WILLS (MOODY), Helen Newington

(b. 6 October 1906 in Centerville, California; d. 1 January 1998 in Carmel, California), dominant female tennis champion of the 1920s and 1930s, considered among the very best of all time.

Wills was born to Clarence Wills, a surgeon, and Catherine Wills, a teacher. She was not a strong child. In fact, her health was somewhat fragile. To counter this, her father tried to stimulate her interest in outdoor activities. First, Wills started swimming. When her father bought her a horse, she began riding. When Wills was eight, her father bought her a tennis racket and played with her every day. For her fourteenth birthday, her parents bought her a membership in the Berkeley Tennis Club. Practicing every day, Wills won the 1921 California State Women's Championship on her first try. Wills learned the game of tennis on the hard cement courts that would "make" her and so many other champions from the West Coast, who could compete year-round on these courts. This gave them a distinct advantage over East Coast players who only had a six to eight month season of practice and play.

Wills was tutored at home by her mother until she was eight years old. She graduated from the top-ranked Anna Head School in Berkeley in 1923 and enrolled at the University of California. She became Phi Beta Kappa because of her academic excellence, graduating with a B.A. in fine arts. No longer in poor health, Wills now stood five feet, seven inches tall, and weighed 150 pounds.

Wills entered the tennis world in 1922. From the beginning, she had a concentration few other players could match. Wills's approach to tennis was simple: "Every shot, every shot, every shot." She played each point as hard as every other, and never gave in either to exuberance or desperation. Her opponents were flummoxed. Observers began to marvel at her sure shots and steady baseline game. Wills's strengths were in the power of her shots and in her demeanor; people began to call her "Little Miss Poker Face."

While her talent was unquestionable, Wills also enjoyed good fortune. She made her mark in the early 1920s, the very time when Americans, eager for what President Warren G. Harding had called "a return to normalcy," were flocking to sports events in record numbers. It was the era of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, and Wills played her own part in the social kaleidoscope of the "Roaring Twenties."

The twenty-year-old Wills faced twenty-six-year old Suzanne Lenglen at Cannes, France, on 16 February 1926. Lenglen was the dominant figure in both French and European tennis, and a great deal of excitement preceded the match. King Gustav V of Sweden and many others scooped up tickets at the shockingly high rate of $50 each. Lenglen won the match 6–3, 8–6, with the points and games even closer than the final score suggests. Wills commented on the face-off: "Her balls were not particularly fast—not nearly as fast as some other women players whom I have met on the court—but they always came back." Considering that Wills was six years Lenglen's junior, and that her game could continue to develop, there was every reason to believe that a memorable rivalry had begun that day in Cannes. Yet the two players never played again.

However, the date of the match was fateful in another way. Just after it ended, financier Frederick Moody pushed through the crowd to introduce himself to Wills. The two married in 1929 but divorced in 1937. Two years later Wills married Irish polo player Aiden Roark. The couple divorced in the 1970s.

Wills dominated women's tennis between 1927 and 1937. During those years, she won eight singles titles at Wimbledon (a record only surpassed by Martina Navratilova in 1990), seven U.S. singles titles at Forest Hills (a record that has yet to be broken), and four French championships at Roland Garros. On top of all of this, Wills had perhaps the single greatest winning streak in the history of the game. Between 1927 and 1933 she won 180 consecutive matches, and in those matches did not lose a single set.

Wills's game was neither fast nor terribly well coordinated, but she made up for these deficiencies by striking the ball earlier and harder than her opponents. No less an authority than Don Budge—who is still regarded by many as the best men's player of all time—asserted that Wills hit the ball harder than any player he ever watched until Steffi Graff in the 1990s. Wills also had a striking profile, which her many admirers labeled "Grecian." She always wore the same stark white visor (which soon became a tennis classic), and cut a fashion statement in her simple but elegant skirts. She acted more in charge and in control than any other player of her era; only Alice Marble in the late 1930s could rival Wills in this respect. In addition, Wills cultivated an aura of invincibility. She was able to turn herself into a legend in the way that Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin did (the latter once remarked that the "movement of Helen Wills playing tennis" was the most beautiful sight he knew). Wills retired from tennis in 1938. She was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1969.

Wills painted throughout her life and later helped to sponsor the work of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, the Mexican husband and wife who introduced Hispanic art to many American viewers. She wrote and illustrated two books on the game of tennis, including Tennis (1939). She also wrote a mystery novel, Death Serves an Ace (1939), and an autobiography (1937).

After her marriage to Roark in 1939, Wills moved first to the Los Angeles area, then to the Carmel Valley in central California in the 1950s. She died of natural causes at the Carmel Convalescent Hospital. Her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea.

Wills's autobiography is 15–30: The Story of a Tennis Player (1937). For biographical information, see Angela Lumpkin, Women's Tennis: A Historical Documentary of the Players and Their Game (1981). See also Larry Engelmann, The Goddess and the American Girl: The Story of Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills (1988). An obituary is in the New York Times (3 Jan. 1998).

Samuel Willard Crompton