Helen Hull Jacobs was born in Globe, Arizona, on August 8, 1908, to a Jewish father, Roland Herbert Jacobs, a Miami Copper Mine executive, and a non-Jewish mother, Eula Hull Jacobs. She had a younger sister, Jean Frances Jacobs (Gross) (1913-2005). Before World War I began, the mining business crashed and the Jacobs family moved to San Francisco, where Helen’s father worked in newspaper advertising.   

From an early age, Jacobs wanted to be a writer. She had no interest in tennis until, as a young teen, she began playing the game with her father, who played to improve his health. When she got good enough to beat him, he allowed her to compete in a tournament at a public park in 1922. In her autobiography, Jacobs says the only shot she had at the time was a forehand drive, no backhand, and a mediocre serve and net game. But with a good eye, quick reflexes, and endurance, she won the tournament. 

Jacobs remained most interested in writing, but with her tennis talent she continued entering competitions. Her skills attracted the attention of William “Pop” Fuller, who coached the era’s greatest female player, Helen Wills, in Berkeley, California. A 1922 article in the San Francisco Chronicle notes that Fuller viewed Jacobs, then only fourteen, as the most likely junior player to follow in Wills’ footsteps.

Fuller agreed to coach Jacobs and encouraged the Jacobs family to move to Berkeley and join the Berkeley Tennis Club. They did, moving into a house that the Wills family was vacating. Jacobs and Wills later shared an alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. 

Attending Berkeley High School, Jacobs practiced with Fuller after school or played against a tennis club member. She typically played against men because she knew her game would improve more quickly by playing against men, who ran faster and had longer strides and greater reach than the women she played in tournaments. The shots men forced her to make to win provided exceptional practice for her women’s match play.

Jacobs made her first trip east in 1924, to compete in the Girls’ National Championships in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While the eighteen-year-old Wills won the U.S. National Championships women’s singles title, the just-turned-sixteen-year-old Jacobs won the girls’ singles title. Jacobs also played in the women’s invitational tournament at Point Judith Country Club in Rhode Island, defeating her elders for the singles title. Her father enrolled her in the Anna Head School for Girls in Berkeley, where she would have more time for tennis.

In 1925, Jacobs played in her first women’s U.S. National Championships, losing in the second round. By 1927, maturing as a competitor, she was invited to play on the Wightman Cup team against Great Britain that included Helen Wills and eight-time U.S. National singles champion Molla Mallory. (Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, who dominated women’s tennis before World War I, founded the Wightman Cup in 1923 to foster international competition and interest in women’s tennis.) Jacobs was a team member from 1927 to 1937 and in 1939; during these years, the team was victorious ten times.

In 1927, Jacobs lost to Wills in the women’s singles semifinal of the U.S. National Championships; in 1928 she lost to Wills in the final. At the time, she was a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, and taking a class on the novel. At age nineteen, she wanted to prepare herself for something other than tennis and was determined to make her own income; writing, unlike amateur tennis, offered that possibility. 

In 1929, Jacobs lost to Wills in the final at Wimbledon. That year, she combined tennis and her college courses with a job writing about tennis for the Oakland Tribune, often writing more than one column a week. In 1934, she covered the men’s national championship for the New York Times and became a member of the San Francisco Press Club.

The sports media of the 1920s and 1930s played a big role in turning tennis into a popular sport. Tennis personalities were deified and spectators at matches grew to record numbers. The media tagged Jacobs and Wills as the “Two Helens,” with Wills as “Queen Helen” or “Big Helen” and Jacobs as “Little Helen” or the “Other Helen.” Their matches became “The Battle of The Century.” 

Despite playing constantly against the queen, Jacobs built her own championship record, never losing hope in a match, she said, until the last point was made. Admired for her forehand chop and aggressive play at the net, her gregarious nature, and a gracious manner on the court, Jacobs came into her own when she won her first major championship, the 1932 U.S. National Championships women’s singles title, the first of her record four consecutive singles titles. 

