06/28/1998
By Bill Knight
El Paso Times
The plot to the novel is simple - and a natural.
The little girl stopped on her way home from piano lessons each day, mesmerized by the dirty old clay tennis court. She sat and watched. Occasionally, she would shag balls. Mostly, she just watched.
Not in her dreams, not in her wildest dreams, did that little girl imagine the game she loved to watch would wrap her up like a magic carpet and sail her away to stardom, take her all around the world, introduce her to the rich and famous, introduce her to a man from one of the nation's most prominent families - a man who would become her husband.
The plot is right out of a Fitzgerald novel.
Today, Margaret Osborne du Pont lives quietly in El Paso's Upper Valley, just a long lob from the tennis courts at El Paso Country Club. She hardly is one to live in the past, working cheerfully with her longtime friend, one-time doubles partner and roommate for the past 32 years, Margaret Varner Bloss, in their horse-racing venture.
Du Pont is the star of the novel, even today an elegant lady - one who grew up in a time when conversation was an art, not a necessity. She can talk easily of today and she can slip gracefully back into that other world that is yesterday.
The memories, after all, are there. So many memories of so many other places, so many other times. Despite growing up modestly, she traveled among a Gatsby-like circuit of the rich and famous in the world of tennis. She won it all in her day - French Opens, Wimbledons, U.S. Opens.
She saw a world change. And she lived it.
· · ·
Born in 1915, du Pont spent her earliest years on a ranch just outside Joseph, Ore., riding a horse to and from school each day with her older brother, Charles.
"Oh, I loved the ranch," du Pont said, her mind obviously whisking her away on a trip back to that simpler time. "Just loved it. I suppose my natural love of animals made me love it. I had my own lambs, had some chickens - and dogs, of course."
Her father, St. Lawrence Osborne, had some health problems, though, and they had to give up the ranch. So the Osbornes moved to Spokane, where the father worked in a garage and the little girl began to discover tennis - watching the people play on that old clay court each day on her way to and from piano lessons.
Two years later, in San Francisco, little Margaret Osborne played tennis for the first time. Her mother, Eva Jane, would take her to the public Golden Gate courts.
"When my mother couldn't take me, I would just put on my skates and roller skate over to the tennis courts," du Pont said. "There was an old building near our house with a brick wall. I used to hit balls off that. Unfortunately, it was uneven brick. My brother didn't play much. My parents didn't play at all. I don't know why I loved the game so much; but I did. I was just fascinated by tennis."
When she was in high school, du Pont began to write about the sport, sending articles to the American Lawn Tennis Magazine and Western Tennis magazine.
Smiling, she said, "It was just tennis, tennis, tennis, tennis."
But this tennis would take her around the world and back again. It would introduce her to the rich and famous and to royalty. It would show her the most glamorous side the world had to offer - and the ugliest.
"My parents didn't have much," she recalled. "After I finished high school, I had two choices - continue playing tennis and write or go to college. I chose to play tennis."
This was the 1930s, not the 1990s. Women hardly had the opportunities they have now. Independence was a word that hardly fit the vocabulary of most women of the 1930s. Yet tennis offered this for du Pont. At 18, she got on a train - all by herself - and traveled three days to reach Philadelphia, where she won the National Girls 18 Tournament.
"That was an experience," she said. "Traveling by myself. Was I scared? I don't remember that I was. Just excited. I loved it all. I loved the travel, going over Donner Pass, changing trains in Chicago ... and, of course, playing tennis."
Perhaps it was the long-ago year of 1939 that made du Pont a champion. She always was talented. But, at that moment, with the world out there hovering on the brink of a calamitous war, she showed the steel in her character and took an entire year off from tournaments.
"I needed a new forehand," she said. "So I just practiced. All day, every day. I worked with Tom Stow of the Berkeley Tennis Club. Oh, I worked hard. I almost quit several times."
But she did not. And her journey through the world - seen through the cross hairs of a tennis racket - continued.
· · ·
The memory said it was somewhere around 1940 when William du Pont Jr. and Margaret Osborne first met. The record said the two were married in 1947.
"He used to come to California for three months every year because his health wasn't very good," she said. "He loved tennis. He was always playing and watching. When we married, we moved to his house in Bellevue, just outside Wilmington, Delaware.
"Of course, I'd been there before," she added. "Most of the tennis players had. During the war, with no tennis in Europe, he would host a grass court tournament, and most of the players would stay in his home. He had four grass courts, one cement court, two outdoor HarTru (a form of clay court) courts and two indoor HarTru courts."
The world put away weapons and joyfully returned to play in 1946. But du Pont will never forget her first trip to Wimbledon that postwar year - a time of joy, a time of sadness. It was when the sport showed her how ugly the world can get.
"I went over with the Wightman Cup team," she said. "None of us had ever been to Europe. It was a pretty sorry sight in London. There was no food. I don't know how those poor people survived. I think about that every so often."
Du Pont and her teammates ate many meals at the American Embassy. William du Pont also helped out, slaughtering some of his beef and flying fresh meat over to a restaurant in London for her.
"It was sad, but it was fun to be playing there," she said. "I went to the French Open that year, too, but I don't remember Paris being as desolate, as destroyed as London. There were 2,000 seats destroyed at Wimbledon, where it was hit by a bomb, and they were roped off. That was sort of gruesome-looking. I remember being in London, looking at the BBC tower. It was the only thing standing. It's marvelous the way they recovered."
