Unlike the Davis Cup, the trophy which Mrs. George W. Wightman put up for women's international play in 1923 has been won by the U. S. regularly since 1931 in team matches against England. Last week, at Forest Hills, however, the U. S. Wightman Cup team had a few anxious moments. With Helen Wills Moody through with tennis for the season, England's pretty 21-year-old Katherine Stammers wore out husky Helen Jacobs, 5-7, 6-1. 9-7. Then demure little Dorothy Round mopped up the court with tiny Ethel Burkhardt Arnold who has been the sensation of U. S. women's tournaments this season. That gave England a lead of 2-to-0. with only five more matches to be played.
With that taut solemnity which belongs only to steeplejacks and women athletes playing for their country, Helen Jacobs and Mrs. Wightman's protege, Sarah Palfrey Fabyan, began edging their team up by winning the first doubles match against Miss Stammers and Freda James. The next afternoon Mrs. Fabyan, who always plays better in the Wightman Cup series than anywhere else, continued her good work by beating Phyllis Mudford King and when Helen Jacobs was through with Dorothy Round, 6-3, 6-2, the U. S. needed only one more point for the series. It was up to Mrs. Arnold to get it in her match with "Kay" Stammers whose fast left-handed drive has helped make her England's No. 3 player, who eats lump sugar during her matches and who, in the Kent Championship last June, won a love set from Mrs. Moody. Mrs. Arnold got it. 6-2, 1-6, 6-3.
Tennis, a game in which size and muscle would appear to be indispensable, always includes one or more practicing peewees. Like Bill Johnston and Bryan ("Bitsy") Grant, Mrs. Arnold, 120 Ib. and just 5 ft., often looks absurd when she comes out on the court, smiling shyly up at her opponent whose subsequent beating becomes all the more distressing. It would be in accurate to say that Mrs. Arnold's apparent limitations as a player disappear when her matches start. She covers the court in a series of wild scrambles, hits a jerky forehand that looks better suited to a flyswatter than a tennis racket and wins on steadiness, indefatigable nerve and the brains which most women players either signally lack or fail to use. As Ethel Burkhardt, she learned tennis in San Francisco, went East at 20 in 1929, reached sixth place in national ranking in 1930, then married a carpet salesman and dropped out of major play. She called attention to her reappearance this year by winning in quick succession the Seabright, Manchester and Maidstone tournaments, in which all the best women players in the country except Mrs. Moody and Miss Jacobs were entered, and which are the major preliminaries to next week's National in which she is not entered.