Background
Wills was born on October 6, 1905 in Centerville, Alameda County, California (now Fremont), near San Francisco. She was the only child to Clarence A. Willis, a physician and surgeon and Catherine Anderson.
Wills was born on October 6, 1905 in Centerville, Alameda County, California (now Fremont), near San Francisco. She was the only child to Clarence A. Willis, a physician and surgeon and Catherine Anderson.
She lived in the small town of Byron, California, and practiced her tennis game at the Byron Hot Springs resort.
Her father, a prominent surgeon in Berkeley, California, gave her her first racket when she was thirteen, and at age fourteen he got her a membership at the Berkeley Tennis Club, which was a prestigious institution.
For Wills, who had come to France, accompanied by her mother, ostensibly to continue her studies in painting, this must have been particularly frustrating.
Wills attended the University of California, Berkeley, as both her parents had done previously, on an academic scholarship, and graduated in 1925 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
The story of how Wills learned to play tennis has always been a part of her legend.
Wills never took formal lessons; instead, she learned by watching and playing against other members, both men and women.
At age seventeen she became the youngest person ever to win the United States women's singles title.
Wills and Wightman eventually went on to become a formidable doubles team, winning the United States Open, Wimbledon, and the Olympics in their best year together, 1924.
They were never defeated when playing together.
Despite this record, Wightman never ceased trying to improve Wills's speed, which plagued her throughout her career.
In fact, when the two played in doubles together, Wightman often shouted, "Run, Helen!"
However, Wills was so dominant at the baseline, and was so good at anticipating where the ball would go next, that she was not often required to run very fast.
Wills's most famous tennis match was played against Suzanne Lenglen in Cannes, France on February 16, 1926.
Wills was only twenty, but she had already won two Olympic medals and three United States singles championships.
Lenglen, the twenty-six-year-old French-woman, was a six-time Wimbledon champion who provided copious fodder for the tabloids with her flamboyant personality.
Wills, who was known for her demure attitude and chaste starched cotton clothes, provided quite a contrast to Lenglen in her silks and furs, although tennis-wise the rising star and reigning champion appeared closely matched.
The match was hyped relentlessly by newspapers from around the world.
Reporters followed both Wills and Lenglen about as they played in other matches in January and early February, searching for any new angle on the story.
The crowd was rowdy, and Lenglen seemed rattled.
She took sips of cognac between points, perhaps to calm her nerves.
Despite play that was not her best, Lenglen won the first set, but Wills made a comeback in the second.
Errors in line judging in that set, not helped by fans who shouted out their opinions on the proper calls, hurt both women's concentration, but Lenglen more than Wills.
Wills took the second set, but Lenglen won the third set and the match, then broke down in tears as fans surrounded and congratulated her.
Wills and Lenglen played each other in doubles again that afternoon—Lenglen won again—and never again faced each other on the court.
A stockbroker from San Francisco named Frederick Moody had noticed Wills, and after her loss he approached her to congratulate her on her good play.
For the rest of her life, Wills would be known as Helen Wills Moody Roark.
For six years, from 1927 until 1933, Wills did not lose a single set in competition.
Wills lost one set to Helen Hull Jacobs, who was often dubbed "Helen the Second" due to her continual overshadowing by Wills, and did not play any more that day: she left the court and announced her retirement.
Wills returned to the sport in 1935 just long enough to play Jacobs again at Wimbledon, defeating her and winning the title.
Wills retired again, but returned once more in 1938.
She played Jacobs at Wimbledon again, won, and then retired permanently.
Wills's presence, on and off the court, was legendary.
On court, whether winning or losing she displayed no emotion at all, only a fierce concentration.
Artists and poets noticed it as well.
In perhaps her most famous artistic representation, painter Diego Rivera placed her at the center of his mural at the former San Francisco Stock Exchange.
Wills was also featured in a sculpture by Alexander Calder, who was famous for his wire creations.
However, she became something of a recluse later in life.
She rarely appeared in public, but she continued to follow sports on television.
She particularly enjoyed watching Martina Navratilova's matches.
This admiration lasted through Navratilova's ninth Wimbledon championship, in 1990, which broke Wills's long-standing record of eight Wimbledon wins.
Although Helen Wills may be nearly forgotten today, her influence lives on in the many female tennis champions who have come after her.
She was United States singles champion again in 1919, and in 1924, at the age of thirty-eight, Wightman, playing with Wills, won in doubles at the United States championships, at Wimbledon, and at the Olympics.
Wightman continued to play tennis well past the age when most athletes retire: she dominated the United States women's over 40 doubles championships for much of the 1946 and '56, winning her final title in that event in 1954, at the age of sixty-seven.
Wightman died in 1974, at the age of eighty-seven.
She was not only dominant in women's tennis, winning thirty-one Grand Slam events over the course of her career, but she also played and beat some of the top-ranked men of her time, including the ranking Italian men's champion and the best player at Stamford University.
She was best known for her famous triple threepeat—winning the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the United States championships three years in a row, from 1909 to 1911—although her scandalous (for the time) tennis uniform of an ankle-length skirt and a short-sleeve shirt that bared much of her arms also brought her some attention.
In all, Wightman won forty-five United States championships in her forty-five year career. Today, Wightman is best remembered for instituting the Wightman Cup, which was intended to be the women's equivalent of the men's Davis Cup.
She was a member of the United States Wightman Cup team in 1923, 1924, 1925, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1938.
Kitty McKane Godfree, who in 1924 inflicted the only defeat Wills suffered at Wimbledon during her career, said, "Helen was a very private person, and she didn't really make friends very much. "
Quotes from others about the person
When asked why he had featured her so prominently, Rivera explained by saying, "Because of that woman, California is known to the rest of the world. "
"[Wills] admired Martina Navratilova greatly, " tennis historian Jeanne Cherry said in Wills's obituary in the Houston Chronicle.
"I think every woman who goes into athletics owes something to her, " her biographer Larry Engelmann, told Dennis Akizuki of the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
"I once asked her how she felt about Martina breaking her record, " Cherry continued, "and she said, 'Well, you know she pumps iron. ' "
Wills married Frederick Moody in December 1929. She divorced Moody in 1937 and married Aidan Roark in October 1939. She did not have any children from either marriage and died on January 1, 1998, aged 92, in Carmel.