Du Pont said it always was interesting to be in Paris for the French Open, but the fact she did not speak French and the fact she detested clay courts took away a little of the luster of that trip.
Her son, Bill, was born in 1952 and this semi-ended du Pont's career. She came back in 1953 to captain the country's Wightman Cup team, and by 1954 she had won another Wimbledon doubles title. She came back and played and played well and "you always play seriously," but it never was quite the same.
Still, she continued to travel the world and live the life.
In 1958, du Pont teamed with Bloss to reach the Wimbledon doubles finals. Du Pont already was well into her 40s, Bloss was 35. They lost to a pair of the game's greats - Althea Gibson and Maria Bueno. Du Pont later teamed with Australian great Neal Fraser to win the Wimbledon doubles title in 1962.
"That's one that got away," Bloss said, laughing. "We played for fun at that time. The World's Fair was in Brussels that year, and we went by there for a week. We played it hard, but it was fun. It was a thrill for me to be in the finals."
Du Pont and her husband divorced in 1964. She stayed in the eastern part of the United States so father and son could remain close. But William du Pont died on Dec. 31, 1965, and Margaret du Pont moved to El Paso in 1966 ... and has been here ever since.
"I just loved it here," du Pont said. "I loved the weather and the people and my good friend Margaret was here. Her parents had always been so gracious to me. They were just wonderful people."
Her son, Bill du Pont, who now lives in Orlando and is in the horse business - selling in Kentucky, owning horses in France and Australia - can barely remember the tennis days.
"I'm not sure I ever knew about her fame," he said. "She was Mom, just Mom. Subconsciously, I would have known - but not appreciated. I do remember going to a fair number of tennis tournaments, which I now recognize as big tournaments - and probably being a pain in the neck. But, most of all, she was just a great mom. And still is."
Bloss, who was a U.S. and All-England champion at badminton, a U.S. champion at squash and an all-around accomplished athlete, laughed and said, "We've known each other about 103 years.
"Everything just worked out," Bloss added. "We come from the same thinking, the same competitiveness. She's pretty easy to get along with. I'm a little more volatile. I have my ups and downs, where I get excited and get mad. I like my way, because it's fun. But she has a mind I respect a lot. She has a very good mind."
The two are both active and competitive with their horses. They love the animals - and never bet on them. It is all done for the love of the animals.
"I kind of run the horse racing," Bloss said, "because I have a little more experience. But, sometimes I'll stew over a problem, go back and forth and back and forth. Then, I'll ask her and she'll come out with the most succinct answer. The answer isn't tempered by anything but the facts."
El Pasoans who have come to know du Pont speak of her almost in terms of awe.
"I had always heard of Margaret du Pont," said El Pasoan Christy Balsiger, who is a member of a family that has been chosen National Tennis Family of the Year. "I worked the credential booth at the U.S. Open one year and I was excited about finally meeting her. But she did not come to the Open that year.
"We've since met and she has become a member of our advisory board and a donor and a real supporter for the El Paso Tennis Foundation," Balsiger added. "She's just such a wonderful lady. She is very, very down to earth; just a lovely lady."
Eric Alwan, publicity director at Sunland Park Racetrack, said, "I just think she's one of the great treasures in El Paso. She's got to be without peer around here as someone who won the wealth of major titles in a major sport. And yet she seems so unaffected by it all.
"She's also been highly successful in racing - she and Mrs. Bloss," Alwan said. "She's just a wonderful, wonderful lady. So successful, yet so very unaffected by it all."
Du Pont's son, Bill, hardly is surprised by such a reaction to his mother.
"She's very quiet and very humble," he said. "She was always known as a terrific sportsperson. She was very renowned for her sportsmanship. She has always been a person who is very focused, who is not concerned about elaborate shows. She's very much her own person. She's done so much, yet she remains unaffected by it."
· · ·
Margaret du Pont remains calm, succinctly eloquent. She lived a life among the rich and famous and was never once affected by it.
Smiling, she said, "I was never impressed by the du Pont name. I'm still not."
She still is in love with the game of tennis, still watches it, maybe even is still mesmerized by it ... just like that little girl in Spokane so many years ago. She occasionally still returns to London and Paris and New York for the big tournaments. But she is far more content living her life in El Paso's Upper Valley.
It is the perfect plot - so simple, so natural. It is the novel made into a movie. It is a Hollywood story ... with a most classic, yet most un-Hollywood-like leading lady.
Margaret Osborne du Pont
Born: March 4, 1915, in Joseph, Ore.; grew up in San Francisco.
Currently: Resident of El Paso since 1966; successful in horse-racing business with long-time friend Margaret Varner Bloss.
U.S. Open: Singles champion 1948, 1949, 1950; doubles champion 1941-50, 1955, 1956, 1957. Mixed doubles champion 1943 through 1946, 1950, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1960.
Wimbledon: Singles champion 1947. Doubles champion 1946, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1954. Mixed doubles champion 1962.
French Open: Singles champion 1946, 1949. Doubles champion 1946, 1947, 1949.
Hall of Fame: Inducted into International Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame, 1967; also a member of the El Paso and San Francisco Athletic Halls of Fame.
Du Pont Park: A public park with tennis courts is named in her honor in San Francisco.
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