Category: The Tennis 128

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.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

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 a jumbo entry, since I hate myself and love my readers. Or maybe it’s the other way around. This post is Part 1. Part 2 is here.

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She came so close. Helen Jacobs had match point for the 1935 Wimbledon title. At 5-3, 40-30 in the deciding set, she forced her opponent to hit a shallow lob, moving within one easy smash of the championship she had so long sought. She had even made sure to drill her overhead ahead of this very matchup. A tougher smash than this one won her the previous point.

A gust of wind caught the ball, knocking it down faster than she expected. She couldn’t adjust and sent it into the net.

Jacobs wasn’t psychologically prepared for such a near miss. She had struggled to put away the second set. Now, her advantage gone, she seemingly sleepwalked through the rest of the match. Down 5-6, she appeared to forget it was her turn to serve. Her opponent was running on fumes, as well, but all Jacobs could muster were two strong serves.

It wasn’t enough. The 26-year-old American had to settle for runner-up, 6-3, 3-6, 7-5. She had reached four Wimbledon finals and lost them all–three of them to the same woman.

Jacobs told a reporter after the match, “I thought it was too good to be true! I just couldn’t believe it when I reached match point and then….” Unable to finish the sentence, she could say only of her conqueror, “She is certainly a great player.”

Helen wrote in her diary: “Finals. Could have beaten the bitch.”

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The “bitch” in question was, of course, Helen Wills Moody. The 1935 Wimbledon title was the 18th of her 19 career major singles titles. The final that Jacobs so nearly pulled out was the 11th meeting between the two. Jacobs had lost nine of the previous ten, the other one decided by retirement.

Long before 1935, the rivalry–if we can be so generous as to call it that–defined women’s tennis. The “warfare” between the women filled more column inches than any other story in women’s sport. Speculation about a frigid off-court relationship was so persistent that Jacobs once wrote a magazine article titled, “There Was Never a Feud.”

There was a feud.

Wills-Jacobs matches sucked so much oxygen out of the sporting scene that people assumed they had faced off even more often than they did. Reporters often wrote that they had played 15 times. Wills herself, later in life, insisted the pair had contested 20 singles matches.

It’s a rare case of record-keeping from the amateur era that we’ve definitely gotten right. By the time Jacobs was skilled enough to play top-level tennis, Wills was a national champion and Olympic medalist. Within a few years, the younger Helen had established herself as one of the few women, and probably the only American, with the slightest chance of dethroning the queen.

In other words, it’s well-nigh unthinkable that a battle between the two Helens could be lost to history.

What the rivalry lacked in quantity, it more than made up for in quality–and even more so in gossip-page fodder. They clashed in seven major finals, meeting in Paris, London, and New York. Two years before Jacobs missed her match-point smash, she overcame Wills via the most famous default in tennis history. In 1938, the Helens would play to a draw for eight scintillating games before Jacobs aggravated an achilles injury and made news simply by not retiring.

When the Helens met on court, it was impossible not to take sides. Wills played the more impressive tennis, so she never wanted for fans. Jacobs was the determined challenger, as well as the friendlier woman once the competition ended. Every news report seemed to have a tinge of bias one way or the other. Former champions, including Bill Tilden, Suzanne Lenglen, and Molla Mallory didn’t bother to hide their preferences. They were Team Jacobs all the way.

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Full disclosure: I, too, am a card-carrying member of Team Jacobs.

Apart from her on-court exploits, she may be the most interesting figure tennis has ever produced. She was a half-Jewish lesbian in an era when Jews rarely made names for themselves in sports and the L-word was not spoken in polite company. She was the first prominent woman to wear shorts on the tennis court. During World War II, she set aside her racket, trained as a Navy WAVE, and rose to the rank of commander in Naval intelligence.

She was popular with fellow players, men and women alike. She wasn’t quite a bohemian, but she moved easily among writers and artists. She chain-smoked.* Her 1936 autobiography, Beyond the Game, drew criticism for containing too much about her literary friends and not enough about her tennis. Jacobs’s belated response, Gallery of Champions (1949), is the best book ever written about women’s tennis.

* She chain-smoked!

Put it this way: If a genie ever grants me a dinner for four with anyone I wish from tennis history, I choose Jacobs, and she gets to pick the other two guests.

On court, she was everything you could ask an underdog to be. The first time the two Helens played a practice match, it was over in seven minutes. (I don’t need to tell you who won.) When Wills retired in the 1933 Forest Hills final and deprived her rival of a full-fledged victory, Jacobs’s public statements could have been mistaken for those of an old friend. “It’s not a game to the death,” she said. “I’m glad Helen didn’t place me in the position of taking the championship over her disabled form.”

She never, ever gave up hope. In the clubhouse after the great disappointment of the 1935 Wimbledon title match, she told a journalist, “Things may be better at Forest Hills…. The day must come when I can beat Mrs. Moody.”

* * *

If the Wills-Jacobs story were made into a Hollywood movie, the first act would end up on the cutting room floor. No one would believe it.

Jacobs was two years and ten months younger than her future rival. From the moment she entered her first San Francisco public parks tournament, in 1922, she followed so closely in Wills’s footsteps, one would’ve thought she was trying to avoid leaving her own.

Her father gave her an old racket and taught her the rudiments of the game. She was beating him soon after, and at one of her first tournaments, she was spotted by Pop Fuller. Fuller was the pro at the Berkeley Tennis Club, where he also coached national junior champion Helen Wills.

The Jacobs family relocated to Berkeley, and thanks to a tip from Fuller, their new house was the one the Wills family had just vacated. Jacobs settled into Helen Wills’s old bedroom and began attending the same private school where Wills had matriculated. Like the older Helen, Jacobs won back-to-back national junior titles. Then she enrolled at the University of California, where–I know, this is getting boring–Wills was also a student.

Wills didn’t concern herself much with her schoolmate. She was already winning majors and setting her sights on a showdown with Suzanne Lenglen. Jacobs, on the other hand, “worshipped the ground on which the elder Helen walked,” at least according to an early biographer. She even took to wearing the same eyeshade that Wills turned into her signature accessory.

Wills remained an idol even after their seven-minute practice match. She almost entirely ignored the younger player, then begged off a second set. Jacobs took the experience as a lesson. She wondered “if the unchanging expression of my opponent’s face and her silence when we passed at the net on odd games were owing entirely to deep concentration; or whether they weren’t perhaps a psychological weapon.”

At this stage, Jacobs was a sponge. Four-time national champion Hazel Wightman made a visit to California in 1923, and she worked with Helen three times a week for the duration of her visit. It was a fulfilling relationship for both. “She was wonderful to work with, that girl,” Wightman later said. “How she would listen to what you were trying to get across, and how she’d concentrate on applying it! Helen Jacobs was the most responsive and, in a way, the most satisfying pupil I’ve ever taught.”

At the 1925 National Girls’ Championships in Philadelphia, Jacobs met Bill Tilden for the first time. The nation’s leading male player never missed a chance to help an up-and-comer, and Jacobs was no exception. The day before the final, Tilden drilled her relatively weak forehand slice. She must have learned something: She won the junior title over Alice Francis, 6-0, 6-0.

* * *

The press had already dubbed Wills and Jacobs “Big Helen” and “Little Helen.” At the Pacific Coast Championships in June 1925, they met for the first time in competition. Big Helen won, 6-3, 6-1. Even at 16, Little Helen was a fearsome competitor; Wills was just too strong. Against credible regional opponents, Jacobs had lost only two games–total–in two previous matches at the event.

One local authority wasn’t ready to make too much of Little Helen’s potential. “They could play every day for the next twenty years,” he said. “Jacobs wouldn’t take a set.”

For a few years, it looked like he was right. The Helens met eight times between 1927 and 1932, and Jacobs never managed more than three games in a set. That isn’t quite as bad as it sounds–Wills was in the middle of a seven-year, 180-match win streak. She wasn’t losing sets, let alone matches, to anyone. No matter how much the younger woman solidified her status as the number two American, she could progress no further.

There were occasional reasons for hope. At the US National Championships in 1927, the two women met in the semi-finals. Wills won the first set, 6-0, and tacked on the first two games of the second in little more than sixty seconds. Finally, encouraged by a volley winner, Jacobs began to hit harder. She gave the gallery something to cheer, winning two games in the second set and taking several others to deuce.

“Miss Jacobs,” wrote the New York Times, “was not to be intimidated, even though she must have realized that her task was hopeless.”

The 1932 Wimbledon final–6-3, 6-1 to Wills–was less engaging. John Tunis described it as “tennis of mediocrity: drive and chop, drive and chop, forever and ever, world without end…. It was tedious tennis, tiresome to watch and, I should imagine, more so to play.” Still, the London Times found a dash of encouragement for the challenger. The older woman, now Mrs Moody, usually swept aside her victims in a half hour or less. Jacobs kept her busy for 46 minutes.

* * *

At some unknown point in the first few years of the lopsided Wills-Jacobs rivalry, something happened to pit the two against each other, personally as well as competitively.

Many observers believed that the bitterness went only one way. Wills wore her disdain for Jacobs on her sleeve. The younger woman, by contrast, could be fulsome with public praise. Sportswriter John Lardner concluded, “It was a one-way friendship, launched by Miss Jacobs and dying of exposure five miles off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.”

However much Jacobs protested, there was nothing she could do about the other woman’s feelings. Fred Moody, Wills’s husband from 1929 to 1937, told the historian Larry Engelmann, “Helen really hated Helen Jacobs. Don’t ask me why…. But Helen hated her like nothing else.”

Jacobs was eventually infected as well. Years after she called Wills a “bitch” in a fit of post-match frustration, she described her former idol to her diary as “that foul woman who calls herself a lady.”

We’ll probably never know exactly what triggered tennis’s coldest war. But Wills’s pretensions to social stature may well have played a part.

Helen Wills’s father, Clarence, was a surgeon, and the family ran in Berkeley’s most elite circles. The Jacobs clan was decidedly middle-class by comparison. Ronald Jacobs tried his hand at mining in Arizona, then moved to San Francisco to take a job in newspaper advertising. The two families would never have crossed paths if it weren’t for the tennis activities of their daughters.

One origin story for the feud identifies a clash between Wills and Jacobs’s mother, Eula. The first time the older Helen went East, she and her own mother, Catherine, were careful to mix only with players and families that met their stringent standards. When mother and daughter Jacobs made the trip a few years later, the Willses made sure that their acquaintances knew that not all Berkeley families were social equals.

