Margaret CourtACMBE (néeSmith; born 16 July 1942), also known as Margaret Smith Court, is an Australian former world number 1tennis player and a Christian minister. Her 24 women's singles major titles and total of 64 major titles (including 19 major women's doubles and 21 major mixed doubles titles) are the most in women's tennis history.
Court was born in Albury, New South Wales. In 1960, aged 17, she won the first of seven consecutive Australian Open singles titles. She completed the career Grand Slam in singles aged 21 with her victory at Wimbledon in 1963. Taking a brief hiatus in 1966 and 1967, Court played as an amateur until the advent of the Open Era in 1968. She completed the Grand Slam by winning all four major singles titles in 1970, part of a record six consecutive major singles victories. Court gave birth to her first child in 1972, but returned to tennis later in the year and won three major singles titles in 1973. She took similar breaks after her second and third children were born, retiring from the game in 1977.
Court is one of only three players in history (all women) to have won the "Boxed Set", consisting of every major title (the singles, doubles and mixed doubles). She is the only player in tennis history to complete a double Boxed Set. Court is also one of only six tennis players to win a double career Grand Slam in two disciplines, matching Roy Emerson, Martina Navratilova, Frank Sedgman, Doris Hart, and Serena Williams. She also won the Fed Cup with Australia on four occasions. The International Tennis Hall of Fame states "For sheer strength of performance and accomplishment there has never been a tennis player to match (her)."[1]Evonne Goolagong called her the greatest female tennis player of all time.[2][3]
Having grown up Catholic, Court became associated with Pentecostalism in the 1970s and became a Christian minister in that tradition in 1991. She later founded Margaret Court Ministries.
Early life
Court was born on 16 July 1942 in Albury, New South Wales.[4] She was the fourth and youngest child born to Maude (néeBeaufort) and Lawrence Smith.[5] Her mother experienced a difficult delivery and came close to dying in childbirth.[4]
Court was raised in Albury where her father worked as a foreman at a cheese and butter factory. The family lived in a "very modest, two bedroom, thin-walled, asbestos dwelling with a tin roof" and did not own a car during her early childhood.[4] She played a variety of sports as a child, including basketball, cricket, softball and soccer, and had a reputation as a tomboy, joining "a group of neighbourhood boys who took pleasure in climbing trees, swinging on ropes over the river, and hitching free rides on trucks as they slowed".[5] Court received her early education at St Bridget's, the local Catholic parochial school. She later attended St Augustine's, a convent school across the river from Albury in Wodonga, Victoria, as well as Albury Technical College.[5]
Court discovered tennis at the age of eight, playing on her own by hitting a tennis ball against a wall with an old fence paling. She was later given an old racquet by her mother's friend and began sneaking in to the nearby Albury and Border Tennis Club with her friends to play on the grass courts. The club's curator and professional coach Wally Rutter soon noticed her talent and invited her to his weekly coaching clinics. She later credited Rutter with encouraging her to pursue tennis professionally and developing her "killer instinct" and sense of sportsmanship.[6]
Court moved to Melbourne at the age of 16 in order to be coached full-time by Frank Sedgman, a former world No. 1. She moved in with her older sister and worked part-time as a receptionist at Sedgman's athletic centre.[5] Sedgman emphasised physical fitness, developing a training regimen that included circuit running, weight-lifting and running on sandhills. He also got her to play on clay courts for the first time, with the intent that she would one day play the French Open.[7]
Tennis career
Court in 1964
As a teenager, Court won various state titles on the Australian junior circuit before winning the 1960 Australian Championships on her first attempt at the age of 17, her first major title.[5] This would prove to be the first of seven consecutive national titles.[4] She became the first Australian woman to win a Grand Slam tournament abroad when she won the French and US Championships in 1962. The next year, she became the first Australian woman to win Wimbledon. Across singles, doubles and mixed doubles, she has won a remarkable 64 major titles.
After the tournament in Munich, Germany in August 1966, Court temporarily retired from tennis. In 1967, she married Barry Court, whose father, Charles Court, and brother, Richard Court, were premiers of Western Australia.[8] She returned to tennis in November 1967, and in 1970 won all four Grand Slam singles titles.[9][10] The next year, she lost the Wimbledon singles final to Evonne Goolagong while pregnant[11] with her first child, Daniel, who was born in March 1972. She made a comeback that year, playing in the US Open and throughout 1973. Her second child, Marika, was born in 1974. She started playing again in November of that year. After missing most of 1976 after having her third child, she returned to the tour in early 1977 but retired permanently that year when she learned she was expecting her fourth child. Her last Grand Slam tournament singles appearance was in the 1975 US Open.[12] Her last Grand Slam tournament appearance overall was in the 1976 Australian Open in women's doubles.[13]
Court is one of only three players to achieve a career "boxed set" of Grand Slam tournament titles, winning every possible major title—singles, women's doubles and mixed doubles—at all four Grand Slam events. The others are Doris Hart and Martina Navratilova. However, Court is the only person to win all 12 Grand Slam events at least twice. She also is unique in having completed "boxed sets" both before the Open Era and after it began.
