"No," she answered, "that wasn't the cause. It was Helen's courage and fight that nearly upset me that day. And while we are speaking of that match, let me correct something that you and a dozen others who reported the match wrote. Most of you said that I choked up in the final set because I knew that victory was worth fifty or sixty thousand dollars to me, and that this knowledge made me nervous. That's not true. If I had stopped to think about such a thing as that Helen would have beaten me. You can't let your mind wander that far in a final round match and still win. The truth is, most athletes have the silliest thoughts during critical moments. When I was behind 1-3 in the final set I remembered what a fortune teller had told me in San Francisco months before. The gypsy had told me that I would win the title, but only after a bad scare. All of a sudden that prediction gave me confidence and I started hitting my shots the way I should hit them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.