Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky

Dod. And once in her element, Myers noted, she quickly picked up steam and became “the beau ideal of what a lady-champion should be,” an unstoppable force of nature “absolutely without a weak point.”[28] Hillyard, however, refused to give up, and in the final set, the two women dueled fiercely, each staying on serve for the first six games. At one point, Dod fell heavily, and it wasn’t clear if she would be able to go on. She stopped, took a few minutes, regrouped, and then put in some of the most punishing tennis the sports journalists and audience members gathered around the court had ever seen. The quality of the play at Worple Road, reporters noted with astonishment, seemed to get better and better as each game passed. Hillyard kept probing, firing off shots deep into Dod’s backhand corner. Dod, wrote the Pastime writer on the spot, responded with “marvelous backhand returns.” In his opinion, “No other lady player is strong enough on the backhand side to return such well-placed drives with such unfailing accuracy.” Dod won the final set 6–4.

      It was to be her last competitive tennis match. Ten years after she had debuted as a little girl in a small tournament in northern England, the now twenty-one-year-old slipped away, disappearing Garbo-like from the world she had so completely dominated. Not that she didn’t like the trappings of victory—her stash of prizes showcased in her Edgeworth bedroom was proof of the fierce pride she felt in her accomplishments; but she had never wanted to be what she derisively termed a “pot hunter,” someone who only stayed with a sport that she had conquered in order to collect even more trophies. Simply coasting, staying atop a game in which she had no true competitors, held little appeal for the Little Wonder. In fact, she said somewhat haughtily, she found the idea of sticking with one game her whole life “appalling.”[29]

      Chapter 3

      Scaling the Heights in Switzerland

       An Elizabeth Main photograph of Dod and two companions during the first-ever winter ascent of the Swiss Drei Blumen, February 23, 1896. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

      Lottie Dod’s absence from the public eye didn’t last long. While she never aggressively courted the media in the same way as did Babe Didrikson—the great American track-and-field star, golfer, basketball and baseball player, and quintessential self-promoter—more than a quarter century later, she did know how to hold her own in the spotlight.

      Hers was a world increasingly fascinated by the sporting hero, by the unlikely accomplishment against the odds. Figures like Thomas Stevens, who in 1887 circumnavigated the globe on a penny-farthing bicycle, captured the attention of writers at the growing number of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, and through them the imagination of the populace. Or Nellie Bly, the globe-trotting New York World journalist. Or impresarios such as Buffalo Bill, whose Wild West show opened in London two months before Dod won her first Wimbledon title, thrilling crowds with the performers’ derring-do. Or the cricketer William Gilbert Grace, who played for an extraordinary forty-four consecutive seasons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

      Dod, with her effortless transition from one sport to the next, with her breaking of one record after another, with her ability to compete against the best of male athletes, was tailor-made for stardom.