1905-
Tennis Champion

Bright New Star. On 19 August 1923 seventeen-year-old and practiced with her on public dirt courts. When her skills outstripped his own, he asked Pop Fuller, a veteran tennis coach, to be her instructor. She soon outplayed female opponents and turned to stronger, older males for competition. She was later to claim that she developed her fast, powerful ground strokes and charging volleys through these early years of play on public courts; she mastered the finer points of defensive play and pinpoint shot-making in actual match play with established women players. Her athletic approach to the game, as well as her hard-muscled, five-foot-seven-inch, 150-pound frame and her adoption of a rather unglamorous trademark — a white visor pulled down to her eyes — seemed to proclaim her origins in the ambitious, energetic American middle class. Whatever the accuracy of the image she projected, Wills...