Sport: Favorite at Forest Hills

(See front cover)

For a few weeks each September, one small corner of Long Island becomes, with less ballyhoo than that occasioned by a college football game, the sporting capital of the entire world. This unique occurrence, moreover, happens so regularly that Long Islanders scarcely bothered to raise their eyebrows at all last week at the prospect of a program which in many ways makes the Olympic Games at Berlin look like a sideshow.

This year, Long Island will lack both the World’s Heavyweight Championship prizefight and the international yacht races which it has been taught to expect.

On the cards, though, are the U. S. Amateur Golf Championship at Garden City next week, the polo matches with Argentina at Meadow Brook next fortnight, and the 400-mile international auto race at Roosevelt Field next month. Last week, at Meadow Brook, the Open Polo Championship series ended. Last week also, International Tennis, a leisurely international carnival in whose circuit the other stops are Melbourne and Nice, Auteuil and Wimbledon, paused at the flat and singularly unarboreal New York suburb of Forest Hills, to play its last major engagement of the year—the Singles Championship of the U. S., for men & women.

In the days when Tilden, Johnston and Richards, first three in the world’s tennis ranking, made the thought of serious rivalry for the Davis Cup an absurdity, the U. S. Men’s Singles Championship was easily the equal of the All-England Championship at Wimbledon. This year the U. S. celebrated the tenth anniversary of its last Davis Cup victory by failing for the first time even to reach the final of the tournament* and the only chance that Forest Hills would supply the season’s climax as well as its conclusion lay in the hope that the Australian and German Davis Cup players would participate in it. The Australians declined. Germany’s famed Baron Gottfried von Cramm, now generally rated the world’s No. 2 player, was kept at home by illness. That left the U. S. title apparently at the mercy of the world’s No. 1, Fred Perry of England, who was also the only important foreigner entered. Perry’s most serious rival was obviously California’s red-haired Donald Budge, who may this year be ranked No. 3 on the international list.

To the not enormously stimulating prospect of a Budge v. Perry final, the Men’s Singles Championship at Forest Hills last week had very little to add. A leg injury forced Defending Champion Wilmer Allison to withdraw his entry. The rest of the seeded players included Jacques Brugnon and three young Frenchmen performing in the U. S. for the first time to gain experience; that coterie of second-flight U. S. stars, like Sidney Wood, Bryan Grant, Frank Parker and Gregory Mangin, who long ago made it clear that their playing would never justify their potentialities; and the latest schoolboy sensation from California, 18-year-old Robert Riggs of Los Angeles, who has won eight major tournaments this season.

After five days of play, Perry, Budge, Grant, Parker, Mangin, Wood and Riggs reached the fourth round safely. In the match to determine the quarter-finalists, however, Riggs had the misfortune to play John Van Ryn, onetime Davis Cup player. Unseeded and unranked because of insufficient play, Riggs was eliminated, 2-6, 3-6, 6-3, 3-6.

Patterned after Wimbledon, the idea of holding the men’s & women’s championships at the same time worked out well at Forest Hills last year. That last week’s gate receipts were bigger than last year seemed, in view of the weakness of the men’s championship as an attraction, due mainly to the fact that the United States Lawn Tennis Association had decided to do so again. For female tennists at least, last week’s tournament might well have rated as the No. i event of the year. In it were entered four members of the team that last June defeated England in the Wightman Cup matches; the topnotch players of Japan and England; a group of youngsters better than any who could be assembled elsewhere in the world; and Helen Jacobs.

Since 1932 Helen Jacobs has won the U. S. Singles Championship four times in a row (a record), but in each of these years she has been beaten at Wimbledon. This year, for the first time, she won there. If she wins at Forest Hills this week, she will at last be recognized as the ablest ten-nist of her sex in the world, a satisfaction that has eluded her for ten years. Last week the forecasts of tennis experts made her an overwhelming favorite to do so.

Helen Hull Jacobs, daughter of a well-to-do mining engineer, was born in Globe, Ariz, in the summer of 1908. Her family spent the following winter in California in a house rented from Author Willard Huntington Wright (S. S. Van Dine). At the age of six months, Helen was presented to Tennist May Sutton, an acquaintance of her mother. Just before the War, the Jacobs family moved to San Francisco. When she was 13, Mr. Jacobs gave his daughter an old tennis racquet, taught her how to use it. The day she won a set from him, she entered a public parks tournament. From then until last week, her career has been noteworthy mainly because the most important person in it was someone other than herself.

The year (1921) Helen Jacobs won the public parks championship her neighbor, Helen Wills, won the Girls’ Championship of the U. S. and became the city’s heroine. To Helen Jacobs, a moody, introspective little girl who disliked everything about San Francisco except the colorful life of Italian fishermen along the waterfront, Helen Wills’s triumph, achieved in the distant and mysteriously exciting East, minimized her own victory. It also opened vistas of a glamorous future and Helen Jacobs decided to emulate it. What gave this decision impetus was that when Helen Wills’s coach at last arranged a game between the two girls. Helen Wrills won 6-0 in seven minutes. What gave the decision its subsequent importance was the odd chance that Helen Wills went on to become the greatest woman player in the world and that Helen Jacobs’ salient characteristic is a dark unshakable determination.

