There are good tennis players, and then there are the greats: those who don’t just excel at the game, but redefine it. Brazilian star Maria Bueno was one of the second group. She emerged in the late 1950s as one of tennis’ most graceful and accomplished champions, becoming one of the first and most beloved South American idols in the sport.
Born in Sao Paulo in 1939, Maria Esther Bueno picked up tennis at the age of six, while going to the club with her family, despite tennis not being a popular sport in the country. “The main thing was football. But I just started playing and I just loved the sport. My father, my entire family played,” she told CNN in 2016.
Bueno said that her family didn’t have any money and no sponsors to support her career, so they gathered money from friends at the club and bought her “a one way ticket” to Europe. “They said ‘come back when you can,’” she told CNN.
She quickly dominated the national circuit and made her international breakthrough in the late 1950s. She broke into the international scene in 1958 when she won the women’s doubles with Althea Gibson at Wimbledon and won the women’s singles at the Italian Open.
A year later, she became the first South American woman to win a Wimbledon singles title, defeating Darlene Hard in the final. “My Wimbledon prize money was 50 pounds in a voucher,” she revealed. That same year, she also won the U.S. Nationals (now the U.S. Open) and ended the season ranked World No. 1.