When Australian tennis champion Evonne Goolagong played in Hong Kong after her first Wimbledon triumph
- Hong Kong was keen to have the game’s newest superstar play in its national grass-court championships following Goolagong’s Wimbledon victory in 1971
- The ‘tousle-haired champion’ was a rarity in the modern era, the Post reported, ‘a young woman who doesn’t really care about money’.
“The Hongkong National Grasscourt Tennis Championships will be held at the Hongkong Cricket Club from October 5 to 10, 1971,” reported the South China Morning Post on September 29 that year.
What came to be known as “the Goolagong Exhibitions” centred on 20-year-old Australian Evonne Goolagong, who had “won innumerous titles, including the Wimbledon Singles in June-July 1971”, and who “is extremely well-built and proportioned as an athlete and has a very attractive and pleasant personality both on and off the tennis court”.
The Post had reported on August 26 that “Goolagong’s path to the Wimbledon title really began four years ago when [her manager and coach Victor] Edwards, who first met his prodigy when she was only nine, persuaded her parents to permit her to move to Sydney to live with his family and receive intensive coaching.
“Until then, the tousle-haired champion who resembles a ‘brown Shirley Temple’ looked destined to remain in obscurity just like the other youngsters in that dusty outback town of Barellan, 380 miles west of Sydney.”
After achieving Wimbledon “victory in 63 minutes of glorious tennis” and bagging a “win worth HK$32,000”, Goolagong found herself in demand, and Hong Kong was keen to have the new tennis superstar stop in on her way to London from Australia.