Louise Brough - #69

She was number 69 on the list.

Louise Brough Clapp, Tennis Champion at Midcentury, Dies at 90

By RICHARD GOLDSTEINFEB. 5, 2014

Louise Brough Clapp, whose powerful serve-and-volley game propelled her to 35 championships in Grand Slam tennis tournaments of the 1940s and ’50s and made her one of the most brilliant doubles players in the women’s game, died on Monday in Vista, Calif. She was 90.

The International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., announced her death.

A former teenage star in Southern California, Louise Brough, as she was known for most of her career, was ranked among America’s top 10 female players 16 times by the United States Tennis Association and achieved the No. 1 national ranking in 1947. She was No. 1 in the world in 1955.

She won six singles titles, including four at Wimbledon, as well as 21 doubles championships and 8 mixed doubles titles in Grand Slam events, tying her with Doris Hart at No. 5 on the overall career list for both women and men.

In doubles play, Brough (pronounced bruff) usually teamed with Margaret Osborne duPont, a longtime friend, and they were virtually unbeatable. Brough and duPont captured 12 women’s doubles championships in the United States Nationals, the forerunner of the United States Open, winning every year at Forest Hills, Queens, from 1942 to 1950 and again from 1955 to 1957.

They also won five doubles titles at Wimbledon and three at the French championships. Brough’s only Grand Slam women’s doubles title without duPont came when she teamed with Hart at the 1950 Australian championships.

But in the quest for women’s tennis supremacy, duPont, who died in 2012, was also a rival, as were Hart, Maureen Connolly, Althea Gibson, Shirley Fry and Pauline Betz.

Brough defeated duPont for the 1947 Nationals title in singles play, then lost to her in the 1948 final in a match that went to 28 games in the last set. Brough bested duPont twice in the Wimbledon singles final.

One of Brough’s most memorable matches came in the second round of the Nationals in 1950, when she faced Gibson, who that year became the first black player allowed to enter the tournament. Gibson was ahead, 7-6, in the third set when a thunderstorm suspended play. Brough won the next day by taking three consecutive games, but that match heralded the beginning of Gibson’s rise to stardom.

The Grand Slam champion Alice Marble marveled at Brough’s twist serve and its topspin, which overwhelmed her opponents.

Brough “streamlined it to match that of many of our men,” Marble once wrote. “She gets an enormously high bounce on this serve, and women are notoriously feeble in their effort to return it, especially on the backhand.”

The tennis historian and journalist Bud Collins called Brough “one of the great volleyers in history” and paid tribute to her prowess in doubles.

“A willowy blonde, she was quiet and diffident, but she was the killer in the left court when at play alongside duPont,” he wrote in “Bud Collins’ Modern Encyclopedia of Tennis.”

Althea Louise Brough was born in Oklahoma City on March 11, 1923. Her family moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., when she was a child, and she learned to play on public courts. She vied with Gussie Moran (who would be best known for creating a sensation at Wimbledon in 1949 with her lace-trimmed panties) as the best teenage player of their era in Southern California and won the girls’ national junior championships in 1940 and 1941.

Brough’s Wimbledon singles titles came in 1948, 1949 and 1950 and again in 1955. Besides winning the United States singles title in 1947, she was runner-up five times. She won the Australian singles in 1950. And she had a 22-0 record in Wightman Cup play between the United States and Britain.