Top 50 Cal Pros: No. 4 -- Helen Wills, Unsurpassed Tennis Dominance

We are counting down Cal’s top 50 athletes based on their careers as post-collegiate professionals. Their performance as Golden Bears is not factored into the rankings.

4. HELEN WILLS

Years at Cal: 1923 to 1927

Sport: Tennis

Age: Died in 1998 at the age of 92

Hometown: Born in Centerville, California (now Fremont) and resided in Berkeley, California, during her high school days

Why we ranked her here: It’s debatable whether Helen Wills was the best women’s tennis player of all time, but there is no debate that she dominated her era more thoroughly than any tennis player before or since. She won 19 Grand Slam singles titles, the fourth-most of any woman at a time when Americans never played in the Australian Championships and seldom played in the French Championships.  More significantly she won 14 consecutive Grand Slam singles events in which she entered, a streak that is more than twice as long as any other player in history.  The streak was actually 16 in a row, because she was hit with losses in consecutive 1926 majors when she had to default matches before they started because of appendicitis. The streak ended when she had to default to Helen Jacobs in the finals of the 1933 U.S. National because of a back injury with Jacobs leading 3-0 in the third set. Discounting the defaults, she won 18 consecutive Grand Slam events she entered. Wills won her first Grand Slam singles title at the age of 17 and her last one at the age of 32, and she dominated nearly every opponent. She lost only 13 games over six matches at Wimbledon in 1932, with the closest match being a 6-3, 6-1 win against Helen Jacobs in the finals. She lost fewer than 20 games in each of the Wimbledon events in 1927, 1928, 1929 and 1930. Wills did not lose more than three games in any set while winning matches on her way to the 1924 Olympic gold medal. She once won 180 matches in a row, and she seldom lost a set. Wills, also known by her married names Helen Wills Moody and Helen Wills Roark later in her career, was ranked No. 1 in the world for nine years by the English publications that were considered the final word on such issues at the time. Her most famous match occurred in February 1926, when she took time off from her studies at Cal to travel to France for an eventual matchup with six-time Wimbledon champion Suzanne Lenglen of France. Lenglen was 26 years old and in her prime while Wills was 20 years old and still a few years from her peak.  They played the match in Cannes, France, on a small court with an overflow crowd. It was sort of like a freshman-laden Cal basketball team facing Duke at Cameron Indoor Arena. Wills was the harder hitter – in fact she was the hardest hitter of her generation – while Lenglen was the flamboyant finesse player.  Lenglen won 6-3, 8-6, and that was their one and only match against each other.  Cal did not have women’s sports at the time of Wills’ reign, but she competed at the same elite level in tennis that pros do today. Wills is credited with being the first American female athlete to gain world fame.