With teenagers Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu meeting for the 2021 US Open women's singles championship, we recall the US Open's oldest champion, Molla Bjurstedt Mallory (pictured above at New York City's Seventh Regiment Armory in 1915), who has won the most singles titles in tournament history.
Her career began when she broke the glass ceiling.
Anna Margarethe Bjurstedt played tennis for the first time in 1903, around the time she turned 19 years old. A friend invited her to play doubles, and she went to the indoor tennis courts of Christiana (now Oslo) in her native Norway to give the game a try. She grabbed a racquet, hit the ball—and sent it rocketing through a skylight, shattering the glass. Bjurstedt, known to everyone as Molla, immediately realized she could hit the ball uncommonly hard.
For the rest of the game, she kept trying to hit the ball with all her might. Her fellow players insisted she pay attention to the court lines, but another idea was already preoccupying Bjurstedt’s thoughts.
“I liked the game, she said, “because it gave me the rare chance to hit something without being reprimanded.”
"There is no age limit; the limit is mental."
Bjurstedt started taking tennis lessons and playing in tournaments that spring. She never passed up a tournament, convinced that competitive play was the only way to improve, and by the fall she had gotten so good she finished as the runner-up in the women’s outdoor tennis championship of Norway. She was strong and fast and had excellent hand-eye coordination. And she was extremely competitive. She won the World’s Indoor Championship at Stockholm the next year and followed that up by winning the Norwegian outdoor championship of 1904.
Except for her younger sister, Valborg, there weren’t many women’s tennis players in Norway who could give Bjurstedt a game. She started playing tennis with men, mostly British diplomats, but they couldn’t rise to her level either. One of the few who could was the Crown Prince of Sweden, Gustav Adolf, with whom she entered the mixed doubles at the indoor championships in Stockholm. Bjurstedt sometimes partnered with him against the King of Sweden and Valborg.
As much as tennis was Bjurstedt’s passion, she knew it wasn’t going to be her livelihood. She went to school in Germany and Paris and studied massage therapy at the Orthopedic Institute in Christiana, and in 1908 she went to London to try to find work as a masseuse. She joined the venerable Queen’s Club to play tennis and realized there was much about the sport she still needed to learn. Work was scarce, however, and she wound up returning to Norway to live with her parents. She was still living there in 1912 when the Norwegian Association entered her in the outdoor tennis competition at the Olympic Games in Stockholm. Playing better than ever before, she won the bronze medal.
"I have nothing of gentleness in my own game, but I do not attempt the impossible."
In 1914, with Europe entrenched in the First World War, Bjurstedt decided her prospects of finding steady employment might be better abroad. She worked for a while in Canada before moving to New York City in October.
In February 1915, shortly before her 31st birthday, a newspaper account of the men’s U.S. indoor championships caught Bjurstedt’s eye. The tournament was underway at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, and she decided to look in on the matches. She hadn’t picked up a racquet since arriving in America and felt restless from not playing.
The armory was—and still is—one of the largest indoor spaces in Manhattan. A dozen full-size courts could fit on the drill hall’s pine floor. Admission to the gallery overlooking the courts was free. Bjurstedt watched the matches for a while and finally asked if she could practice there after the tournament ended. Tthe women’s national indoor championships was going to be held at the armory the following month, she was told, and she could enter it if she wished. She entered on the spot.
Before leaving the gallery, Bjurstedt saw Charles Haggett, whom she had befriended at the Stockholm Olympics, where he coached the Swedish team. She went over to him and told him she had just entered the women’s indoor tournament.
Then Bjurstedt added, rather dolefully, “I want to win.”
“Go ahead and do it,” Haggett said.
And that’s what she did. Bjurstedt returned to the armory a month later and captured the championship without losing a set. In the final, she beat Marie Wagner, already a five-time winner of the indoor tournament and runner-up at the 1914 U.S. National Championships. Bjurstedt’s powerful forehand and unprecedented ability to hit the ball on the rise, along with her great stamina and unrelenting competitiveness proved to be an unbeatable combination.
"It helps in everything to be able to clench the teeth and say, 'I am going to win.'”
When the outdoor tennis season began, Bjurstedt entered the Spring tournament at the West Side Tennis Club, which she joined as a member, and won that singles title, too. She played in a few other local tournaments before heading in June to Philadelphia for the women’s 1915 U.S. National Championships at the Philadelphia Cricket Club.
Bjurstedt dressed for her matches in a long-sleeve white blouse with a high collar and a long white skirt, and, as always when she played, wore a Japanese brooch at her collar, even though she insisted, “It is so ugly I cannot wear at any other time.” She sailed through the draw but needed her good luck charm in the final. Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, winner of the national championship in 1909, 1910 and 1911, won the opening set. Bjurstedt rallied to take the next two sets, however, to become the first international player in the tournament’s 29-year history to win the championship, which in 1968 was renamed the US Open.
After winning the title in 1915, Bjurstedt repeated as women’s singles champion in 1916, 1917 and 1918. She lost for the first time in the national championships in 1919, when she was defeated by Marion Zinderstein in the semifinals. Bjurstedt exacted a measure of revenge the following year, when she overwhelmed Zinderstein in the 1920 championship match. By then, she was Molla Bjurstedt Mallory and a naturalized U.S. citizen, having recently married Franklin Mallory, a New York stockbroker.
Burjstedt’s most celebrated victory at the U.S. National Championships occurred the following year, in her 1921 showdown with Suzanne Lenglen, the undefeated European champion. The meeting between the world’s top two players took place not in the finals, as everyone anticipated, but in the second round due to the luck of the unseeded draw. Ready for the challenge, Mallory played flawlessly in the first set, running her opponent ragged, and won it convincingly, leading to Lenglen’s tearful retirement from the match two points into the second set. Mallory went on to defeat Mary Browne, who had won the title three times before Mallory arrived on the scene, and against whom Malory had played a series of goodwill matches in 1917 to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I.
Mary Browne (left) and Molla Bjurstedt Mallory before the start of their 1921 championship match.
Mallory successfully defended her title in 1922 and won the championship for an eighth and final time in 1926, at the age of 42, making her the oldest—and still the winningest champion, man or woman—in tournament history. She defeated eight different opponents in her championship victories, including Helen Wills, who defeated Mallory in the 1923 and 1924 finals on her way to becoming a six-time winner. Mallory played in the singles tournament for the last time in 1929, when she was 45 years old, and reached the semifinals.
At the US Open Court of Champions—the pavilion at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center that serves as a lasting tribute to the US Open’s legendary singles champions—the plaque honoring Mallory and her achievements is situated ahead of the other players, as it should be. Although her name may be unfamiliar to many, she remains unrivaled as a champion.
