Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations
In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Jadwiga Jędrzejowska [POL]Born: 15 October 1912
Died: 28 February 1980
Career: 1929-62
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1937)
Peak Elo rating: 2,207 (1st place, 1938)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 67
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When Jadwiga Jędrzejowska made her first appearance at Roland Garros in 1931, a French newspaper referred to her as “the Polish woman, whose name is as massive as her drives.” It didn’t take long for fans to catch on to the sheer power of her forehand, which made her the best player in Poland before her 16th birthday.
Her name was more difficult for international fans to grasp. In 1933, a London newspaper explained that Jędrzejowska’s rise “is why BBC announcers turn grey.” American reporters were still clarifying the pronunciation four years later. She simplified it to “Yen-dray-ow-ska … not really accurate but it is close enough.” When Alice Marble assisted an English reporter with his own representation, the printed result was–and I can only hope this was a joke–“Eeadjeffska.” Fans resorted to nicknames, calling her “Jed” or “Ja-Ja” or “Zsa-Zsa.” At home, she was “Jadzia.”
Opponents might have struggled with her name as well, but their primary difficulty was keeping up with her forehand. At the 1933 Surrey Championships, where she played only her second-ever tournament on an indoor wood court, the London Sunday Dispatch wrote, “she made a number of shots which no woman player in the world could have returned.” Even with practice, few of her colleagues could match her on the ground. Marble played competitive tennis for almost a decade before facing Jędrzejowska, but after a match with the Polish woman in 1937, she said, “I believe it was the first time I was ever outhit.”
Ja-Ja’s raw power, coupled with a steady backhand and surprising speed, was enough to reach three major singles finals and defeat every significant player of her era. In Poland, she nearly wiped out the competition altogether, winning 22 national singles titles, one of them because no one else dared challenge her. Her homeland wasn’t known for producing Wimbledon champions, but then again, as she often said, she was born on a tennis court.
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Jędrzejowska’s quip was almost literally true. Her parents were poor, but their house was adjacent to the courts of the Krakow Academic Sports Association. From a young age, she worked for tips as a ballgirl to contribute to the family coffers. It was a small step from there to a borrowed racket and a glimmer of the power to come.
Her father gave her a homemade racket, and when her friends copied her to make their own, they staged tournaments. Before long, Jadzia was much better than her friends, and she similarly outstripped her fellow teenage girls at the local club. The alternative was to play with the boys. Reporters would later write that she hit her forehand like a man–well, that’s part of the reason why.
By age 15, she had gained national recognition. The newspaper Przegląd Sportowy wrote that no one in Poland hit such drives. She was the sensation of the national championships. Two years later, she took a new crowd by storm at the German Championships, just her second international trip. She forced eventual finalist Hilde Krahwinkel (later Sperling, and a future three-time major champion) to three sets in the second round. A few months later in Merano, she nearly upset Cilly Aussem–the woman who beat Krahwinkel in Hamburg and would win Wimbledon the following year–pushing her to 10-8 in the decider.
Jędrzejowska made her major debut at Roland Garros in 1931. The draw did her no favors, but she managed to impress local experts, going three sets against 5th-seeded veteran Elizabeth Ryan and reaching the semi-finals of the consolation draw. A month later at Wimbledon, she held her own against two-time champion Kitty Godfree, losing another three-setter. Her 8-9 record in 1931 hardly presaged the feats to come, but only two of those losses were in straight sets.
The London Observer offered a brief profile in 1934, when Jędrzejowska was still working her way up the ladder:
Small, dark, and incredibly active, the Polish champion is most attractive to watch. No half measures with her: a fiery and sustained attack is the basis of her game. She hits the ball as if she hated it, and covers the court as quickly as any girl has ever done. Full of courage, the more renowned her opponent the more determinedly does Mlle. Jedrzejowska set about the task of beating her–and her pluck often carries her through.
The Observer sketch turned out to be a bit of a jinx; Ja-Ja fell in the Wimbledon fourth round in a lopsided match against Sarah Palfrey (later Palfrey Cooke). Her ascent to the top of the game would take time.
