Tennis Climax

(See front cover)

Unlike tennis in England, where the world's championship at Wimbledon is the one great tournament of the year, tennis in the U. S. progresses through a series of increasingly important invitation tournaments to the grand finale of the Men's Singles Championship at Forest Hills. By last week, U. S. tennis had reached its semi-final stage: the last round of the women's singles, at Forest Hills, and the men's doubles championship, on the grounds of the Longwood Cricket Club at Brookline, Mass.

At Forest Hills, the stanch disinclination of a slim British Sunday-school teacher to play on Sunday, and four days of rain, had delayed the tournament a full week. When sturdy Helen Jacobs, whose muscles were as solid as her opponent's convictions, finally took the court against Dorothy Round, who had beaten her twice in England and even won a set from Helen Wills, the slow moist turf made a perfect surface for the slow, sly Jacobs chops. Her victory, 6-4, 5-7, 5-2, set the stage for a final that promised to be boringly familiar. Even the fact that Helen Wills Moody had been troubled all week by a sore back led no one to suppose that the result could differ materially from that of other Moody-Jacobs encounters, in which Helen Jacobs had failed to win a single set.

Just how different this match was to be did not become apparent even when Helen Jacobs had won the first set, 8-6, keeping Mrs. Moody on the defensive, chopping back her fastest drives to the corners of the court so that she never had a chance to stop running from one end of her baseline to the other. In the next set, Mrs. Moody seemed to have recovered some of her old assurance. When Helen Jacobs crept up to 3-all from 0-3, Mrs. Moody briskly ran off three more games in a row. After a ten-minute rest, she came back to the court and sat down in a linesman's chair to wait for her opponent.

In 1921 Suzanne Lenglen, after losing a set to Molla Mallory, defaulted when she developed a hacking cough. That set the pattern for the extraordinary way in which Mrs. Moody's supremacy in women's tennis, unchallenged for seven years, ended last week. In the first game of the third set, she double-faulted twice, so feebly that the crowd grew restless and Umpire Benjamin Dwight had to hold up his hand for silence. Helen Jacobs won that game and the next, from 0-30. Serving again, Mrs. Moody won one point and then lost four in a row. She walked to the side of the net as though to change courts, held up her racquet, said to Umpire Dwight that her legs were so tired she felt unable to continue. Sensing the situation before the crowd knew what had happened, Helen Jacobs ran up to the net, put her arm around Mrs. Moody's shoulder, begged her to continue. Mrs. Moody shook her head and walked slowly off the court while the crowd, as incredulous as it was impolite, booed and whistled and a crowd of photographers gathered quickly around Champion Jacobs.

When she left the court, Mrs. Moody said she hoped to come back later to play in the doubles final with Elizabeth Ryan against Betty Nuthall and Freda James.

Later she decided to default that match as well. She explained: "In the third set of my singles match I felt as if I were going to faint because of pain in my back and hip and a complete numbness of my right leg. The match was long and by defaulting I do not wish to detract from the excellence of Miss Jacobs' play. I feel that I have spoiled the finish of the national championship and I wish I had followed the advice of my doctor and returned to California."

Whether or not Mrs. Moody would have been physically capable of finishing her match and whether she should have done it, were by no means all that tennis enthusiasts had to argue about after her default. Dr. Thomas C. Chalmers, who had been attending Helen Jacobs, said he had advised her not to play, described some of her ailments: "Acute inflamed gall-bladder . . . heart condition not as good as it should have been . . . constantly under treatment." Dr. Chalmers said that Miss Jacobs had played only because of "her sporting idea that a champion should defend her title," that during the final she had sustained herself with whiskey capsules.

A tournament that had been a series of mishaps presently ended with one more. Alice Marble, substituting for Mrs. Moody in the doubles, for exhibition purposes, received one of Betty Nuthall's hardest slams in her left eye when she was standing close to the net. The ball bounced back across the net. Alice Marble fell down, had to be helped off the court into the clubhouse.

