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The American tennis star Darlene
Hard gritted her teeth. Despite retiring
from the circuit five years earlier to
coach, she was back on the big stage, in
the 1969 US Open doubles final, but
staring defeat in the face. She and her
scratch partner, the cerebral French-
woman Françoise Dürr, had just lost
the first eight games to trail 0-6 0-2
against the top seeds, Margaret Court
and Virginia Wade.
“We can’t lose like this,” she told Dürr.
“We’ve got to at least get one ‘1’ up on
the scoreboard.” The pair regrouped,
the unorthodox Dürr lobbing viciously
and Hard net-rushing in the teeth of
their opponents’ majestic attacking
shots. Suddenly the balance of the
match shifted. Hard’s crisp volleys and
overheads began finding their mark
while the favourites looked vulnerable
for the first time. The underdogs with
nothing to lose hit out freely as they
began a sensational comeback.
They levelled at set-all then at 5-4 in
the deciding set, match point up, Hard
served and rocketed to the net, blasting
a high backhand volley past the dumb-
founded Wade to take the match. The
spectators roared as Hard and Dürr
hugged, incredulous at the unlikely
result. Bud Collins, the tennis historian,
later described it as “one of the most re-
markable and crowd-pleasing victories
of the year”.
The upset was typical of Hard’s in-
domitable spirit and the overwhelming
confidence that, despite her diminutive
stature, had brought her three Grand
Slam singles titles and 18 doubles majors
in a glittering amateur career. Ironically,
however, her best known performance
was her straight sets defeat by Althea
Gibson in the 1957 Wimbledon final,
which made the African-American the
first black champion. Hard gained a
measure of consolation in the doubles
final, teaming up with Gibson to take the
title with the loss of only three games.
Despite her outstanding record in the
Wightman Cup, spearheading four
American victories over Britain, in the
late 1950s and early 1960s the independ-
ent-minded Hard fell foul of official-
dom, partly through her frankness
about her sexuality. At a time when
same-sex relationships were consid-
ered shameful and were generally
shrouded in secrecy, her intimacy with
several women, including the charis-
matic Brazilian star Maria Bueno, made
her controversial and she was briefly
dropped from the US national side.
Darlene Ruth Hard was born in 1936
in Los Angeles and raised in nearby
Montebello. Her sporty father, an offi-
cial with a trucking company, intro-
duced her to male-dominated sports
including baseball, football and basket-
ball, while her ambitious mother, Ruth,
a secretary and keen tennis player,
coached her regularly on public courts.
Hard was an athletic child and excelledHard studied paediatrics at Pomona
College from 1957 and won the first
women’s inter-collegiate title. Asked to
hit with a 13-year-old rising star, Billie
Jean Moffitt, she recognised a cham-
pion in the making and regularly made
the three-hour round trip between
Pomona and Long Beach in heavy traf-
fic to drive her protégée to coaching
sessions. Decades later Billie Jean King,
as she became, paid tribute to Hard’s
training regime. “It changed my out-
look,” she wrote, “because I got my first
extended taste of what it meant to play
at a high level.”
In 1963 the pair teamed up to clinch
the crucial rubber in the inaugural
Federation Cup team event — now
named after King — saving two match
points in the final against Australia.
On retiring from the tour in 1964
Hard became a professional coach and
ran two sports shops, though she never
mentioned her past achievements. In
the mid-70s one of her pupils, Mona
Cravens, the University of Southern
California publications director,
recruited her to a role in design and
computer systems maintenance at the
university and she worked there for the
next four decades. Cravens described
her as “gruff on the outside, but a real
softy on the inside”.
Hard’s sister, Claire Brundage,
survives her. Her brief marriage to
Richard Waggoner Jr ended in divorce
and she had no children.
Hard played mainly in the amateur
era for little more than basic travel
expenses and £10 Lillywhites vouchers,
even for winning Wimbledon titles. Her
only proper pay-day had come in 1969,
the year after the introduction of Open
tennis. She received a modest $1,000 for
her US Open doubles triumph but, in
later life, she insisted she did not envy
the current generation of multi-
millionaire players their fame and
wealth.
“We played,” she said, “because we
loved the game.”Darlene Hard, tennis champion, was born
on January 6, 1936. She died of
complications following a fall on
December 11, 2021, aged 85Divo when he contracted Covid-19; he
made his last appearance on stage with
the group in Bath on December 6 and
two days later was taken to hospital in
Manchester, whereupon the rest of the
tour was cancelled. He had previously
caught the virus in December 2019 and
received a vaccine in Mexico, where he
lived for part of the year, his agent said.
He is survived by his former wife, theDarlene Hard
Confident Californian tennis champion who lost the 1957 Wimbledon final to Althea Gibson and mentored Billie Jean King
DENNIS OULDS/GETTY IMAGES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGESCarlos Marín
Spanish baritone who rose to fame in the UK with Il Divo, the chart-topping pop opera group formed by Simon Cowell
When the pop impresario Simon Cow-
ell decided that classical music needed
to be sexed up in order to sell it to a
mainstream popular audience, he spent
two years auditioning hundreds of
hopefuls before finding Carlos Marín
and his three fellow singers who made
up Il Divo.
“When Carlos sang every hair on the
back of my neck stood up,” Cowell said.
“To my untrained ear he was as close to
a star as I’d ever heard.”
Like a cross between the Three
Tenors and One Direction, the quartet
created a genre all their own. It came to
be known as “popera”, as Marín and his
classically-trained colleagues delivered
pop standards such as Bridge Over
Troubled Water and The Time of Our
Lives in operatic tones over romantic
string arrangements.
