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WILLS, HELEN NEWINGTON 1905-

TENNIS CHAMPION

Bright New Star

On 19 August 1923 seventeen-year-old Helen Wills achieved national prominence when she won the women's singles final at the U.S. Championships, defeating the powerful Norwegian-born, seven-time U.S. champion, Molla Bjurdstedt Mallory. In the process Wills captivated the American public with her athleticism, her youth and striking beauty, and her poise both on and off the court. In fact, she exhibited so much public reserve that in 1922 New York Evening Mail columnist Ed Sullivan had dubbed her "Little Miss Poker Face." Wills soon became the dominant American woman tennis player of the 1920s.

Democratic Tennis—a New Wave

Wills launched a new trend in U.S. tennis. Unlike many of the players of her own and earlier generations, she was not from the privileged eastern upper classes with their private-school training. She was, instead, the daughter of a California doctor who had handed her a racquet when she was eight years old and practiced with her on public dirt courts. When her skills outstripped his own, he asked Pop Fuller, a veteran tennis coach, to be her instructor. She soon outplayed female opponents and turned to stronger, older males for competition. She was later to claim that she developed her fast, powerful ground strokes and charging volleys through these early years of play on public courts; she mastered the finer points of defensive play and pinpoint shot-making in actual match play with established women players. Her athletic approach to the game, as well as her hard-muscled, five-foot-seven-inch, 150-pound frame and her adoption of a rather unglamorous trademark—a white visor pulled down to her eyes—-seemed to proclaim her origins in the ambitious, energetic American middle class. Whatever the accuracy of the image she projected, Wills proved enormously attractive to Americans in general, who began to flock not only to her matches but also to the public tennis courts that were being built in large numbers during the 1920s.

To England and France

In 1924 Wills attracted international attention when she played in the Wightman Cup competition and at Wimbledon in Great Britain and then moved on to the Olympics in Paris. Though the American team lost 1-6 to the British women in Wightman Cup play, Wills reached the singles finals at Wimbledon where she took a set from England's Kathleen "Kitty" McKane before losing to McKane 6-4, 4-6, 4-6. Wills and her partner, Hazel Wightman, defeated McKane and Mrs. B. C. Covell in the Wimbledon ladies' doubles, 6-4, 6-4. Later that same summer Wills, as a member of the U.S. Olympic tennis team, won the gold medal for women's singles by defeating France's Didi Vlasto, 6-2, 6-2, and, with Wightman, another gold for ladies' doubles.

Tennis and Other Pursuits

In the fall of 1923 Wills had enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she had received a scholarship to study art. (She insisted throughout her life that painting was her true vocation and tennis a mere pastime,) While at Berkeley she published a book of poetry, The Awakening (1926), and earned both Phi Beta Kappa honors and a letter in tennis, becoming the first woman at the California university to letter in sports. She had repeated as U.S. champion in 1924 and 1925 but did not play at Wimbledon in either 1925 or 1926; illness and injuries troubled her during the 1926 season and prevented her from defending her U.S. Championship title that year.

Lenglen

By early 1926, however, the public was eagerly anticipating a match between the talented young American and the reigning queen of tennis, Suzanne Lenglen, the "French Goddess" who had taken two national titles in her native country and six Wimble-dons. Lenglen—hardliving, temperamental, supremely gifted—seemed the antithesis of the hardworking, un-demonstrative Wills, who traveled with her mother, kept regular hours, and avoided public attention whenever possible. On 16 February 1926, following massive bally- hoo that drew royalty, nobility, and the rich and famous from Europe and America to Cannes where the match was held, Wills and Lenglen met. Their play was excel-lent, but the results were disappointing for the American: her power game was finally dismantled by Lenglen's strategy and finesse, and Wills lost the match 3-6, 6-8. She did not play Lenglen again, since in the summer of 1926 the French star turned professional and was therefore prohibited from playing in the major tournaments. As a consequence of her loss to Lenglen, Wills returned to California from Cannes determined to improve her strategy, her footwork, and the diversity of her game.

Dominance

From 1927 into the mid 1930s when illness and injuries again began to plague her, Wills dominated women's tennis. She won singles titles in the French Championships four times (1928, 1929, 1930, and 1932), in the U.S. Championships seven times (1923, 1924, 1925, 1927, 1928, 1929, and 1931), and at Wimbledon eight times (1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1935, and 1938). Her record eight titles at Wimbledon stood for fifty-two years until 1990 when Martina Navratilova won her ninth singles title. In 1928 Wills had become the first player of either sex to win the singles titles of the United States, France, and Great Britain within one calendar year, and in 1929 she again claimed all three titles. Astonishingly, between 1927 and 1933 she did not lose a set in singles competition anywhere in the world, and she won 180 matches in succession.

Retirement

Wills briefly retired from tennis in 1936 but then returned to competition until she left the game permanently in 1939. Her 1929 marriage to stockbroker Frederick S. Moody ended in divorce in 1937, and in 1939 she wedded Aidan Roark, a polo player, from whom she was divorced in the early 1970s. A notably private person, Wills has spent most of her retirement years in California where she has written, painted, and played the occasional tennis match with friends.