Court lost a heavily publicised and U.S.–televised challenge match to a former world No. 1 male tennis player, the 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, on 13 May 1973, in Ramona, California. Court was the top-ranked women's player at the time, and the New York Times claimed[14] that she did not take the match seriously because it was a mere exhibition. Using a mixture of lobs and drop shots, Riggs beat her 6–2, 6–1. Four months later, Billie Jean King beat Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes match in the Houston Astrodome.[15]
In January 2003, Show Court One at the sports and entertainment complex Melbourne Park was renamed Margaret Court Arena.[16] Since 2012, the arena has attracted calls for its name to be changed on the basis of Court's statements against gay and lesbian rights.[17][18][19]
Playing style, Grand Slam records, and rankings
Court at the net in 1970
During the 1960s, Court was considered to have a very long reach which added a new dimension to women's volleying. With a height and reach advantage and being extremely strong, she was very formidable at the net and had an effective overhead shot.[20] She was considered unusually mobile for her size and played an all attack, serve and volley style which, when added to her big serve, dominated conservative defensive players.[21] Part of what helped her win was her commitment to fitness training. Court was dubbed "The Aussie Amazon" because she did weights, circuit training and running along sandy hillsides. This training helped keep her relatively injury-free through most of her career.[22]
Court won a record 64 Grand Slam tournament titles, including a record 24 singles titles, 19 women's doubles titles and a record 21 mixed doubles titles. The total includes two shared[23] titles at the Australian Championships/Open in 1965 and 1969.[24] The mixed doubles finals of those years were not played because of bad weather and the titles are shared by both of the finalist pairs.
Court won 62 of the 85 major finals (72.9%) she played, including 24–5 (82.8%) in singles finals, 19–14 (57.6%) in women's doubles finals and 19–4 (82.6%) in mixed doubles finals.
Court reached the final in 29, the semifinals in 36 and the quarterfinals in 43 of the 47 major singles tournaments she played. During her amateur career, from the 1962 Australian Championships to the 1966 Australian Championships, Court won 11 of the 17 major singles tournaments she entered. In a subsequent period of dominance after the start of the Open Era, she won 11 of the 16 major singles tournaments she entered between the 1969 Australian Open and the 1973 US Open. She was 146–2 (98.6%) against unseeded players in major singles tournaments.
Court is the only player to have won the Grand Slam in both singles and mixed doubles. She won the singles Grand Slam in 1970, the mixed doubles Grand Slam in 1963 with fellow Australian Ken Fletcher and the mixed doubles Grand Slam in 1965 with three different partners (Fletcher, John Newcombe and Fred Stolle).
Court won more than half of all the major tournaments held in 1963 (8 of 12), 1964 (7 of 12), 1965 (9 of 12), 1969 (8 of 12), 1970 (7 of 11) and 1973 (6 of 11).
According to the end-of-year rankings compiled by London's Daily Telegraph from 1914 to 1972, Court was ranked world No. 1 six times: 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1969 and 1970. She was also ranked No. 1 for 1973 when the official rankings were produced by the Women's Tennis Association.
Career timeline
Margaret Court playing doubles at Wimbledon alongside Evonne Goolagong
1960– Won her first singles title at the Australian Championships, but lost the junior girls final there to Lesley Turner.
1962– Won three of the four Grand Slam singles tournaments.
1963– Became the first Australian woman to win a singles title at Wimbledon. She and Ken Fletcher became the only team to win all four Grand Slam mixed-doubles titles during the same calendar year.
1964– Won three of the four Grand Slam mixed doubles tournaments. Her women's doubles title at Wimbledon completed her career "boxed set" of Grand Slam titles.
1965– Won three of the four Grand Slam singles tournaments and all four Grand Slam mixed-doubles titles, with three different partners.
1966– After losing in August to Vlasta Kodesova in the quarterfinals of a tournament in Munich, Germany, Court temporarily retired.
1968- Returned to match play in November 1967 at the New South Wales Championships. She resumed playing a full schedule in 1968, where at the beginning of the season, she lost to Billie Jean King in the finals of the Western Australia Championships and the Australian National Championships.
1969– Won three of the four Grand Slam singles and mixed doubles tournaments.
1971– Won the Australian Championship for the 10th time. After losing in mid-July to Billie Jean King in the semifinals of a tournament in West Kirby, England, Court left the tour to prepare for the March 1972 birth of her first child.
1972– Returned to the tour in late July. Lost to Billie Jean King in the semifinals of the US Open.
1973– Won three of the four Grand Slam singles and women's doubles tournaments. Became the first mother in the Open Era to win the Australian, French, and US Open championships. Lost her match with Bobby Riggs. Her women's doubles title at the French Open completed a "boxed set" of Grand Slam titles won exclusively after the start of the Open Era in 1968.
1974– Absent from the game until November because of the birth of her second child. Won the Western Australian Championships on her playing return and reached the final of the New South Wales Championships the following week.