That speculative tale is the basis for another: that Eula became carelessly outspoken in her dislike of Helen Wills. One story even has Mrs. Jacobs jeering Wills from the grandstand when she turned up late for a Wightman Cup match. Another version has Eula misinterpreting (or correctly interpreting, who knows) a frosty post-match handshake as a slight of its own.

* * *

So many possible causes of the feud have been put forward that it seems like one of them must be true. Maybe all of them are true, and it’s a miracle the Helens didn’t kill each other.

Ted Tinling, the Wimbledon player liaison and dress designer, wrote of “dark rumors of religious differences and difference in sexual preferences.” Hoo boy, that would do it, wouldn’t it?

Ronald Jacobs was Jewish. Helen, as far as I know, was not observant, of Judaism or any other faith. The Jewish press enthusiastically claimed her, though a 1936 Time magazine profile includes the non sequitur, “Helen Jacobs is not a Jew.”

Tinling may have been suggesting that Wills was anti-Semitic. It wouldn’t have been out of character for a snobby, upper-class white American family of the time to have disparaging views of religious and ethnic minorities.

To Teddy’s other implication, we know that Jacobs was gay, and Wills–at least on the evidence of her two marriages–was straight. Jacobs’s orientation seems to have been an open secret. A recent profile calls her “out, loud and proud”–certainly not by today’s standards, but perhaps by those of her own era. She had a ten-year relationship with Henrietta Bingham, daughter of the American ambassador in London. On one occasion, a door unexpectedly swung open and ballroom full of guests saw the two women in the middle of a decidedly non-platonic kiss.

She wasn’t the only gay woman on the circuit. Far from it. But if Wills did object (if–as with the possibility of anti-Semitism, we just don’t know), she may well have shunned every player rumored to be homosexual. From our vantage point almost a century later, we can’t tell either way.

What makes Tinling’s hints believable is that Wills’s dislike for her rival seemed to verge on physical repulsion. The fingertip-brush handshake that Eula witnessed in 1927 was par for the course.

Fellow player Edith Cross told a story that Wills once entered a locker room and found Jacobs’s bags next to her own. She hurled them out the window without explanation. Like Fred Moody, Cross couldn’t explain where it all came from. All Cross knew was, “She just hated her.”

* * *

Two more theories, then we get back to the tennis. Feel free to skip ahead, but you have to admit, this is juicy stuff.

In 1933, the Chicago Tribune ran a three-part series called “The Warfare Between the Helens.” It was written by Ruth Reynolds, who appears to have been a teenage novice working for the advertising department. Though her sources are unclear, her pieces are full of plausible detail.

Reynolds explained that at the University of California, Wills was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. Other Kappas wanted Jacobs to join, too. “Neither girl will talk about it,” she wrote. But there were two possibilities. One, that Wills blackballed her rival–literally. Voting was done with colored balls, and Wills dropped a black one, killing the younger Helen’s chances. Or, maybe, Jacobs was admitted as a pledge, but it was she who didn’t want to share a sorority with another tennis star.

Contemporary sportswriters loved to play up the “catfight” aspect of the dispute, so an origin in sorority membership would’ve been appropriate.

The final possible root of the feud is the most believable of all, even if it doesn’t seem to account for the level of hatred that developed.

Alice Marble learned early on that Helen Wills was not the most generous of champions. Marble–another Pop Fuller protégé–was practicing one day with her coach when Wills passed by. Fuller asked if she would be willing to give young Alice some pointers. Helen simply said no.

Marble told Larry Engelmann, “She saw us all as competition for attention and that was that…. I think she considered every other player as a rival.” From an early age, Marble was a faithful member of Team Jacobs. Wills hardly left her any other choice.

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Click here for part 2, which covers the remainder of Jacobs’s career.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Mats Wilander [SWE]
Born: 22 August 1964
Career: 1981-96
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1988)
Peak Elo rating: 2,309 (1st place, 1983)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 33
 

* * *

Mats Wilander played some of the longest matches in tennis history. Those epics, especially the ones against Ivan Lendl, featured grueling baseline rallies that often spanned several dozen strokes or more. In the 1982 French Open final against Guillermo Vilas, a single point lasted 90 shots.

“Tennis to be respected,” said one spectator in Paris. Not necessarily enjoyed. Vitas Gerulaitis, one of Wilander’s victims that week, called him the “Ball-Wall from Sweden.”

Despite relying on a brand of tennis that Sports Illustrated once called “patty-cake,” Mats considered himself an aggressive player, even more so than the famous net-rushers of his era:

I’ve always believed that I play more aggressively than a player like Edberg or McEnroe. I think they play a tennis of chance, win or lose. I think that’s a negative attitude, which stems from the fact that you’re not good enough from the baseline. My game was built on hitting shots that prevented my opponent from hitting his best shots. To rush up to the net like that is like holding up a dartboard and giving your opponent an arrow. If he makes his shot, I won’t be able to hit the ball.

In 1982, he said, “I hate baseline rallies. Sometimes, though, I have to stay back there to win matches.”

Mats was a tactician, first and foremost. A problem solver, and one of the greatest of all time. If he needed to hit 30 shots before the court opened up for a backhand winner, he would do that. If he worried he was getting predictable, he would serve-and-volley with his opponent two points away from victory.

If a young player came along with a shot he thought he could use, like Stefan Edberg’s devastating kick serve, Wilander would copy it and put it to use in a grand slam final.

He was the master craftsman. For seven years in the 1980s, the rest of the tour was his toolbox.

* * *

It took some time before the tennis world recognized Wilander as an individual. Seeing a teenage clay-courter from Sweden with a two-handed backhand, people couldn’t help but think of a young Björn Borg.

Borg didn’t play the 1982 French Open, because he wasn’t willing to commit to the full schedule that the tour required. More than one wag speculated that he showed up anyway, in disguise. He wasn’t hitting quite as hard, but he couldn’t help but take the title, all under the assumed name of “Mats Wilander.”

When Mats won the tournament, extending Sweden’s reign at Roland Garros to five years, it hardly helped differentiate the two. Ion Țiriac asked, “Do you have some kind of laboratory for tennis machines in Sweden? Machines you put small heads on?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDzFht20HNw

Wilander had nothing but respect for Borg, of course. They had faced each other once, the previous year in Geneva, and the older man won, 6-1, 6-1. Mats believed that the two games he won were gifts. Had he faced Björn at Roland Garros, he figured he would fare just about as well.

However, the two Swedes didn’t know each other well, and Borg wasn’t even the 17-year-old’s idol. He looked up to Ilie Năstase. “You don’t idolize someone who is like yourself,” he said. “You idolize somebody you’d like to be like.”

Both men had two-handed backhands, but that’s correlation, not causation. Mats was wielding his double-hander–and using it to beat kids much older than himself–before Borg was Borg.

Wilander also displayed a more well-rounded game, even if he didn’t always use it. He volleyed better than the teenage Borg had, possibly better than Björn ever did. He didn’t serve-and-volley against Vilas in the 1982 French final, but 18 months later, when he was still just 19 years old, he came in behind almost all of his first serves in the Australian Open final against Lendl. He won better than three of every four.

* * *

What the two men had in common was an on-court calm that bordered on the superhuman.

It was the first thing that many observers noticed about the young Swede. Țiriac said, “Wilander’s mind is a weapon. Let’s put it this way: This is an old kid.” At the French in 1982, no one expected him to beat Lendl–Wilander himself most emphatically included. He assumed that his opponent would mount a fifth-set charge, and he started to feel the nerves. Solution? “I decided not to show it to anyone. It’s always best just to keep playing.”

Six years later, Paul Annacone said, “The biggest weapon in today’s tennis isn’t [Andre] Agassi’s forehand, it’s Mats Wilander’s brain.” Or maybe it was Brad Gilbert who said it. Or Jay Berger. Sources disagree. They probably all said it. It was obviously true.

Even here, Borg and Wilander were more different than similar. Borg achieved his imperturbable calm by controlling everything, orienting his entire life around his tennis. The younger man could never do that. He slept every chance he got, but it would never occur to him to track the hours. He wasn’t obsessive about training. On tour, he had few rivals and many drinking buddies.

Mats playing guitar in 1985

His coach, John-Anders Sjögren, called him a “life connoisseur.” It’s not a label that would fit many multi-major winners, especially in the modern era.

The contrasting approaches of Borg and Wilander brought them back to the same place: an absolute disregard for pressure. Teammate Anders Järryd said,

If I had a choice of one player in the entire history of tennis to have on my Davis Cup team, I’d choose Mats. He’s so cool in the critical moments. He’s the one you’d want next to you if your house caught fire.

* * *

It didn’t hurt that Wilander was one of the fittest guys on tour. He told Tom Perrotta of the Wall Street Journal in 2011, “Tennis is a running game, not a hitting game–it’s not golf.”

Mats certainly wasn’t concerned about finishing matches quickly. In his first couple of seasons on tour, he never aimed for the lines. His margin of safety was enormous, he rarely missed, and rallies dragged on until the other man made a move. So what if the result was so boring that a proposal emerged to change the game? The idea was that a warning light would flash after the 30th shot. Once the light was on, the players would have five strokes to finish the point.

The 1982 Roland Garros final lasted four hours and 43 minutes. Vilas, veteran of many protracted clay-court battles, admitted that Wilander was physically stronger than he was.

In 1987, Wilander and Lendl dragged out the US Open final for four hours and 47 minutes–and that one didn’t even make it to a fifth set.

Mats may have liked his chances even better had he come along a couple of decades sooner, before the widespread adoption of the tiebreak. The marathon match in Flushing required two of them. Without breakers, Wilander would’ve smashed every match-length record on the books.

In July 1982, he played what was then the longest Davis Cup singles match in history. On an indoor carpet court in St. Louis, he went toe-to-toe with John McEnroe–then the number one player in the world–for six hours and 32 minutes. He dropped the first two sets, but nearly completed the comeback in the deciding fifth rubber. Final score: 9-7, 6-2, 15-17, 3-6, 8-6.

McEnroe didn’t play again for a month. Wilander went straight to the airport, hopped a plane back to Sweden, and won a tournament in Båstad the very next week.

* * *

The game that made Mats a teenage champion wasn’t going to work forever. In fact, he started to discover holes in his approach just one year later, when he lost the 1983 Roland Garros final to Yannick Noah.

Most opponents did their best to avoid the Wilander backhand. Noah, by contrast, went after it, feeding him shallow, low balls on that wing. Players with slice backhands wouldn’t have had a problem with the tactic. A two-handed slugger was left with few options.

Solution: Learn to hit a one-handed slice backhand.

