Sport: Wimbledon

• Share

(See front cover)

The 108th Bishop of London, the Rt. Hon., Rt. Rev. Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, had every reason to be well pleased last week. In Town was a 23-year-old friend of his, Helen Newington Wills, that tennis girl from California. Although she is perhaps the world's best amateur woman player and although he is a septuagenarian, the Bishop and Miss Wills played tennis together last month while she was in England to be presented at Court. It was not, however, to play him a return match that she had returned. It was Wimbledon time. The Bishop, like many another distinguished oldster, began making the 15-minute trip out to the new stadium to watch the players practice and then begin to play for the highest titles the tennis world holds.

Besides his friend Miss Wills, the Bishop eyed and appraised the other seeded women players, Spain's dark and dashing Lili d'Alvarez who would like to play in a bathing suit; England's cheery, sandy-haired Eileen Bennett and determined, hard-driving Betty Nuthall; Mme. Renee Mathieu who is France's greatest woman amateur; Miss E. L. Heinie who lives and plays in South Africa; rosy Fraulein Aussem of Germany, and the other Californian Helen, Miss Jacobs, who strained her back a few days before the tournament but did not think it would bother her and between whom and Helen Wills is supposed to exist not only rivalry but a shade of dislike.

Tall, gaunt William Tatem Tilden II once hurt his finger on his right hand while he was at the height of his career. It was characteristic of him to walk down a Philadelphia theatre aisle holding the injured member aloft so that all might see. Miss Wills, ace of women players, from the opposite edge of the U. S., is just the opposite sort of person.

In 1918 Dr. Clarence A. Wills took his quiet pig-tailed daughter to a sunny tennis court in Berkeley, Cal., and handed her a racquet which she swung at first like a nightstick. She missed the first ball. She changed her grip and hit the next one. Within a month she could defeat her father. Four years later, when she was 15, she won the U. S. junior singles champion ship. Before she was 17 she drove back the shots of burly Molla Bjurstedt Mallory and became champion of the U. S. Two years later she met her most glorious defeat at Cannes at the hands of swarthy, turbaned Suzanne Lenglen, most graceful of women tennis players, now a professional. Followed a Paris operation for appendicitis and the Wills tennis for a while was slowed. Now she again leads all women players.

Masculinity characterizes the Wills game. No woman hits a ball so hard. Whenever she can she practices with a man, because "it is the best training, the men are naturally more strong, though not always so deft" Her training is strictly a personal matter. She dislikes to think of people reading of what she likes to eat (string beans, chocolate ice cream) and drink (milk). About her other likes and dislikes she is less reticent. Yellow is her favorite color (see cover). Telephone books are her pet aversion. It is hard for her to find numbers because she does not know her alphabet very well. She was taught to sing it.