ITF

Winning the Fed Cup for Australia alongside Lesley Hunt and Margaret Court The dreams – the aforementioned constitutional reform is the third – are the other key elements of this extraordinary tale, the first of them having started to feel remotely achievable when Goolagong was still an eight-year-old gazing in wonder from afar at a coaching clinic she was too young to attend. For one week, once a year, two coaches from Sydney would hold a clinic in Barellan. "I just loved it. I thought it was fantastic. They saw me peering through the fence and thought, 'Okay, we'll lower the age group' next year, and so they accepted nine-year-olds," recalls the third of the eight Goolagong children. "I was on my way." Within 12 months, she had improved so much that the coaches called their boss, "Mr Edwards", as Evonne always called him. This one's a natural, they said. Come and see her. While the rest is history, of a good kind, Evonne was oblivious. "I was too busy doing the clinics and enjoying being on the court." She still does. As her mother waved her off to local tournaments, it was always with the same words. "Mum used to say, 'Bye, have a lovely day,' because she never knew anything about tennis, and when I'd come back she'd say, 'Did you have a lovely day?' I always remember that, so I always tell the kids during our camps to have fun with it, to 'have a lovely day'. ➝ As a 12-year-old on court with doubles partner Patricia Edwards "Every time I hit the ball against the wall with an apple- crate board, which is how I started, I used to pretend that I was on that magical court" ITFWorld // SPRING 2018 09 At Wimbledon in 1979 E V O N N E G O O L A G O N G C A W L E Y

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