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As a tennis player, Pauline (who prefers to be called Bobbie) is an obvious cut or two below the alltime greats, Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody. But she has certain natural gifts of champions: she is cool; she is confident of winning; she has a quick eye and a good court sense; her footwork is superb. No matter how impossible a shot looks, she makes a dive at it. Says she: "I am a retriever."
On a cement court, which she likes best, her acrobatics are rough on the hands and knees; on a grass court, she grass-stains her starchy white outfit and doesn't mind. After a bad spill at Wimbledon this summer, she bounced up to wisecrack: "And they say it takes three weeks to get laundry done in England." As a court strategist, she rates alongside another Californian, ex-Champ Helen Jacobs. Say tennis writers sadly: if Pauline only had the strokes.
No Foot-Stamping. Experts debate whether her brilliant backhand (rated more powerful than Lenglen's but not as consistent) makes her other strokes look weak. Whatever the fact, sheer virtuosity is only relatively important to Pauline Betz. The thing that makes her go is a terrifying determination not to lose at anything—tennis or checkers, or gin rummy at a cent a point. Competition is the spice of her life. Says Pauline: "If I were a second-rater, I'd quit."
The Betz competitive urge is the kind that once kept powerful Molla Bjurstedt Mallory, a sturdy Scandinavian with square-cut bangs, at the head of the class during and after World War I. Neither of them went in for irate foot-stamping like Lenglen, nor walked off the court as Helen Wills Moody did in 1933 when it looked as if she would take a licking. When Pauline's hit-or-miss game misfires, she usually controls herself.
To keep her temper down, she has worked out a talking-to-herself routine for tough matches. Examples: when a linesman's decision goes against her, she tells herself that the other girl was going to win the point anyhow. When the crowd follows the old U.S. custom of rooting for the underdog (Pauline hasn't been one for four years), she assures herself that there is still one person on her side: Betz. When her game goes hopelessly haywire, she mutters to herself: "Well, my friend, do you like this as well as tennis?" Before a match she is nervous, and unable to keep her meals down; she quit eating pre-game lunches. But when red-haired Pauline gets out on the court, narrows her green eyes and sets her jaw, she is cool as a cucumber.
The Betz Club. Women's tennis, in the days of the fighting Helens—Moody and Jacobs—was a catty rivalry that was high in headline value and low in court manners. Betz is on wisecracking terms with her two principal rivals (also from California): San Francisco's chubby, red-haired Margaret ("Ozzie") Osborne and blonde Louise Brough (rhymes with rough) of Beverly Hills. All of Ozzie's strokes except the backhand (which is only good) are better than Betz's.