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1935 brought another step forward. The Polish star improved on her Wimbledon result, reaching the quarter-finals before losing to Helen Jacobs, 6-1, 7-5. She went on a tear after the Championships, winning four titles, including two on English grass over the newest star on the British circuit, Anita Lizana. The Birmingham Gazette reported that “the two girls played a titanic match” to decided the Midland Counties championship in Edgbaston. The paper added of the Polish-Chilean pair, “Although they could not understand one another a firm friendship sprang up between the girls.”
1936 was even better. Jędrzejowska opened her season on the French Riviera, where she–like her pal Lizana–had trouble with the steady Frenchwoman, Simonne Mathieu. After losing two matches to Mathieu in Monte Carlo and Cannes, Ja-Ja got her revenge in Vienna, winning the Austrian national title in what one Viennese newspaper called “an almost endless, nerve-wracking struggle.” The Pole saved seven match points in the second set of a two-and-one-half-hour battle that was finally decided in her favor, 4-6, 7-5, 15-13.
At Wimbledon, she continued her steady progress, this year reaching the semi-finals. In a quarter-final against British hope Kay Stammers, Jed may have played her best tennis yet. “Such was the hair-line judgment of Miss Jedrzejowska’s driving … that it was never perfectly safe to go up, even on the widest and deepest balls.” The London Evening Standard continued, “After she had been passed on three occasions, Miss Stammers abandoned her net campaign.”
This year, she met Jacobs one step closer to the title match, but the result was the same, a 6-4, 6-2 semi-final loss to the woman who would win the tournament. The London Daily Herald wrote, “She appeared to be overwhelmed by the occasion,” a criticism Ja-Ja would hear again.
Jędrzejowska defended her post-Wimbledon victories at the Midland Counties and Welsh Championships. Both titles came against German opponents, prompting one testy letter to the editor about the inappropriateness of a championship of Wales decided between women named Jędrzejowska and Kraus. Presumably, that correspondent was happier when Jed finished her season at home, winning a couple of tournaments in Poland.
She could count eight titles–plus the Wimbledon semi-final–from her 1936 campaign. For the first time, Ja-Ja was a consensus top-ten player, slotting in at sixth on most of the lists published in contemporary newspapers. The best was still yet to come.
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1937 brought a new challenge: Alice Marble. In a little over two months, Jędrzejowska would face the American five times. Unlike anyone else Marble played so many times, Jed got the better of the matchup, winning four of their 1937 duels.
They played twice in the run-up to Wimbledon, and both matches went three sets. Despite the scorelines, the Polish star was clearly the better player. The Observer told the story of the second final, at the Kent Championships in Beckenham:
[Mlle. Jędrzejowska drove] with tremendous power and [showed] complete superiority as far as ground shots were concerned. Mlle. Jędrzejowska’s shots certainly do travel at a rate of knots, and often so completely beat her opponent that Miss Marble’s “Ah! beautiful!” was heard more than once…. [Miss Marble’s] ground-strokes were not comparable to her opponent’s: service and volleying are great assets, but they will not win matches by themselves.
Their third meeting, in the Wimbledon semi-finals, continued in the same vein. The crowd oohed and awed over Ja-Ja’s power, and the Evening Standard neatly summed up the contrast between “Marble, perhaps the finest volleyer, and Miss Jędrzejowska, certainly the hardest driver, among the Wimbledon women”
Jed was often described as “sturdy,” a diplomatic adjective from reporters who could hardly let a paragraph pass without describing a woman player’s physical appearance. But the Evening Standard made clear that her game was more than just power:
Miss Jędrzejowska herself is no mere ‘hit and hope’ player; now and then she pulled out an awkwardly angled short ball and made the other scamper…. Miss Jędrzejowska would be a wonderful recruit for any club of women track runners. Over and over again she raced wide one way, then wide the other to pick up the apparently unreachable. A destroyer for speed, a battle cruiser for power.
The women played twice more on the American swing, splitting two finals in Seabright and Rye. After Marble lost the final in Rye, her coach Eleanor Tennant had seen enough, saying, “Stupid cautious tennis ruins the game for players as well as spectators. You can’t specialize in patball tennis from the backcourt. Go to the net and gamble.”
