The Tennis 128: No. 78, Simonne Mathieu

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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Simonne Mathieu [FRA]
Born: 31 January 1908
Died: 7 January 1980
Career: 1926-39
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1932)
Peak Elo rating: 2,237 (1st place, 1930)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 147
 

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Helen Jacobs described her friend and rival Simonne Mathieu as a “player with limited strokes, average physical attributes and the will to win encumbered … by temperament.” That wasn’t even the worst of it:

[T]here was one great drawback to Simonne’s game that she was never able to overcome–or perhaps she did not think it necessary–the absence of any sort of effective volley or smash. This shortcoming did not prevent her winning innumerable doubles championships, but it was a tremendous handicap in singles competition against players who had the strokes and tactical sense to draw her up to the net with short, low shots and then lob deeply.

Those gaping holes in her game so thoroughly blocked Mathieu’s chances at success that she reached the Roland Garros final eight times–winning two–and claimed nearly 150 singles titles. Oh, and history remembers her as an even more accomplished doubles player, with 13 major titles in women’s doubles and another two in mixed.

Jacobs even went out of her way to make it clear that the Frenchwoman’s distinction wasn’t due to any particular strength in “match play psychology.” (Really, they were friends!) Mathieu had three assets, and three assets only: A powerful forehand, a steady backhand, and what Jacobs called an “indomitable fighting spirit.”

The last one was the most important of all. For someone competing at a world-class level in 1930s tennis without any net game at all, every match was a fight.

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Simonne Passemard started fighting–and winning–almost as soon as she first picked up a racket. Of fragile health as a girl, she took after her older brother and began playing at the Stade Français club in Paris. By the time she was 15, she was collecting national trophies.

Sportswriters were dismayed when, aged only 17, Simonne married the writer and editor René Mathieu. Few women balanced family life with a tennis career in those days, so it seemed that France would lose one of its best hopes before she could make a mark on the world stage. She had two sons in 1927 and 1928*, further decreasing the chances that the young prospect would pursue the sport.

* Several sources claim that when Simonne won the French junior championships in 1926, her baby was sleeping courtside. The story is almost too good to check, but the dates don’t add up. The couple married in October 1925, so even if it was a shotgun wedding–admittedly, as good a reason as any for Simonne to marry at 17–it’s tough to reconcile that with her tournament play in January, March, and May of 1926. The only information I can find about her son’s birthdates is one vague, unsourced mention of 1927 and 1928. There are indeed two separate 10-month gaps in her playing record: one before the 1927 French Championships and the other before the German Championships in August of 1928. She may well have played some matches with one eye on a stroller, just not as a junior.

The young Mme. Mathieu refused to conform to expectations. She handed over her sons to her parents, who then moved out of Paris. Her sons, understandably, felt they had been abandoned. A grandson, Bertrand Mathieu, was able to see the separation with the benefit of greater distance. He thinks of his grandmother as an early feminist.

Simonne would certainly prove to be a formidable character during the war, when she founded the women’s auxiliary to the Free French Forces, marched with Charles de Gaulle, and was condemned to death in absentia by the Vichy government. First, though, she had a lot of tennis to play.

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Records from European tournaments in the 1920s and 1930s are incomplete, but the best career tally I’ve been able to put together gives Mathieu 510 wins against 94 losses. That tally is an approximation, but it probably understates her actual performance. Her losses were newsworthy, so they’ve generally survived in the historical record. Her wins, especially in early rounds, could be forgettably routine. Whatever the exact numbers, it’s virtually certain that she won more than half of the tournaments she entered and close to 85% of her matches overall.

Rare as they were, her losses seem to paint the most vivid picture of her experience on court. Her skills came into relief when an opponent faced down the challenge they offered. Dorothy Round beat her in the 1933 British Hard Court Championships, and a newspaper report said that Simonne “is one of the most difficult players in the world to beat outright either with a drive or a drop shot.” When Round knocked her out again at Wimbledon the following year, Mathieu lost a three-setter despite missing long only three times.

Helen Jacobs faced her at Wimbledon in 1932–it was their second meeting–and despite winning by the fairly routine score of 7-5, 6-1, the American recorded it as “one of the most difficult I have ever played.” Mathieu left herself little margin of error for her groundstrokes, slugging forehands with a short backswing and a whiplash follow-through. By the second set, Simonne was trying underarm serves, and she was still dogged enough that the two women played a 98-stroke rally. She was so frustrated by the end of the match that she stormed off without waiting for her opponent, a serious breach of etiquette.

Mathieu (left) with Helen Jacobs at Wimbledon in 1933

Mathieu held her own against Round and Jacobs, as she did with almost all of her rivals. The one exception was her exact contemporary, the German (and later Danish by marriage) star Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling.

Mathieu and Sperling played each other at least 15 times*, and the Frenchwoman lost all but one. Their clashes included the 1935, 1936, and 1937 Roland Garros finals, as well as a 1936 Wimbledon semi-final, one of Simonne’s four missed chances to reach the title match at the All-England Club.

