• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Tennis Grandstand

Unique Tennis Perspectives

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • My AI Account
You are here: Home / Archives for Helen Wills

Helen Wills

Imagine Having A Sitter Overhead To Win Wimbledon, Missing It, Then Losing!

July 6, 2017 by tennisbloggers

by Randy Walker

@TennisPublisher

 

Wimbledon is a place where dreams come true, but also where nightmares occur as well.

On the most heart-breaking moments in Wimbledon history happened on July 6, 1935 when American Helen Jacobs lost the Wimbledon women’s singles final to Helen Wills Moody by missing a simple overhead smash on match point. Jacobs missed the easy shot when leading 5-3 in the final set, only to lose 6-3, 3-6, 7-5.

Wrote Bud Collins in his famous “Bud Collins History of Tennis” book of Jacobs and her mishap, “Jacobs took a winning 4-2 lead in the third, with one powerful serve knocking the racket from Moody’s hand. She then broke Moody’s serve to lead 5-2, but Moody broke back to 3-5 in a game where she was facing a match point at 40-30 and Moody flicked a desperation lob with Jacobs at the net. It looked like a simple smash, but a gusty wind caused the ball to sink so swiftly that Jacobs had to drop to her knees to hit it…into the net. That turned the match around. Jacobs went down fighting, serving two aces when trailing 5-6, but losing the match, 6-3, 3-6, 7-5. It was her fourth loss to Moody at Wimbledon, three in a final. Jacobs also lost to Moody in the 1928 U.S. final.”

There was redemption for Jacobs, however, as she goes on to win the title the following year – her only Wimbledon singles titles – defeating Hilde Krahwinkel  6-2, 4-6, 7-5 in the final.

In 1938, Jacobs and Wills Moody again play in the Wimbledon final, but Jacobs is again hit with bad luck, twisting her ankle at 4-4 in the first set and is not able to move well around the court and loses the next eight games. The second set lasted a mere eight minutes.

Helen Jacobs
Helen Jacobs

Filed Under: Blogs, Featured Columns, Latest News, Lead Story Tagged With: Bud Collins, Helen Jacobs, Helen Wills, Wimbledon

Olympic Withdrawals – From Tilden and Lenglen – Agassi and Sharapova

August 7, 2008 by Randy Walker

Pull-outs from the Olympic tennis competition has become almost as much of a tradition as the Olympics Games itself.
Maria Sharapova is the most recent example with the reigning Australian Open champion pulling out of the Beijing Games – and the U.S. Open – with a shoulder injury. Other recent pullouts include Marcos Baghdatis, Mario Ancic and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Some other examples of high profile pullouts from past Games include Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf before the 1996 Games in Atlanta, (strained Achilles tendon and left knee injury, respectively) Andre Agassi before the 2000 Games in Sydney (cancer diagnosis to his mother and sister), Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati before the Athens Games (left knee and hamstring, respectively).
The other high-profile player not in the Beijing field is of course 2003 U.S. Open champion Andy Roddick and 2004 Olympic silver medalist Mardy Fish. While a super-patriot when representing the United States in Davis Cup – and at the 2004 Games – Roddick made the tough decision to focus on getting a leg up on his rivals at the U.S. Open by not traveling to the other side of the globe just two weeks before the fourth and final major tournament of the year. Roddick’s reasoning for skipping the Games is to put the Open as a high priority this time around. Fish, another Davis Cup stalwart, made the tough decision as well having already achieved Olympic glory on his resume.
Another great American tennis champion, Bill Tilden, took perhaps the same reasoning when skipping the Olympic tennis competition at the 1924 Games in Paris, although his public excuse for missing out on the Games was due to his journalistic contracts. On March 11, 1924 – as documented in the my new book On This Day In Tennis History (New Chapter Press, $19.95) – Tilden announced that he will not represent the United States in the Paris Games. Tilden’s reasoning is that even if he wanted to play for the United States, the U.S. Olympic rule that forbids athletes from writing for newspapers prevents him from competing since he is contracted to write two articles per week for various outlets. Wrote the New York Times on the day “The tennis champion had never definitely announced that he would go abroad this year if picked for the Olympic team. Two months ago, Tilden said he did not think he would go because of the sharp competition expected in the national singles and in the Davis Cup matches. He said he regarded the Davis Cup competition more important than the Olympics and that he felt he could husband his strength for those matches in the event he is to be one of the contestants.” The USLTA also had enacted a similar rule for amateur tennis, but it is not scheduled to take affect until Jan. 1, 1925.
Also in 1924, French superstar Suzanne Lenglen withdrew from the competition in the capital city of her home country due to illness. She does, however, attend select sessions of the competition. Reported the Associated Press on the first day of the 1924 competition, “Suzanne Lenglen, the world’s champion, watched some of the matches until the sun became too uncomfortably warm for her. She looked thinner than usual. Mlle. Lenglen said she still felt ill and her appearance bore out her statement.”
The benefactors of Tilden and Lenglen’s withdrawals in 1924? Vincent Richards, Tilden’s Davis Cup teammate who won singles gold over France’s Henri Cochet, and Helen Wills, who won the singles competition over France’s Didi Vlasto.

Filed Under: Archives Tagged With: Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, Bill Tilden, Davis Cup, Helen Wills, Henri Cochet, Jennifer Capriati, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Marcos Baghdatis, Mardy Fish, Maria Sharapova, Mario Ancic, Olympics, Pete Sampras, Serena Williams, Steffi Graf, Suzanne Lenglen, Vincent Richards

Primary Sidebar

Copyright © 2019 and beyond by TennisGrandstand LLC