Wilander’s strategy was simple. He copied the best slice he knew, the one hit by Australian doubles specialist Peter McNamara. In the Noah match, he hit only a dozen slices. Six months later in the Australian final against Lendl, he hit 34. The next time he competed for the French Open title, in 1985, he hit 57. It hardly increased his screen time on highlight reels, but he subtly forced opponents to play to his strengths.

The slice backhand often set up a more aggressive two-hander

Lendl presented a different set of problems. Not only was he one of the few men who could win a long baseline battle against the Swede, he was also committed to self-improvement. The Lendl that Wilander faced in 1986 was far superior to the one he beat as a 17-year-old.

Solution: Beat Lendl at his own game.

A fellow player, Matt Doyle, convinced Mats that a proper regimen of strength training would add power to his serve, his forehand, even his best-in-class double-handed backhand. Working out with Doyle–essentially, training like Lendl–would mean a new level of dedication for the Swede. But if he was ever going to dislodge Lendl from the top of the ranking list, it was clear what he needed to do.

* * *

Half-hearted commitment might have held Wilander back more than any physical deficiency.

He was never a tennis machine, no matter what critics of his style liked to say. He found it especially hard to get motivated for smaller tournaments. In 1988, he explained to journalist Franz Lidz that he easily gave 100 percent in every match at a grand slam. At the year-end Masters, 99 percent. Anywhere else, it was 70 or 80 percent.

The number one ranking didn’t drive him the way it motivated the likes of McEnroe and Lendl. Winning a Davis Cup championship for Sweden did, at least until he achieved that goal by beating the Americans in 1984. After that, he wondered, “What more could people ask of me? And when I started to think like that, the pressure went away.”

What good is it to be preternaturally cool under pressure, if there’s no pressure?

Taking aim at Lendl and the number one ranking gave Wilander a renewed push. In 1987, Lendl was still too strong. The pair met three times, and Mats won only a pair of sets–one each in the marathon Roland Garros and US Open finals. Despite seeing some of the improvements that Doyle had promised, like more punch on the serve, he finished the year where he started, ranked third behind Lendl and Boris Becker.

The payoff came in 1988. He beat Pat Cash for the Australian championship, 8-6 in the fifth. At the French, he straight-setted Henri Leconte for his third title there. He finally came face to face with Lendl at the US Open, where they played for both the title and the number one ranking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXlWqiC_Xw

A younger Wilander wouldn’t have had a chance. The 24-year-old edition, armed with a bigger serve, a more confident net game, and an ever-improving slice backhand, had just enough to outlast Lendl. The match ran to five sets, and at four hours and 54 minutes, it set a new record for the longest grand slam final. (Novak Djoković and Rafael Nadal added an hour to the mark in 2012.)

Wilander came to the net over 100 times, and he hit an astonishing 395 slice backhands. By now, the slice wasn’t just a stopgap, it was a weapon in its own right. Typically a defensive stroke, players tend to win far fewer than half the points they play when they use it. Against Lendl that day, Mats won 58% of points when he hit a slice.

The Swede won the match, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 5-7, 6-4, improving his record in grand slam fifth sets to an unbelievable 13-1. After eight years on tour and seven major singles titles, he finally ascended to the number one ranking.

* * *

What happened next was, in retrospect, entirely in character.

Wilander won a small tournament in Palermo, then managed just two victories in six matches over the rest of the season. In the Davis Cup final that December, the newly-minted number one gave away a two-set advantage to lose to Carl-Uwe Steeb, a German ranked 74th in the world.

As far back as 1983, Mats had seen it coming. “In the future,” he said then, “if there is too much pressure, too much publicity, maybe I won’t want to be number one.”

Once he overtook Lendl, he didn’t have anything left to prove. He told Sports Illustrated, “John [McEnroe] and Jimmy [Connors] felt a responsibility to reaffirm their ranking every week. It was different for me…. I’ve just been Number One. What am I supposed to do, show them I can be Number One again?”

There was no risk of that. Mats lost the top spot after a second-round exit at the 1989 Australian Open. He didn’t win a title for the entire season–the first time since 1981–and he finished the year outside the top ten.

He liked tennis, but the “life connoisseur” had other interests and new challenges. He played guitar and started a band. He stayed home with his wife and young daughter. He would always be the problem solver capable of puzzling out how to beat every new tactic that cropped up on tour. Now he had other problems to solve.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Hana Mandlíková [CZE/AUS]
Born: 19 February 1962
Career: 1978-90
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1984)
Peak Elo rating: 2,316 (3rd place, 1986)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 27
 

* * *

7-6, 3-1, 40-15. Hana Mandlíková’s second time in the Wimbledon round of 16, and she was only a few volley winners away from a place in the quarters. Across the net was the veteran Evonne Goolagong, a player just as graceful as Hana, but with considerably less of the youthful fire that made the 18-year-old Mandlíková the most watchable woman on tour.

The fourth-round contest could have represented a passing of the torch from one generation’s most stylish one-handed backhand to another. Instead, it degenerated into a farce. Mandlíková missed serves, biffed volleys, and double faulted to let her opponent back into the match. From 2-3 in the second set, Goolagong won ten of the next eleven games and a spot in the final eight.

A collapse of that magnitude at Wimbledon would have been enough to make a reputation for years. Indeed, six years later, Mandlíková would say, “Every player has a label; one is a choker, one is a quitter…. Sometimes, I don’t think I get enough credit.”

She may have been right about that. But if anyone ever deserved the “choker” tag–or the less loaded version, that of a “talented flake”–it was Hana.

The week before the Wimbledon loss to Goolagong, Mandlíková fell apart in even more shocking fashion against Tracy Austin at Eastbourne. She won the first set 6-1 and held a game point for 4-0 in the second. After losing that game, she failed to convert another three chances to go up 4-1, then another three opportunities for 4-3. She never did win that fourth game of the second set, and she went out limply in the third, 6-2.

“She can go through a streak of form when I don’t really know what to do, so I just hang in there,” Austin said after the match. “This was the best comeback I have ever made.”

Hana had a knack for helping her peers achieve memorable comebacks. The Eastbourne defeat was already her fourth loss of the season to Austin, all of them in three sets. Only a few months past her 18th birthday, she had already lost 12 professional matches after winning the first set.

* * *

A lot of ink would be spilled over the following decade in an attempt to explain the perplexing Miss Mandlíková. She would struggle with injuries while still in her teens, and no matter how much she matured, the dominant duo of women’s tennis–Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova–would make it impossible for her to get a handhold at the top of the ranking ladder.

The raw talent was never, ever in doubt. The International Tennis Federation introduced their world junior rankings in 1978, and Hana was its inaugural number one. She won her first adult tournament in Europe the same year, at age 16. In 1979, she needed just three events on the Avon Futures circuit before winning one and gaining promotion to the top level of tournaments in North America.

Mandlíková made her first big move at the end of the 1979 campaign. She claimed three titles in four weeks leading up to the Australian Open, knocking out veterans Sue Barker, Dianne Fromholtz, Virginia Ruzici, and Wendy Turnbull. In early 1980, she took a set from Navratilova in the Amelia Island final, then pushed Evert to three sets at both the Italian and the French.

17-year-old Mandlíková at Wimbledon, in 1979

The Roland Garros semi-final against Evert was, for many, the introduction to Czechoslovakia’s latest star. For the Washington Post, Barry Lorge wrote of Hana’s “great athletic gifts … bursts of inspiration and mental lapses.” He continued, “She has so many shots, she sometimes doesn’t seem to know which to call on, and seems to have little concept of percentage play.” As in so many matches that season, Mandlíková seemingly disappeared. She won a topsy-turvy first-set tiebreak, then managed only four games the rest of the way. Evert ran off 16 points in a row to open the deciding set.

Regardless of outcome, Hana’s game was immensely appealing. She reminded fans of Goolagong and Maria Bueno, two of the most popular players of the previous two decades. She showcased immense variety, especially off the backhand side. Her netrushing came naturally–her father was an Olympic sprinter–and she pulled off shots at net that even Navratilova didn’t dare dream of.

What neither the press nor Mandlíková’s growing legion of fans recognized was the difficulty of life on the circuit for a teenager from the Eastern Bloc. Jan Kukal, a former tour player and Czech Davis Cup coach, worked with Hana in the early 1980s. He told Peter Bodo in 1984:

She had trouble with the language and, of course, the way of life was to her very strange. To me, it isn’t fair when people speak of Hana as a great talent who is weak or who doesn’t have good discipline for tennis. It makes it sound like she came up easy, like she had no problems to reach a high position. Actually, survival was difficult for her even before her trouble with injuries or motivation.

Kukal’s comments don’t entirely explain why the talented teenager was so strong early in matches and so weak when victory neared. But on a tour dominated by Americans and Australians, held mostly in English-speaking countries, Mandlíková faced challenges much more vexing than finding someone to restring her racket.

* * *

If Hana was indeed a choker, she didn’t seem to suffer any aftereffects. The collapse against Goolagong would’ve destroyed many careers. It was a mere stepping stone for Mandlíková.

In 1980, the teenager began working with Betty Stöve, the Dutch player who had reached the Wimbledon final in 1977. Stöve provided tactical savvy and training advice. Perhaps more importantly, she was a friend who helped Hana navigate life on tour.

The breakthrough came just two months after Wimbledon, at the US Open warmup in Mahwah. The Czech won her first title of the season, defeating Navratilova and Andrea Jaeger in three sets apiece. She took the first set from Martina, dropped the second, yet somehow held on for the victory.

For a player of Hana’s flightiness, such a win might have proved as meaningless as the collapse at the All-England Club. Instead, she built on it. Seeded ninth at the US Open, she drew Navratilova in the round of 16 and beat her in straights. Another narrow escape against Jaeger earned her a place in the final. Playing for the title against Evert, it was the French Open all over again. Mandlíková won the first set, then Chrissie took over. Final score: 5-7, 6-1, 6-1.

The pattern was remarkable. Between Roland Garros and Flushing Meadows, the two women met three times. Hana won the first set of each contest. Evert swept the rest, never losing more than two games per set.

Mandlíková in 1984 with Stöve, whose
expertise went beyond the tennis court

Still, the US Open final represented a step forward for the 18-year-old. She finally beat Chrissie (in straights!) a month later in Atlanta and piled up four more titles before the end of the year. One of them was the Australian Open, marking her first major championship just a few months after her debut appearance in a grand slam final.

* * *

Hana continued her fine form at majors into 1981. She won the French, beating Evert in the semi-finals. It was Chrissie’s first loss at Roland Garros in eight years. The final, against sixth-seeded Sylvia Hanika, was a mere formality in comparison.

