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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Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling [GER/DEN]Born: 26 March 1908
Died: 7 March 1981
Career: 1929-50
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1936)
Peak Elo rating: 2,306 (1st place, 1934)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: At least 106, perhaps 123
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Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling knew she didn’t play the most exciting brand of tennis. At least she had a sense of humor about it.
Her 1935 Wimbledon semi-final against Helen Jacobs was typically protracted. Don’t let the lopsided score fool you. The 6-3, 6-0 defeat was hardly an easy day’s work for the American. Rallies with Sperling often went 30, 40, 50 shots or more. She chased down everything, and she forced opponents to generate their own pace.
One game ended with yet another gutbuster of a point, running past the 50-shot mark. Jacobs and Sperling stood at the umpire’s chair on the changeover–sitting wasn’t allowed back then–and Hilde smiled. “My husband and I have a dinner engagement. Do you think we’ll get there for coffee?”
We know it was a joke because Sperling and her husband, the Danish player Svend Sperling, were not stupid. If Hilde was scheduled to play a match, there was always the chance it would last all day. The New York Times characterized the 1936 Wimbledon final–another match Sperling lost to Jacobs–as a “hundred minutes of agony.” This in an era when a 30-minute set was an unusually long one, and top players often coasted through early rounds in 20 minutes or less.
When Hilde faced another woman capable of playing the same infinitely patient style, 100 minutes was just the start. On the French Riviera at Beaulieu-sur-Mer in 1937, Sperling faced defending champion Simonne Mathieu in the final. She had beaten Mathieu in their nine (or more) previous meetings, but this time, the Frenchwoman was prepared to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Sperling took a 5-2 lead, and Mathieu scrambled back to 5-all. The first ten games took a full hour. Simonne broke for 6-5 in a 25-minute game, then needed 35 minutes to hold serve for 7-5. Finally in the ascendancy, Mathieu won the second, 6-1, but even that took another three quarters of an hour.
No one in tennis history has played the game of attrition better than Hilde did.
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She was born Hilde Krahwinkel, in Essen, Germany. After marrying Svend Sperling in 1933, she became a Danish citizen as well. She joined a tennis club in her adopted country, and from that point on, she represented Denmark in international competition. Not that her opponents noticed–they were too busy catching their breath to worry about flags.
There are two more things you need to know about Hilde Krahwinkel’s life before she became a tennis champion. First, she was a cross-country runner. At the time, tennis players–especially women–weren’t expected to be the physical specimens they are today. Would-be stars generally trained simply by playing the game, perhaps with a bit of light calisthenics on the side. Hilde was, by virtue of her earlier avocation, one of the fittest women on the circuit.
Second, she had a deformed right hand. She had injured the ligaments of her ring and little fingers, so she could not use them to hold a racket. It was even worse than that: They bent down toward her palm, so they got in the way of a traditional grip. In the days of one-handed backhands, tennis players really only used one hand, and apparently Hilde never tried to play lefty.
The end result was a game that made purists weep, spectators wait, and opponents wilt.
Ahead of the 1936 Wimbledon final, the Guardian sought to correct the misperceptions of readers who only knew Sperling by her dominant scorelines:
The ‘man in the street’ [who saw the scores] would doubtless credit her with a fine and impressive game, a fierce service, making use of her exceptional height, if a baseline game then savage hitting, if a volleying game then rapid rushes for the net and decisive volleying. The ‘man in the street’ would be wrong, but that would be nothing new, for he usually is.
Fru Sperling in serving makes a peculiar pawing-the-air action, much as [British Wightman Cup player Phoebe Holcroft] Watson used to make, and then sends over a tame ball, the second even tamer. Her forehand is a lifted stroke, with a poor trajectory and little pace. Her backhand is safer, sometimes well produced, sometimes not, because she is standing on her toes. She has no smash; she volleys confidently on the forehand and given an easy ball she makes the point. Where then is the quality or qualities that make of such unpromising material a champion?
