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The Original ‘It Girl’ of Tennis Played Drunk, Undressed and Undefeated

Suzanne Lenglen was tennis's first true socialite—ditching the corset, sipping brandy between sets and turning the court into her own runway decades before anyone thought to call an athlete a brand.

Before Naomi Osaka, before Serena Williams, before Billie Jean King, there was the French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen. When she died in 1938, at the age of 39, Reuters declared her “the greatest woman lawn tennis player of all time.”

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She was born on May 24, 1899, in Paris, though her family moved shortly thereafter to the provincial town of Compaigne. She came from a well-to-do family—her father inherited a horse-drawn omnibus company—who loved tennis. Her father bought her first racket from a toy store when she was age 11, and she played on a makeshift court on their back lawn. The children of the household staff were called in to compete against Suzanne when no one else was available. She was so clearly talented that her father bought her a new professional racket within the month.

People would often claim that her father, Charles, deliberately tried to raise a prodigy on the court, a role which might bring to mind the Williams sisters today. People claimed that Charles Lenglen developed extensive training programs, marking the court into specific squares and demanding that Suzanne send the ball to a section he named; she was deprived of dessert if she did not hit the squares. This was a story he disputed. Charles agreed that he did offer her advice regarding her play and would watch opponents practicing and report back on their style of play. But he also claimed that “the women, not the sportswoman,” was his interest as a father. 

He met his competitive match very early in Suzanne’s life. Newspapers noted that, while the family all enjoyed tennis, “Charles Lenglen is as bad a player as one can be. He stopped facing his daughter in the courts long ago, after receiving a pitiless drubbing at [Suzanne’s] hands.” At........

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