Wills v. Lenglen

Suzanne Lenglen, with a shaking hand, tilted to her lips a long amber glass. The touch of her hand frosted the glass, for she was very hot; only a mad woman would imbibe iced liquors at such a time--a mad woman, or a French woman. Onetime King Manuel of Portugal, Grand Duke Michael of Russia, ex-King George of Greece, the Rajah of Pudukkottia, watched the amber glass tilt up and up; the linesmen, the umpires and 4,000 of the smartest women and the richest men in Europe counted her rapid swallows. Nine, ten, eleven. . . The glass was empty. Suzanne Lenglen picked up her racquet, and faced once more the girl in the cotton dress the other side of the net.

The third game of the second set of their match at Cannes--a match which has been given as much publicity as the conference of Locarno--had just ended. Miss Wills led, 3-0. Mile. Lenglen had won the first set, 6-3. Both had been, at the beginning, too nervous to play well and too wary to divert with any spectacular activities the people who since eight in the morning had poured into Cannes along the highroad from Nice and Monte Carlo. Helen Wills seemed to be thinking too much. Suzanne Lenglen's nerves were twittering. Regal in pink silks, she had won her advantage from her opponent's errors. Then Helen Wills, driving at the corners, volleying and smashing, took three games in succession. Hence Lenglen's demand for the amber glass. It contained brandy and water.

As her cells took up the liquor, courage spouted through her veins, empurpled her falcon-face. Once more her skirt began to kiss her knee from above. Once more she leapt in air--Lenglen of the rotogravure sections, idol of a nation. The girl in the cotton dress left the net for the baseline. With a cat-cunning step that seemed a little weary, a little slow, she wove from side to side, forehand, backhand, stroking hard, deftly--but not so hard, not so deftly as a moment before. Lenglen took the next three games. Wills took the seventh, another deuce game. Lenglen evened the score. Wills took another game. She was hitting her service harder now. The handsome, impassive Greek mask of her face was weary drawn. Lenglen evened the score again, Wills took the odd game--and then occurred that curiously dramatic incident which gave all the U. S. sporting sheets an opportunity to say that Miss Wills had been cheated out of the match by the stupidity of an Englishman. The score was 40-15. She needed only one point for the game and set. Lenglen's return seemed to fall outside the line. Miss Wills sure she had won the set, started to change courts, when the linesman--Cyril Tolley, one-time British amateur golf-champion--told her to come back.

"What did you call that ball?" she asked the ponderous Tolley. Her voice shook, her face was furious. For the first time in her life she was showing emotion on a tennis court.

"Inside," said Tolley.

Helen Wills threw up her hand in a staccato gesture of despair for Tolley's crumbling intellect, his blindness. "Out, out," shouted the spectators, confident that they could see better than Mr. Tolley, whose stool was a yard from the baseline. Possibly the ball was out; possibly the decision kept Miss Wills from winning the greatest match of her life. No one will ever know. Suzanne Lenglen, against whom some equally dubious decision had been called in the first set, ran out the set 8-6, and a moment later was borne from the court on the shoulders of her worshipers, her purple face peering, like a ribald Nero's from a wreath of flowers.

"Helen," she told a reporter, "showed more intelligence than I expected. . ."

"Suzanne," said Miss Wills, "was as good as I expected her to be . . ." "And the universe," said the London Evening News, "can now go on as before. . . "