At Brookline, rain delayed the start of the men's doubles, made the courts slippery when 30 of the 32 teams played their first matches. A default gave the Australian team whom the crowds wanted most to see--Jack Crawford & Vivian McGrath--the dubious advantage of rest instead of an easy match before they met Berkeley Bell & Gregory Mangin in the second round. The weather, still soggy, gave them a much less dubious advantage when the match began because Bell has trouble standing up even when the footing is dry and firm. After winning without difficulty, 6-3, 6-3, 7-5, Crawford & McGrath came up against the newly organized team of sly George Lott and towering Lester Stoefen. Stoefen & Lott concentrated their attack on 17-year-old McGrath's two-handed backhand. He missed 14 out of 17 chances in the first set, improved later but not enough to play offensive tennis against the fastest combination in the tournament. Their victory--6-2, 7-5, 7-5--put Lott & Stoefen in the semi-finals against young Jack Tidball & Gene Mako of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, another Australian team that no one had thought much about was doing much better than anyone expected. Young Donald Quist and Don Turnbull beat Allison and Van Ryn, who have been U. S. doubles champions or runners-up since 1931, 15-13, 0-6, 6-1, 7-5. That bracketted them with Lott & Stoefen in one half of the semifinals. In the other, Frank Shields and Frankie Parker played Vines & Keith Gledhill, defending champions. Shields and Parker took the first two sets, with Vines playing badly. Vines and Gledhill won the next two, when Shields was shaky. Finally, shrewd little Parker pulled his game to its peak and helped his partner run out five games in a row for the last set and the most startling upset of the tournament--6-3, 6-4, 3-6, 3-6, 6-2.

A field with more first class foreign players than any U. S. championship in years was not the only thing that gave last week's tournament at Brookline a special importance. Coming after the closest Davis Cup matches on record, it was a chance to try out new combinations, like Lott & Stoefen, Crawford & McGrath. Furthermore, it gave U. S. tennis followers their first brief glimpse of the player who has become indisputably, for this year at least, the world's No. 1. Last winter Jack Crawford won the Australian singles championship at Melbourne, beating Keith Gledhill in the final. In the final of the French hard court championship, he finished Henri Cochet in short straight sets. In July he won at Wimbledon in a final that some experts considered the greatest tennis match ever played, against Ellsworth Vines. John Herbert ("Jack") Crawford needed only a victory at Forest Hills this week for a clean sweep of the world's four biggest tournaments, a preeminence in tennis that no player has attained since Tilden.

Equipped with thick muscles, the suggestion of a paunch and a brisk, business-like walk, ruddy-faced Jack Crawford bears no resemblance whatever to the tall, somewhat languid youths of whom the U. S. first ten is largely composed. For a long time his game, too, failed to resemble theirs in efficiency. An excitable temperament and inability to control his shots held him back. Crawford started to play tennis on his father's 1,200-acre farm at Albury, New South Wales, took it up more seriously when his family moved to Sidney. In 1924, aged 16, he played in his first tournament. Two years later, in the Australian Junior Championship, he beat a member of the Australian Davis Cup team, on which he played in 1928. In 1930 he married Marjorie Cox, famed Australian girl tennist, with whom he had won most of Australia's mixed doubles titles. Since 1931 his game has improved steadily but so slowly that by 1933 even England's Queen Mary, who never misses a Wimbledon tournament, had the impression that it had taken phenomenally long. After he beat Vines last spring, Crawford was presented to the King & Queen at Wimbledon. Said the Queen: "You're 29, aren't you?" Said Crawford: "No, your Majesty, I'm 25."

Technically, the strength of Champion Crawford's game lies in its lack of any noticeable weakness, in a knack of anticipation, and in an extraordinarily keen discrimination about when to play a ball and when to let it go out. His serve, almost as severe as Vines's, is equally dependable. With slower ground strokes than most first-rate U. S. tennists, and less style than most Englishmen, who play as though the net were a mirror, Crawford has an energetic steadiness that depresses his opponents, a tireless ability to play his positive, muscular shots, not for aces but for errors. The most unusual thing about Crawford on a tennis court is his flat-topped, thick-framed 14-oz. racquet, shaped like the racquets that were fashionable before the War. The fact that the name of Crawford's racquet is Alexander sometimes leads people to suppose it is one of the Hackett & Alexanders brought out by Spalding in 1912 and named for the famed U. S. doubles team of Harold Hackett & Fred Alexander. Shaped the same way, it is neither a relic nor a copy but a standard product of Alexander Racquet Co. of Launceton, Tasmania. Flat-topped racquets remained popular in Australia long after they had gone out of fashion elsewhere, partly because famed Norman Brookes, who became head of the Australian Lawn Tennis Association after he retired from active tournament competition, continued to prefer them. Australia's Adrian Quist and Donald Turnbull used the same kind. Unlike U. S. players who have their bats strung, with gut so fine that it never lasts more than one day, often less than a set, Champion Crawford uses "any kind" of gut, thick, durable and oldfashioned, has his racquets restrung as many times as ten.

