Biography | Marion Jones — the challenge round was a rule about travel, and at San Rafael in 1898 it settled a championship with nobody on the court

On the morning of Friday 9 September 1898, on a tennis court at San Rafael in Marin County, California, Marion Jones won the ladies' singles championship of the Pacific Coast. She beat Anna H. Martin, the champion of Nevada, 6-1, 6-2, 6-2 in the final round. Then she was given the championship, because the holder did not come.

The association's own annual for the following year sets both facts on one page. Miss Bee Hooper, it says, did not appear to defend her title as champion, so the championship went to Miss Jones by default. Lower down the same page, in the block of scores, the championship round is entered as Miss Jones defeated Miss Hooker, by default.

**What a challenge round was, and why it was a rule about travel.**

Under the challenge round the holder of a title played nobody until the rest of the field had produced a challenger. Everyone else entered a tournament called the all-comers'; its winner then played one match, against the holder, for the championship. The holder's whole season could be that single match.

The arrangement had a consequence that nobody appears to have set out to create. Because the holder played only once, and only at whatever ground the association had fixed for the event, a holder who was somewhere else on the day lost the title without playing. There was no other way to defend it. In a country of that size, and in a game that paid its players nothing, that made a championship partly a question of where you lived and what you could afford to do about it.

Marion Jones's four seasons show the mechanism working from every side, and two of the four turned at this ground.

**1898, San Rafael: the title gained.**

She came to San Rafael in September 1898 as the national all-comers' champion, having won that tournament at Philadelphia in June and then lost the challenge round to Juliette Atkinson. This platform's entry on that Philadelphia match is written from Atkinson's side. Three months later, on the other side of the continent, Jones won an all-comers' tournament again and this time the holder did not appear, so the challenge round was not played and the title was hers.

The annual's account of the play is worth having, because it is one of very few descriptions of how any of these women actually struck a ball. It says Jones played almost entirely from the base-line and put considerable force into all her strokes, that her backhand and forehand were equally good, and that she made few nets and outs. Alice Hoffman, it says, was her strongest opponent, ran to the net on every occasion, and was passed down the lines and across court.

**1899, Philadelphia: the same thing at national level.**

On 24 June 1899, at Wissahickon Heights outside Philadelphia, Jones won the final of the national all-comers' and took the championship of the United States because Atkinson, the holder, did not defend. A dispatch went out from Philadelphia that evening and was set independently by at least three printers: the New-York Tribune of 25 June on page six, the Saint Paul Globe of the same morning on page fifteen, and the Richmond Dispatch of the same morning on page thirteen.

All three set the same clause about what had happened. Jones, they say, had

"carried off the honors, and now holds the title"

and of Atkinson two of the three settings agree word for word that she

"will not defend it"

with the Tribune's scan failing at exactly that point.

The three settings do not agree on what the event was called. The Tribune sets the women's championships, plural; the Saint Paul Globe sets the women's championship, singular; the Richmond Dispatch sets the woman's championship. Three papers on one morning, printing one dispatch, gave the tournament three different names. The Richmond setting also drops the words of Staten Island from Atkinson's entry, which is an editor's cut rather than a divergence. The Saint Paul scan damages two characters inside the first quoted stretch, where the other two settings are clean, and that is a fault of the scan rather than of the compositor.

The score of the all-comers' final is given as 6-1, 6-1 in both settings that print it, against Maud Banks of the Philadelphia Cricket Club; the two disagree on the last set, which the Saint Paul table gives as 7-5 and which the Tribune's scan renders as 7-3. No reading is adopted here.

**1900: the title lost the same way it was won.**

The association's annual for 1901, reporting the season of 1900, disposes of it in two sentences: the single championship was won by Miss McAteer rather easily, and Miss Marion Jones did not defend her title. She was abroad. The chronicler J. Parmly Paret, writing in 1904, says she was abroad and defaulted to the challenger, and this platform's entry on Myrtle McAteer is written from the challenger's side.

