She was the top-ranked U.S. player from 1923 through 1925 and 1927 through 1929. In 1950, sportswriter Grantland Rice ranked Helen Wills as the greatest female tennis player of all-time. Awards and honors In 1935, she was named Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. Wills was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1959 together with the late Bill Tilden who had died in 1953. They were the 22nd and 23rd members of the Hall of Fame. In 1981, Wills was inducted into the (San Francisco) Bay Area Athletic Hall of Fame. In 1996 Wills was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. In July 1926 and 1929, Wills appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The New York Times obituary described her as "arguably the most dominant tennis player of the 20th century". Wills is name-checked in the Leonard Bernstein musical Wonderful Town, written in 1953 but set in 1935. In the song "Conga", Ruth Sherwood sings "What do you think of our rocks and reels?/ Mothersill's/ seasick pills?/ How do you feel about Helen Wills?" Playing style and personality When asked in 1941 about whether Wills or Lenglen was the better player, Elizabeth Ryan, who played against both of them in singles and partnered both in doubles, said, "Suzanne, of course. She owned every kind of shot, plus a genius for knowing how and when to use them." However, Wills and Lenglen are seen as having different skills and strategies. Wills served and volleyed with unusually powerful forehand and backhand strokes, and she forced her opponents out of position by placing deep shots left and right. Lenglen was more physically nimble, and she was more imaginative—able to quickly change shots in response to conditions. Lenglen was a master of the drop shot and close net work, which was Wills' soft spot. Aware of her weakness at the net, Wills drove her opponents deep into the backcourt as much as possible. Playing Wills was, according to Helen Jacobs, like playing "a machine... with implacable concentration and undeniable skill" yet with little flexibility. Analogizing Wills's game to poker, George Lott, a 12-time winner of Grand Slam doubles titles and a contemporary of Wills, once said, "Helen's expression rarely varied and she always tended strictly to business, but her opponents were never in doubt as to what she held: an excellent