Court back in focus

When it comes to Grand Slam singles titles in any era, only Margaret Court remains ahead of Serena Williams, and the gap has now been reduced to one.

Williams has 23 and is showing no signs of calling it a career. Court, a powerful and attacking Australian, won 24 from 1960 to 1973 and seemed well aware that she would probably not be the leader for long. “If she beats my record, she deserves it,” Court said. “I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

She also knows that neither Williams nor anyone else is closing in on her most remarkable record: 62 Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles and mixed. “Nobody will ever hit my 62,” she said.

That is not a bad prediction considering how dominant Court once was and how few players still compete in all three events at every Grand Slam tournament. But perhaps it is wise for Court not to give Williams any additional targets. Williams, who has a combined 39 major titles for the moment, has become a voracious history-maker at an age when Court and most of her contemporaries had already retired.

At 35, Williams romped to her seventh Australian Open singles title without losing a set. Court was a frequent observer from the front row. “The men, I enjoy,” Court said of the modern game. “The women, I don’t enjoy so much, because it’s up and down the centre the whole time. I think it’s boring.”

As for Williams in particular? ''I think her serve gets her through,” Court said. “She’s got a wonderful serve. I think if that’s not working, then she gets wobbly.”

Never afraid to rush the net during a career in which she defeated the likes of Maria Bueno and Billie Jean King, Court, now 74, remains unafraid to speak her mind. Despite the show court at the Australian Open that bears her name, she is in many respects a marginalised figure in women’s tennis. Her phenomenal on-court achievements — she completed a calendar-year Grand Slam in 1970 — and her pioneering approaches to intense physical training and to competing after motherhood are underappreciated for a cocktail of reasons.

Her career straddled the amateur and Open eras, and the emphasis today is increasingly on Open-era achievement. She was never No 1 in the WTA computer rankings, which began in November 1975, when Court was playing little and edging toward retirement.

Eleven of Court’s 24 Grand Slam singles titles came at the Australian Championships, where the fields were predominantly or exclusively Australian in her earliest years and the draws were sometimes as small as 32 players.

There is also the delicate matter of Court’s social views. A senior pastor at the Victory Life Center, a church in Perth, she is outspoken in her opposition to homosexuality, which has driven a wedge between herself and the WTA Tour. Two of its most iconic past champions, Martina Navratilova and King, are openly gay.

Well aware that her views continue to make her a champion non grata in some circles, Court said she believed she deserved a wider forum in the sport she once dominated. “I go and talk to schools, and I talk to children, but particularly the tennis circuit is too scared to have me speak because they think you are going to perhaps go and evangelise,” she said.

“I mean, I’m not that silly.”

She is correct that tennis officials are concerned about handing her the microphone for fear of it becoming a megaphone. But her playing career and her opinions will be back in the spotlight as Williams chases No 24 at the French Open, which begins in May.
Williams already holds the Open-era record for Grand Slam singles titles. Her victory in Melbourne gave her one more than Steffi Graf’s 22.

“With all the respect to Margaret Court, it’s another era,” Patrick Mouratoglou, Williams’ coach, said. “Of course the record is there, and we definitely want to beat it, but there is a professional era, and the record was Steffi Graf.”

To be fair, Court did win 11 of her major singles titles and complete her Grand Slam in the Open era, which began in 1968. But Williams was asked, after her latest major victory, whether she put a mental asterisk next to records like Court’s.

“Well, yeah, it’s definitely different now — you know, 128 in every one that I played,” Williams said, referring to draw sizes. “But at the same time, Margaret did her thing. She won here, what, nine times?”

Thirteen, a reporter answered, although the correct number was 11.

“Oh, my gosh,” Williams said. “Wow. That’s crazy. But, yeah, she definitely deserves her credit for her hard work. I do, too, and Steffi does, and Chris and Martina do. Different eras. Different types and different people. I would’ve been good if I played in that era.”

Court did not dispute that view, but pointed out that Williams would have been limited by equipment like wooden rackets. “You would not have got the power off the ground,” Court said. “Because, I mean, I did a lot of weights, and I was strong, and I hit the ball hard. But you wouldn’t have got the power.”

But Court — the same height as Williams at 5-foot-9 — was an intimidating, often unstoppable force in her day. Born Margaret Smith, she picked up the game on her own at age 8 in Albury, a city on the Murray River in New South Wales. She started by using a fence picket to hit scavenged balls against a garage.

In an autobiography published last year, Court wrote that she would later sneak onto the local courts with friends through a hole in a fence. Her prodigious talent was eventually recognised, even though she chose to play with her nondominant right hand and never switched back to her left.

She moved to Melbourne and was 17 when she won her first Australian singles title in 1960, upsetting Bueno, the elegant Brazilian and No 1 seed, in the quarterfinals. Court emerged in the golden age of Australian tennis and was mentored by champions like Frank Sedgman. Although she clashed with Australian tennis officials, she achieved her goal of becoming the first Australian woman to win Wimbledon, in 1963.

Navratilova is credited with transforming the women’s game with her intense physical training, but Court did much the same in her era, often training alongside men. She later traveled on tour with her husband, Barry Court, whom she married in 1967, and then with Danny, the first of their four children, during the 1973 season.

Court said she “won 24 out of 25 tournaments” that year, faltering only at Wimbledon. That was the same season she agreed to face 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, the self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig,” who routed her in straight sets in Ramona, California, in May in the so-called Mother’s Day Massacre.

Her loss set the stage for Riggs’ “Battle of the Sexes” match with King four months later in the Houston Astrodome. ''It was probably a mistake in my life; it looked rosy at the time,” Court said of her own match with Riggs, which she said she had lost because she failed to prepare for it seriously enough and then froze.

King, her longtime rival, did not make the same mistake, defeating Riggs in front of an estimated worldwide television audience of 90 million and becoming even more of a cultural icon.

While King remained an essential figure on the WTA Tour, which she helped found shortly before the Riggs match, Court kept her distance, returning to Australia and raising her children, farming and coping with depression.

“It was the Scriptures that changed my life around,” she said. “It was like the shipwrecked ship was put back together again, and you found that life was really worth living. I only wish I had known some of the stuff I know now about the mind when I was playing. A few finals where I was down, I wouldn’t have let go. I would have won a few more.”

Still, no one has won more, at least for a little while longer.