Nothing read here says the association considered moving the tournament, or holding the challenge round at a second venue, or asking the holder when she would be in the country. Paret writes that the women's championship tournaments had always been held in Philadelphia, and the roll of champions printed in his volume begins in 1887.

**1900, San Rafael again: the same non-event at the same ground.**

In the same season in which Jones lost the national title without playing for it, the Pacific Coast ladies' championship was decided at San Rafael for the second time in three years, and it went the same way. The annual records that the previous year's event, held at Del Monte near Monterey, had been won by Violet Sutton of Southern California, that she did not come north to defend, and that the championship round was therefore won by default. The new champion beat Alice Hoffman in the final round, 6-2, 6-3, having beaten two others to reach it.

So at this ground, in 1898 and again in 1900, a championship of the Pacific Coast changed hands with nobody on the court for the match that decided it. On the other side of the country the national title did the same in 1899 and 1900. Four championships in three years, none of them settled by a championship match, and the same rule behind all four.

There is a second mechanism visible here and it is the venue. The women's Pacific Coast event was at San Rafael in 1898, at Del Monte in 1899, and back at San Rafael in 1900. A holder had to follow it. The men's Pacific Coast singles, by contrast, was at San Rafael in 1896 and 1897 by two newspapers' reports, was entered for San Rafael in the 1899 fixture list printed a season ahead, and was at San Rafael again in 1900 and in the 1901 fixture list.

**Who she was, and how loosely the record was kept.**

The sources consulted here give her name and origin in five different formulations, naming four different places and spelling her first name two ways. The 1899 wire, in all three settings, enters her as Miss Marion Jones, of Pasadena, Cal. The Los Angeles Herald, printing a picture of her a week after the San Rafael final, calls her Miss Marian Jones of Santa Monica and adds that she is the daughter of Senator Jones of Nevada. The San Francisco Call, announcing a match she was to play at the California Tennis Club that same month, calls her Miss Marion Jones of Nevada. The Providence News, reporting the 1901 championship, calls her Miss Marion Jones of Nevada. Paret in 1904 calls her Miss Marion Jones of California. The association's annual for 1901 calls her Miss Marion Jones of far-away California. Nothing here reconciles them, and the point is not that any of them is wrong. The Los Angeles Herald's caption is the only source read here that offers any explanation, in giving her father a Senate seat for Nevada. What a period source records is where a paper or a draw sheet said a player came from, which is not the same question as where she lived.

The looseness is not confined to her. The annual prints Hooper and Hooker for the same woman within a dozen lines of one page. The 1901 annual calls the new Pacific Coast champion Miss Marion Hall of San Francisco; the San Francisco Call, listing the same tournament's entries, calls her Miss Miriam Hall of the California Club. The 1901 annual also names Miss Violet Sutton of Southern California, a surname this platform has already met in its entry on May Sutton, who came from the same part of the state; no source read here states a relationship between them and none is asserted.

That the bodies keeping this record could not hold a competitor's name steady down one page is itself a fact about how much attention the women's game was getting.

**Amateur-era note.**

Every title named above belongs to a competition closed to anyone who had ever been paid to play, which is the footing all pre-1968 material on this platform sits on. It bears here in a specific way. The rule that decided these championships assumed a holder could be at a fixed ground on a fixed date at her own expense, and the people who wrote it were the people for whom that assumption held.

**Correction to a neighbouring entry.**

This platform's entry on Myrtle McAteer says of the 1899 national championship that it went to Marion Jones, who did not have to play for it. That is loose and is narrowed here. Jones played the all-comers' tournament and won its final. What she did not play was the challenge round, because Atkinson did not appear for it. The distinction is the whole of this entry's argument and the McAteer entry should be read with it.

**Scope note.** This is a biography anchored at a place in its subject's life, on the same footing as this platform's other player entries pinned at grounds and public courts. The Pacific Coast championship enters as the instrument that shows the rule; this is not the opening of an arc about that circuit, which would be a separate decision.

