Helen Wills Moody

Tennis Player

• Born: October 6, 1905
• Birthplace: Centerville (now Fremont), California
• Died: January 1, 1998
• Place of death: Carmel, California

Sport: Tennis

Early Life

Helen Newington Wills was born on October 6, 1905, in Centerville (now Fremont), California. Her parents were Dr. and Mrs. Clarence Wills. When she was very young, the family moved to Berkeley, California, where Helen was raised in a privileged social environment.

As a small child, Wills learned tennis from her father, and as a present for her fourteenth birthday, she was given a membership in the Berkeley Tennis Club. Soon she was playing every day, receiving help from William Fuller, the volunteer coach at the club who also arranged matches for her. Next, she started entering local tournaments and was soon winning them all.

The Road to Excellence

In 1921, when Helen was fifteen, she was sent east to play in the National Junior Tournament for girls 18 and under and to play on the women’s circuit. She won the National Junior Championship and did extremely well in the other tournaments. Her career as an outstanding tennis player had begun.

The next year, 1922, Helen again won the National Junior Singles title and also won the National Junior Doubles with Helen Hooker. In the U.S. National Championship singles she reached the finals, where she was beaten by the defending champion, Molla B. Mallory. The defeat bothered Helen and motivated her to practice even harder when she returned to California. However, she did win the U.S. National Championship doubles title paired with Marion Z. Jessup. At the end of the year, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) released the rankings of the top ten women, seventeen-year-old Helen was rated third.

In 1923, Helen won the U.S. National Championship singles title, beating Mallory in the finals, and earned the number-one ranking. She was also selected as a member of the inaugural U.S. Wightman Cup team to play in an annual match between the top women players of the United States and England.

By this time, the press had given Helen the nickname “Little Miss Poker Face” for her incredible concentration on the court coupled with her expressionless behavior. They soon had to call her “Queen Helen,” because for the next fifteen years she was the outstanding figure in women’s tennis.

The Emerging Champion

In 1924, Helen traveled overseas and played at Wimbledon. She reached the finals, where she lost in three sets to the best British player, Kitty McCane, but she won the doubles title playing with Hazel Wightman, donor of the Wightman Cup. Then she and Wightman went to Paris for the 1924 Olympic Games, where Helen won two gold medals, one in singles and one in doubles paired with Wightman.

Returning home to the United States, Helen accomplished a “hat trick” by winning all three titles at the U.S. National Championships: The singles, the doubles with Wightman, and the mixed doubles with Vincent Richards. When the rankings came out for 1924, Helen was number one again.

Continuing the Story

Helen won the U.S. National Championship singles five more times—in 1925, 1927, 1928, 1929, and 1931; she did not enter the 1926, 1930, and 1932 tournaments. In 1933, her last year in the U.S. Championship singles, she played in her most controversial match. Losing in the finals to her perennial rival, Helen Jacobs, she claimed she was ill and defaulted. Critics still wonder if she pretended to be sick to avoid outright defeat.

Helen won the U.S. National Championship doubles title two more times, once with Wightman and once with Mary K. Browne. In 1928, she won another mixed-doubles title, this time with John B. Hawkes. At Wimbledon, Helen Wills won the singles championship eight times. Her record of eight wins was not broken until 1990, when Martina Navratilova won her ninth Wimbledon singles title. After a two-year layoff between 1935 and 1937, Helen Wills competed at Wimbledon for the last time in 1938, and she defeated Jacobs in the final. Helen’s victory after her long layoff earned her the comeback player of the year award.

In the French Championships, she won the singles three times and the doubles twice, both times with Elizabeth Ryan as a partner, and she played on the Wightman Cup teams ten times, serving as captain in 1930 and 1932.

Helen married Fred Moody, a California stockbroker, in 1929. In 1937, they divorced, and she married Aidan Roark, a writer and polo player. When she retired from tennis in 1938, Helen participated in few events connected with the game. She was an accomplished artist whose works were exhibited in galleries all over the world. She also wrote several books; the best known was her autobiography, Fifteen-thirty: The Story of a Tennis Player (1937). Later, she retired to live a quiet, private life in California.

Summary

Helen Wills Moody competed for eighteen years, and for most of those years she dominated women’s tennis, winning thirty national and international championships. Between 1927 and 1933 she did not lose a set in singles; she won 180 matches in a row until the default to Helen Jacobs at the U.S. Championships. The USTA listed her in its top-ten rankings nine times, seven of those years at number one. In world rankings she was number one for nine years. Some tennis experts rate her as the most controlled champion the game has ever seen. In 1959, the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame inducted Helen, calling her “the greatest woman player in the annals of lawn tennis.”

Bibliography

Engelmann, Larry. The Goddess and the American Girl: The Story of Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Orr, Frank, and George Tracz. The Dominators: The Remarkable Athletes Who Changed Their Sport Forever. Toronto: Warwick, 2004.

Wills, Helen. Fifteen-thirty: The Story of a Tennis Player. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937.

Wimmer, Dick, ed. The Women’s Game. Short Hills, N.J.: Burford Books, 2000.