The Tennis 128: No. 49, Helen Jacobs, Part 1

Helen Jacobs

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 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.

The 1935 Wimbledon final (from 1:30)

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.

This is the card

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.”

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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.

Jacobs in 1929. Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations

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.

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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.

The 1929 Wimbledon final

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.

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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.”

A Jacobs glamour photo from 1935.
Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations

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.

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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.

Helen got along with most of her peers on the circuit. Jacobs (left) with Sarah Palfrey.
Credit: Boston Public Library

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.”

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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.

Jacobs, “surrealized” by Angus McBean for The Sketch in 1936

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.

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