**Gaps this entry declares.**

No source read here names the club or hotel in the 9 September 1898 report itself; the Los Angeles Herald places the final at the San Rafael tennis court and nothing more. The identification of that court with the courts of the Hotel Rafael rests on two other papers reporting the Pacific Coast championship there in 1896 and in 1897, and is an inference across one and two years respectively. It is not established here that the hotel's courts were the only tennis courts in San Rafael.

Nothing read here gives the date in September 1898 on which the doubles championship was played beyond the annual's statement that the ladies' singles occurred on its morning, the ninth. Nothing read here establishes where Bee Hooper was, or why she did not come, and no account of her absence is offered. The dates of the 1900 national championship at which Jones defaulted are not established here; only the year is. The 1900 Pacific Coast tournament's dates are given as the 25th and 26th of August by the annual and as beginning on the 24th by the San Francisco Call of the 25th, and neither is adopted.

No photograph of the Hotel Rafael or of its courts is offered here. Period views of the hotel exist in a Californian digital archive, but their rights status was not established in this session and none was used.

**Coordinate.** 37.977558, -122.520194, precision radius 500 m. This pin does not meet this platform's two-independent-source standard and is published with that disclosure.

The corner is named by a regional history publication, which places the Hotel Rafael's entrance at the corner of Belle Avenue and Rafael Drive in San Rafael and reports that two concrete gate towers still stand there. No period plan or map of the hotel was consulted. The two coordinates averaged into the pin are a commercial road-network geocoder at 37.977559, -122.520206 and the United States Census Bureau's geocoder at 37.977556, -122.520182. They agree to about two metres, but they are two providers running the same kind of estimate on the same road network, which is one reading and not two. OpenStreetMap's surveyed geometry for Rafael Drive centres its northern segment about 110 m east of this pin; that is a different object and was not averaged in.

The radius is 500 m for a reason separate from the weakness above. The pin is the hotel's entrance corner, which is what the sources name and what physically survives. The courts were somewhere on the grounds, and the two accounts consulted give those grounds as 21 acres and as 43 acres. Even the smaller figure is a square roughly 290 m on a side. Nothing read here says where on that ground the court stood, and a tighter radius would claim knowledge this entry does not have.

The hotel itself was built in 1887 or 1888 depending on which account is read, and burned in 1928; the land was sold in 1939 and became a residential subdivision. The ground under this pin is a residential street.

**Cover.** Page 327 of The Book of Sport, published in New York by J. F. Taylor and Company in 1904, digitised from the University of Toronto's copy and served by the Internet Archive, which catalogues the item as not in copyright. The full leaf is 2748 x 3900 px and was opened and read at full size. The page is used entire rather than cropped because the page is the document. It carries, set into the right-hand side of the text block, a halftone portrait captioned Miss Marion Jones, measuring about 851 x 1475 px on the leaf: a head-and-shoulders studio photograph of a young woman, her shoulders angled away from the camera and her face turned back toward it, dark hair worn high with light flowers set in it, in a pale high-necked lace bodice. Around it runs J. Parmly Paret's chronology of lawn tennis, including his sentences about her 1899 title by default and her 1900 default while abroad, and at the foot of the page his engraved signature. Nothing else is printed on the leaf.

Two things about the source belong with the picture. Paret was not a detached witness: the record page in his own volume lists him as the winner of the men's all-comers' tournament of 1899, and the book is a commercial publication by J. F. Taylor and Company rather than an association one. And the book's copyright page forbids reproduction of its portraits, a prohibition printed in 1904 and long since lapsed, which is why the page can be published here.