Alice would take the advice, and she lost only two more matches in the remainder of her amateur career. Jędrzejowska couldn’t claim Marble’s five-major singles haul, but she deserves some credit for the final nudge that pushed the American to greatness. At one point in their rivalry, Marble said that the Polish star was the best player in the world–high praise from the woman who would soon hold that mantle herself.
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Marble’s assessment is jarring, since Jadwiga Jędrzejowska never won a major, and no writer ever placed her at the top of an international ranking list. The consensus among contemporary journalists was that she came in third at the end of 1937 and that she belonged in the middle of the top ten in 1936, 1938, and 1939.
My Elo ratings agree with the year-end assessments, placing her between 3rd and 6th from 1936 to 1939. But had a more modern, week-by-week ranking system been in place in the late 1930s, we might remember Ja-Ja as the first Polish number one.
The Elo ratings first award Jędrzejowska with the top spot on May 30, 1938, after she claimed her first British title of the season with wins over Nell Hopman, Sarah Palfrey (at that point Mrs. Fabyan), Mary Hardwick, and Dorothy Bundy. Her 52-week record at that point was a whopping 64-4, including 13 titles. The span covers her four wins over Marble, two against Palfrey, and one against her former nemesis, Helen Jacobs.
Ja-Ja (left) with Helen Jacobs, who saved
her personality for the court
History is preoccupied with two of the defeats: Ja-Ja lost in the finals of both Wimbledon and the US National Championships. The first match was a tight loss to Dorothy Round, and the second was more lopsided, against Anita Lizana. Both were great players who could rise to the biggest of occasions. But neither one sustained their form into 1938. Round married and gave birth, skipping the entire 1938 season. Lizana struggled to cope with the pressure as the new national hero of Chile.
Jędrzejowska, on the other hand, just kept winning. She dropped a final to Marble in June of 1938, then defended her titles at Beckenham and Queen’s Club, conclusively beating both Palfrey and Hilde Sperling. On the strength of those wins, despite a quarter-final loss to Jacobs at Wimbledon, she held on to the retrospective, Elo-based number one ranking until August, when Marble finally took it over.
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After Ja-Ja lost in the round of 16 at Forest Hills in 1938, she had less than one year remaining before the European War wiped out competitive tennis for the duration. Rising political tensions–combined with a lingering foot injury–limited her play during that time.
Still, she had a few more highlights in store. In 1939, she reached the Roland Garros final, battling inconsistency in the early rounds before ultimately falling, 6-3, 8-6, to Simonne Mathieu in the title match. Two weeks later, she won her third straight Queen’s Club title with another drubbing of Hilde Sperling. And in July, barely a month before Germany invaded, she won yet another pair of Polish Championships.
When the war began, Jędrzejowska was just shy of her 27th birthday. She may never have regained her 1937 form, but the six-year conflict prevented her from finding out. Instead, she struggled through the war, waiting tables until she could no longer endure serving the German occupiers. Despite a chance to escape to Sweden–arranged by tennis aficionado King Gustav, who also intervened to save Jean Borotra–she stayed at home. By the end of the war, she had lost more than 40 pounds. Her home, along with family mementos and tennis trophies, had burned to the ground.
Yet the woman who was born on a tennis court wasn’t about to give up so easily. When Wimbledon resumed in 1946, Ja-Ja was there. She lost her first match, but she picked up the Wimbledon Plate after winning six matches in the consolation draw. Now in her mid-30s, she successfully defended the Plate in 1947.
Jędrzejowska cut back on her travel, but she continued playing Polish events for more than a decade. She finally retired after winning the triple–singles, doubles, and mixed–at the 1961 national tournament. Even then, she wasn’t done, accepting the invitation of Gladys Heldman to travel to New York for the 1962 US Championships. 25 years after her 1937 run to the final, she lost in the first round. Still, she took a set off of Margot Dittmeyer, a West German 23 years her junior.
More than a decade after her last tournament appearance, a journalist asked Ja-Ja if she was still playing. The 64-year-old said yes–the obviously was implied. “How can you stop?”
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Thanks to Damian Kust and Peter Wetz for research and translation help from the Polish and German, respectively.