At Wimbledon

The score was 3-5 in the third set-- match point for Helen Jacobs--with Mrs. Moody serving. In the stands, the capacity crowd of 19,000, many of whom had stood in a queue all night to get a seat, leaned forward, silent as death. It was, they realized, the crucial point of the most exciting match that Wimbledon had ever seen. To understand why it was the most exciting it would have been necessary to know something of what led up to it, to understand, for instance, exactly why two young women from California who, if they had wanted to see which was the better tennis player, could have done so any afternoon on the courts of the club they both belong to at Berkeley, were now in Wimbledon's centre court doing that and considerably more.

Helen Wills went East for the first time in 1921, a shy sturdy-legged girl with pigtails, won the National Girls' Championship at Forest Hills. Coolidge had just become President, Jack Dempsey was Heavyweight Champion and Babe Ruth was playing his fourth season with the New York Yankees the year she won the U. S. Women's Championship for the first time, in 1923, against nutbrown, iron-muscled Molla Biurstedt Mallory. By 1927, after Suzanne Lenglen had turned professional, Helen Wills, at 21, was admittedly the ablest amateur woman tennis player in the world. In 1929, she was presented at Buckingham Palace in a shin-length ivory satin dress, exhibited her paintings in London, won the Wimbledon title for the third time, married Frederick S. Moody Jr. So good was she that, for the sake of excitement, all tennis experts could do was look for her closest rival. They found one near at hand: Helen Jacobs, of Berkeley. Three years younger than Mrs. Moody, Miss Jacobs was rudely and obviously labeled "Helen II." thus starting the bitterest rivalry in the history of women's sport.

Beneath Helen Jacobs' first wish to be a tennis player there must have been a furious hope to be like her famed neighbor. The irony of her success was that the more she became like Helen Wills the more dramatically she emphasized the differences between them. For Helen Wills Moody to defeat her on the tennis court with superb, indifferent ease -- at Wimbledon in 1929 and 1932, at Forest Hills in 1928 and 1931--became a matter of routine. While Helen Wills Moody was feted in London and Paris, Helen Jacobs was mentioned in the newspapers as the unfortunate girl whom Mrs. Moody regularly beat. The pressure of this situation was so obvious that the newspapers invented a personal feud between the two young women, a feud which could never have existed off the courts since tennis was the only true and ultimate expression of it. As years went by, Helen Jacobs' game improved and Mrs. Moody's once or twice showed signs of weakening. Finally, in 1933, there came the day when Helen Jacobs had her chance to win. In the U. S. finals at Forest Hills, she was leading 3-0 in the third set. Mrs. Moody suddenly walked off the court, explained to the umpire that her back was hurting her, that she must default.

Everyone at Wimbledon last week knew what had happened after that: how newspapers had accused Mrs. Moody of poor sportsmanship; how she had spent a year and a half recovering her health; how Helen Jacobs had gone to Wimbledon in 1934 and been unexpectedly beaten in the finals by an English girl named Dorothy Round; how last spring Mrs. Moody had packed up her rackets, sailed for England, only to be eliminated in the semi-finals of a minor tournament that made it clear that she had not quite reached her oldtime form; how Helen Jacobs had finally been presented at court in a full-length white satin gown the week Wimbledon started (see cut); and how, finally, the two girls had played through to last week's final. Now, at match point, there seemed nothing left for the crowd to see except how Helen Jacobs would finally accept the victory for which she had waited so long, how Mrs. Moody, who had never had to do it before, would acknowledge defeat.

Then there happened the incredible incident which will be a nightmare for Helen Jacobs as long as she lives. She trotted up to smash the easy lob that seemed destined to end the match, hit the ball into the net. That made the score deuce. Mrs. Moody, suddenly reassured, ran out the game, the set, the match, 6-3, 3-6, 7-5.

P: Said Baron Gottfried von Cramm, first German tennist to reach a Wimbledon final since the War, "He was very, very much too good for me." "He" was Frederick John Perry, ablest British tennist since the Doherty brothers, who, playing far better than a year ago, had won the Men's Singles Championship for the second year in a row by beating von Cramm in the final, 6-2, 6-4, 6-4. The round before, Perry had beaten Australia's Jack Crawford, Wimbledon champion in 1933, and von Cramm had beaten redhaired Donald Budge of California who, in his first appearance at Wimbledon, had done so well that he may be chosen to play singles on the U. S. Davis Cup team when it goes into action July 20.

P: When "Wimbledon Week"--which lasts two, climaxes the London season-- ended, three other championships had been decided: Men's Doubles, Crawford and Adrian Quist of Australia; Women's Doubles. Katherine Stammers and Freda James of England; Mixed Doubles, Perry and Dorothy Round.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.