Berkeley Tennis Club Looking Back 100 Years By Wendy Markel in collaboration with Don Jacobus
As a member of the Berkeley Tennis Club (BTC), I have always been struck by the incredible physical location it occupies in our community. And over the years, I have become aware of the long history of fame that has put it on the larger international tennis map. As the club celebrates it centennial at its Tunnel Road location, we thought it would be a good time to look back.
The game of tennis came to the United States from England in 1874. The Berkeley Tennis Club was created in 1906, and play began on the two courts of rolled earth in May 1907 at the leased location of 2624 Hillegass Avenue, Berkeley. The club started with 40 members but swelled to 180 members by 1908. In 1909, five courts were in operation, with three of the courts surfaced with crushed seashells.
“The first Berkeley woman to achieve national recognition in tennis . . . was at the university on (a court) which girls were prohibited from playing after eight o’clock in the morning! After 1906, she became one of the first women players at the newly formed Berkeley Tennis Club.[i]” Her name was Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, and she went on to win 43 national championships!
In 1917, the club’s Hillegass lease was about to run out. The membership explored alternative arrangements, which led to the present site at 1 Tunnel Road. Around that time, the clubhouse was built by club member and Tunnel Road resident, architect Roland S. Stringham.
The BTC lease from the Claremont Hotel stipulated that two weeks per year would be free from rent, with the understanding that this time would be held for the Northern California Tennis Association Tournament. The first tournament held was called the California State Patriotic Tournament after the end of World War I. After 1917, the California State Championships were held at the Berkeley Tennis Club in the spring, and the Pacific Coast Tournament took place in the fall.
In the 1920s, a young girl to burst onto the Berkeley Tennis Club scene was Helen Wills. She was given a membership in the Club for her 14th birthday present. At age 18, she won the Wimbledon Ladies’ Singles and eventually took 11 Wimbledon titles and 4 titles at the French Nationals. She was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1959. To quote Anna Harper in an interview in 1975, “Helen Wills . . . every morning would run from her home on Tunnel Road all the way down to the Anna Head School in the middle of Berkeley to strengthen her legs. Well, I didn’t think they looked as though they needed strengthening.”
In a 1975 interview with Ned McFord, he said, “In the 1920s, there were only two big (Northern Californian) clubs—the Cal Club and the Berkeley Tennis Club. That’s where all the players were centered; there was nothing else.”
Don Budge, one of the club’s most famous members, was 15 years old when he joinedin 1930 and went on to win the California State Junior Championship and the Pacific Coast Juniors, and in 1938, he won all three Wimbledon titles. At Wimbledon, he lost no sets in the entire tournament! That same year, he turned pro—at age 23.
In the early 1930s the Claremont Hotel, apparently in need of more capital, sold off a small portion of their land. It concerned the BTC members that the hotel might seek to sell their leased land. A club member, Wallace Alexander, a friend of Helen Willis, offered to buy out the club property and lease it to the club. About ten years later, in 1943, under the auspices of Roy McDonald and Cyril George, plans were formulated to buy off the Alexander loan by issuing $35,000 worth of 20-year bonds. “The Berkeley Tennis Club is a weather-beaten little-shingled building with a porch around it. A few yards beyond it, there is a single track railroad, and a locomotive and a few cars invariably puff and clank by at critical moments on the courts.”[ii]
The Berkeley Tennis Club was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1945, the bonds were fully subscribed to by its membership, and an agreement was made to retire the bonds and meet the 5 percent interest on them on a yearly basis. By this time, the club’s membership had grown to about 160 members, but by the 1960s membership applications would burgeon to the point that there were 500 members; some new members had to wait as long as four years before space was available for them to join.
In 1971, the Berkeley Tennis Club hosted its last Pacific Coast International Tournament. The club simply could not compete with the size of the Oakland Coliseum or the San Francisco Cow Palace. Aside from that, some members felt that the extreme commercial orientation was “not in keeping with the traditions of the Berkeley Tennis Club.”
Through the years, Berkeley Tennis Club has been blessed with many great players in its membership, including Don Budge and Helen Wills Moody as mentioned, Helen Jacobs, William Johnson, Edward Chandler, Bill Crosby, Hugh Ditzler, Julie Heldman, William Hoogs, Frank Kovacs, Don Jacobus, Clif Mayne, Bill Maze, Jim McManus, Jeff Borowiak, Girls’ 18 National Champion Sasha Podkolzina, and Hazel Wightman (of the Wightman Cup), and many others.
In 1968, one of the United States Davis Cup matches was hosted at the BTC. The U.S. team of Arthur Ashe, Clark Graebner, Stan Smith, and Bob Lutz triumphed over the Mexican team that year. The club has many feathers in its cap, and not the least of these is the fact that the BTC was the “only private club ever to have both the No. 1 male and No. 1 female players in the world as members—Don Budge and Helen Wills.”[iii] The club has the largest representation of any organization in Northern California in the Northern California Tennis Hall of Fame.
Recently, Billie Jean King returned to the club at which she played at so often in her younger years to crown the Girls' 18 National Champion. Berkeley Tennis Club was proud to give Billie Jean an honorary lifetime membership to Berkeley Tennis Club at that time.
The real soul of the Berkeley Tennis Club is reflected in a quiet dignity of sportsmanship. It basks in the fame of past tennis “greats,” at the same time as it energetically encourages the famous of the future and nurtures the comradery of all its members. ------[i] The Berkeley Tennis Club, A History 1906–1997” by Gail Baxter and Luther Nichols [ii] Alice Marble in American Tennis 1957 [iii] Geoff Hayes