From Brookes, who was one of the world's best players from 1907 to 1920, Champion Crawford received more than his notion of what kind of bat to use. Now a Melbourne manufacturer, in his middle 50's, Norman Brookes still plays formidable tennis. Last winter he teamed with Vines in a doubles match against Gledhill and Gerald Patterson, whose victory at Wimbledon in 1922 was the last by a British subject until Crawford's this year. Brookes's stubborn ambition to bring the Davis Cup back to Australia had something to do with the tour that gave Crawford and his confreres a chance to play at home against Vines, Gledhill. Van Ryn and Allison last winter. As good-humored as Brookes is taciturn, Crawford commented chipperly when Editor Wallis Merrihew of American Lawn Tennis asked him last spring whether he expected the Davis Cup to go back to the U. S.: "I expect the Davis Cup will go back to Americawhen we take it there on our way to Australia." If Vines and Crawford play each other in the final at Forest Hills, the match will be like another between a hard-serving Californian and a steady Australian--when Brookes played Maurice McLoughlin in the Davis Cup matches at Forest Hills in 1914 and lost, after one of the longest first sets on record, 15-17, 3-6, 3-6. Since Tilden's retirement to professional tennis and Cochet's unmistakable decline, tennis has had no completely preeminent player. Favorites to prevent Crawford from completing his clean sweep at Forest Hills this week will be Vines, Perry and Shields, three players who certainly belong in the world's first four but whose ratings in relation to each other experts have difficulty in deciding. Others--like Allison and Lott; Sidney Wood, who has slipped since winning at Wimbledon in 1931 but might come back; Stoefen, who is so impressive on the court that nothing he might do would be surprising--would be capable, on their best days, of beating any of the first four. Forest Hills usually turns up at least one dark horse. This year the tournament will have two prodigies. Parker and McGrath.

Vines, after a disappointing season in which he lost two matches in the Davis Cup series as well as the Wimbledon final, last week started to defend his U. S. doubles championship under an additional burden of worry about his amateur standing. After two weeks of consideration, the U. S. Lawn Tennis Association finally decided that while he might have been guilty of thinking about becoming a professional, Vines had never definitely promised to do so, hence remained amateur. Still possessed of the best first serve and the hardest forehand drive in tennis, Vines last week showed signs of having closed the gap between his 1933 form and the game that made him unbeatable in 1932. Said he: "I think my chances of winning the American singles championship are as good as those of any American. . . . I'm all right physically, so I guess it's a question of mental adjustment. . . ."

Frederick John Perry has a sleek appearance, a bland cosmopolitan manner which belies the fact that he taught himself tennis on London's public courts, became world's ping pong champion before he made a Davis Cup team. For England, at least, Perry is the No. 1 player of 1933. He beat McGrath. then Allison and Vines, then Cochet and Merlin in this year's Davis Cup matches. If he gets what he calls a "good win:" over Crawford, whom he has not played this year, it will be in the final at Forest Hills, because they will doubtless be in opposite halves of the draw. For the last five years, the winner of the Pacific South West tournament has won the U. S. title the next year. Perry won the first last year.

Frank Andrew Parker, 17, has been the prodigy of U. S. tennis almost as long as Vincent Richards was. He still emphasizes his youth with peculiar baggy knickerbockers which hang down to his shins. Almost unbeatable on clay, he should be a member of next year's Davis Cup team, think Lott and Vines. Parker's father, Paul Pajowski, is dead. His mother entrusts him to the care of famed Tennis Coach Mercer Beasley, who fervently hopes he will get beyond his present height of 5 ft. 9 1/2in. Beasley's greeting to Parker when he returned from six weeks abroad to coach the Davis Cup team: "What's the matter? You haven't grown at all."

Convivial, black-haired Francis Xavier Shields, handsomest of U. S. tennis players, looked in 1931 like a better prospect than Vines. This year he started so erratically that he was automatically left off the Davis Cup team, revenged himself by winning five U. S. tournaments in a row, roundly beating Vines in the last big invitation tournament of the year, at Newport.

Baby-faced Vivian McGrath who pronounces his name "McGraw," lopes around the court like a kangaroo, holds his racquet with both hands when hitting off his left side, is a month younger than Parker. Son of a Mudgee, N. S. W., farmer, he beat Vines in Australia last winter, spry little Jiro Satoh in last summer's Davis Cup matches. Unlikely to get far at Forest Hills, the experience will help him become, with Crawford, the mainstay of Australia's Davis Cup team in 1934.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.