* Jacobs wrote that the pair had met 15 times before what I believe to be their tenth encounter, so it’s possible that we’re missing some results.

The two women had similar styles. Sperling’s advantages: She was taller, and she was not entirely allergic to the forecourt. British journalists ascribed her Wimbledon victory against Mathieu to her “stonewalling tactics” and “impregnable defence.” The Frenchwoman knew how to handle every game style except her own. Jacobs wrote, “[H]er game was extremely steady but her patience was not.” She tried to end points early, but Sperling had an answer to all of Simonne’s attempts at aggression. The German didn’t lose a single set until their eighth meeting.

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Sperling was particularly dominant on Mathieu’s home court. In the 1935 French final, the home favorite was helpless, winning only three games. A news report dismissed the match as being “utterly devoid of interest.”

A year later, Mathieu came a bit closer, losing 6-3, 6-4. Both women were content to wait for the other to make a move, and one observer felt “there seemed no reason why the rallies should ever end.” Individual points often required 50 strokes or more. The crowd booed and whistled until Simonne said, “If you don’t like it, why not come down and take our places?” Mathieu couldn’t outlast the German, and presumably no one in the grandstand could, either.

Mathieu had more support on the Riviera. Since 1929, she had made the annual trek to France’s south coast, taking advantage of the mild winter climate and the hospitality at one Mediterranean resort after another. The competition wasn’t up to quite the same standard as it was at the majors, and Simonne feasted on it. She won all 16 Riviera tournaments she entered in 1935, then went undefeated again over 14 events in 1936. In her career, she won more than 50 singles titles along the coast, plus another 86 doubles trophies.

In 1937, the Frenchwoman’s home-away-from-home-court advantage would be put to the test. Sperling, her nemesis, made her first trip to the Riviera. The two women met in the final at Beaulieu-sur-Mer in February. Mathieu had squeaked past another newcomer, Anita Lizana, in the semis, while Sperling clobbered British player Mary Hardwick, 6-0, 6-1. The German hadn’t lost on a clay court in two years.

Sperling built a 5-2 lead in the opening set, and it looked like it would be yet another one-sided victory for the German. But this time, Mathieu had the patience to out-steady the steadiest player of her era. She fought back to 5-all. The match was an hour old–an eternity for ten games in 1937–but it was just beginning. It took another 25 minutes for Simonne to break for 6-5, and 35 minutes more to seal the set. One report says that some rallies reached 70 strokes which, given the time they took, sounds like a conservative count.

After the two-hour battle for the first set, Sperling had nothing left in the tank. Mathieu won the second, 6-1, in “only” 45 minutes.

Beaulieu represented Simonne’s 36th straight singles title on the Riviera. Alas, the triumph was short-lived. Both her winning streak and her hopes against her rival ended just one week later. At Monte Carlo, it was Sperling who won the protracted first set, 8-6, and Mathieu opted to retire and save energy for the doubles. In four more meetings, she would never again win a set against the German champion.

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Mathieu’s consolation prize was a good one: a pair of Roland Garros titles. In 1938 and 1939, the French Championships were played a bit later than usual, so competitors had to choose between a trip to Paris and proper grass-court preparation for Wimbledon. All the Brits and most of the Americans picked grass over clay. Political tensions also contributed to the limited field in 1939.

Simonne didn’t have to defeat Sperling, Helen Jacobs, or Helen Wills to hoist the trophy, but there’s no record of her complaining about that. In 1938, she brushed aside Nelly Landry of Belgium, 6-0, 6-3, and she defended her title in 1939 with a narrower win over Jadwiga Jędrzejowska. Now 31 years old, she had hardly lost a step. Ja-Ja tested her with drop shots in the second set, and the London Times wrote of the champion, “[O]ne has rarely seen her covering a court so quickly.”

In the same two years that she won her French titles, she made her only trips to the United States to play the American grass-court circuit. In 1938, after a career of annual trips to Wimbledon, she struggled to adapt to the slower turf and the higher bouncing balls on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1939, she didn’t even make it on court at Forest Hills. France declared war on Germany a week before the tournament began, and Mathieu headed back across the ocean.

She immediately threw herself into the fray, offering her services to the British Auxiliary Territorial Service in London, then founding a similar organization, the Corps Féminin Français, for women to support the Free French Forces. She ended the war with a rank of captain, though a fellow volunteer later said that the hierarchy was rather improvised, and that Mathieu was given her command only because of her tennis stardom. However she gained her position, she earned the respect of her charges.

When Paris was liberated in 1944, Simonne had spent four years away from her family. She been forced to give up her sporting career just as she was recording some of her best results. The tennis community celebrated the end of the German occupation with a match between Henri Cochet and Yvon Petra at Roland Garros. Cochet was a legend, a seven-time major winner and one of the his country’s beloved Four Musketeers. Petra was the two-time defending champion of the wartime Tournoi de France. But there was room on court for one more champion. In the umpire’s chair, in full-dress uniform, was Simonne Mathieu.