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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Helen Jacobs [USA]Born: 6 August 1908
Died: 2 June 1997
Career: 1924-41
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1936)
Peak Elo rating: 2,228 (1st place, 1936)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 27
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Note: This is Part 2. I recommend starting with Part 1.
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By the early 1930s, Helen Jacobs had at least one advantage over Helen Wills Moody. She was more committed to tennis, and she played more of it.
After losing the 1932 Wimbledon title, Jacobs went home with the rest of the American contingent. Wills stayed in Europe to study painting. The younger Helen had the run of the Eastern swing for the first time, and she made the most of it. She won consecutive titles at Seabright, Maidstone, and Forest Hills, dropping only two sets in 15 matches.
When Time put Jacobs on the cover a few years later, it added the cheeky caption, “Where there isn’t a Wills, there’s a way.” With the elder Helen absent, it was clear just how far Jacobs stood ahead of the field. The New Yorker noticed several outstanding individual strokes belonging to other American women, like the volley of Sarah Palfrey. But Jacobs–now increasingly dubbed Queen Helen II–had “the best-rounded and most effective game.”
The 1933 season proved that Jacobs wasn’t the only princess in waiting. She lost twice to England’s Dorothy Round, a hard-hitter who would finally end Wills’s set streak in the Wimbledon final. (Queen Helen I held on to the title anyway, winning in three.) Jacobs beat Jadwiga Jędrzejowska in the Austrian Championships–her first title on clay–but fell to an even more accomplished dirtballer, Simonne Mathieu, in the semi-finals in Paris.
Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations
The most important development of the European sojourn, however, happened out of competition. Among the many people who wanted to see Jacobs topple Wills was one of the last women to do so herself: Suzanne Lenglen. Lenglen had won her only meeting with the elder Helen back in 1926. She went pro not long afterwards. Suzanne felt that she still knew how to defeat the reigning amateur champion. From the wrong side of the amateur/professional divide, there was no hope of a grudge match to prove it, so her only option was to train someone to win in her place.
The obvious choice was Jacobs. Lenglen gave her some lessons, and like Hazel Wightman a decade earlier, Suzanne found her a willing pupil. The former champion urged Helen to hit deep groundstrokes into the corners–as often as necessary–while retaining a hefty margin of safety. She felt it was a “tennis crime” to miss into the net. Only when it was time to go for the kill should Helen hit flatter balls with a greater risk of error.
Beyond the tactical advice, Lenglen gave Jacobs the confidence that Wills had exploitable weaknesses. Many players, Jacobs later wrote, knew how to beat Wills–they had seen men do so in exhibitions and practice matches. She wasn’t “naturally agile,” so she could struggle when drawn to the net with drop shots. Strong volleyers could beat her by taking the net themselves. The problem was getting there. The elder Helen understood this as well as anyone, and she had “perfected a defense against the volleyer that required on the part of her opponent a baseline game as sound as the net game.”
Suzanne helped close that gap. Jacobs would watch her rival celebrate more victories, but she would never be dominated by “Big Helen” again.
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Both Helens arrived at Forest Hills in 1933 nursing physical ailments. Wills had a back problem that came and went. Jacobs had just been diagnosed with acute gallbladder inflammation. She fainted at her hotel during the Seabright tournament, and her physician recommended that she not play at all.
The two women cruised through the early rounds, then showed their fragility as they neared the finish line. Jacobs was pushed to an 11-9 first set in the quarter-finals by Josephine Cruickshank, a Californian she had handled easily the year before. Wills needed three sets to escape a threat from Betty Nuthall in the semi-finals, a match that brought Queen Helen’s American set streak to a close after more than seven years. Jacobs played her own three-setter in the semis, getting revenge on Round for her defeat at Wimbledon.
Once again, Jacobs would attempt to dethrone her elder on one of the sport’s biggest stages.
She executed the Lenglen game plan to perfection. Her forehand chop–long a weak link in her game–was relentlessly deep and accurate. Her net play was the best anyone had seen all week. Her serve, a reliable standby for the challenger, was as strong as ever, especially under pressure. Playing perhaps the best tennis of her life, Jacobs won the first set, 8-6.
The second seed recognized how much ground remained to be covered. She wrote in Gallery of Champions:
If I was to win, I must maintain my game at the same level for two more sets, if necessary…. I did not agree with those who claimed that a woman player could not attack at the net for three sets. In fact, I found it less tiring to go to the net, volley and smash, than to remain in the backcourt covering twice the ground in pursuit of Helen’s magnificent drives.