**Second image.** Page 122 of Wright and Ditson's Officially Adopted Lawn Tennis Guide for 1899, which reports the season of 1898, 2356 x 3830 px, from the Internet Archive's copy, opened and read at full size. It is plain letterpress with no illustration. It is included because it is the document the first half of this entry rests on, and because the contradiction is visible on it without magnification: the prose paragraph names Miss Bee Hooper as the holder who did not appear, and the block of scores lower on the page enters the championship round as won from Miss Hooker. The page also carries the annual's description of Jones's strokes and the full set of scores from the tournament. Every halftone plate in this particular volume failed to print in this scan, a fault established in earlier research for this platform's tennis entries and re-checked here; the letterpress pages are unaffected, which is why a text page and not a portrait is used here.

**Sourcing note.** Two passages above are in quotation marks. Both are from the dispatch of 24 June 1899 as set independently by different printers, read as machine-read page text rather than through any summarising layer, which is this platform's condition for quotation marks. The first is rendered identically by the New-York Tribune and the Richmond Dispatch; the Saint Paul Globe sets the same words and its scan damages two characters within them, which is stated above rather than hidden. The second is rendered identically by the Saint Paul Globe and the Richmond Dispatch, the Tribune's scan having failed there. The divergences between the three settings are reported in the body. No headline is quoted from any of them, because a headline is written by the paper and not by the wire. Everything else on this page is attributed paraphrase, including every passage from the two annuals, from The Book of Sport, and from the Los Angeles Herald.

**Sources.** Wright and Ditson's Officially Adopted Lawn Tennis Guide for 1899, pages 121 to 122, for the Ladies' Pacific Coast Championship of 9 September 1898 and page 180 for the 1899 fixture list: https://archive.org/details/wrightditsonoff16unkngoog , text at https://archive.org/download/wrightditsonoff16unkngoog/wrightditsonoff16unkngoog_djvu.txt , page image at https://archive.org/download/wrightditsonoff16unkngoog/page/n142.jpg . Wright and Ditson's guide for 1901, reporting the season of 1900, for Jones not defending, for McAteer's win, and for the ladies' Pacific Coast championship at San Rafael on 25 and 26 August 1900: https://archive.org/details/wrightditsonoff10unkngoog . New-York Tribune, 25 June 1899, page 6: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1899-06-25/ed-1/?sp=6 . The Saint Paul Globe, 25 June 1899, page 15: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn90059523/1899-06-25/ed-1/?sp=15 . Richmond Dispatch, 25 June 1899, page 13: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85038614/1899-06-25/ed-1/?sp=13 . Los Angeles Herald, 19 September 1898, page 3, for the final having been played at the San Rafael tennis court and for Santa Monica and Senator Jones of Nevada: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85042461/1898-09-19/ed-1/?sp=3 . The San Francisco Call, 18 September 1898, page 15, for the match announced at the California Tennis Club and for Nevada: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85066387/1898-09-18/ed-1/?sp=15 . The San Francisco Call, 25 August 1900, page 4, for the San Rafael entries and Violet Sutton not defending: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85066387/1900-08-25/ed-1/?sp=4 . The San Francisco Call, 5 July 1896, page 9, for the Pacific Coast championship on the courts of Hotel Rafael: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85066387/1896-07-05/ed-1/?sp=9 . The Record-Union, Sacramento, 4 July 1897, page 5, for the same: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82015104/1897-07-04/ed-1/?sp=5 . The Providence News, 29 June 1901, page 3, for the 1901 final and for Nevada: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91070630/1901-06-29/ed-1/?sp=3 . The Book of Sport, New York, 1904, for Paret's chronology and the cover image: https://archive.org/details/bookofsport00newyuoft , cover at https://archive.org/download/bookofsport00newyuoft/page/n350.jpg . The hotel's corner, its gate towers, its acreage, its fire and the subdivision of its land, from Marin Magazine's history article on the Hotel Rafael: https://marinmagazine.com/community/history/the-luxurious-hotel-rafael/ , with the smaller acreage figure from the Marin County pages at https://legacy.sfgenealogy.org/marin/ourtowns/ot_sr.htm .