As a 25-year-old seventh seed at Wimbledon in 1949,
Gussie Moran made jaws drop and flashbulbs pop at the usually staid All-England Club in London when she showed up for her first match minus the knee-length skirt considered proper for women at the time.
She lost the match, but her striking fashion statement appeared on magazine covers around the world, the British press dubbing her "Gorgeous Gussie."
"She had no idea what she was getting into," Neworth said. "She definitely liked fashion and was very attractive, but she was very naive and hadn't traveled much."
Moran was ranked as high as fourth in the United States, would be a doubles finalist at Wimbledon and reach the singles semifinals at the U.S. Open, but would always struggle to be known for more than the skirt and the "Gorgeous Gussie" moniker she got from the British press.
"Gussie was the Anna Kournikova of her time," tennis great Jack Kramer said in 2002 in the Los Angeles Times, which first reported her death. "Gussie was a beautiful woman with a beautiful body. If Gussie had played in the era of television, no telling what would have happened. Because, besides everything else, Gussie could play."
In the 1960s she was once on a helicopter crash in Vietnam that left her with chronic pain and anxiety. The accident was the beginning of a downward spiral for Moran. For years, it seemed, her career and personal life were constantly in turmoil. She was sexually assaulted in 1975, leaving her battered and depressed. Broke, she worked anonymously in the Los Angeles Zoo’s gift shop for a time. She survived the last two decades of her life on Social Security after selling all the mementos from her tennis career, including her famous lace panties.
Original monochrome picture here
https://i.imgur.com/z3C8ZKF.jpg
As a bonus today, this restoration/recolorization of a British magazine cover. The picture was in pretty bad shape.
Original here https://i.imgur.com/8iRPWDy.jpg
I had to take extreme measures to get rid of all that noise. No programs do a perfect job at that. When it removes lots of noise it blurs the image too much.
That Gussie Moran became a sex symbol following the panties incident in 1949 is not so hard to believe by looking at this picture. She really was a very beautiful woman. She is actually wearing the dress and panties (minus the red items) that she wore the year before at Wimbledon.
It asks "What next Gussie?" because she had just recently decided to leave the International Tennis Tour. She Accepted a $87,000 contract from Jack Kramer and Bobby Riggs to join them and Pauline Betz for a series of professional matches. They wanted Moran on-board mostly for her sex appeal, despite the fact she hadn’t won a major tournament. That amount would be estimated at almost $900,000 today. Unfortunately for them, sometimes the arenas were half empty.
