Pat Canning Todd
The Woman Who
Called Them
Doddering Old Men

On July 22, 2022, Mary Patricia Canning Todd would have turned one hundred years old. She won a Grand Slam singles title as a young mother. She beat Pauline Betz, Louise Brough, Margaret Osborne duPont, Doris Hart, and Maureen Connolly — the only player of her generation to defeat all five of the greatest champions of the post-war era. She was defaulted from the French Championships as the defending champion for refusing to play on a court she considered beneath her dignity, then called the officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association a group of "doddering old men" for punishing her in the rankings. She stayed in a maharajah's palace in India. She told her husband on their wedding day that tennis would always come first and he was second. She wore signature padded striped tops and could hit her backhand, as she put it, on a dot. In the annals of women's tennis, there has never been anyone quite like Pat Todd.

Patricia Canning was born in San Francisco on July 22, 1922, the daughter of a wholesale grocer. The family lived in Alameda, just across the bay, in a house that happened to be next door to the local public tennis courts. When she was eight years old, she walked onto those courts with a five-dollar racket, and within five years she was travelling the country to play in tournaments.

Her mother, Winifred Canning, packed the family into their Model A Ford and drove Pat and her brother Bill on the Pacific Northwest circuit — Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver. Pat won every division she entered, juniors and women's open alike, against girls and women far older than herself. By age ten, she had been given an honorary membership to the Berkeley Tennis Club, where she began to attract serious attention. By sixteen, she was competing in national tournaments on the East Coast.

What made her rise remarkable was the almost complete absence of formal coaching. Pat developed her game by watching, imitating, and competing. She had one coach, George Hudson, whom she later described with characteristic irreverence as someone she thought was their chaperone, or something. Her weapons were self-taught: a powerful backhand that became her signature shot, aggressive baseline play, and a fighter's temperament that refused to concede a point, a match, or an argument.

Her serve, by contrast, was something of an adventure. Louise Brough later offered her own assessment of it with amused affection: it was so bad it was good. It was the kind of serve that kept opponents guessing, not because of its power or placement, but because nobody — possibly including Todd herself — quite knew where it was going. And yet it won her a French championship, a world top-four ranking, and the respect of every player she ever faced.

In 1941, at the United States Nationals at Forest Hills, the nineteen-year-old Patricia Canning met Richard Bradburn Todd, a naval officer who helped run the tournament. They married on Christmas Day that year. She told him, with the deadpan humour that would become her hallmark, that tennis would always come first and he was second. She later insisted she had been kidding. Richard, who knew his wife, likely had his doubts.

Their daughter Patricia Ann was born on November 7, 1943, in the middle of the war. What happened next was virtually without precedent in women's tennis: Pat Todd went back to competition. In an era when marriage ended most women's sporting careers and motherhood ended the rest, Todd simply carried on playing — and winning. She was ranked in the US top ten in 1942 and again from 1944 onward, competing as a married mother throughout.

In 1946, with the war over and international tennis resuming, the Todd family moved to La Jolla, California, where Pat's talent caught the eye of William Kellogg Sr., the owner of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. Kellogg became her sponsor, funding her travel to national and international tournaments. It was the beginning of her greatest years. That autumn, she reached the final of the US Nationals, where she pushed the formidable Pauline Betz to 11–9 in the first set — the longest opening set in the history of the women's final at that time. She lost, but the tennis world had taken note: Pat Todd was no longer a promising outsider. She was a genuine contender.

Pat Todd's career played out in the shadow of the four women who dominated post-war tennis: Pauline Betz, Louise Brough, Margaret Osborne duPont, and Doris Hart. They were the Big Four, and to be the fifth-best player in the world during their reign was both a distinction and a kind of curse. Todd was good enough to reach Grand Slam semi-finals and finals year after year, but rarely good enough to beat the very best consistently — except, gloriously, when she did.

Her record against the Big Four reveals a player who could beat anyone on her day. She was 1–6 against Brough in Grand Slam matches, 1–3 against duPont, and 1–1 against Hart. But she defeated them all at least once — and she beat Maureen Connolly too, which precious few players of any era could claim. At Wimbledon, she reached the semi-finals four times between 1948 and 1952. She was never quite the best, but she was always dangerous, and she was always there.

Her partnership with Doris Hart in doubles was her most potent weapon against the establishment. Together they won the 1947 Wimbledon doubles and the 1948 French doubles, and they remained the only team to beat Brough and duPont in a Grand Slam final during the great partnership's prime. In mixed doubles, Todd won the 1948 French title with Jaroslav Drobný — the Czech exile who would become one of the most storied figures of the era.