Wade, Virginia (1945—)

views updated

Wade, Virginia (1945—)

Wimbledon tennis champion, known for her aggressive play and ability to recover from mistakes, who brought a sense of high drama to the court and was tremendously popular with fans . Born Sarah Virginia Wade on July 10, 1945, in Bournemouth, England; daughter of an Anglican cleric.

Learned to play tennis in South Africa, where her family moved when she was a child; first qualified for Wimbledon (1962); finally won the Wimbledon singles championship (1977); by the time she retired from professional play (1987), was third in world rankings for number of titles won, including singles titles at Wimbledon and the U.S. and Australian opens; inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame (1989).

Little disturbed the quiet neighborhood of Durban, South Africa, around the Anglican Church of St. Paul's. It was, in those pre-apartheid days, solidly British, its rows of neatly kept houses and fastidiously trimmed lawns comfortably settled in suburban tranquility. There was only one slight annoyance to break the spell—the nearly constant thwack of tennis ball against racquet, followed by the inevitable plock of the ball hitting the pristine white paint of the Wade home, the two-stroke sequence monotonously repeating itself for hours on end. "Tennis was an obsession," Virginia Wade once said of her childhood passion, so much so that her father complained about the black marks spattered over the white facade of the house and forced Virginia to practice against the more secluded garage.

She had always been an energetic child, following in the footsteps of her older siblings—two brothers and a sister—who all excelled at athletic pursuits and who carried their enthusiasms with them to South Africa from Bournemouth, England, where Virginia had been born on July 10, 1945. She was barely a year old when her father, an Anglican cleric, accepted a position in a parish in Cape Town, South Africa, just after the end of World War II. Four years later, he was appointed the archdeacon of St. Paul's in Durban. "I was so energetic I don't know how Daddy kept me quiet long enough to concentrate on his sermons," Wade said. But that was before she discovered a long-forgotten tennis racquet hidden away in the junk closet she had been assigned to clean one day when she was nine years old. "I loved the quick and visible results when the ball and racquet connected," she said, "and I was tantalised by the idea that there was something very exact about it."

It was not unusual for a young white girl of comfortable means growing up in South Africa in the 1950s to take up tennis, a popular leisure time activity for the middle and upper classes and one that could be pursued year round thanks to the country's mild climate. All the Wade children played tennis at one time or another, but only Virginia became obsessed with the game because, she later claimed, "I cared more about it than the others did." Wade was soon playing in local junior tournaments and advanced to open tournament play, but presently found herself bored with the level of competition she was facing. Her frustration became apparent when what few players she could find at her level complained she was slamming the ball too often and without reason. Virginia admitted her play was becoming tinged with anger. "I was angry with myself at my mistakes," she said of a growing reputation for emotional volatility. "It was an unfortunate signature to be stuck with." Her future in tennis seemed doomed when her father announced in 1956 that the family would be moving back to England, where she knew the lack of a well-developed training system like South Africa's would mean fewer chances to find qualified teachers and more challenging opponents. But it was the elder Wade's opinion that racial divisions were worsening in South Africa to such an extent that his friendly relations with several black clerics might place his family in danger. Incredibly, he picked out a house in the one place in England where Virginia might feel most comfortable. "I had always thought Wimbledon was the name of the place where tennis was played," she once recalled, not realizing it was also a suburb of London.

Her first months in Britain were not encouraging. "Winter was hideous," Wade later remembered of the family's arrival in Southampton on a dreary February day, a stark contrast to the semitropical warmth of South Africa. "My clothes were not remotely thick enough. The dream was over." But at least there was tennis at some of the local courts, and just down the road from her new home was Wimbledon itself, where Virginia would wait in line for hours for standing-room tickets to watch all her favorite players. Then, too, there was the Queen's Club, where much to her surprise Virginia found an active junior training program under the tutelage of an Australian coach named George Worthington. By 1962, Wade had qualified for an inter-school tournament to be played at Wimbledon itself, the first time she stepped onto that hallowed ground as a player rather than as a spectator. Even better, her team won the tournament thanks to Virginia's energetic, if still unfocused, play. By the end of that year, she had been seeded No. 1 in the British Junior ranks and was being called Britain's most promising junior player.

But it was now that the temper for which she had become known in South Africa came back to haunt her. During a juniors match she played against an equally peppery opponent, the audience watched in shocked fascination as the two young women hurled insults at each other and threw racquets to the ground in alternating fits of pique. "It's a wonder we didn't blacken each other's eyes," Wade said of the match that would lead to her later characterization in the press as the "Wild Woman" of tennis. The fact that her game actually got worse when she tried to control her temper did not help matters. "Getting mad made me feel guilty, and suppressing myself scuttled my involvement in the match," she said. It would be a personality trait that would taint her entire career. Only Billie Jean King seemed to get through to Wade some years later by suggesting, "You never have time on the court to waste getting mad."

