There will always be Paris as Christine Truman recalls French Open glory

Sporting anniversaries come and go, but it is rare to find a champion celebrating a 60-year flashback with as much vim and laughter as Christine Truman Janes, the 78-year-old Suffolk grandmother who prefigured Rafael Nadal and Martina Hingis by picking up her maiden French Open title while still a teenager.

To chat to Truman (let’s stick with her playing name) is to be transported into a different world: one in which her formidable mother Aimee chaperoned her around the globe, and her closest rival – world No 1 Maria Bueno – was also her doubles partner. The concept of coaches barely existed and medical guidance was sketchy, so Truman was increasingly affected by a niggling Achilles injury – sustained, with typical elan, when her high-heeled shoe slipped into a hole in a wooden floor during drinks at the Jamaican Embassy.

That 1959 French Open proved to be the apex of Truman’s 18-year career – a surprising one, too, because it was not obviously set up to suit her bombastic game. Her angelic poise on the court belied a forehand that could melt rubber.

What she did not have was the fleet-footed mobility of her Hungarian opponent in the final, defending champion Zsuzsi Kormoczy – whose name becomes less intimidating when you hear it pronounced as the neighbourly-sounding Susie Komoxie.

“Zsuzsi didn’t hit many winning shots,” Truman told The Sunday Telegraph. “But she was so good at retrieving and accuracy, like all those continental clay-court players. They didn’t give you anything and you had to concentrate on every ball.

“But I had just won two titles, in Rome and Lugano. I had a secret weapon called Jaroslav Drobny [the 1954 Wimbledon champion who came from Prague but now lived in Putney]. I had met up with him on the Caribbean circuit in January that year, and he offered to help me on the clay.

“We would practise at Queen’s or Wimbledon and he would make me hit targets: first short angles, then deep ones.

“I didn’t use drop shots, though. My mother thought they were cruel and that I would grow up with a mean face if I played them.”

Aimee Truman spent countless hours attending her six children’s matches as a vocal – and sometimes critical – assessor. (Christine’s youngest sister Nell played in the French Open doubles final in 1971, while brother Humphrey became the RAF’s tennis champion.)

According to the former BBC tennis correspondent John Barrett, “Mrs Truman always used to sit with the mother of Bobby Wilson, who was a Wimbledon stalwart in the 1950s and 1960s.”

They were known as the toughest doubles pairing on the circuit, even though they never took the court.

But according to Christine – whose own daughter Amanda would go on to become British No 2 – her mother’s interventions did not extend beyond that drop-shot ban. “I don’t think it would have worked if my parents had had any background in tennis,” she said.

“They mostly left me to get on with it. My father hardly ever attended matches because he was a chartered accountant in the City – although I’m happy to say that he came to the Paris final. Yul Brynner was there too, which I found very exciting because I was a huge fan of The King and I.”

After wrapping up a 6-4, 7-5 victory, Truman received £40 towards her travel costs, plus a small silver replica of the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen.

Although she was a Wimbledon fixture for almost two decades – even becoming the victim of Martina Navratilova’s first victory at the All England Club in 1973 – the flowering of Truman’s career was as brief as it was brilliant.

A singles finalist at three of the four majors, plus a doubles champion at the fourth (the Australian Open, which she won in partnership with Bueno), Truman’s most visible moment was the 1961 Wimbledon final. She led fellow Briton Angela Mortimer by a set and 4-3 before slipping and aggravating that same Achilles problem that stemmed from the Jamaican ambassador’s party.

In a joint interview published in The Daily Telegraph in 2011, Mortimer said: “I think I would have won anyway.” Truman’s reply was nicely judged. “Actually, I think it probably was a turning point. I felt I was in a winning position, but after the shock of the fall I lost concentration. And against you, Angela, you couldn’t afford to do that.”

Asked this week about her meteoric rise, Truman explained her ambitions had been spurred by reading about Lottie Dod – the multi-sport champion who claimed the first Wimbledon ladies’ singles title in 1887 at the age of just 15.

“It was always my dream to be good young,” Truman said. “I couldn’t play at Wimbledon until I was 16, because that was the rule. But I already had the proportions by then. My ghastly height. I always said I was 5ft 11½in because I never wanted to admit to being 6ft.

“The thing about being so young is that I was fearless. It was only recently that I realised how oblivious I must have been.

“A friend asked me to play in a golf tournament about five years ago, and I was so afraid of letting my partner down that I could barely hold the club. I thought, ‘Oh, I get it now! That’s what nerves feel like.’”