Wills fought back to take the second set, 6-3, and the players went off court for the customary pause before the third set. A break was exactly what the older woman did not need. Her back tightened up, and when the gladiators returned to court, she increasingly felt what she called a “blinding” pain when she stretched for balls. She began to feel dizzy, and onlookers could tell that the player who came out for the third set was a mere shell of the one who had left ten minutes before.
With Jacobs leading 3-love in the third, Wills signaled that she could not continue. Accounts differ at this point–there are more versions of these few moments on court than there are of the feud itself–but it seems that Jacobs offered to let her opponent rest and attempt to recover. The Wimbledon champion declined and walked off the court.
In the tenth meeting of the Helens, the challenger finally got her victory. Sort of.
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Jacobs was gracious in victory. She didn’t question the severity of the injury or the motivations behind her retirement.
(At least in public. I don’t know what she wrote in her diary.)
Her supporters were less charitable. To a man, they felt that Wills should’ve played out the match and allowed Jacobs an unblemished victory. A radio broadcast put Molla Mallory on the air almost immediately. Molla had benefited from what was–until that day–the most famous retirement in Forest Hills history. In a 1921 match, Lenglen walked away after losing the first set to the defending champion. Suzanne didn’t appear hobbled at all, and the American press was vicious. She was dubbed “Miss Cough-and-Quit.”
Mallory saw history repeating itself. She thought that Wills quit because she knew was going to lose. Queen Helen I wanted to deny her opponent a true victory.
Elizabeth Ryan found it hard to argue with that. Ryan was Wills’s doubles partner, and the pair was scheduled to play the final later the same day. Wills, oblivious, intended to remain in the doubles. Even setting aside the impropriety of returning to the court after a default, her partner realized that if Wills did so, it would cause a riot. Ryan was forced to do her partner’s dirty work for her. Technically, she the one who defaulted, missing her chance at winning the French, Wimbledon, and US Championships in a single year.*
* At Wimbledon, Wills had been Ryan’s fourth choice as a partner, largely because she feared Helen would, for some reason or other, end up pulling out of the event.
While there was never a consensus, Wills found little support for her conduct in the third set. Allison Danzig wrote in the New York Times, “Perhaps it would have been for the best if she had followed her doctor’s orders … and given up tennis for the year.” Bill Tilden said, “I like to think she regretted the decision before she reached the clubhouse.”
The British press refused to believe the reports from across the ocean. A champion couldn’t really have behaved that way. They figured their Stateside counterparts were twisting the story beyond recognition.
The final word belonged to a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, who had reflected earlier that year on the Mallory-Lenglen default. “The American idea is to finish no matter what happens.”
Helen Wills did a bit of journalism, as well.
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However the elder Helen should’ve handled the Forest Hills final, there was no question that her back injury was severe. She would be confined to her bed for much of the fall, and she wouldn’t play competitive tennis again until 1935.
Jacobs didn’t take as much advantage as she could have. In 1934, she beat Simonne Mathieu at Roland Garros, but lost in the final to the Englishwoman Peggy Scriven. In Gallery of Champions, she ranked the major winners she had faced in her career, and Scriven came in last. At Wimbledon, she reached the final and lost a tough battle to Dorothy Round.
Back at Forest Hills, she cruised to a third consecutive US title. Elizabeth Ryan managed only a single game in their quarter-final match, and Sarah Palfrey won only five in the final.
Queen Helen II didn’t reign as imperiously as her predecessor, but you’ll notice there aren’t any early-round defeats in this story. After she defeated both Scriven and Round in Wightman Cup play, the New Yorker described her effect:
Miss Jacobs has the spirit of a quattrocento murderess in tennis. She is merciless and precise and trim, and one suspects that her opponents feel as soon as they step on the court that their function is simply to be fascinated victims.
Most challengers were in the same boat as Palfrey. Talented, sure, but hopeless. The same author concluded that the Forest Hills runner-up “simply had nothing with which to overwhelm Miss Jacobs, who patiently sticks to the baseline until her opponent is off guard, then polishes off the point, from the rear, mid-court, or the net.”
On the other hand, she would never be mistaken for a cold, Wills-style killer. George Joel of the Jewish Criterion gave the best description of why so many fans were drawn to Jacobs. She was “a delight to watch. She makes wry faces, smiles at the good ones, gesticulates and chases a ball as though her life depended on it.” Even when she was mowing down the competition, her humanity was on full display.
