Last year, USC alumna Gail Wilson Kenna ’65 came across a weathered newspaper clipping inside of a box filled with mementos while doing research for a tennis memoir she was working on. The 1957 clip showed Darlene Hard, a future member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, presenting a young Kenna with the runner-up trophy at a junior tennis tournament.

“I wanted to know more about this woman who gave that trophy to me,” says Kenna, who titled her book Tennis Talk of a Nobody. “I remember her as being so easy to talk to. So not full of herself.”

Kenna, who played on the USC women’s tennis team from 1961 to 1964, was sad to learn that Hard had died in 2021 at age 85. She was also shocked to discover they had a Trojan connection: Hard spent the last 42 years of her life working at USC in Student Publications.

Kenna had no idea. It seems neither did most people — including hundreds of students who worked on The Daily Trojan newspaper or USC’s El Rodeo yearbook each year. The Hard who handled payroll, ad layouts, yearbook design and distribution, and so many other duties had been one of the very best tennis players in the world in the 1950s and ’60s. She had twice won the singles title at the U.S. Championships (now the U.S. Open), which begins this week at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y. Hard also won six women’s doubles titles at the prestigious tournament.

A hidden gem

“Our students didn’t even know that she was a champion, and rarely did I disclose that because she didn’t want to be interviewed,” says Mona H. Cravens, USC’s longtime director of Student Publications. “But she seemed very happy to be right here.”

Scott Smith started as a reporter at The Daily Trojan in 1997 and was editor-in-chief in the spring of 2001. After graduation, he was hired as an employee and became part of the small staff at USC Publications — where Smith got to know the late tennis champion well.

“She never really wanted to be in the limelight in her job at USC,” Smith says. “There would be many students who would know her for two or three years and it wouldn’t be until maybe the last six months before graduation that they would find out about her previous life. It was just sort of a revelation for them, and it was very exciting.”

One of the few staff members who did know about Hard’s illustrious past is Lynette Merriman, USC Academic Affairs’ associate vice provost for Campus Support and Intervention. The two women were among the earliest to arrive on campus each day and gradually became friends during their early morning walks from the parking structure to the Student Union building where they both worked.

“Darlene was a hidden gem, one of those staff members who gave a good portion of her life to the university,” Merriman says. “She really liked being around young people, seeing what they were bringing to the world and what they had to offer. But she liked to be unassuming and stay in the background.”

‘That was a lifetime ago’

In 1977, Cravens signed up for tennis lessons at Griffith Park in Los Angeles. She was shocked when an employee at the pro shop informed her that her tennis instructor had been U.S. champion in 1960 and 1961. Cravens was soon flipping through encyclopedias inside Doheny Memorial Library on the University Park Campus and was blown away to find page after page about Hard and her on-court accomplishments.

“At my next lesson, I said, ‘Dard [her nickname for Hard], I had no idea that you were a famous tennis player.’ She said, ‘Oh, that was a lifetime ago.’”

Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Hard went on to be ranked among the top 10 singles players in the world from 1957 through 1963 and reached a career high of No. 2 in those rankings in 1957, 1960 and 1961. She is considered by many to be the best doubles player of her generation. But like most top female players of that era, Hard didn’t make much more than expense money despite winning a staggering 21 Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles and mixed doubles.

In 1957, the year she lost to Althea Gibson in the Wimbledon final, Hard teamed up with Gibson at the same tournament to win the women’s doubles title.

A few months after making the first of two Wimbledon singles finals in 1957, Hard returned home to Montebello, where she and her younger sister had been raised by her truck driver father and secretary mother. She began pursuing a degree in pediatric medicine at Pomona College; while a student there, she won the first-ever women’s intercollegiate national singles title. Hard then left college without her degree to return to tennis full-time playing in tournaments around the world until 1964. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1973, the highest honor in the sport.

After she quit international competition, Hard was able to make a living as a tennis instructor. But Cravens was stunned to see Hard — who had once been presented with the runner-up trophy by Queen Elizabeth II on Wimbledon’s Centre Court and who had mentored a young Billie Jean King — clipping coupons from a newspaper.

“Someone who had attained such greatness was totally unrecognized and really struggling just to make a living,” Cravens recalls. “My heart went out to her.”

An unexpected career change

Cravens began paying Hard on occasion to do some accounting work and was impressed with her work ethic and superior organizational skills. In 1981, she approached her tennis instructor with an opportunity to work for her in the student publications department at USC. The former champion happily accepted. As the decades passed and technology evolved, so did Hard’s duties and expertise.

“I think she was especially grateful to have the university as a new avenue for doing meaningful work,” Smith says. “She would always pick up new stuff and want to learn it and engage with the next thing.”

Each spring just before commencement, Hard would set up a table in Hahn Plaza with stacks of yearbooks to distribute to students.

“She would take great, great pride in making sure that everything was accurate,” Smith says. “She always wanted to make sure that she was being true to the students and was upholding the university’s good name and its legacy.”

Rare returns to the world stage

Hard was typically low-key about her tennis career once she arrived at USC. In 2007, for example, she declined to attend a gala dinner in Beverly Hills for the Southern California Tennis Hall of Fame despite being among those inducted that year.

The only time her tennis life and her USC life collided in a public way was during a USC-Colorado basketball game in 2014 at the Galen Center. At the game, Hard was presented with a replica of a trophy from the Federation Cup (now called the Billie Jean King Cup), the largest annual international team competition in women’s sports. Hard was on the U.S. team that won the inaugural competition in 1963, but that team never received individual trophies. Then-USC women’s tennis coach Richard Gallien was among those who arranged for the presentation to take place at USC because of Hard’s longtime employment at the university and her considerable tennis accomplishments.

“I wanted to meet her and tell her how wonderful I thought she was,” says Gallien, who led the Trojans for 22 seasons and now coaches the women’s tennis team at California State University, Los Angeles.

Gallien thought it would have been amazing to have a world champion like Hard attend some Trojan tennis matches or meet with the team a time or two. But he didn’t dare ask.

“I would’ve pushed for it, but I didn’t think it would be well received,” he says. “I could tell that was not her cup of tea.”

But there were also a few times during her years at USC that Hard was convinced to return to the world stage. In 1997, she joined Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Steffi Graf and other past U.S. Open champions at the opening ceremony for the just-opened Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City. That same year, Hard was inducted into the Intercollegiate Tennis Hall of Fame.

Three years later, Hard appeared delighted as she returned to Wimbledon’s Centre Court for an even larger event honoring all living singles and doubles champions and singles finalists including Björn Borg, Martina Navratilova and Rod Laver, with whom Hard had won two mixed doubles titles.

After her death, the foundation of the Skull and Dagger Society — the oldest honor society at USC — named one of its six $5,000 scholarships for students of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in Hard’s honor.

“She was a quality person who very few people got to know even though she worked for more than 40 years at USC,” Merriman says. “When she passed away, I felt sorry for people who didn’t know her. I was very fortunate.”