At Wimbledon, Mandlíková beat Martina in the semi-final. Once again, she took the first set, lost the second, and somehow recovered to win the third. Evert got her revenge in the final, skipping the first-set drama and dispatching Hana, 6-2, 6-2.

The Czech had reached four consecutive grand slam finals, winning two of them. Remarkably, she wasn’t even at full strength. A few years later, Stöve told Bodo, “When she won the French, she was only able to warm up for 10 minutes before her matches, that’s how much her back hurt…. Hana actually withdrew from Wimbledon, but changed her mind after five minutes and re-entered.”

Mandlíková later suggested that her back spasms were triggered by nerves. Whatever the cause, they slowed her down, and they would linger for years.

Another problem she had to contend with in 1981 was the ranking system. The WTA algorithm at the time was an average, not a cumulative point total. It was also very complicated, and the tour did a poor job explaining it to players and fans.

Somehow, it was possible to reach the final of four straight majors and still be ranked fifth. In practical terms, there was an enormous difference between fourth and fifth. Any time the top four players entered a tournament, number five could face Evert or Navratilova as early as the quarter-finals. That was Mandlíková’s fate in Toronto, where Chrissie beat her in straight sets. Hana’s draw in Flushing was the same. Evert unceremoniously ended her slam final streak, 6-1, 6-3.

This particular fifth-ranked player, understandably, didn’t like it. (It didn’t help that no one understood it.) She felt she’d have a better chance against Evert later in tournaments. She was right to be skeptical of the computer. In 2019, a researcher applied a later WTA ranking algorithm to results from 1980 and 1981. He found that Mandlíková not only would’ve cracked the top four, she would’ve been number one for much of that summer.

My historical Elo ratings disagree. That formula ranks Hana fifth for the entirety of the 1981 season, behind Evert, Navratilova, Austin, and Jaeger. Mandlíková’s inconsistency, winning Roland Garros one week, dropping a decision to qualifier Kim Sands at Eastbourne two weeks later, counts against her in many ranking systems. Still, she was a bigger threat at the majors than Elo–or the WTA computer of the time–gives her credit for.

* * *

5-3, 30-love. In March of 1985, Mandlíková had bounced back from injuries and apathy and appeared ready–again–to dislodge the best players in the game. It was the semi-final of the Virginia Slims Championships, and she was two points away from taking the first set from Navratilova.

After Martina lost to Hana at Wimbledon in 1981, she dominated her younger rival. For much of that span, the fitter-than-ever Navratilova crushed everyone. She won nine matches in a row against Mandlíková. Part of it was Hana’s own punchlessness: she dropped eleven straight to Chrissie, as well.

The stylish Czech slipped a level, but she never lost her self-belief. After losing to Evert at the 1983 French Open, she said, “I think I am a much better player than Chris. If I’m in good shape, I beat her two-and-two.”

(After another Hana boast, Chrissie responded, “I guess she should be cocky. She beat me three years ago.”)

In 1984, Mandlíková beat Martina in Oakland, snapping a 74-match win streak. In Princeton the following year, she ousted Navratilova 7-5, 6-0. Martina lost only two bagel sets in seven years, and Hana was responsible for both of them.

Still, a second consecutive upset proved to be a bridge too far. From 5-3, 30-love, Navratilova won four straight points. Martina saved a set point at 4-5. Hana’s 44 winners were impressive, but they weren’t quite enough to do the job. The match went to the veteran, 7-5, 7-6.

Sports Illustrated called it “some of the finest shotmaking ever seen in women’s tennis.” Mandlíková’s confidence remained unshaken. She would concede only that her opponent “was luckier today—not a better player—just luckier.”

* * *

5-0, 40-30. Six months later, Mandlíková and Navratilova were at it again, now at the 1985 US Open. Hana had failed to capitalize on her big wins (and “unlucky” near-misses) from the beginning of the season, losing in the quarters in Paris and the third round at Wimbledon. At Manhattan Beach in July, she turned in a classic Hana performance, losing to Claudia Kohde Kilsch despite leading one set 5-1 and the other 5-2.

Mandlíková reached the final after surviving a challenge from Evert in the semis. It was only Hana’s second victory against the American in her last fifteen tries, and unlike so many of their previous matches, it was Chrissie who won the first set, and the Czech who came back to win.

Hana rode her momentum into the final for 17 minutes. In that time, she won five games and earned a set point on Martina’s serve. The stadium, presumably, held its collective breath. Navratilova saved the break point with a backhand winner, then held for 5-1. Another backhand, an aggressive return of Hana’s second serve, got Martina a break for 5-2.

And so it went. Navratilova broke again–at love–for 5-4. At 5-all, Hana fell to love-40 before she finally reacquainted her brain with her right arm. She saved eight break points (and squandered three game points of her own) before finally holding for 6-5. Martina was the one who crumbled in the tiebreak, converting only one of her five service points and dropping the breaker, 7-3.

At its best, the match featured the same jaw-dropping net play that characterized the Slims Championship semi-final in March. As Stöve told her charge, “It’s a battle of who gets to the net first.” Both players moved forward over 100 times. If one of them didn’t serve-and-volley, the other would often charge in behind the service return. Mandlíková was the only woman capable of holding her own against the Navratilova attack.

At the 1985 US Open, Hana was hitting shots
like this even before the final.

Except for when she couldn’t. Hana lost the second set, 6-1, allowing her opponent 11 of 12 points in one stretch.

But as ever, Mandlíková’s form returned as quickly as it disappeared. A brilliant mimic, one of her strokes could go astray simply because an opponent was hitting her own badly. In this final, there was no chance of getting into a rhythm. The average rally lasted less than three strokes.

Hana once again reengaged, and she served for the match at 5-3. Martina broke her–of course–this time with an opportunistic forehand passing shot. The next three games were comfortable holds, and the title would be decided in a shoot-out.

Finally (finally–finally!), Mandlíková got hot at exactly the right moment. She won the first six points of the breaker, landing all but one of her first serves. None of them came back. On her third match point, she put away a backhand volley, and she became a US Open champion.

* * *

For years, it seemed that every feature article about Hana asked the same questions. Had she changed? If not: Could she change? It’s an irresistible hook when writing about immature, inconsistent, or otherwise inscrutable athletes.

In some ways, the answer was yes. She eventually became more comfortable speaking English, got used to life on tour, and–for the most part–learned not to say the first thing that popped into her head about the shortcomings of her fellow players. Her tactical sense improved, and she got better at closing out matches.

But at the level that really mattered, the answer was no. While late-career Hana was an improvement on the teenage version, the results didn’t differ much. The cumulative effect of injuries had some say in that. Navratilova had an even bigger influence: After the 1985 US Open final, the two women played 16 more matches, and Martina won 15 of them. Hana’s consolation prize was the title at the 1987 Australian Open, the last time the pair met in a final.

What truly never changed was Mandlíková’s belief in her own abilities. By the end of her reign at number three, she no longer trailed Evert. Now she had to chase Steffi Graf. Before she lost in the fourth round at the 1987 US Open, the New York Times described Hana as “undaunted.” She thought Graf’s time at the top wouldn’t last long: “When I was 18 and I look at how mentally immature I was, I just can’t see it.”

Twelve months later, Graf would hold the Grand Slam and erase all doubts. Mandlíková, struggling with a heel injury and waning motivation, was on her way out.

It’s a shame, because while Hana lost seven of her eight meetings with Steffi and may never have made any progress, Graf was the kind of opponent she would’ve gotten worked up for. She said in 1986 of her earlier rivals, “Any time I step on the court, I believe I can beat Chris. The other players don’t and that’s the wrong attitude. Same with Martina. Nobody believes they can beat her. I do.”

Mandlíková’s self-assurance was evident to all who watched her play, and it helped her amass more victories against Evert and Navratilova than almost anyone else. At her best–even if it didn’t quite last for an entire set–she could beat anyone.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

John Newcombe [AUS]
Born: 23 May 1944
Career: 1960-81
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1967)
Peak Elo rating: 2,209 (1st place, 1974)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 76
 

* * *

John Newcombe was the last Wimbledon champion before Open tennis transformed the game in 1968. For a young man of 23, he was quite experienced, making his seventh trip to the All-England Club. Harry Hopman had spotted his talent early on, letting him tag along on the Aussie Davis Cup squad’s circuit around the world when he was only 17.

Newk was the king of the amateur tennis world in 1967. In addition to Wimbledon, he won the US Nationals at Forest Hills, led his nation to its fourth-straight Davis Cup championship, and picked up another ten titles besides. Out of 128 singles matches, he won 111. He had a “job” working for Slazenger, and it was only a matter of time before he’d sign on the dotted line and start collecting the big bucks in pro tennis.

By the time he dispatched Clark Graebner in the Forest Hills final, he and doubles partner Tony Roche had already come to an agreement with David Dixon, the promoter who, with billionaire Lamar Hunt, was putting together what would become the World Championship Tennis (WCT) tour. Newcombe and Roche were the anchors of what would become the “Handsome Eight.” They would play most of the year on the WCT circuit, and thanks to the revolution in tennis, they would be able to enter the majors, as well.

The bad news: Everybody else could sign up for the majors, too.

Fred Stolle turned up at Forest Hills in 1967 as a spectator. The defending champion, he was ineligible to play after joining the professionals. He joked he was there “to see how they pay the amateurs this year–under the table or over it.”

Before switching sides, Stolle had beaten Newk in 13 of 22 career meetings. Newcombe asked him, “[I]f I wanted to play the pros, what would I have to improve? My backhand and my second serve, would you say?” Stolle suggested the difference was more tactical, “which shots to try for winners off of.”

What strikes me about the exchange isn’t anything about Newk’s game, it’s that the superiority of the pros was taken as absolute truth. Newcombe lost only four games in the Wimbledon final that year, yet he recognized he was essentially playing in the minor leagues.

1968 would prove him right. Graebner and Arthur Ashe would stop him from reaching the semi-final at either Wimbledon or Forest Hills, and he’d lose 37 matches, including decisions to veterans Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall–men who the amateur-professional divide had long shielded him from. He lost five in a row in early February, another four straight a couple weeks later. He dropped six decisions that year to Dennis Ralston alone.

A lesser man would’ve accepted his new second-tier status in the game. The 24-year-old Newcombe, however, got back to work.

