Researching a Tennis Legacy, and Uncovering a Potential Injustice
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Version 0 of 1. The world is a daunting haystack when looking for century-old needles. For a good portion of her adult life, Anna Wilding has made it a pastime, searching for artifacts and information on her great-uncle, a long-deceased tennis champion named Tony. She has also come to realize that in the culture of global connectivity, reverberating across the Internet, are mysterious echoes of long ago. In the 100th anniversary year of the height of her once-famous ancestor’s career, she recently stumbled upon a riddle that has turned her pursuit of knowledge into a cry for fairness. The question is who, if anyone, should answer for a potential injustice that may have been committed many decades past. Growing up in Christchurch, New Zealand, Anna Wilding knew that Anthony (or Tony) Wilding had been a Davis Cup star and a national hero for what then was the team from Australasia. In 1907, he teamed with the Aussie Norman Brookes for an emotionally charged defeat of the bully empire, Britain. An avid athlete who also played cricket and other sports, Tony Wilding went on to win four consecutive Wimbledon men’s singles titles from 1910 to 1913. He died, at 31, two years later while fighting for the British Empire on a World War I battlefield in northern France. Before going to war, he played friendly matches against politicians and princes. He was said to be planning to marry an American silent film actress, Maxine Elliott. “He was apparently very popular with the ladies, kind of a James Dean character, riding all over Europe on his motorcycle,” Anna Wilding said. In 1978, Tony Wilding was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. Anna Wilding, a filmmaker and actress who grew up in New Zealand, said she did not know about the induction until she moved to New York about eight years ago. This was also about the time she set out to find her great-uncle’s grave. As a highly competitive junior player, she eagerly read a biography that was written in 1916 by a tennis journalist, A. Wallis Myers. In that book — which followed by one year Tony’s autobiography, written with Myers — Anna learned that he was killed while in command of about 30 men on May 9, 1915. His death occurred near Neuve-Chapelle, France, but his body was reinterred in a cemetery for war victims. Searching small villages, staying in bed-and-breakfasts, she located the grave in Richebourg-l’Avoue in the Pas-de-Calais region. Unlike the anonymously buried, Anthony Wilding had his name on a headstone. As an amateur sportsman, he had followed his father, Frederick, into the law profession. That Anna’s father, the tennis champion’s nephew, was also named Anthony Wilding and became a lawyer only heightened her interest. Now 88, Anna’s father had long been a guardian of the family legacy. In New Zealand, the Wilding name remains well known. “Occasionally, someone would attach the name to something without permission, and he would gently ask that they not,” she said. “But my father never had any real issues, never wanted to pursue anything — until I told him what I had found.” Three months ago, while surfing the Web, she came across a 1933 printed advertisement on eBay for a tennis racket made by Wilson Sporting Goods that was called the Wilding. In the ad, which appeared to be from a catalog, the racket was listed as model A528, with a dealers’ wholesale price of $5.60. It was on sale for $5.48. Her father told her he had never known of such a racket that was endorsed by his uncle. He suggested she do more research. She proceeded to find several more references to the Wilding, including one suggesting it was one of Wilson’s best-selling rackets. She came to believe that the then young company produced the racket without permission, using the name of a popular and dead war hero. Her research suggested it was sold between 1917 and 1933, but perhaps not in the Australasian region. She sought legal advice. In e-mail exchanges, a lawyer for Wilson did not deny the racket’s existence but refused to discuss it, saying that whatever occurred can never truly be known. “It is not productive to debate facts about events that occurred over 80 years ago because none of us know the facts,” Molly Wallace, Wilson’s director of corporate communications, said in a statement. Wilson’s position has frustrated the Wildings, who are considering litigation, even as Anna acknowledged this was not the way they would prefer to mark a century passing since Tony last won Wimbledon. In his time, he did not have to play seven grueling rounds, as will the winner of this year’s tournament, which begins Monday. The defending champion was originally excluded from a knockout round, which produced a challenger to play the titleholder. In his 1915 autobiography, Tony Wilding wrote of a preference for the American system of making the defending champion play all rounds, according to a review of the book in The New York Times. He believed it to be more equitable. “He was supposed to be one of the great sportsmen of his time,” Anna Wilding said. With all she has learned, with the ancestral connections she feels, she has contemplated making a documentary film about her great-uncle. “His sister, Cora, was my godmother,” she said. “She gave me my first camera.” A settlement with Wilson, she added, could finance the project. Who knows what her sleuthing would uncover next? |