Wimbledon's First Wunderkind

In 1893, at the age of 21, she left tennis for a second, and final, time. Her retirement, however, was hardly to the sidelines. "The great joy of games is the hard work entailed in learning them," she once said. So, after scaling Wimbledon, the Mount Everest of tennis, Dod believed that some new challenge was in order. For her it was golf.

In 1894 she made her debut in the British Women's Open Championship at the Littlestone Golf Club in Kent, prompting one clever journalist to quip, "Now Lottie Dod, so neatly shod/Steps forth upon the tee./On tennis green, she is the Queen./At golf what will she be?"

It didn't take long for her countrymen to find out. At both the 1898 and '99 Opens, Dod reached the semifinal rounds, and in 1904 she won the championship, at Troon.

Not content to rest during the off-season, Dod joined Great Britain's women's field hockey team in 1899 and '90 in its games against Ireland, and after taking up archery, she brought home a silver medal from the 1908 Olympics. She also became an expert figure skater, passing international tests to qualify as a judge in that sport. Her insatiable hunger for greater and greater challenges led her to become one of the first women to toboggan down the treacherous Cresta run, while on a vacation in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Dod also took up and mastered sculling, horseback riding, mountaineering, bridge and even billiards. In her later years, as the lead contralto with London's prestigious Madrigal Society, she gave a command performance before Queen Mary; and for her services as a visiting nurse during World War I, she was awarded a Red Cross gold medal.

It is said that at the time of her death, on June 27, 1960, 88-year-old Charlotte Dod was listening to the 83rd Wimbledon Championships on her radio in a nursing home in Sway, near England's southern coast. Only 70 miles away the hydrangeas were in bloom outside the All England Club, and the grass courts inside were worn from nearly a week of constant play. In just a few days the women's final would be played. At the end of the match the crowd would stand and cheer just as they had 73 years earlier for Dod, though the chant echoing through the grandstands would be different this time, and a different young, dark-haired sensation, Maria Bueno of Brazil, would be the Queen of Wimbledon.