Bill Tilden was even more direct:
She is one of the best yet most hopeless looking tennis players I have ever seen. Her game is awkward in the extreme, limited to cramped unorthodox ground strokes without volley or smash to aid her, yet she has been the most consistent winner in women’s tennis each year since 1934.
The first time Jacobs saw Hilde play, in 1931, she could only wonder, “If Hilde was number three in Germany, what could number four be like!” Then she looked on as the German defeated rising British star Dorothy Round in straight sets.
Jacobs, along with the rest of the tennis world, would spend much of the 1930s watching Hilde pick apart one standout player after another.
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Sperling’s match record almost defies belief. She won at least 106 singles titles, perhaps as many as 123. Most of them came within a single decade, between her emergence as a first-rank player in 1929 and the beginning of World War II.
Her record at the majors is sparse, because she never traveled to either Australia or the United States. She probably never even considered a trip to the Antipodes, and the calendar made Forest Hills impossible. The North American swing clashed with the German Championships, held each year in late July or August. Still, she won Roland Garros for three straight years, 1935 to 1937, and reached the Wimbledon final twice. She made it to the semis on another four occasions.
Her dominance came on the European continent. Those tournaments were primarily on clay, but she also excelled at indoor events held in the winter (usually played on faster wood or tile surfaces), and she cared enough about Wimbledon to skip the French in 1938 to better prepare on grass.
Our knowledge of her exact exploits is incomplete. For many of the tournaments she played, we know only the result of the final. Still, we’ve documented 331 match wins against only 39 losses, good for a winning percentage just short of 90%. Since the gaps in the record are generally early-round matches, the true figure must be even higher. Simonne Mathieu, her most frequent opponent and one of the best players of the era, beat her only once in at least 15 tries.
From May 1933 to June 1936, Sperling won an incredible 33 straight finals. She actually claimed 36 titles in that span; three of her final-round opponents withdrew. Seven of the victories came indoors; another five were contested on grass. Hilde scored the last 23 of those wins in straight sets.
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How did she do it?
So far, I’ve mentioned Hilde’s injured hand and near-total lack of proper technique. The Guardian pointed out her awkward and ineffective service, then hinted at poor footwork. Yes, the 1930s were a different time, but should this woman have been competing at Wimbledon at all?
Adding to Sperling’s oddity, she was unusually tall. She stood close to six feet tall, towering over opponents who were often six inches shorter. We tend to see height as an asset on court, but Helen Jacobs called attention to the other side of the ledger. “Without a sense of anticipation, natural court position and a knowledge of tactics and strategy, a very tall player can be tied into knots on the tennis court.”
Though Hilde sometimes looked a bit knotted up on the baseline, it rarely stopped her from getting yet another ball back. Her height–combined with her fitness–meant that there was nowhere on the court she couldn’t reach. Jacobs wrote:
Where the average woman player covered the baseline in five strides, Hilde covered it in three. To lob against her required a shot of sufficient height and depth to evade the reach of the average man; and to pass her along the sidelines meant eluding a racket that appeared to extend across the alley.
She got to the ball, and she put it back in play. Sometimes that meant running, but just as often, she barely needed to move at all. “[O]ne noticed how little the long lady ran, how she just stood for the most part,” wrote the Guardian. “At one time on a short high lob she waited for the bounce and then slowly walked forward and hit it out.” No tiny adjustment steps for Hilde.
She relied on her opponent’s pace, so rallies were often as slow as they were long. However unorthodox her technique, she had her own version of every shot. You could drag her to the net and she might not put the ball away, but she wouldn’t miss.
Sperling’s contemporaries might have failed to grasp what was going on with her forehand. The Guardian called it a “lifted stroke.” Jacobs described it in more detail: “Her forehand drive began at approximately the level of her knees, the racket head dropped well below the wrist, continued upward and over the ball.” Few observers thought such a motion was a good thing.
To a modern reader, though, that sounds an awful lot like a topspin forehand. If you’ve ever tried to hit topspin groundstrokes with a primitive racket, you know that she wasn’t Rafael Nadal out there. It’s hard work for modest gains, and the attempt can look awkward. Still, if that’s what she was doing, the result would have been particularly challenging to opponents who rarely saw anything like it. It would’ve fit seamlessly into her baseline-warrior game.