New challenges awaited when Virginia entered Sussex University, which had no strong tradition of team sports and which made it even harder for Wade to keep up her practice schedule. She spent hours on slow, stuffy trains shuttling between Sussex and London for practice at the Queen's Club and played badly when she was picked for Britain's Wightman Cup team in 1964—the first of what would be a recordbreaking 21 consecutive years of Wightman Cup play. Court wags thought she was a powerful player, hitting the ball hard and racing to make difficult returns that would elude more timid players; but, they said, she had no control over the ball. Only Worthington remained convinced that "Ginny," as she was now universally called, had the makings of a world champion. "One day she'll prove I'm right," he confided to friends. Worthington's confidence was sorely tested in the next three years, as Virginia struggled to keep to her studies and advance in the rankings at the same time, at one point taking final exams in a room hired for her next to Wimbledon. So it was with some relief that Virginia finally took her degree in mathematics in 1966, looking back on three years of Wimbledon and Wightman Cup play with little to her credit. "Foolishly, I thought Wimbledon's galvanizing effect would be all I'd ever need to win," she said of those difficult years. "Success at Wimbledon requires virtually a twelve-month preparation. Somehow I thought that providence would see that it all just happened."

She stubbornly continued to hold that view even after being freed from her studies, devoting nearly all her time to tennis, setting as her goal the U.S. Open and departing for America on her 21st birthday to begin play on the U.S. tennis circuit to qualify. Among her colleagues on the U.S. Tennis Association roster were a young Chris Evert, Evonne Goolagong and Martina Navratilova ; and signing up for the fledgling Virginia Slims circuit, she faced players like Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals , and Margaret Smith Court . There were a few victories, mostly in doubles play, but Wade returned to England at the end of the season with a lackluster singles record, no further toward her goal. There followed another round of international touring. Although her record improved only slightly, Wade felt her game was getting better. "My best tennis was better than it had been," she once recalled; but added, "My worst was still bad." The low point for her was a Caribbean tour, playing a grueling schedule in sweltering heat from Jamaica to Venezuela to Colombia and losing to a string of much lower seeded opponents. Returning

to England at the end of the tour, she played her way to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon, which she considered some consolation after her first full year of non-stop tennis. But her patchwork record was attracting attention in the press, which used words like "tempestuous," "explosive" and "glowering" to describe her.

In 1968, Wade decided to join the ranks of many of her peers and turn pro, although she had mixed feelings about the decision. "I was adamant that I shouldn't be a puppet of the professional promoter," she said. "If the money was there, that was fine. If not, I wasn't going to go out of my way to procure it." Her ambivalence became evident when she won her first Open tournament in her hometown of Bournemouth. She refused to accept the £800 in prize money, the amount, she said, being too much less than that awarded to the winner of the men's tournament. Despite the predictable press attention her announcement attracted, Wade felt that her 1968 win at Bournemouth justified another try at Wimbledon.

I always felt I could get better. That's the whole incentive.
—Virginia Wade

The accepted entry points for Wimbledon at the time were the Wightman Cup and the Davis Cup, both played on Wimbledon courts and both important tests for the bigger matches that lay ahead at the prestigious site. Wade had unsuccessfully competed on four Wightman Cup teams, but this time she rocketed to both the singles and doubles titles against the American team. Virginia faced the American Nancy Richey in the singles championships, a replay of a match between them two years before which Wade had lost in the third set. But this time, victory was hers; and this time, the press concentrated more on the game she had played than on her by now famous temper. "This was a performance as controlled, as disciplined, as intelligent as had ever been produced by this unpredictable player," one journalist wrote of the match with Richey.

Now, Wimbledon lay ahead, barely a week after the Wightman Cup victory. But as Wade began play in her first match, on courts sodden with four days of rain, her winning streak quickly dissipated, and she was easily defeated by a Swedish player she had faced with success in past years. "It was an embarrassing nightmare," Wade said later. "This was the year my target was to reach the semifinals at least, and I was beaten in the first round." She had serious doubts about pressing on with her plans to travel to Forest Hills for the U.S. Open, but the chance to leave the constant sniping and gossip about her public play and private life in England proved irresistible. Seeded sixth for the tournament, Virginia managed to win her early matches, handily defeating the formidable Rosie Casals and Judy Tegart to arrive at the semifinals. Much to the surprise of the crowd, her victories had come without the expected displays of irritation and outright bad temper. "Only once had I winced at a bad bounce," Wade later boasted, "and then thought 'Shut up and get on with it.'" She maintained her newfound concentration and cool during her semifinal play against Ann Jones , an important rival for best player in Britain; and in 43 unruffled minutes, Wade played her way to a 7–5, 6–1 win to enter finals play against Billie Jean King. It was the most important final in which she had played so far in her career. This time, it took only 42 minutes to send King down to defeat at 6–4, 6–2 and capture her first U.S. Open title. Wade was the first British woman to do so since 1930.

