Helen Hull Jacobs was born on August 6, 1908, in Globe, Arizona, to Roland Herbert Jacobs, a mining executive of Jewish background, and Eula Hull Jacobs. The family soon left the mining town, first for San Francisco and then Berkeley, California, where Helen grew up and discovered tennis at the Berkeley Tennis Club under coach William “Pop” Fuller. As a teenager she already showed the persistence that would define her public image. She won the national junior championship in 1924 and repeated the feat in 1925. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 1926 into the early 1930s, though tennis soon claimed more of her time than classes.
Jacobs’s career unfolded in the long shadow of Helen Wills Moody, another Berkeley product and the dominant player of the era. The two Helens first practiced together when Jacobs was fourteen; Wills won 6-0 and declined a second set. Their later meetings became known as the Battle of the Helens. Sportswriters loved the contrast: Wills was reserved, precise, and almost invincible; Jacobs was outgoing, fighting, and popular with crowds even when she lost. They met in seven Grand Slam finals. Wills won six of them. Jacobs’s only victory over her rival came in the 1933 U.S. Championships at Forest Hills, when Wills retired with a back injury while trailing 8-6, 3-6, 3-0. The crowd booed the withdrawal. Jacobs asked Wills to continue. The win stood, but it never felt like a clean triumph.
Despite the one-sided rivalry, Jacobs built an outstanding record of her own. She won the U.S. National singles title four years running, from 1932 through 1935, the first woman to do so. She added three U.S. doubles titles and the 1934 mixed doubles crown. In 1936 she finally captured Wimbledon, defeating Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling in three sets, and was ranked world number one that year. She reached six Wimbledon finals in all. She appeared in the world top ten every year from 1928 to 1940 and played on the U.S. Wightman Cup team from 1927 through 1939, helping the Americans win ten times. Altogether she collected nine major titles and reached eighteen other Grand Slam finals.
On court Jacobs was a right-hander who relied on a sliced forehand, aggressive net play, and stamina rather than overwhelming power. Off court she changed the look of the game. In 1933 she became the first prominent woman to wear tailored shorts at a championship event, first at the U.S. Nationals and then at Wimbledon. Tradition had demanded skirts and stockings. Jacobs thought shorts were more practical. The choice caused comment, then imitation. She appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1936 wearing the new style. That same year she was named Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year for 1933’s accomplishments.
Jacobs began writing while still competing. Modern Tennis appeared in 1933, Improve Your Tennis and her autobiography Beyond the Game in 1936. Over the following decades she published roughly twenty books, including instruction manuals, biographies of other players such as Gallery of Champions, children’s stories, and novels. One novel, By Your Leave, Sir, drew on her wartime experience. She designed women’s sportswear and later ran a small farm on Long Island.
During World War II she joined the Navy, serving in intelligence and rising to the rank of commander, one of only a handful of women to reach that grade at the time. She trained and worked with the WAVES. After the war she continued writing and farming. She never married. Later accounts describe long-term relationships with women, including Henrietta Bingham in the 1930s and Virginia Gurnee in later years. In 2015 she was inducted into the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame.
Jacobs retired from competitive tennis in 1947 after an Achilles injury. She was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1962 and to several other halls, including California’s. She died of heart failure on June 2, 1997, in East Hampton, New York, at the age of eighty-eight.
History often remembers her as the other Helen, the tenacious runner-up who humanized a sport then dominated by one seemingly unbeatable champion. That framing understates what she actually did. Four straight U.S. titles, a Wimbledon singles crown, a decade in the world top ten, a fashion change that stuck, a wartime commission, and a second career as a working writer all belong to her independently of any rivalry. She played through an era when women’s tennis was still finding its public, and she helped give it personality, persistence, and a more practical wardrobe. Fans liked her because she kept coming forward even when the scoreboard said she should not. That quality, more than any single trophy, is what lasted.