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Sperling’s peers didn’t need anyone to explain why Hilde was so good. (Though Jacobs wished her non-playing friends could better empathize with “the physically and mentally exhausting experience” of facing her.) The pressing conundrum on the circuit was how to beat her.
There was a prevailing theory. A would-be giant killer must patiently (very patiently!) wait for her chances, then strike aggressively, taking every chance to hit past the gangly German, especially on the forehand side.
Then again, from 1932 to 1939, Hilde lost an average of two matches per season. For all its logical soundness, the conventional wisdom didn’t work.
The actual winning strategy was even more demanding than the standard advice. Against the few players who could manage it, Sperling would lose when the woman across the net simply outlasted her at her own game. As we’ve seen, that’s how Mathieu scored her single, marathon victory in 1937.
It’s also what Helen Wills Moody was forced to do in her final meeting with the German. Wills Moody had long struggled with Hilde’s slow-motion steadiness. In 1932, the American edged her way through a Roland Garros semi-final, 6-3, 10-8. She hadn’t lost a set in five years, and no one else had gotten so close.
In 1938, Sperling finally pulled off the upset, ousting Wills Moody at Queen’s Club. They met again at Wimbledon two weeks later, in the semi-final. Helen discarded the conventional wisdom entirely, generated her own pace, and refused to be dislodged from the baseline. She rarely tried for winners, even when the German coaxed her to the net. Wills Moody was the best player of the era, the hardest hitting pre-war woman. Nonetheless, Hilde gave her an epic struggle, one that finally ended 12-10, 6-4 in the American’s favor.
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There was one more component of the formula for defeating Hilde Sperling. Of the five women who ended her ten attempts at a Wimbledon crown, only one–her countrywoman Cilly Aussem–was European. Three were Americans who rank among the all-time greats (Wills Moody, Jacobs, and Alice Marble), and the last was the talented Australian, Joan Hartigan.
The Europeans knew her too well. They were exhausted before they stepped on court. Only Aussem escaped the curse. When they met for the 1931 championship, Hilde’s game wasn’t yet the soul-crushing machine it would become. Her fellow German had beaten her on multiple occasions as she matured.
Like so many Continental players of the 1930s, Sperling’s career was left incomplete. When World War II began, Sperling was 31 years old. Her results at the All-England Club were going in the wrong direction since her runner-up finish in 1936, but she had still won seven smaller titles in the last twelve months.
Her decision to settle in Denmark turned out to be prescient. The Sperlings were able to sit out the conflict and play as much tennis as they wanted. Hilde even picked up a couple more trophies. The calm was briefly pierced in 1944, when a Danish newspaper accused Svend of spying for the Germans. Even that crisis didn’t linger. The couple relocated to Sweden, the story was retracted, and recreational tennis continued apace.
While no one ever called Hilde’s game “graceful,” it was the sort of style that aged well. She could lose a step or two, and her brilliant anticipation would still allow her to keep a rally going until her opponent collapsed with frustration or fatigue.
She remained capable of making a pest of herself on the international circuit into her forties. When top players trekked to Northern Europe, she was waiting. At the 1950 Scandinavian Indoors in Copenhagen, she beat the British player Joan Curry, ten years her junior. In Oslo for the Norwegian Championships the same year, she dispatched ranking Americans Betty Rosenquest and Dorothy Head. Both women were born when Hilde was 17.
The most memorable final of Sperling’s post-war career, though, came two years earlier. This one was against a contemporary. Jadwiga Jędrzejowska had suffered through the war years in occupied Poland. At the 1948 Swedish International, the two old foes were delighted to see each other again. Both women reached the final, where Jędrzejowska proved to be as dogged a competitor as she had been a decade earlier. She took the first set, 8-6.
“But when I was hitting the winning ball,” the Polish woman wrote, “I understood that I was very exhausted.” The match ended quickly, 6-8, 6-0, 6-1 to the German.
Hilde had done it again.