When Playing Wimbledon Was No Big Deal
May 30, 2011
ALEX A. writes from England:
John Lavery’s evocative painting of a woman playing tennis shows us a serene world that has utterly vanished. Apart from the graceful woman at the centre of the picture, notice also the nonchalant posture of the gentleman watching the game. Sport was just a way of relaxing in those times – very far from the modern meretricious scrabble for adulation etc.
My favourite Victorian tennis anecdote – in fact my only anecdote about the game back then – concerns Charlotte “Lottie” Dod who won the Ladies’ Singles Championship five times in the 1880s.
She won her first championship at the age of 15. After the match she arrived home with her winner’s medal. Her brother William, who happened to be in the garden, asked where she’d been. Lottie replied that she’d been “up to Wimbledon” where she’d won the ladies’ tennis championship. “Oh really,” said William, and without pausing carried on weeding the garden.
— Comments —
Hurricane Betsy writes:
William Dod sounds as if he has a bee in his bonnet of some sort in his careless, uninterested response to his sister Charlotte’s announceing that she won the Ladies’ Tennis Championship.
Wimbledon may be a bizarre, lurid circus today, but even back in Victorian times, it was an accomplishment that merited attention, certainly from family members. I smell a rat here, I really do. A man’s jealousy of a woman’s accomplishment, maybe? Certainly the brother could not have been entirely ignorant of his sister’s monumental achievement. Perhaps there was some conflict in the family over who Mother & Father loved more, some issue going on, but in any case this boy’s ungracious behaviour was unnatural and uncalled for. If he himself was an athlete I can see some rivalry here.
We can reject the excessive, meretricious barrage of adulation that athletes receive, without ignoring their skills, talents and perserverence altogether. Further, if one has a huge talent, there’s nothing to gain by pretending it doesn’t exist, to do it only occasionally on an amateur level. You have to go for it.
Laura writes:
It was un-sportsmanlike of him. He should have gotten up and congratulated his sister.