* * *

Here is the difference between the amateur game and Open men’s tennis, in one table. I’ve listed Newcombe’s match winning percentage, along with his age at Wimbledon, for each year from 1966 to 1974:

Year  Age  Win%  
1966   22   78%  
1967   23   87%  
1968   24   65%  
1969   25   70%  
1970   26   74%  
1971   27   77%  
1972   28   78%  
1973   29   73%  
1974   30   87%

All of these are good seasons, don’t get me wrong. Even 1968 isn’t as much an outlier as the table makes it appear. The first WCT circuit included several round robins, especially at the beginning when Newk was adjusting to his new life as a touring pro. My Elo ratings, which take into account strength of opposition, rate Newcombe as the fourth best player at the end of the season, behind only Laver, Rosewall, and Ashe.

Still, the ’68 and ’69 campaigns were a bit of a letdown for a player who was nearly untouchable in his last amateur season.

1969 was marked by one near-miss after another. He beat Roche in a five-setter for the Italian title, then lost another five-setter to Tom Okker at the French. He upset Laver at Queen’s Club in the semi-final, then lost a heart-breaker of a two-setter to Stolle in the final, 6-3, 22-20. Laver beat him in four in the Wimbledon final, then dispatched him again in Boston two weeks later. At the US Open, he got past Stolle, 13-11 in the fifth, then lost to Roche–yet another five-set struggle–in the semis.

Newk and Roche were not just doubles partners, they were close friends. None of that mattered on the singles court. “Some of the hardest matches I’ve ever played, real blood and thunder five-setters, were against Tony,” Newcombe said.

The Elo formula credits him with another fourth-place finish, now behind Laver, Roche, and Okker. In the year of Laver’s Grand Slam, however, the glory that Newk had reached just two years before must have felt very far away.

* * *

With so much money on the line, there was now more to tennis success than simply piling up tournament victories. As Newcombe matured, he added to his appeal on the both the tangible and less-tangible sides of the ledger.

In 1967, the 23-year-old from Sydney was just another serve-and-volleyer, albeit the best of the amateur pack. He could boast a strong serve–both first and second–and a powerful forehand. His backhand was functional, and anyway, the rest of his game was strong enough to hide it. His game was even better suited to doubles than to singles; he won six doubles majors as an amateur (five of them with Roche) and eleven more in the Open era.

Many fans, understandably, saw Newcombe as little more than the latest Aussie. The parade of stars from Down Under had been winning most of the majors for 15 years, many of them with the same combination of fitness and big-game tactics that Newk offered. Frank Deford saw the potential for more:

Even now, Newcombe plays the net with his own special daring—on top of it, challenging, like a third baseman moving in close, defying a potential bunter to hit away. And his on-court peculiarities–shirttail out, tousled towhead, a large inurbane grunt that he dispenses with each serve–can become crowd-pleasing characteristics. The considerable charm of the private Newcombe is unlikely to remain hidden within the public one.

The Sydneysider would never become Ilie Năstase, but in time, he would cash in on his own brand of crowd-pleasing charm. First, he doubled down on the aspects of his game that made him an amateur champion.

It’s uncanny how many of Newk’s skills were described as the very best on the circuit. Jack Kramer said he had never seen a better second serve. In 1970, Sports Illustrated described his forehand as “perhaps the strongest in tennis.” Deford credited him with “a scrambler’s lob the equal of anybody’s,” and he emphasized that Newcombe’s head and heart were even better than his stroke equipment.

As for the backhand… In the first game of the 1968 Wimbledon doubles final, he smacked the hardest backhand winner of his life. Fred Stolle, on the other side of the net, wasn’t worried. “We don’t have to worry about that shot any more–now that you’ve hit your one for the year!”

* * *

In 1970, Newcombe returned to the Wimbledon winner’s circle. His opponent was the 35-year-old Ken Rosewall, part of the 1953 Davis Cup-winning team that inspired the nine-year-old John to pursue tennis in the first place.

The press box was pulling for the veteran, a sentimental favorite who would never win Wimbledon despite reaching four finals. Rosewall gave them hope, pulling out the fourth set after Newcombe took a two-to-one lead, but he couldn’t withstand Newk’s attack. The younger man won the fifth set, 6-1.

By then, Newcombe had earned a reputation as a man to fear in long matches. In the quarter-finals of the same tournament, he outlasted Roy Emerson after losing the second and third sets. It was a momentous struggle to finish the job, 11-9 in the fifth. An early proponent of advance scouting, Newk would keep an opponent guessing until the very end. He liked to keep a tactic or two in his back pocket, ready to spring something new if he ended up in a deciding set.

Most of all, he backed himself to the hilt when matches got tight. One journalist noted in 1970, “It is said in tennis that Newcombe is so tough when he is behind that you have to shoot him to win.” He could lose interest when he was winning, but never when there was ground to make up. “I’m at my best in a five-set match, especially if I get behind. My adrenaline starts pumping.”

One fellow player said in 1975 that Newcombe was “the cockiest guy around, cockier than [Jimmy] Connors.” Hard as that is to believe, his self-belief could reach staggering levels. For Rod Laver and Larry Writer’s 2019 book, The Golden Era, he told the authors that he won “80-90 per cent” of his five-setters. That is a truly impressive rate. Alas, it was not his. I count 86 five-set matches in his singles career, of which he won 52–a respectable but much more human win rate of 60%.

* * *

Fans could be forgiven for believing Newk’s hyperbole. He almost never lost a five-setter when the stakes were high. He won seven of nine Open era finals that went the distance, and between 1966 and the end of his career, he won 17 of 23 five-setters at majors.

One of those was his signature match, even more memorable than the Wimbledon final against Rosewall. In 1971, he waltzed past the veteran, 6-1, 6-1, 6-3 in the semi-final. His reward was a final against Stan Smith. Newk won more than half of his career meetings with the American, but it was never easy:

Stan tries to overpower you mentally. A certain amount of that is the way he plays–the steamroller, smothering you at the net. But I can deal with that. What is more tiring is his air–that smug confidence. You must concentrate all the time or you’ll give up. Nobody wears me out like Smith does, but it’s not from the tennis, it’s mental fatigue.

Newcombe lost the second and third sets. He won the fourth, but found himself one point away from dropping to 4-1 in the decider. From there, wrote Rex Bellamy, “Newcombe fought back with the fury of a wounded but indomitable lion who knew he had to kill or be killed.” In the end, mental fatigue got to the American, not the Australian. Smith double-faulted on the final point to give Newcombe the match.

The two men faced off again in the 1973 Davis Cup Challenge Round in Cleveland. The United States had held the Cup since 1968, but many observers felt that it hardly counted. Contract pros were forbidden from the competition, so a veritable wing of the Hall of Fame–Laver, Rosewall, Emerson, Stolle, Newcombe, Roche, and more–was kept off the Australian side. The rules finally caught up with the times in 1973, and a “Dad’s Army” of veteran Aussies assembled for the campaign.

Newcombe-Smith was the first match of the tie, and it didn’t disappoint. Newk served big, and even his backhand chalked up winners. In a little over three hours, the Australian scored another five-set victory. The next day, he paired with Rod Laver to finish the job. Smith and Erik van Dillen didn’t stand a chance: The Aussies won the doubles with the loss of only seven games.

* * *

The 1973 Davis Cup represented the end of an era. Laver and Rosewall were getting old. Harry Hopman, the man who had guided generations of Australian stars, had moved on to work at an academy in New York. The increasingly global spread of the game meant that while you could still find Aussies in the draw of just about every tournament, it was no longer a lock that the final would involve two of them.

But John Newcombe still had something to prove.

By his mid-twenties, Newk sought a balance between tennis and life. A few grueling seasons–128 matches in 1967, the first WCT tour in 1968–drove him to establish a comfortable home where he could recover from the rigors of the road. He bought a ranch in New Braunfels, Texas, built it up to become a tennis mecca, and rarely missed a chance to spend extended stretches there.

With national pride on the line, he refocused for the 1973 Davis Cup. Before the triumph in Cleveland, he won his fifth singles major, beating Jan Kodeš in another high-profile five-setter. Now 29 years old, his self-confidence and approach to the game had hardly changed. “I knew that if I kept hitting the same shots at him,” he told Sports Illustrated, “he could keep it up for 50 minutes or an hour, but not for an hour and a half.”

The Cup in the bag, his target was to become number one on the new ATP computer ranking. He got there, in part, by playing more tennis than he had ever played before. By June, he had won six titles, and despite never crossing paths with the reigning top dog, Ilie Năstase, he gained the number one position in June.

Alas, he lost to the ageless Rosewall in the Wimbledon quarter-finals, and the tournament’s winner, Jimmy Connors, became king of the ATP computer a few weeks later. Newcombe couldn’t strike back, since he was busy playing the first season of World Team Tennis. At the US Open, he lost to Rosewall again.

As Connors solidified his status at the top of the game–he would hold the top ranking for more than three years–the come-from-behind champion still had one more triumph in his racket bag.

Newcombe arrived at the 1975 Australian Open in mediocre form. He still ranked second to Connors, but in two months, he had lost to the likes of Phil Dent, Geoff Masters, and Ismail El Shafei. He hardly looked better in the second round when he needed five sets to get past Rolf Gehring, a German ranked outside of the top 200 in the world.

It would be an exaggeration to say he quickly played his way into form. He just squeaked past Masters in the quarters, losing a third-set tiebreak before sneaking out of a 10-8 fifth set. His opponent in the semi-finals was Tony Roche. As they had so many times before, the long-time partners and friends refused to give an inch. Newcombe advanced by nearly as close a margin as he had in the round before, 9-7 in the decider.

Connors awaited in the final. Finally, “six months of verbal warfare” would be settled on the court. Whatever the computer spat out, Newk still considered himself the man to beat. He had defeated Connors in their two 1974 meetings. In Melbourne, he made it three. Jimbo’s fearsome return of serve kept Newcombe pinned to the baseline, but the veteran still managed to come through in four, 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 7-6.

* * *

The 1975 Australian title gave Newcombe seven major championships in singles to go with 16 doubles slams. He’d add a 17th in Melbourne the following year.

But his days of beating Connors were over. They faced off in a exhibition-style challenge match in Las Vegas a few months later. This time, Jimbo won in four, and he’d never lose to the Australian again.

Newcombe’s late-career resurgence, however, made him a rich man. He walked away with about $300,000 (about $1.6 million in today’s dollars) from the Connors match alone. By that time, he was endorsing rackets, resorts, watches, luggage, and shoes. His Texas tennis ranch, offering clinics to socialites, had spawned franchises.

While he would never return to number one, he remained capable of testing the best players on the planet for years. In 1981, he entered the US Open with Fred Stolle, another man who had been winning majors since the days of amateur tennis. They made a surprise run to the semi-finals, falling only after they pushed John McEnroe and Peter Fleming to a fifth set.

