She looks like she could turn around and play a three-setter tomorrow, but there hasn’t been an accessible tennis court anywhere within cooee of Judy Chaloner for around 10 years now, which is how she prefers it.
The only one she’s actually aware of looks pretty well fenced off from any action.
“I know that the ex-cricketer, not that I’ve ever met him, Adam Parore has a big holiday home not that far from me, and there is a tennis court next to his helipad. I’ve seen his helicopter whup-whupping overhead a few times, but I reckon that that court hasn’t seen a lot of use.”
Chaloner, New Zealand’s top female tennis player of the late ‘70s era was, for 44 years, New Zealand’s sole female Grand Slam champion, pairing with Australia’s Dianne Evers to win the Australian Open Women’s Doubles Championship, in 1979. (A run finally broken when Erin Routliffe captured the 2023 US Open Doubles title with Gaby Dabrowski.)
Amazingly, Chaloner and Evers were not even presented with their winner’s trophy on the grass courts of the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club that day in Melbourne- a stark contrast to the elaborate presentations nowadays at the four Slams.
“At the end it was shake hands, and then, okay, no…goodbye everybody,” recalls Chaloner.
If that wasn’t galling enough, the pair didn’t even get to play out their finals dream on Kooyong Centre Court. Chaloner and Evers did however prevail in three sets over their Australian/Dutch opponents, Leanne Harrison and Marcella Mesker, 6-2, 1-6, 6-0.
“They re-scheduled us to play on Court One because a men’s match had run on too long. Although Court One did become a lucky little setting for us. We were just below the clubhouse. The courtside seating was some terraces; those long benches with planks of wood. There was no fanfare, no nothing. The umpires certainly didn’t have a microphone, and I can’t really remember if we even had ball kids or not. And then, no trophy.”
The organisers did somehow remember to give them their prize money for winning: “We went up to a little caravan afterwards and they wrote me out a cheque for $1,100 Australian dollars. Not quite enough to buy a house with, but I guess not too bad for those days.”
Decades passed, then out of the blue Chaloner received a letter from Tennis Australia requesting confirmation of her street address. “So I gave it to them, thought nothing more of it, and then this platter which was supposed to have been presented to us individually as commemorative trophies after our win in ‘79 arrived on my doorstep a few weeks later. I was as stunned as the next person!”
After her playing days, she worked for many years as a professional tennis coach, highlighted by her running for 20 years a large-scale junior programme out of the Campbell Park Tennis Club in Auckland, “Where I created a monster, as one member put it.” (The programme being such a success the participants grew from 70 kids shortly after inception, to over 400 at one point.)
“The beginning of all that was a friend from the club asking me if I’d coach a small group of kids on a Saturday. Then they asked me ‘please’ to come back and do more, and so I committed to every Saturday for a whole summer. I initially did six months, then it was one year, which then somehow evolved into 20. It slowly grew until in the end there weren’t enough courts.”
Around ten years ago Chaloner decided on a fresh start, and headed north. These days she’s happiest whenever she’s outdoors, either when travelling, or at home tending her over 100 fruit trees on the three and a half acre property she lives on near the town of Opononi, on the southern shore of the Hokianga Harbour.
“It’s a lot of work with all the trees and harvesting fruit and vegetables, but I love it and I live in a great community where we share and swap food and fruit, whatever we have really. It’s just a magic place to live. I also started a banana plantation, so now I’ve got bananas all year round.”
As befits an ex-athlete, her travel experiences are often fairly energetic ones- “I’ve done a couple of the very long Camino walks; one was from central Spain to the base of the Pyrenees, which was over 700 kilometres. The other was from Lisbon to the famous cathedral, the Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. That also was over 700 kilometres. I don’t think I’ll be doing another one (laughs.) It’s certainly a challenge to be walking around a marathon a day.”
Chaloner still loves tennis, don’t get her wrong. For as long as she can recall, she flies over every mid-January to take in the awesome sprawl of the Melbourne Park tennis complex for the Australian Open. She has membership to ‘The Last Eight Club,’ for players in Singles or Doubles who have reached a quarter final or semi final respectively at one of the four Grand Slams.
“It feels amazing to be able to crash out inside ‘The Last Eight’ when it’s up to over 40 degrees outside and steaming. My pass gets shared around my family as you can bring in one guest per day. It means a lot to have that kind of access to what is these days an iconic event in world sport.”
Making her annual pilgrimage to Melbourne also affords Chaloner the chance to catch up with her Doubles partner from their Open victory, Dianne Evers. “We hadn’t seen each other in decades, but that’s all different now.”
It was through the persistence of Evers that their non-existent trophy presentation of 1979 was finally rectified, albeit an incredibly late 40 years hence, in 2019.
“Dianne was a Melbourne girl at the time we won, and so she took the lead in getting in touch with the right people over there. I’m sure it was a lot of hard work, but it was arranged that we could have a photo op holding the actual trophy together. The funny thing about it was just how serious it all was. Out came the trophy in this huge glass cabinet with security. But anyway there it was, and after only seeing it live from a distance and on television, we finally got to hold it and see our names on it. We’d had our time in the sun, shall we say. At last.”
Judy Chaloner also played singles on the WTA pro tour. Notably, she reached the second round of Wimbledon in 1978 by beating Sheila McInerney of the USA, 9-7, 6-4.