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Jacobs rode her 1934 momentum all the way to match point at the following year’s Wimbledon final. Despite losing at the French Championships to Hilde Sperling, she turned the tables on the Danish player at Wimbledon, beating her 6-3, 6-0 in the semi-finals.
She came within one wind-blown overhead smash of the 1935 title. Winning the final point against Helen Wills Moody was still too much, and she was stuck with another second-place finish. At home, though, she was as authoritative as ever. She beat Palfrey again for a fourth-straight US National title, winning twelve of twelve sets en route.
Simultaneously underdog and champion, Helen’s popularity only grew. The New Yorker called her, along with Englishman Bunny Austin, “the noblest player who has never actually won at Wimbledon.” She had now introduced man-tailored shorts to women’s tennis in both the United States and Europe, igniting a fashion trend.
Jacobs didn’t have Wills’s glamour, but the Daily Mail conceded that she “looked better in shorts than any man we could think of.”
Just one year later, she looked positively radiant as she finally lifted the Wimbledon trophy. Wills had opted for semi-retirement, and despite a ragged start to the season, Queen Helen II steadily improved throughout the fortnight.
Jacobs began her stay in England with two losses in the Wightman Cup. The two women who beat her, Round and Kay Stammers, were conveniently dispatched by others at Wimbledon. That still left stiff competition. Her final four opponents were all past or future major finalists: Lili Alvarez, Anita Lizana, Jadwiga Jędrzejowska, and Sperling. Championship point at the All-England Club remained difficult–Helen needed more than one this year, too–but against Hilde, the psychological barrier proved to be surmountable.
The crowd went wild, if you’ll pardon the cliché. They showered Helen with a five-minute ovation. Some historians attribute the outpouring to anti-German feeling–Sperling was born in Essen and had become a Danish national by marriage–but Wimbledon fans have always loved an underdog. They’d been watching Jacobs fall just short for nearly a decade.
George Lott, the partner with whom Helen won the 1934 mixed doubles title at Forest Hills, once said that she “got the furthest with the leastest.” The British crowd recognized that Jacobs, at long last, had gotten as far as a tennis player could hope to go.
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She made it in the nick of time. At her first tournament back in the States, Jacobs won a three-set final against the 22-year-old Alice Marble. Another Bay Area product, Marble had long been credited with the best serve on the circuit. The rest of her game was catching up. At Forest Hills a few weeks later, Marble reversed the result. She beat Helen in another three-setter to end the veteran’s four-year reign at the US National Championships.
The match against Marble was compromised by a bandage on Jacobs’s right hand–though she was too much the sportswoman to mention it. Helen’s career was increasingly a matter of injury management. With other things to do–books to write, parties to attend with Henrietta Bingham–she cut her playing schedule to the bone. In 1937 she played seven events. In 1938, she entered only three tournaments plus the occasional exhibition.
One of those tournaments–of course–was Wimbledon. For the first time since 1935, she wouldn’t be the only Queen Helen in the draw.
Neither woman arrived at the 1938 final in peak condition. Wills was noticeably slower after her two-year layoff, and she had lost two matches in the month before the Championships. Jacobs suffered an Achilles injury in the early rounds.
The tournament committee seeded them third and fourth, but it was impossible to imagine they’d go home without one last showdown. Wills battled through a monumental semi-final against Sperling, winning 12-10, 6-4. Jacobs collected her last-ever victory over Marble, who wouldn’t lose another match in the remaining two and a half years of her amateur career.
The final battle of the Helens was an anticlimax. It really lasted only eight games. Wills took a 4-2 lead; Jacobs came back to even the score. The reporter for London Times believed “the match was in the balance.” Fighting for a break in the ninth game, the younger woman wrenched her ankle, aggravating the earlier injury. She limped on, and “what followed was embarrassing to watch.”
Wills, as she had done so many times, oversaw a bloodless execution. She was apparently unfazed by her opponent’s suffering, and she lost only three points as she ran out the match, 6-4, 6-0, in little more than five minutes.
No one, absolutely no one, missed the message. Wills had denied her rival a proper victory five years earlier. Jacobs, more visibly compromised, refused to do the same. As Bill Tilden wrote, “Wills left the court eight times World Champion, but Jacobs left it crowned World Champion Sportswoman.”
In that one category, at least, Little Helen surpassed her elder.