McEnroe was the kind of doubles player he respected–a singles standout whose skills applied just as well to the doubles court. Long after his retirement, Newcombe told Rod Laver, “[Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan] play a nice game of doubles and best of luck to them. In our day they’d have been lucky to make the quarters. Look at the teams they’ve beaten in the grand slams, doubles specialists who wouldn’t be among the top 100 singles players.”

I suspect the Bryans would’ve done just fine in the 1960s, ’70s, or any other era. But Newk is entitled to his opinion. If anyone knows what it takes to win tennis matches regardless of context–singles, doubles, amateur, professional, exhibition, knockout, round robin, Davis Cup, Team Tennis, you name it–it is John Newcombe.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

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
 

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Jana Novotná [CZE]
Born: 2 October 1968
Died: 19 November 2017
Career: 1987-99
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1997)
Peak Elo rating: 2,295 (2nd place, 1998)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 24
 

* * *

In making this list, I’ve picked up a couple of tricks for identifying all-time greats who have been unfairly neglected. These aren’t things I actively sought out, just trends that have emerged as we go through the list.

First, many of the best doubles players in history were stronger singles competitors than we give them credit for. A few names that come to mind are Rosie Casals, Tony Roche, and Pam Shriver. The skills that make singles and doubles champions aren’t that different from each other, and that was even more true before the increased specialization of the last couple of decades.

Second, if a player is better known for losses than wins, history has probably done them a disservice. We remember David Ferrer for his valiant, failed attempts to dislodge Rafael Nadal. Vitas Gerulaitis is the guy who needed 17 tries to beat Jimmy Connors. What the capsule summaries miss is the sustained excellence required to earn one’s way onto the biggest stages.

Jana Novotná emphatically ticks both boxes. With Helena Suková, she won five major doubles titles before her 23rd birthday. The Czech duo came within one match of completing the Grand Slam in 1990. In 1998, Novotná three-peated again, playing three slams with Martina Hingis and winning the lot.

And of course, if you know one thing about Novotná, it is that she gave away the Wimbledon title in 1993. Upon her untimely death from ovarian cancer five years ago, the New York Times obituary began with her losing the final. The headline called her a “Czech Champion,” but the lede had her crying on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.

Her name has become a byword for choking in tennis. When I wrote about Serena Williams’s collapse to Karolína Plíšková at the Australian Open a few years ago, I managed to get through a draft without mentioning Jana’s name. By the final edit, she was in. Apparently it’s not optional.

Had Novotná lost in the quarter-finals that year, we would remember her more for the Wimbledon title she did win, in 1998. Had Steffi Graf made quick work of the title match, Jana would be just one more of the excellent players who weren’t quite up to the Steffi standard. Instead, she got so close–4-1, deciding set, game point–and then looked terrible as the biggest match of her career slipped away.

* * *

Novotná’s member page at the International Tennis Hall of Fame website makes a gallant effort to focus on the positive. There’s no mention of the 1993 Wimbledon final until the fourth paragraph, about halfway through the biography.

Alas, if you’re reading that page, you probably know what happened. The attempt, well-intentioned as it is, feels a bit like an ashen journalist pointing and yelling, “Don’t look! Don’t look at the double-faulting server!”

Jana insisted that she didn’t choke–she was playing her usual high-risk game. It takes a very charitable eye, however, to watch the replay and agree.

Graf pulled out a squeaker of a first set, 8-6 in the tiebreak. Novotná came out more aggressive in the second and capitalized on Steffi’s errors to quickly force a decider, 6-1. She kept the momentum going, breaking Graf twice to reach 4-1 in the third.

A textbook serve-and-volley point gave Jana game point for 5-1. Then it all came apart. She double faulted, missing her second serve by a mile. Two unforced errors at net gave the game to Graf. Steffi still wasn’t playing well: Novotná generated two break points in the next game but couldn’t convert. At 4-3, she double faulted three more times. After a hold to love for the German, Jana made three unforced errors and won only a single point in her final service game.

She told the Independent later that year, “That’s the way I play. It had worked in the semi- finals and quarter-finals. OK, I gave her a chance with the second serve and the easy volley. But I’ve looked at the tape of the final and I would play it like that again.”

A lot rests on what Jana meant when she said like that. She had a reputation for double faulting more than the typical player, since she often came in behind her second serve and opted for a more aggressive delivery. Serve-and-volleyers accept that while they’ll get passed and they’ll miss the occasional easy volley, the percentages are on their side.

Rushing the net, like Jana did, was a high-risk endeavor

Still, they are percentages. My win probability model says that Novotná had a 95.6% chance of victory from her most favorable point in the third set. The average odds of winning from match point are 97%, and Serena’s position before her 2019 tumble came in at 98.9%. Give any player–let alone a make-or-break netrusher like Jana–two dozen leads like the one she held against Graf, and she’s bound to blow one of them.

Unfortunately, the one she blew was on Centre Court, title on the line, with the whole world watching.

* * *

Before the fateful Wimbledon, Novotná was known as a good-but-not-great singles player. She had reached the final at the 1991 Australian, where she upset Graf and took a set from Monica Seles. She was a top-tenner, but just barely.

Afterwards, her ranking didn’t matter. Her reputation as a choker was set. Sue Barker said, “[S]he does rather have that label now, and she’ll have to work twice as hard to lose it.”

Twice as hard. If only it were so easy.

Jana might have been deluding herself about having played out the Wimbledon final the right way. Still, her attitude was the right one for a quick recovery.

When the tour returned to Europe for the indoor season in September, she reached the final in Leipzig (losing to Graf quickly this time) and picked up a title in Brighton. Quarter-finals in Australia and Miami got her into the top five on the WTA computer for the first time, and in the fall of 1994, she ran off a 16-match win streak indoors, including titles in Leipzig, Brighton, and Essen.* She joined forces with Arantxa Sánchez Vicario to win the doubles at the 1994 US Open and the 1995 Australian.

* She once said, “I could win three straight tournaments, and people would still say, ‘Yes, she’s playing well. But remember the Wimbledon final when she choked?'” Fact check: True.

One might even say that she had been working twice as hard. With her coach, countrywoman and former grand slam champion Hana Mandlíková, she developed an increasingly well-rounded game and slowly discovered what it took to become a top player.

Sometimes, that meant gutting out matches that should’ve come more easily. The 1994 Leipzig championship required two come-from-behind victories, each decided at 7-5 in the third. At Melbourne Park in 1995, she battled into the fourth round with a 9-7, third-set win over Lisa Raymond. Whether she should’ve let those matches get so close is beside the point. She repeatedly worked her way into situations where chokers choke, and she didn’t.

And then she did. At the 1995 French Open, less than two years after the Wimbledon debacle, Novotná wasted six match points in a third-round loss to Chanda Rubin. Three of them came at 5-0 in the deciding set. Any hope the 26-year-old had of ditching the choke-artist label was gone for good.

* * *

Even with another indisputable disaster on her résumé, the Czech star kept bouncing back. While she might have been “too smart for her own good,” as Franz Lidz wrote in Sports Illustrated, she had no problem marshaling the selective memory that separates champions from the rest. She was able to forget the collapses, even if no one else could.

Her ranking fell as low as 14th in early 1996, but she quickly turned it around. She won the trophy in Madrid in May, picking up her first title on clay since in seven years. The fall indoor season was once again her best stage, where she won three straight tournaments, beating Martina Hingis and Jennifer Capriati twice each.

Novotná finished the season at a career-best ranking of number three, and in another six months, she edged into second place. At long last, she returned to the Wimbledon final, where an abdominal injury–combined with the pitiless Hingis–ended her title hopes in another three-setter. The Duchess of Kent reminded her that the third time could be the charm.

Stories about Jana’s runner-up finish in 1997 invariably mentioned her first near-miss at Wimbledon. But anyone who was paying attention could tell that the fragile, too-smart, pick-your-choke-narrative Novotná was a thing of the past.

Medal winners in the 1996 Olympics singles event. L to R: Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Lindsay Davenport, and Novotná. Jana would win doubles majors with both of her fellow medalists.

The 1997 campaign continually tested her mettle. 28 of her 68 singles matches went to a third set. She won 19 of them, and her 9 losses included the injury-marred Wimbledon final. Even the most uncharitable observer could call only one of the defeats a choke job: a US Open quarter-final loss to her doubles partner, Lindsay Davenport. No one could blame her for that one. Gusty winds made for conditions so extreme that both players were laughing at points throughout the 84-minute deciding set.

Novotná’s final three-set victory of the season, over Mary Pierce, sealed a title at the year-end championships, the most important non-major event of the year. She was a 29-year-old surrounded by teens, but she was playing the best tennis of her career.

* * *

1998 was Jana’s 13th Wimbledon. Since the famous final in 1993, she had never failed to reach the quarters. She was stopped only by the best: Graf, Hingis, or Navratilova.

Finally, Novotná peaked at the perfect time, against the right opponents. In the quarter-final, Venus Williams was the one who crumbled, losing focus when line calls went against her. Jana played even better in the semi, avenging her 1997 defeat to Hingis. She rarely dared to serve-and-volley against the sharpshooting 17-year-old, but she came to net 65 times in two sets, finishing the job in her favor 29 times. Novotná won, 6-4, 6-4.

Jana even received something even rarer than a victory over the testy Swiss–she heard comments from Hingis that might be interpreted as praise. “[S]ometimes it seems like the older the better.” (Hingis’s generous spirit wouldn’t last. After winning three doubles majors with Novotná, Martina ditched her partner, saying she was “too old and slow.”)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF1NaNXZdtI

With Graf upset early and Hingis out, that left the unlikely figure of Nathalie Tauziat standing between Jana and Wimbledon glory. Tauziat, another veteran serve-and-volleyer, was playing her first grand slam final, despite being a year older than Novotná. It showed. Both women were cautious, and errors piled up in the early going.

The Czech didn’t silence her nerves entirely, but she came through when it counted. After breaking at 3-all in the first set, she held serve comfortably to run out the frame. While a slew of unforced errors prevented her from serving out the match at 5-4 in the second, she commanded the ensuing tiebreak, landing her first serves and keeping the pressure on Tauziat’s delivery. She completed the victory, 6-4, 7-6(2).

The Duchess was right: the third time was a charm. Novotná, appropriately enough, capped the victory with yet another doubles triumph. She won her fourth Wimbledon doubles title in eight finals, her 11th major championship in the discipline. She’d tack on another at the US Open two months later.

Back in 1993, Jana had posed a rhetorical question: “How many chokers get to the Wimbledon finals?” Five years later, she might ask, “How many chokers get to the Wimbledon final three times–and win one of them?” To Novotná, the answer was clear. “It comes down to this: You have to depend on yourself, you have to know who you are, how good you are,” she also said.

