Barbara Jordan

Barbara Jordan

Christmas week, 1979: most of the game's best skipped the Australian Open, leaving a 32-woman draw with seven seeds and no defending champion. Barbara Jordan, ranked 68th, made the trip anyway. She beat the second seed, a seventeen-year-old Hana Mandlikova, 6-2, 6-2 in the quarterfinals, survived Renata Tomanova 5-7, 6-3, 6-3, then won the event's first all-American final over Sharon Walsh, 6-3, 6-3. That week accounts for her 1 major and all 1 of her career titles.

The cheque was $10,000, the biggest of her career; she spent it on a Honda Civic. Born in Milwaukee in 1957, Jordan finished her Stanford economics degree in three years and won the 1978 collegiate doubles alongside her younger sister Kathy Jordan, later a top-ten player. Barbara peaked at No. 55 that December, won the 1983 French Open mixed doubles with Eliot Teltscher, then took a UCLA law degree and became an attorney for the city of San Jose. Her name, she joked, lived on in Melbourne as a bar-trivia answer.