1975– Played the final Grand Slam singles match of her career, losing to Martina Navratilova in a quarterfinal of the US Open 6–2, 6–4. At her final Australian championships (played in December 1974), she suffered only her second defeat in the singles prior to the final in all her appearances at the event, losing to Navratilova in a quarterfinal. Having won the mixed doubles at her last Wimbledon (partnering Marty Riessen), she partnered with Virginia Wade at the US Open to win her 62nd Grand Slam title and 19th Grand Slam women's doubles title, defeating King and Casals in the final. This was Court's last Grand Slam title. Her last tournament of the year was in late September in Tokyo where she won the title.
1976– Court was absent from the game until late September due to the birth of her third child. Tokyo was her first tournament after returning to the tour, where she lost the final to Betty Stöve. She finished the year by defeating Sue Barker in the singles final in Melbourne, Australia
1977– Played the final singles match of her career, defeating Greer Stevens in the third round of the Virginia Slims Championships of Detroit 5–7, 7–6, 6–3. Court defaulted the quarterfinal to Françoise Dürr upon learning that she was pregnant with her fourth child.
In 2021, she was advanced to a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), for "eminent service to tennis as an internationally acclaimed player and record-holding grand slam champion, and as a mentor of young sportspersons".[32]
Ministry
Court was raised Catholic but became involved with Pentecostalism in the mid-1970s. In 1983, she gained a theological qualification from the Rhema Bible Training Centre, and in 1991 was ordained as an independent Pentecostal minister and so speaks publicly about her faith.[33] She subsequently founded a ministry known as Margaret Court Ministries.[34] In 1995, she founded a Pentecostal church known as the Victory Life Centre in Perth.[35] She still serves as its senior pastor. Her television show, A Life of Victory, airs on Sundays on the Australian Christian Channel and used to show locally in Perth on former community television station West TV. She has generally embraced teachings associated with the Word of Faith movement[34] and teaches her view of biblical doctrine.[36]
In 1997, Court established Victory Life Community Services, later rebranded as Margaret Court Community Outreach (MCCO).[37] In 2014 it was described by The West Australian as "one of WA's biggest stand-alone food charities", supplying around 25 tonnes of food each week.[38]
Since 2010, she has been the president of Victory Life International, a network of like-minded churches, and is a long-standing patron of the Australian Family Association and Drug Free Australia.[39][40][41]
Court was criticised in May 2017 after writing a letter to The West Australian decrying Qantas, the largest airline in Australia, for being a corporate supporter of same-sex marriage and saying that she would boycott the airline. The letter, and further follow-up interviews, again led to calls from some Australians and tennis players to rename the Margaret Court Arena.[18][46] Some politicians, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, rejected calls for the change of name, saying the name celebrates Margaret Court as a tennis player.[47]
In June 2017, The Guardian's Russell Jackson wrote that Court had always held bigoted views, which he described as "stubbornly immovable", citing her support for apartheid in 1970 ("South Africans have this thing better organised than any other country, particularly America") and her criticisms of Navratilova in 1990 ("a great player but I'd like someone at the top who the younger players can look up to. It's very sad for children to be exposed to homosexuality") as examples.[48] He suggested that this and the similar incident from 2012[44] are calculated provocations, allowing Court to portray herself as the victim and use the publicity to her advantage, and show that "for better or worse, Court is now the principal architect of her own image".[48]
On 23 January 2019, Anna Wintour, in her keynote address for the Australian Open's Inspirational Series, renewed calls for the arena's renaming.[49] Court responded by saying she was "disappointed" that someone "coming from America" was "unable to tolerate views that were not in line with her own" and "[is] telling us in this nation what to do".[50] Later in the year, Court called on Tennis Australia to honour her and the 50th anniversary of her 1970 Grand Slam in the same way as it honoured Rod Laver earlier in 2019, arguing that the organisation should disregard her views on same-sex marriage, as her tennis achievements are from "a different phase of my life from where I am now and if we are not big enough as a nation and a game to face those challenges there is something wrong." Tennis Australia issued a statement that it "recognises the tennis achievements of Margaret Court, although her views do not align with our values of equality, diversity and inclusion" and said that it is "in the process of working through" how Court's milestone might be included at the 2020 Australian Open.[51] During the tournament, however, high-profile guests Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe paraded a banner calling for the Margaret Court Arena to be renamed in honour of four-time Australian Open champion Evonne Goolagong.[52][53]
In 2020, her Margaret Court Community Outreach charity was denied a Lotterywest grant for a freezer truck on the basis of her public statements on gay people. She subsequently announced she would lodge a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission of Western Australia.[54]
Note: The shared mixed doubles titles at the Australian Championships/Open in 1965 and 1969 are not always counted in Court's Grand Slam win total because the finals were never played. The Australian Open does officially count them as joint victories.[56] Otherwise, she would have 21 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles, which is reflected in the above table.
↑Macdonald, Geoff (29 August 2011). "NY Times: Aces of the Game". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 13 September 2014. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
↑"Our Story". Margaret Court Community Outreach. Archived from the original on 23 January 2021. Retrieved 23 January 2021.
↑O'Leary, Cathy (18 September 2014). "Those going hungry on rise". The West Australian. Archived from the original on 23 January 2021. Retrieved 23 January 2021.
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