Tennis: The Homey Type

The trouble with being a girl athlete is that people often don’t really think of her as a girl. Australia’s Margaret Smith, however, never encounters that difficulty. She could trounce most of the world’s male tennis players, but to anybody’s eye she is vividly and unmistakably a girl.

Pretty and auburn-haired, Margaret Smith, 21, is the best woman tennis player in the world. She was the best girl tennis player in Albury, New South Wales (pop. 15,000), when she was only ten, and the “keeper” of the local public court would let her play only against boys. She liked to station herself at the net and casually flick the boys’ best shots right back into their faces. “That’s how I got to be a good volleyer,” she says.

By the time she was 15, Margaret had already won 60 tennis trophies. One year later, Frank Sedgman, perhaps the best tennis player Australia has ever produced, undertook to coach her through the hard-to-cross gap that separates excellence from greatness. Under Sedgman’s coaching, she ran, lifted weights, avoided boy friends. “They don’t mix with tennis,” she explains. In 1960, at 17, she upset Brazil’s Maria Bueno in the finals, became the youngest woman ever to win the Australian championship.

Margaret has been beaten since—but only by herself. “Nerves,” the experts called it when she lost to the U.S.’s Billie Jean Moffit at Wimbledon last year, after winning the Australian, French and Italian titles and going undefeated for ten months. Losing at Wimbledon, Margaret says, was “the biggest disappointment of my life. I let a lot of people down.” She made up for that defeat by besting Billie Jean in straight sets in this year’s Wimbledon final, running out the last game in typical slash-and-smash Smith fashion: two booming sideline forehands, a perfectly placed passing shot in the corner, and a lunging, lashing volley that kicked up a puff of chalk as it kissed the base line and bounded out of reach.

Her rivals backhandedly insist that Margaret Smith is “as strong as the average man.” At hearing that Margaret shudders slightly, smiles sweetly, and says: “I’m really a homey type.” Last week she certainly seemed in a hurry to get home. At South Orange, N.J., in the finals of the Eastern Grass Court championships, she needed only 24 minutes to wallop the U.S.’s No. 1-ranked Darlene Hard, 6-1, 6-1.