Jacobs’ nine major championship victories—five singles, three doubles, one mixed doubles—included her 1933 defeat of Wills (by then Wills Moody) in the U.S. National Championships, although it came by default when Wills Moody ended the match claiming an injury. Jacobs was leading in the third set 3-0. Jacobs’ fans and many in the sports media that had constructed a rivalry between them questioned Wills Moody’s behavior. Rather than criticize Wills Moody, Jacobs said she was happy to have defended her title (Jacobs 1936, 170).

In 1934, Jacobs won a triple crown of singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles at the U.S. National Championships. Fifty years later, she told tennis authority, writer, and sportscaster Bud Collins that winning the Wimbledon singles championship in 1936 was her greatest memory. Ranked Number One in the world that year, in September she appeared on the cover of Time magazine in the shorts she first made famous on the U.S. National Championships courts in 1933 and the following year at Wimbledon. In 1936, she also published her autobiography, Beyond The Game, written in response to lengthy articles about her that did not tell her story accurately. Her first book, Modern Tennis, had been published in 1933. She was inducted in the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1962.

Helen Jacobs met Henrietta Bingham in 1934, when Jacobs’ Wightman Cup team was invited to an Independence Day garden party at the residence of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Robert Worth Bingham, Henrietta’s father. Soon after, Helen and Henrietta became lovers. Their intimate relationship is detailed in the biography, Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham, written by Henrietta’s grandniece, Emily Bingham, and documented by Jacobs’ diary from the Helen Hull Jacobs Papers housed at the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Henrietta introduced Helen to horseback riding, which led her to a love of fox hunting. Jacobs writes in her autobiography that the thrill of tennis competition could not compete with the excitement and personal risk of a good hunt. 

Soon after the United States entered World War II, Jacobs exchanged her shorts for a service uniform, first joining the American Women’s Voluntary Services in 1942. By January 1943, she was enrolled in the training program at Smith College to become an officer in the WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the women’s branch of the United States Naval Reserve. During the war she was assigned to the public relations office of the WAVES training school at Hunter College in New York City. First commissioned as a lieutenant junior grade, in June 1953 she was a lieutenant commander when, as one of the nation’s leading sports figures, she was invited to have lunch with President Eisenhower at the White House. On July 1, 1953, she gained the rank of Commander, a rank only five women had attained at that time.

Between 1933 and 1977, Jacobs wrote 21 books, including tennis instruction books and novels described as historical, romance, or pulp fiction. Many of her novels were written for young adult readers, including Laurel for Judy (1945) and Adventure in Bluejeans (1947). Her novels often referenced her life experiences. The main character of Center Court (1950) is a women’s amateur tennis champion. In By Your Leave, Sir (1943), an American woman in London decides to become a WAVE. Jacobs also wrote two essay compilations: Gallery of Champions (1949), on women tennis players, and Famous American Women Athletes (1964).

Amid tennis, writing, designing sportswear for such notable clothiers as Harrods, and her Naval career, Jacobs also became a farmer, in Virginia, where she raised Labrador retrievers.

In the mid-1930s Jacobs was offered a $1,000 a week radio contract. She turned it down because it would jeopardize her amateur tennis standing. In 1947, she was forced to retire from competition when she tore a tendon. In 1956, she turned professional, becoming a teaching professional at the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club, where she had first competed in 1925. In 1968, she received the “Tennis Immortal” award from the Lawn Tennis Writers Association, the year American and Wimbledon champion Billie Jean King received its “Good Guy” award. 

Helen Hull Jacobs died on June 2, 1997, in Easthampton, New York. She was survived by a sister and her longtime partner, Virginia Gurnee, to whom Jacobs had dedicated her 1964 book, Famous American Women Athletes. 

Beyond The Game. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1936.

Gallery of Champions. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1949.  https://archive.org/details/galleryofchampio0000unse/mode/2up

Famous American Women Athletes. New York: Dodd, Meade & Company, 1964. https://archive.org/details/famousamericanwo1964unse/page/n7/mode/2up