The rivalry between the two girls grew from the courts to the newspapers. It moved from San Francisco to New York and on to Europe. It came to dominate the game of tennis as the rivalry between Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth of England once dominated British politics. Because, to the protagonists, it was no less serious, reporters mistook it for a mere personal feud, based on the fact that the Willses were more socialite than the Jacobses.

While Helen Jacobs was winning the U. S. Girls’ Championship (1924 and 1925), Helen Wills was winning the U. S. Women’s Singles. When Helen Jacobs got on the Wightman Cup team (1927), Helen Wills won her first title at Wimbledon. When Helen Jacobs was presented at Court (1935), she was six years behind Helen Wills, who by that time had married a San Francisco broker, Frederick Moody. In the long rivalry between the two, they played each other eight times. Helen Wills Moody won seven. Helen Jacobs won once, in the U. S. final at Forest Hills in 1933, but only when her opponent defaulted under highly debatable circumstances in the third set. A year ago in the all-San Francisco Wimbledon final, Helen Jacobs reached match point but Helen Wills Moody won. This year Helen Wills Moody was not in the tournament and Helen Jacobs at last found her way to her first Wimbledon title.

Women athletes, likely to be much more under the spell of sport than men, hate losing even more. Since coming so close to outright defeat by, Helen Jacobs, Helen Wills Moody has not entered any major tournaments. Last month she announced that she would henceforth make designing women’s underclothes for Lastex her major interest (TIME, Aug 10). If she wins at Forest Hills this week, Helen Jacobs may reasonably conclude that her rivalry with Helen Wills Moody is essentially over and that she has attained her end.

Often frustrated, Helen Jacobs’ career has been far from futile. In her efforts to beat Mrs. Moody, she became expert enough to beat any other girl player in the world. She left the University of California as a senior in 1930. She fulfilled an ambition to write; of three able books her autobiography, Beyond the Game, is last and best. She was taught to ride to hounds by Henrietta Bingham, daughter of the U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. She achieved the goal of all young female notables by establishing a fashion in clothes. This was when Bunny Austin advised her to play tennis in shorts and she did so in the presence of Queen Mary at Wimbledon in 1934. Her shorts, more becoming than the Wills eyeshade and longer than those worn by most girl tennists, were made for her by a London men’s tailor. She still gets them from him, demands four fittings to a pair.

As No. 1 tennist, Helen Jacobs has a game marked less by brilliance or speed of stroke than by steadiness and tactical skill. Her most dependable stroke is a forehand slice, taught her by Tilden. She places it with magnificent depth, tantalizing accuracy. She trains by skipping rope, drinks sherry, wears a hair net, uses little makeup, no red nail polish. She owns a Border terrier named Laetitia of Crendon, likes amusing socialites, has thus far shown no romantic interest in men. She plays bad ping pong. Helen Jacobs is not a Jew. She weighs 124 Ib. She walks with her feet pointing straight ahead. Next winter, she will live in Buckinghamshire, England, write a biography of her ancestor Carter Braxton, who signed the Declaration of Independence for Virginia.

When the Women’s Singles started last week, experts picked as a major rival to Helen Jacobs, who won her first two matches with ease, twinkle-toed Sarah Palfrey Fabyan of Boston. For her first-round match, Mrs. Fabyan walked onto the court with chubby, fat-legged Dorothy May Sutton Bundy. When they walked off an hour later, Mrs. Fabyan was out of the tournament, 6-2, 3-6, 4-6, and the Bundy family was in the tennis news again for the first time in six years. Little “Dodo” Bundy’s mother is Helen Jacobs’ old friend who, as May Sutton, was the most famed woman tennist in the world at the turn of the Century. Mrs. Bundy is now a Los Angeles tennis teacher whose star pupil is Patricia Ziegfeld. “Dodo’s” father, separated from his wife since 1930, is famed Thomas C. Bundy, U. S. doubles champion with Maurice McLoughlin in 1912, 1913, 1914. Of “Dodo,” 19, who got tennis lessons only when her mother had time left over from teaching other children, Mrs. Bundy said last week: “I believe it would make a better player and I know it would make a better looking girl of her if she would diet moderately.”

With Mrs. Fabyan on the sidelines, Helen Jacobs’ major rivals seemed to be Alice Marble and Kay Stammers. Alice Marble, who may be the world’s next No. 1 woman tennist, is a 23-year-old California girl who wears the shortest of shorts, a jockey cap pulled down over her right eye, no rouge over her pale complexion. In the Essex Invitation final last month she took a love set from Helen Jacobs, finally lost, 3-6, 6-0, 4-6. She puts more speed on the ball than any other tennist of her sex. A promising player two years ago, she collapsed during a hard match in Paris, developed pleurisy, spent a year recuperating. Last week her coach, Eleanor Tennant, who also teaches Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Groucho Marx, et al. saw her game at its speedy best against Anne Parry, 6-0, 6-2.

Pretty Kay Stammers, whom English critics like to describe as the “typical” British girl tennist, and who likes lacrosse, cricket, lump sugar and planters’ punches, played Mrs. John Van Ryn just before her husband’s match with Riggs, spoiled her afternoon, 6-2, 6-4.

*Australia, which beat the U. S., defeated Germany in the final, lost to England in the challenge round.