One of the most attractive players to grace the courts, Alice Marble was deceptive. Her blonde loveliness and her trim athletic but feminine figure belied the fact that she played tennis in the late 1930s in a masculine manner that more closely approximated the game of Don Budge or Ellsworth Vines than it did the game of any woman.

There had been women before her who could volley and hit overheads--Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody among them--but none played the "big game," the game of the big serve and-volley, as it was to be called years later, as their standard method of attack the way Marble did regularly. No woman had a stronger service. Her first serve was as severe as any, and she delivered the taxing American twist serve as few women have been able to do. She followed it to the net for emphatic volleys or the strongest kind of overhead smash.

A right-hander pressing the attack without a letup, she could win from the back of the court as well as at the net. Her groundstrokes, made with a short backswing and taking the ball on the rise, were not overpowering, and her forehand was not always steadfast against the many fine backcourt players of her day, in part because of her daring in playing for winners. But in the aggressive all-court game she played, with her speed and agility and with her skill in the use of the drop shot, they served to carry her to four U.S. titles and to the Wimbledon Championship. World War II brought about French, Wimbledon and Australian tournament suspension or she might have added appreciably to her major conquests.

Her dominance is evidenced by her record of invincibility in 1939 and 1940. She did not lose a match of consequence either year. In winning her fourth U.S. title in 1940, she did not yield a set. She was voted by sportswriters the Woman Athlete of the Year in 1939 and 1940.

She was in the World Top Ten 1933, 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1939, No 1 the last year, and in the U.S. Top Ten those years, plus 1932 and 1940. No. 1 from 1936 through 1940.

Second-seeded at Wimbledon in 1938, but jolted in the semis by unseeded Helen Jacobs, 6-4, 6-4, Alice then embarked invulnerably on one of the greatest passages in the game's history. She won the remaining 18 tournaments and 111 matches of her amateur tenure, posting nine tourney titles and 45-0 match marks in 1939 and 1940. The streak was second only to Helen Wills Moody's 27 titles, 158-match procession to the 1933 U.S. final. Thus for her last three years of amateurism she won 23 of 24 tournaments, 120 of 122 matches.

Born September 28, 1913, on a farm in Plumas County, CA, she was a product of the public courts of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. A natural athlete she worked out with the minor league baseball players of the local Seals (including Joe DiMaggio) when she was their 13-year-old mascot. Marble made perhaps the most remarkable recovery from illness and obscurity in the game's annals to become the very best of her time.

Her soaring career--in 1933 she was No. 10 in the world, a U.S. quarterfinalist--seemed over by her 20th birthday, and she vanished from the scene for almost two years. In a weekend tourney at Easthampton, N Y, that year she had to play singles and doubles semifinals and finals on the last day (108 games!) in 100-degree heat. The result was sunstroke, keeping her from Wightman Cup singles, weakening her for the remainder of the season. The following spring, during team matches in Paris, Alice collapsed and was hospitalized. Cut down by anemia and pleurisy, frustrated and depressed by misdiagnosis of tuberculosis and the medical judgement that she must forget tennis, she didn't recover her health fully until 1936 when, startlingly, she won the first of her four U.S. titles, deposing Helen Jacobs, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.

She began to play again in 1935 in California, and changed to the eastern grip. When in 1936 Marble returned to the East, officials of the USTA were fearful that she might jeopardize her health permanently if she resumed serious competition. But she was determined, and with the assistance of her coach, Eleanor Tennant, she undertook to re-establish herself and get back to the top.

At Forest Hills she came up against Jacobs in the U.S. final. Jacobs had held the title four years in a row, raising serious doubts about Marble's chances. But Marble won, attaining the No. 1 ranking. In 1937 she lost in the quarterfinals but again was ranked No 1, and she held the top spot in 1938, 1939 and 1940, winning the U.S. crown all three years and winning all three titles at Wimbledon in 1939. In four years of Wightman Cup play she lost but one match in singles and one in doubles. An aging Bill Tilden, 48, and Don Budge, 25, at the top of his game, headlined the 1941 pro tour that opened at Madison Square Garden, along with Alice Marble and Mary Hardwick. Budge won, 51-7, and Marble was 72-3 in the head-to-head series of matches.

In her 1991 autobiography, "Courting Danger", Alice wrote that she decided to turn pro at the end of 1940 because, "What's left for me? I'm champion. . . and may as well make the most of it." She got a $75,000 guarantee from L.B. Iczly, the president of Wilson, who bankrolled the tour. This, she said, despite a $100,000 offer from the wealthy tennis fan Will duPont (who later married Margaret Osborne) to not turn pro because he enjoyed watching her on the Eastern grass circuit. During World War II she played exhibitions at military installations across the U.S., and revealed in her book that she was sent as a government agent to Switzerland in 1945 to spy on Nazis before the war ended.

She entered the Hall of Fame in 1964, and died December 13, 1990, in Palm Springs, California.