Cowell’s hunch that he could sell
operatic singing to an audience that
would never set foot in the Royal Opera
House to see La traviata proved to be
commercially astute. As the world’s
most mature boy band Il Divo went on
to sell more than 30 million albums.
Contracted to dress exclusively in
suits by Giorgio Armani and accesso-
rised by Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci,
the group cut a dash as clean-cut and
polished as their music and were mar-
keted to appeal to female fans of a
certain age. A 2009 review of one of the
group’s concerts in The Times reported
that the perma-tanned Marín was “the
main target of Il Divo’s knicker-throw-
ing fans”.
Critical appraisals of Il Divo’s music
centred around the old canard of low art
versus high art. Peter Paphides, the
former chief rock and pop critic of The
Times, called them “The Four Cheeses”.
Their award at the Classical Brits in 2011
when they were voted “artist of the
decade” over the likes of Bryn Terfel and
Anna Netrebko was resented in some
quarters. Members of the group were
vocal in expressing their hurt at what
they considered to be the “sniffy” atti-
tude of the broadsheet press.
What was often overlooked in the
polemical exchanges was that Marín’s
baritone blended attractively with the
tenors of David Miller, Urs Bühler and
the French pop singer Sébastien Izam-
bard, and their singing gave pleasure to
millions. The group’s concerts were
guaranteed sell-outs and their 2009
world tour “An Evening with Il Divo”,
on which they played 130 dates across
six continents, broke box office records.
Marín was on a tour of Britain with IlFrench-born singer Geraldine Larrosa,
better known by her stage name Inno-
cence. Although they divorced in 2009
they remained on good terms and had
recently recorded a cover of Queen’s
Bohemian Rhapsody together.
Carlos Marín Menchero was born in
1968 near Rüsselsheim, West Germany,
to Spanish parents, Carlos Marín Snr
and Magdalena Menchero. He grew up
in Madrid and held joint German-
Spanish nationality.
Several of his pre-teen years were
spent in the Netherlands, where he
made his recording debut at the age of
eight with an album titled The Little
Caruso, produced by the Dutch singer-
songwriter Pierre Kartner. The family
returned to Spain when he was 12 and
he took singing lessons from the tenor
Alfredo Kraus and the operatic sopra-
no Montserrat Caballé, herself no
stranger to “popera” crossovers via her
Barcelona duet with Freddie Mercury.
As a teenager Marín won several
television talent shows and by his 20s
had graduated to musical theatre, per-
forming in productions of Les Miséra-
bles and Grease and in traditional Span-
ish zarzuelas and singing operatic roles
in The Barber of Seville, Madam Butterfy
and La bohème. When Il Divo formed in2003 he was in his mid-thirties and the
most experienced of the quartet. The
group’s debut album the following year,
which included foreign language
versions of My Way and Unbreak My
Heart, knocked Robbie Williams off the
British charts and went to No 1 in 13
countries.
The group’s third release, Ancora,
became the only classical crossover
album to top the US pop chart. There
were collaborations with Céline Dion
and Engelbert Humperdinck, a tour
with Barbra Streisand and performan-
ces at an inauguration ball in Washing-
ton for President Obama and at Wind-
sor for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
When Il Divo were resting Marín
toured his own solo show, with concerts
across North and South America,
Europe and Asia.
“Singing is my way of saying what I
feel, my way of life,” he said. “Singing is
what makes me feel alive.”Carlos Marín, Il Divo singer, was born on
October 13, 1968. He died after
contracting Covid-19 on December 19,
2021, aged 53Marín on stage in California, 2018Email: [email protected]Darlene Hard in 1955, and after defeat by Althea Gibson in 1957at all ball games, but she
showed particular pro-
mise at tennis where
her natural aggression
and speed around the
court made her a for-
midable opponent.
By her early teens she
was being mentored by
tennis greats such as Perry Jones and
Alice Marble at the Los Angeles Tennis
Club, which produced most of the top
US juniors. She enjoyed early success
and although academically gifted she
joined the tennis circuit after high
school, sharpening her game through
hard-fought battles with big namessuch as Doris Hart, Maureen Connolly
and Shirley Fry. She was soon ranked
inside the world top 10 and after losing
two Wimbledon singles finals, in 1957
and 1959, to Gibson and Bueno respec-
tively, she won her first major singles
crown, the 1960 French Championship,
thrashing the Mexican Yola Ramirez
after putting out Bueno in the semis.
That summer she again beat Bueno,
in a cliffhanger, to take the first of two
successive US National titles. However,
she was best known for her doubles
skills, underlining her versatility by
winning 13 women’s and five mixed
crowns with eight different partners,
including Bueno, Shirley Brasher (née
Bloomer) and Rod Laver, who declared
that her overheads were even deadlier
than his.
“She was a clever, unpredictable
player who was enormously competi-
tive and lightning-fast round the court,”
remembered her British rival Angela
Barrett (née Mortimer), “and she’d al-
ways give you the shot you’d find most
awkward to
play.”
Through-
out her life
Hard dis-
liked proto-
col and gen-
erally insist-
ed on doing
things her
way. She or-
ganised her
own practice
sessions
before team
champion-
ships, lead-
ing the US
captain
Margaret
Osborne du-
Pont to label
her “a disrupting element”. When the
Queen presented the 1957 Wimbledon
trophies, Hard and Gibson both curt-
sied obediently, but while Gibson
backed away afterwards, as instructed,
Hard ignored the diktat, turned her
back on the Queen and skipped back to
the changing room.po
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