LENGLEN DEAD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1938, Page 8

LENGLEN DEAD

TENNIS PLAYER WHO SET NEW STANDARDS CAREER OF MANY TRIUMPHS (By Telegraph—Press Association. Copyright.) LONDON, July 4. The death is announced in Paris of Mmlle. Suzanne Lenglen, the famous tennis player. Mmlle. Lenglen had been suffering from anaemia. The death of Suzanne Lenglen removes the greatest woman tennis player the world has even seen. Her strokes were perfection itself, and as a stroke artist she was not excelled by any other player, man or woman. She had not the strength, either physically or in hitting power, that characterises Mrs Helen Mills-Moody, the only other woman player with a record at all comparable to hers, but neither had the American the skill and fitness of the French woman. Suzanne Lenglen raised women’s tennis to a plane that it had never before attained to, and it is due to her influence that the standard among women is as high as it is today. Whereever she played, she was the principal attraction. Indeed, she was the focal point of all eyes wherever she was, whether on the court or off it, for she set also a new fashion in women’s tennis clothes. Her frocks and her coloured bandeaus were copied, everywhere. She was born at Compiegne on May 24, 1899. The great New Zealander, Anthony Wilding, had something to do with forming the early career of this prodigy, for he saw her latent possibilities when she was still but a child with pigtails down her back. He predicted for her a great future, and he often played with her in mixed doubles in tournaments on the Riviera. Her father was keen that she should excel in tennis, and he became her coach. He was a hard taskmaster. He was painstaking and thorough. He allowed her to play only with men, and he formed all her strokes on the best strokes of the best men. Her training was a' real business and her practising equally so. He had the court marked out into squares and she had to hit the ball into whatever square he directed. Is it any wonder that she became the most accurate player the world has ever known, or that she reduced her errors to almost a negligible quantity? He insisted on correct strokes, correct footwork and correct court position. Mlle Lenglen’s first championship win was at Picardy when she was only 14 years old. A year later she won the world hard court singles and doubles championships in Paris. Earlier, before her fifteenth birthday, she scored the first of her many victories over Miss Elizabeth Ryan, then one of the world’s greatest players, and one to be her partner in many subsequent doubles victories, including several times at Wimbledon.

From 1919, when she won the first of her Wimbledon singles' titles, until her retirement as an amateur in 1926 to be a professional, Mlle Lenglen never lost a singles except when she defaulted to Miss Mallory in the American championships as the result of illness, after losing the first set. That was the only set she lost in singles in all those years. After Mlle Lenglen turned professional in 1926, very little was heard of her in the tennis world. She was outstanding as a dress designer, she started a tennis coaching school, and she wrote first-class books on tennis. Recently she was given a very responsible post in the teaching of sport in France.