If you wanted to be a top tennis player in the late 1930s, there was a huge benefit to being a member of ____. Or to being named ____.

This post is by Phil. A couple of months ago, this blog had a discussion that was prompted by the fact that 2 of the top 5 female American tennis players are the children of billionaires. One, that could be a coincidence, but with two it seems that there must be something going on. See the discussion.

Well, right around the time Andrew made that blog post, my wife and I joined the Berkeley Tennis Club. On the wall of the club there’s a little display.

Both female Wimbledon singles finalists were named Helen! Isn’t that amazing? What are the odds?

Nah, of course the real news here is that three of the four singles finalists were from the Berkeley Tennis Club. And it’s not like they were honorary members, or had once been members and were kept on the books: they lived within a few miles of the club. To me, this seems even more remarkable than the ‘billionaires’ thing. Even in 1938, tennis was played by a lot of people in a lot of countries. I guess the two Helens might have benefited by being able to play against each other, maybe there weren’t that many other places two elite female players could get practice like that…so that helps a bit, I guess. But then what are the odds that a top male player would happen to play at the same club? Under any circumstances it seems kind of amazing to have 3/4 of Wimbledon singles finalists come from the same small club, but there’s another fact which increases the level of difficulty: the club had (and has) no grass courts. (Don Budge’s Wikipedia page says “Accustomed to hard-court surfaces in his native California, Budge had difficulty playing on the grass courts in the east.”) Wimbledon has grass courts.

Honestly, I don’t know how to think about this, as far as how remarkable it is. If you think about it too narrowly — what are the chances 3/4 of Wimbledon singles finalists in 1938 would be from Berkeley? — that’s like throwing a dart at a wall and then drawing a bullseye around the dart once you see where it hits. But what’s the right way to think about it? What are the chances that at least 3 finalists at any major tennis tournament would come from the same town, in any year?

As long as I’m here, I’ll mention some off-topic facts that I came across when doing extensive research for this post (by which I mean I skimmed the Wikipedia entry for each of the three). 1. Charlie Chaplin was once asked what he considered to be the most beautiful sight that he had ever seen. He responded that it was “the movement of Helen Wills playing tennis.” (From Helen Wills’s Wikipedia page). 2. In 1938, when Budge was 22, he won Wimbledon without losing a set, and later that year he won the U.S. Open, becoming the first person to win the Grand Slam (winning all four major titles in a row). 3. Here, in its entirety, is what Wikipedia has to say about Helen Jacobs’s WWII experience: “Jacobs served as a commander in the U.S. Navy intelligence during World War II, one of only five women to achieve that rank in the Navy.”