She returned to England as the toast of the sporting press, and the win at Forest Hills supplied her with more than just a title. The novel experience of playing an important match without losing her concentration to bad temper proved that her approach of past years—"wanting victory without the slogging," as Wade put it—had worked against her. "This is when you discover that instinct alone cannot sustain you," she said. "Improvisation isn't sufficient. You need mental technique. Being good isn't good enough. You have to know why and how." Wade worked on that technique for the next two years of nearly constant play, often without the professional guidance of the kind of coaching found in the United States. She played to the semifinals at Forest Hills in 1970, losing to Rosie Casals; became the Italian women's champion in 1971; and was confident of another victory at the U.S. Open that year when she slipped during play at a small tournament in New Jersey and badly sprained her ankle, putting her out of competition for the rest of the year. But in 1972, she fought back to capture the singles title at the Australian Open and could tell reporters: "I can honestly say that I am enjoying every moment on court."

By 1975, after winning the U.S. Open, the Australian Open, and capturing the Italian title, Wade was telling friends that she had no doubt she would win Wimbledon; and it seemed her prediction was accurate when, at the last tournament leading up to that year's Wimbledon play, she defeated both Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King to take the tournament title. At Wimbledon itself, she played superbly to the semifinals to face Australia's Evonne Goolagong in what was generally conceded to be the best match of the entire tournament due to the precise control displayed by both women. But the victory went to Goolagong, who defeated Wade by just two points. In a display of her new self-confidence, however, Virginia decided to learn from the defeat instead of giving in to despair. "I wasn't going to be defeated twice in one day," she said. "What I had to do was correct my technical weaknesses and leave the press and public to sort out their image of me in whatever way they liked."

Over the next year, she practiced relentlessly and learned, as she later explained, to recreate at will the mental focus on the court that would produce her best play, able to react to conditions fluidly. She compared it to an actor learning lines. "The first thing he has to do is get the words out of the way," she said. "On stage, his concentration is no longer on stringing them together or picking up his cues. Now he is free to create and spontaneously react to what is happening on stage. It's the creative process you take out on the court with you." Admitting for the first time that she couldn't win Wimbledon without professional guidance, she sought help from Jerry Teeguarden, who had coached Margaret Smith Court to world championship status. Teeguarden set to work on Wade's serve—called by the press "the best serve in women's tennis" but, as Teeguarden pointed out, one that took too much energy from the rest of her game.

By the time the 1977 Wimbledon matches came around, Wade felt the goal was in reach as she defeated her old opponent and good friend Rosie Casals in the quarterfinals. Even when it became apparent that she would be facing Chris Evert in the semifinals, her confidence never wavered. Evert was at the time considered the world's best tennis player and virtually unbeatable. "I knew I could beat her," Wade later wrote. "I wanted to." She felt "fully rehearsed" for the match everyone was sure Evert would win. But it was Virginia who triumphed, battling back after losing the middle of three sets to advance to the finals. She faced Betty Stove , whom Wade had often played in past years and whom she had often defeated; and her training and newfound concentration carried the day as she quickly defeated Stove 4–6, 6–3, 6–1 to capture Wimbledon at last after 17 years of trying. To add even more significance to the victory, Queen Elizabeth II presented Wade with the prized Wimbledon trophy, it being the centennial year for the tournament, as the crowd broke into a joyful rendition of "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow."

Wade's subsequent career could never surpass the personal triumph represented by her 1977 Wimbledon victory, although she returned to Wimbledon's Centre Court in the two subsequent years, during which she again faced Evert in semifinals play but this time lost to the American superstar. In succeeding years, she advanced only as far as the quarterfinals, in 1979 and in 1983. By the time of her retirement in 1987, she was 63rd in the international rankings; but she had played at Wimbledon for a record 28 years, had remained in the top-ten rankings for 13 straight years, from 1967 to 1980, and had placed second during 1968. In 1989, Wade was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

But it was Wimbledon in 1977 that would always remain the crowning achievement of her career and her voyage of self-discovery. "One has the right, which need never be surrendered, to graduate, to ascend," Virginia Wade wrote during that remarkable year. "To use every possible source of inspiration to confront the issues that separate you from what you want, is the spiritual inheritance of each of us."