There is a difference between winning a title and falling five points short. But Novotná, unlike so many pundits and fans, recognized that the gap between the two was slim. She believed in herself at a time when the world knew her only as the one who fell apart when the stakes were highest. She never shook the choke-artist label, and apparently she never will. But she persisted until she won the title that had so narrowly eluded her, securing a place among the greats of the game.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Roy Emerson [AUS]
Born: 3 November 1936
Career: 1953-77
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Major singles titles: 12
Total singles titles: 119
 

* * *

In September 1962, Rod Laver completed his first Grand Slam with a 2–6, 4–6, 7–5, 4–6 defeat of his fellow Australian, Roy Emerson. It was the tenth meeting between the two players that year, every single one of them in a final. In less than four years, the two men had faced off a whopping 30 times. Laver led the series, 19 to 11.

That year, Laver beat Emerson in seven title matches–at the Australian Championships, the Altamira International in Venezuela, the River Oaks tournament in Houston, the Italian Championships, the French Championships, Queen’s Club, and now the US Nationals. Emerson fell short at Wimbledon only because of a freak injury in the doubles. “He has beaten some great players in the finals,” joked Emerson to the Forest Hills crowd.

Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel: Laver was likely to turn pro. For the last fifteen years, the professional game had steadily chipped away at the amateur ranks. Wimbledon champions received particularly lucrative offers. Of the six winners there between 1955 and 1962, only Neale Fraser chose to remain an amateur.

“It will be nice playing someone else in these finals,” Emerson said.

Even Emerson probably didn’t realize how true that would prove to be. Between 1963 and 1967, the six-footer from Queensland would reach ten more major singles finals, and he’d win them all. He won 12 titles overall in 1963, and he rode a 55-match win streak to an astonishing 19 titles in 1964. He did all this while playing doubles–usually winning–almost every week. Laver called him “the best men’s doubles player of our era,” with 16 major titles to prove it.

After Laver turned pro, there was little incentive for Emerson to follow. Roy’s brother-in-law, 1957 Forest Hills champion Mal Anderson, said, “Top amateurs nowadays make more than the average pro anyway. Emerson collected a healthy paycheck from a sinecure at Philip Morris*, and the best amateurs collected several hundred dollars per week in “expenses” when they played tournaments.

* Few celebrity endorsers have ever been so ambivalent. “Part of my job was to smoke my employer’s product at company functions and store appearances. I took tiny puffs and tried not to inhale because I didn’t want smoke in my lungs…. I was the most uncool smoker ever.”

There was a heavy downside risk in joining the professional ranks, as well. Even apart from the money, he might have struggled against the different standard of competition. Even Laver had a tough time when he first switched. Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated that Emerson “would not be an immediate pro success and, as un-colorful as he is, he would be absolutely veiled in defeat.”

Roy wouldn’t turn pro until 1968, when Open tennis removed much of the decision’s gravity. He was the last great amateur champion.

* * *

It is easy to overrate Emerson. His 12 grand slam singles titles were the most of any player until Pete Sampras won his 13th at Wimbledon in 2000. Even now, Emerson’s haul is good for fifth place on the all-time list.

It’s an impressive tally, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he benefited from a particularly weak era. Most of the top players of his generation had defected to the pros. There was also a dearth of men’s tennis talent coming of age in the 1960s. The next great players to come along after Emerson, Arthur Ashe and John Newcombe, were seven and eight years younger, respectively.

Laver wrote, “Roy rose to the top on the back of natural attrition,” though he adds, sportingly and probably correctly of Emerson’s peak, “Emmo was on fire in those years, and he’d have given me some tremendous matches had I still been around.”

An even more skeptical view comes from pro tennis majordomo Jack Kramer. For his 1978 book, The Game, Kramer imagined a world in which men’s tennis had never been separated into amateur and pro ranks. He listed his hypothetical Wimbledon and Forest Hills champions for each year from 1931 to 1967. His counterfactual gives every single 1960s title to Laver, Ken Rosewall, or Richard “Pancho” González. In reality, Emerson won four of those majors; all Kramer will say is that Roy (or one of several other contenders) might have “sprung a surprise.”

Still, it’s easy to take all of this too far. Emerson did win those dozen majors. You can only beat the guy on the other side of the net, and from 1961 to 1965, he did exactly that–about 500 times.

Emmo–the Aussies weren’t very creative with nicknames–was two years older than Laver, and the pair reached the top of the amateur game at about the same time. Emerson won his first two majors in 1961, both with final-round triumphs over Rocket Rod. He beat Laver in five title matches that year, and some journalists placed him first in their year-end rankings.

My retrospective Elo ratings aren’t quite so rosy, but they demonstrate how competitive Roy was with the rest of the field–even including the professionals. Here are his year-end Elo rankings from 1961 to 1967:

Year  Elo rank  
1961         3  
1962         2  
1963         4  
1964         1  
1965         2  
1966         2  
1967         3

Emmo was one of only three players–along with Laver and Rosewall–to hold the number one position in that seven-year span. He topped the Elo list for 57 weeks between mid-1964 and mid-1965, and he had brief spells as number one in 1962, 1963, and 1966. He wasn’t the best player of his generation, but the numbers suggest that he would’ve been a contender for every major title–even if his countrymen from the pro ranks had been around to stop him.

* * *

Emerson was a fitting apex to Australia’s great run of world-beating amateurs, a star who would wipe you off the court in the afternoon and buy you a beer in the evening.

Arthur Ashe spoke for a generation of players:

Everybody loved Emmo as a man and respected him as a player. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like him. Everywhere on the circuit, he’d be the last one to leave the bar at night and the first one on the practice court next morning. He’d stay there longer too. Emmo closed more bars and practice courts than anybody I’ve ever known.

The stories of hyper-fit Aussies get a bit repetitive, but Emerson was the fittest of them all. He took coach Harry Hopman’s advice to heart, running circles around his teammates–sometimes almost literally. When the Davis Cup squad ran ten kilometers to the beach, the rest of the group stopped to take a dip while Emmo ran straight back.

The physical training paid off on court. In one stretch between 1961 and 1967, Emerson won 44 of his 64 five-setters. Even in short matches, Emmo pushed his opponents to the limit. He played fast, knowing that most of his peers couldn’t recover as quickly between points.

Emmo’s fitness ameliorated the effects of his full-tilt lifestyle, as well. Bud Collins described Emerson’s and Fred Stolle’s system as “snooze and booze.” One of them would go out, and the other would rest up for the next day’s tennis.

All that time in the gym also helps explain his relatively late peak. He was 24 years old when he won his first major, at the 1961 Australian Championships, after seven years of experience at grand slams. His best years came later still. While dynamic shotmakers like Laver and Lew Hoad could break through earlier, grinders tended to take more time to develop. Laver’s defection to the pros opened the way for Emerson to dominate the amateur tour in 1963, but it’s possible he would have emerged as a superstar around that time no matter what.

* * *

Emerson’s development on clay courts was even slower than his growth into an elite player on grass. In time, though, it was as complete as the rest of his game. He reached the French Championships final in 1962 and won it all in 1963.

When the American team chose clay as the surface for the Davis Cup Challenge Round in 1964, Emmo won both of his singles matches. By then, the home team didn’t dare hope for anything different. The Americans figured they would lose the two points to Emerson; they aimed to win the other three. (They didn’t.)

Emerson at the 1967 French Championships

Perhaps Roy started with a bit of an advantage. The Emerson family lived on a farm in tiny Blackbutt, Queensland. They laid out their own tennis court by spreading out anthills for a playing surface and stringing up chicken wire for a net. The resulting court was probably closer to clay than anything else.

Nonetheless, Emmo wasn’t prepared for his first outing at Roland Garros. Hopman brought him along on the Aussie Davis Cup squad’s world tour in 1954, and the 17-year-old got a early taste of European tennis:

In the French Championships I was drawn to play a bloke I’d never heard of, a Hungarian named József Asbóth, in my first match. The kid fresh out of Blackbutt was overjoyed to be up against a nobody. I raced into the dressing room and I said to Ken Rosewall, “Muscles, I’ve a great chance of winning the first round.” He asked who I was playing. “József Asbóth.” Ken held up three fingers. I said, “What’s that?” He said, “That’s how many games you’re going to win against József Asbóth in three sets.”

Next day I’m waiting on court two at Roland-Garros and out walks this gentleman in long creams. I thought he was the umpire, so I introduced myself. He said he was pleased to meet me and his name was József Asbóth. We started playing. Muscles was watching in the stands, a big grin on his face. It was a slaughter. Józseph, who was 37 and a clay specialist who had won the French singles crown in 1947, had the ball on a string. Seemingly without hardly moving he was always in the right place to return my shot. His clever lobs and chips and drop shots all played with control jerked me all over the court. I was drenched with sweat and his creams weren’t even creased. Ken’s prediction was wrong. I won more than three games, I won nine. József carved me up 6–4, 6–1, 6–4.

Thirteen years later, Emerson was the one doing the carving. At Roland Garros in 1967, he lost only one set in his last four matches, and he beat Tony Roche for the title. The championship completed Emmo’s second career Grand Slam, making him the first player to accomplish the feat.

* * *

By the time Open tennis arrived in 1968, Emerson was 32 years old and past his peak. The 1967 French was his last time reaching the semi-finals at a major. Still, he continued to excel in doubles. Emerson and Laver won the doubles at the first Open tournament, at Bournemouth in 1968. They also teamed up to win the Australian Open in 1969 and Wimbledon in 1971.

Emmo held his own against Laver on the singles court, as well. In 1968, they split ten meetings. In 1969, the year of Rocket Rod’s second Grand Slam, he still snuck off with a victory over his old rival in Japan.

1967 was Emerson’s last Davis Cup campaign, wrapping up a remarkable nine-year run in which the Aussies won the Cup eight times. Roy won 34 of his 38 matches in that span, serving as the anchor of the team for the last five seasons. His reign ended in 1968 only because he signed as a contract pro, making him ineligible. His country could’ve used him; they didn’t win the trophy back until 1973.

Nonetheless, he was a tireless fighter for the green and gold. At the 1973 Aetna World Cup, an international team event for professionals, Emerson came up with a surprise win over Arthur Ashe. He hadn’t beaten Ashe since defeating the American for the 1967 Australian title. Ashe, a Davis Cup veteran, recognized what motivated the players from Down Under. “When Emmo puts on the Australian jock or shirt or whatever it was he wore tonight, he does well.”

