.
Was Goolagong too gentle to be a No.1? “Nothing really strikes me as being important before I go on court,” Goolagong said after beating King. “Then suddenly I feel I can do it.”
A few weeks earlier, she had won the French Open and her first grand slam, then predicted she would lose in London. “I don’t think I can win
Wimbledon just yet,” she said. “I’ve got to get more experience on grass.”
In winning her Wimbledon semifinal, she ended King’s run of five successive Wimbledon finals.
Court and Goolagong, who were doubles partners, had played each other before. Goolagong had beaten Court for the first time in the Victorian singles title in February 1971, a year after Court had won the grand slam of titles. Court played Goolagong into traps during the match; Goolagong responded with down-the line and crosscourt winners.
Their relationship, then and now, was tangled. Goolagong had stayed at Court’s house. They were doubles partners. Yet Goolagong found Court to be “almost surly” at the net after her Victorian win.
Goolagong later credited Court because she “pushed and pushed and pushed me until I finally did beat her”. But she was disappointed by Court’s take on this win, which Goolagong found to be dismissive. “Hell hath no fury like Margaret Court scorned,” she later said in her autobiography.
Court won Wimbledon the previous year. She was a hot favourite.
Yet she was detecting a pattern she would come to resent. Court was a sporting role model for players in the generations ahead. She didn’t smile much, she didn’t joke, and she did not inspire wider warmth.
When she played Goolagong, she had found, the fans wanted Goolagong to prevail. “Every time I played against (her), the crowd took her to their heart and made me the villain,” she later said. “I wondered what I’d done to be so unpopular.”
In the dressing room before the biggest game of her life, she appeared to be the only person not nervous.
“Even the people looking after them (the players) were all on edge,” said Mrs Twynam, the dressing-room attendant. “(Evonne) didn’t know what was happening. She was so naive. She was so fresh and innocent.”
Ten minutes before the game, Mrs Twynam put elastic into Goolagong’s knickers. The player had not noticed that they were about to fall down.
Goolagong instantly signalled her joyous intent. She broke Court in the first game of the match with a crosscourt forehand. Centre court fans swelled in appreciation.
A backhand volley won the second game. As a reporter wrote, Goolagong “bounced happily around the court to beat Margaret to the decisive volley”.
Within minutes, Goolagong had a 4-0 first-set lead over Court. Then she appeared to shut down, as she sometimes did. Errors grew on her preferred backhand. The score narrowed to 4-3 and she faced two break points.
So she pulled off a winning volley, then a drop shot, then a lob. She soon won the set 6-4.
Court’s tendency for untimely nerves struck in the second set. But Court had overcome worse positions: earlier that year, at the Australian Open, she was down 2-5 to Goolagong, who suffered a cramp, panicked, and lost the next five games and the match. At 0-5, Court rallied to save three match points. On the fourth match point, she double-faulted. The match had lasted 70 minutes. She explained her strategy for winning – there wasn’t one. “I didn’t have a plan for beating Margaret – or for any of my other matches,” she said. “I just go on the court and play.”
Goolagong has since offered some explanation for her blithe approach so at odds with every other successful player.
One of eight children of a shearer, Kenny, the traumas of her childhood – the need to hide from “the welfare man” under the bed – would not emerge until decades later.
“I think that’s why losing a match never really bothered me,” she said earlier this month. “I just felt lucky to be there in the first place to enjoy this wonderful game, and it was my own little world … I felt this is my world. No one can touch me here.”
The tale of Goolagong’s discovery, by coach Vic Edwards, initially read like a quaint study in the student and the scholar. Goolagong had been noticed by a neighbour, Bill Kurtzman, staring at kids playing tennis through the fence of the Barellan courts. There wasn’t much money, or enough chairs for all the kids to sit at dinner. She yabbied and fished (a lifetime passion) in the Murrumbidgee River.
Edwards plucked her from Nowheresville. He persuaded her parents to let the then nine-year-old to move to Sydney. Barellan had a collection for her, and paid for her clothes and suitcase.
Edwards and his wife enrolled Goolagong in school and formally adopted her at 14. The regimented intensity of the relationship, as well as Goolagong’s vivid belief that Edwards had made several clumsy passes at his protégé, had soured the bond by the mid-1970s. By then, Goolagong had shrugged off her adolescent stylings and gotten married. She lost Wimbledon finals after 1971, and freely admitted that she didn’t “want to win as badly” as she once had.
When she won Wimbledon again in 1980, as a mother, she had been treated as a former star a half rung below the top three or four players.
Other players won more titles, but Goolagong was the most memorable winner of a generation.
Newcombe would watch Goolagong’s matches for pleasure, especially encounters against Evert, which were “like watching chess”.
“I’d think, ‘Oh she’s in trouble here, I wonder what she is going to do’ and she’d come up with something that I hadn’t seen myself to win the point,” he said.
King felt Goolagong was sometimes mentally lazy. Other players argued that she lacked a killer instinct, which conflicts with the fact of her seven grand slam wins. Wade, her wonderfully articulate opponent, extolled Goolagong’s differences.
“To compete at the highest level you have to have a combination of skills that don’t necessarily go together – aggression but control, power but delicacy, mental concentration that isn’t always possible in the midst of free flowing movement,” she said.
“But Evonne had the extra, the flair that made everything she did seem natural … Evonne’s strokes seemed to shoot out of her arm, almost as if she couldn’t help herself.”
When she was awarded Australian of the Year for 1971, Goolagong said: “It’s something I’ve always wanted – to be known as an Australian. When I was younger I was always referred to as an Aboriginal tennis player.”
In more recent years, she has explored her Wiradjuri heritage. But Goolagong has eschewed the political combat of race relations. Now 69, she has not obliged the usual hoopla that might be expected on the anniversary of such a sporting milestone.
No fuss. It’s one of Goolagong’s greatest strengths. As Wade said, Goolagong didn’t play for money, power or stardom, but “just for love”. She had the purest soul in tennis, “light and warm and imbued with luminosity of spirit”.