Most of the what-ifs of Emerson’s career end up casting a bit of doubt on his legacy. What if Laver and Rosewall had remained amateurs? What if Emmo had turned pro and failed to make the grade?

One lingering hypothetical works the other way. In 1966, Emmo was the two-time defending Wimbledon champion. In his quarter-final match with Owen Davidson, he chased down a ball, slid on the grass, and crashed into the umpire’s chair. He hurt his shoulder, and though he continued playing, he lost the match.

With Emerson out of the picture, Manolo Santana won the tournament. But Santana recognized his good fortune. “Everyone knows Roy Emerson is the true champion.”

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Tracy Austin [USA]
Born: 12 December 1962
Career: 1977-83 (and brief comebacks until 1994)
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1980)
Peak Elo rating: 2,369 (1st place, 1980)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 30
 

* * *

Everything Tracy Austin did, she did younger than anyone else. She was on the cover of World Tennis when she was four years old. Sports Illustrated announced that “A Star Is Born” in 1976, when she was 13. She won her first pro tournament a year later.

Somehow, the barrage of age records aren’t what sets Austin apart. Women’s tennis has seen prodigies come and go for a century, from Suzanne Lenglen and Maureen Connolly to Jennifer Capriati and Coco Gauff. Tracy was part of a particularly precocious charge, leading a generation that included Pam Shriver, Andrea Jaeger, and Kathy Rinaldi, among other teen starlets.

The striking, unusual aspect of Austin’s career is that, when she arrived on tour as an eighth-grader, she was already essentially a pro. She didn’t take any prize money in 1977 for her debut victory at the Avon Futures of Portland, as she was technically an amateur. But I mean “pro” in the figurative sense. She was tactically sound, mentally prepared, and PR-savvy, at least as much as any 14-year-old could be.

She was the first child star of the big-money WTA era. Within a decade of her appearance on tour, the women’s circuit would put age rules in place to protect young players. (Ironically, Wimbledon lifted its rule to allow Tracy to play in 1977.) Yet at first, Austin made those regulations look unnecessary. Until her body began to betray her, there was no sign she needed to be shielded from anything. Plenty of teens would do too much, too soon, but Tracy insisted to Bud Collins in 1994, “It wasn’t burnout. I’ve never been burned out.”

She set the tone for the millionaire prodigies of the decades to follow. Her mother traveled with her full-time, so she made few friends on the tour. She fearlessly stared down women she ought to have idolized, like Chris Evert. Others, such as Martina Navratilova, she annoyed into submission.

Most of all, Austin played like an adult, no matter how much her pinafores and pigtails made her look like a child. For about a year, she was a curiosity, a five-foot-nothing retriever with nothing but potential. After that, though, the rest of the tour had to grapple with a new reality. The unprepossessing highschooler in braces was a killer.

* * *

Austin came by her precocity honestly. Her mother, Jeanne, took up tennis with a vengeance as an adult, and she dragged her five kids to the club with her. Tracy was the youngest, and three of her siblings–Pam, Jeff, and John–also played at the pro level. Growing up in Southern California, they could practice year round.

Based at Jack Kramer’s club in Los Angeles, the Austins had access to some of the region’s best coaches. Tracy’s first coach was Vic Braden. Braden told a reporter in 1976 that, even before her first birthday, he would roll a ball inside her crib. “Back then she sliced the backhand,” he quipped.

A few years later, Robert Lansdorp took over. Lansdorp became known for his groundstroke expertise, a reputation he owes at least partly to Austin’s prowess from the baseline. He would remain in Tracy’s camp, with only short breaks, for the rest of her career. He considered her a “mental giant” from an early age, and in 1980, he predicted, “[S]he can be the greatest ever.”

It became increasingly difficult to find anyone to argue with him. Austin reached the quarter-finals of her first US Open, in 1977, upsetting Virginia Ruzici and fourth-seed Sue Barker. In nine WTA events as a 14-year-old, she lost in the first round only once. A year later, she won two top-level tournaments and recorded her first upset over Navratilova. In 1979, she won the US Open, knocking out both Evert and Navratilova to become the youngest ever to hoist the trophy there.

The aspect of Austin’s game that everyone noticed–opponents in particular–was her sheer determination. “Tracy obviously had something, especially mentally, almost better than just about anyone else,” said her one-time rival Shriver. “She didn’t break down under pressure.”

When Tracy beat Barker, Billie Jean King said, “Wait until she learns how to choke.” Billie Jean was still waiting nearly three years later. In the semi-finals of the 1980 Avon Championships, the teenager beat her for the fifth time in a row.

* * *

There was a lot of waiting in Austin’s game. Broadly speaking, she was a Chrissie clone. Both women sported a two-handed backhand and the doggedness to use it until the woman on the other side of the net missed. Neither had a strong serve–Braden described Tracy’s as a “baby-puff” delivery–but the rest of their games were so airtight that it didn’t matter.

In Austin, Evert met her equal. The Match Charting Project has logged two of their clashes, each of which averaged an astonishing nine shots per point. The battles themselves could be soporific, but the outcomes–which the pair split almost down the middle–were of critical importance.

How you rate Tracy depends a great deal on how much weight you give to her victories against Evert. Austin scored her first upset at the 1979 Avon Championships, in their fourth meeting. She won again at the Italian Championships two months later, breaking Chrissie’s 125-match win streak on clay. The US Open final later that year was the first of five consecutive wins for the younger woman, including three in the space of ten days in January 1980.

Evert won only ten games in the last three of those matches–combined. She declared she was burned out, and she took a three-month break from the tour. Sarah Pileggi, writing for Sports Illustrated, was ready to mark the end of an era. For Pileggi, Evert and Evonne Goolagong had defined the previous epoch; Austin and Navratilova were the stars of the future.

It didn’t work out that way, of course. Chrissie returned from her sabbatical with something to prove. She won the French Open (Austin wasn’t there–it conflicted with exams), reached the Wimbledon final, and won the US Open, beating Austin in the semi-finals there.

Still, Tracy was far from ready to concede the spotlight to her elder. She beat Evert in the Toronto final the next year. At the 1981 season-ending championships, the two women met at the round-robin stage, where they fought for 3 hours and 18 minutes. A single 26-point game required more than 500 shots. Evert won in a third-set tiebreak, but it was a pyrrhic victory. They met again in the semi-finals, where Austin proved relentless. The teenager reeled off nine straight games, getting her revenge, 6-1, 6-2.

* * *

Chrissie wasn’t the only giant that Austin had to slay. When Tracy arrived on tour, Martina Navratilova was nearly as fearsome. The transplanted Czech had won a major every season since 1975, and she lost only 10 of her 90 matches in 1978.

Navratilova, with her lefty serve and attacking game, posed a very different sort of challenge to the newcomer. Fortunately for Tracy, her own style would prove to be particularly irritating to Martina.

Austin broke through in her fourth match against the left-handed star. In the quarter-final of the 1978 Virginia Slims of Dallas, when Tracy was still only 15, she halted a 37-match win streak of Navratilova’s. The generational clash went to a third-set tiebreak. At the time, breakers were best of nine points. The ninth point was for all the marbles, if it came to that–no need to win by two. Austin was fearless even by her own standards, serve-and-volleying at 4-3, only to see her opponent pass her with a diving forehand. On the deciding point, she rushed the net again, and this time she put away a volley to finish the upset.

Their encounters weren’t always so thrilling, especially not for Martina. Austin delivered another upset at the Avon Championships of Washington, the first tournament of the 1979 season. Chasing down yet another lob en route to a 6-3, 6-2 loss, Navratilova said aloud, “It’s so boring I can’t stand it!”

In one two-and-a-half-year span, from July 1979 to the end of 1981, Austin won 11 of 17 meetings. (Overall, Navratilova finished the career series ahead, 21-14.) The matchup never got any more interesting for Martina. After winning a three-setter at Filderstadt in 1981, Tracy excitedly told her coach, “Once I lobbed three times in a row and she yelled, ‘Boring!’ right in the middle of the point. I couldn’t believe she did that! I decided right then I would do it some more.”

Austin wouldn’t be around to grapple with Martina much longer, but her influence would linger. Navratilova’s struggles with pesky, determined opponents like Tracy played a big part in her early-1980s decision to devote herself even more wholeheartedly to training and become the fittest player that women’s tennis had ever seen.

* * *

It’s possible to tell a story of late-1970s tennis in which Austin was just lucky, coming along at the right time. Evert was distracted by her marriage to John Lloyd, and Navratilova had yet to fully dedicate herself to the game. If you can’t think of Tracy as more than a pigtailed moonballer, it’s a convenient narrative to hold onto. It’s true that Chrissie wasn’t quite as deadly as she had been a few years before, and Martina wasn’t as overpowering as she’d become.

But we need to be careful not to get the cause and effect backwards. In 1980, the season when Austin took over the number one ranking and knocked Evert off the tour entirely, Chrissie won 72 of 79 matches. Navratilova won 91 out of 104. Even slumping, the duo was nearly untouchable.

Over her entire two-decade career, Martina lost more often to Austin than she did to anyone else except for Evert. Only two women–Navratilova and Goolagong–tallied more career wins against Chrissie than Austin did. With only a bit of exaggeration, we can compare Tracy’s achievement to that of the early-career Novak Djoković, who forced another dominant twosome to make room at the top.

Unfortunately, the similarities between Novak and Tracy go only so far. By the time the 19-year-old Austin won her second major at the 1981 US Open, she was already coping with the injuries that would end her career. Sciatica sidelined her for the first four months of 1981, and it caused her to miss the same span in 1982. She sputtered through a 1983 campaign, and aside from a few brief comeback attempts, her career was over.

Her remarkable mental strength probably disguised a fragile, growing body that wasn’t ready for the rigors of full-time training and tournament play. Evert played nearly as much as a youngster, but she grew up on clay courts, while the Austins developed their games on more punishing cement surfaces. And Tracy, with the determination of a player twice her age, rarely paced herself in competition. We might remember her for her moonballs, but when she hit for winners, she gave it all she had. When Austin was hitting at full force, moonballs were what came back.

While it’s tempting to speculate on what might have been, Austin’s teen years showed us, more or less, what she was ever likely to accomplish. Yes, she could’ve won dozens more tournaments, perhaps even another several majors. But what we saw was, more or less, what we would’ve gotten. At age 21, the veteran’s game was not that different than the one that made her a pre-teen champion, an imperfect but complete package. In 1973, the Austin family asked for advice from the legendary Australian coach Harry Hopman. Seeing the 10-year-old play, he demurred. “What do you tell a genius?”