Women's Tennis

On the many neat squares of green turf and white chalk which the West Side Tennis Court at Forest Hills, Long Island, provides for the game of lawn tennis, there flowered, last week, innumerable figures in white skirts and colored sweaters who arranged themselves in opposing pairs and began to move in the sunlight, forward and back, from side to side, like the bright porcelain dolls of some minute carnival, weaving a country-dance to music no one else could hear. They were the competitors in the Women's National Championship Tournament. At the end of the first day there were not so many of them; at the end of the second, fewer still; at the end of the third there were only eight.

How Mrs. May Sutton Bundy came to be absent from among those eight was, reporters thought, a "heart-story." It was 20 years ago, when she was 19, that May Sutton, a California girl who did not permit her gentility to interfere with her agility, or her garments with her respiration, came out of the West to win the Tennis Championships of the U. S. and England. Twice she held the singles championship of the world, three times the U. S. title, married Thomas Bundy, (Bundy held, at the time, the national doubles title with Maurice McLaughlin, "The California Comet," the most spectacular player who ever stepped on a court.")

Years passed. Shorter of skirt but not of wind, she continued to play sterling tennis. In 1921 she was put at number 4 in the national ranking. Last March, in Pasedena, she took a set from Champion Helen Wills. She played her again last week in the third round, won the first two games, returned Miss Wills' terrific forehanders with a sting that made a huge gallery rise to cheer her. The match, however, could have only one outcome; the score of her de-feat was 6-3, 6-2. While this was occurring, Mrs. Lambert Chambers, Mrs. Bundy's opponent in the Wimbleton finals in 1905, 1906, 1907. put out Miss Marion Williams of California, 6-1, 6-4. Miss Joan Fry, 19-year old Wimbleton (England) finalist, was no small fry for Miss Mary K. Browne, three times champion, second in the national ranking, who went down, in a sensational upset, before the spectacular drives, the amazing volleys, and the affronting grin of the British frail, 2-6, 6-4, 6-3.

Next day Miss Kathleen McKane, Wimbleton winner, played a nip and tuck match with Miss Elizabeth Ryan. When Miss Ryan took a tuck in her skirt, Miss McKane helped herself to a nip from a glass under the umpire's chair, pulled out the victory, 3-6, 7-5, 6-2. Miss Goss and Mrs. Mallory won; Miss Wills ended the hopes of the precocious Fry. In the doubles, Miss Goss and Mrs. Jessup put out Miss McKane and Miss Colyer, the English Davis Cup pair who had been favored to reach the finals.

No longer were the courts of the West Side Club the scene of a populous and pretty carnival. Combat had narrowed, grown bitter. Miss Wills played Miss Goss. The latter skimmed the net-cord with her strokes, whisked them to send up spirals of chalk from the baseline, won the first set 6-3. Prickly heat began to affect the vertebrae of the spectators. Was a champion going down? Miss Wills, smiling her poker smile, won a love set, ran through six of the next eight games, tucked the match in her vanity case.

Mrs Molla Bjurstedt Mallory became, for a set and a half against Miss McKane, the invincible, brown-sinewed Nordic of her salad days. Then weariness crept up her body, dulled the edge of her fiery nerves. She lost, 4-6, 7-5, 8-6. Miss Wills, champion of the U. S,. was left to face Miss McKane, Champion of Britain. Flanked with an enormous fagot of roses, the championship cup glittered on a table beside the court. Miss Mc-Kane and Miss Wills issued from the clubhouse, faced photographers, began to rally. The gallery which filled the stucco stadium was amazed to see a sort of, could it be, well nervousness in the champion's play. No, merely caution. But as the first set progressed they began to have fears. Where was the resistless speed? Where the champion's iron nerves? Even that poker face was wan now, as Miss McKane, playing as if the sub-subconscious conviction of victory, took the first set, 6-3. Twenty-four minutes later the match was over. Miss Wills, in the greatest tennis exhibition of her life, ran out a love set, allowed only two games in the third. When the final point was scored, she yielded for the first time in her career to the impulse of savage exultation that makes the Indian prance, the schoolboy yowl, the boxer shake his gloves over his head. She threw down her racket and leaped in air and cried out shrilly before she crossed to shake the hand of Miss McKane.

Elsewhere in the U. S. rackets were not idle.

In Newport. "In few cases was the ball returned!" With this journalistic naivete a pressman described the match between William M. Johnton and Brian I. C. Norton at the Newport Casino. No epigram could have summed it up as neatly. Johnston, since he already won the tournament on two previous years gained permanent possession of the Casino silver bowl, valued at $1,400.

Davis Cup. Tilden, Johnston, Williams, Richards, in the order named, were chosen by the Election Committee to represent the U. S. in the coming Davis Cup matches.

At Brookline. Gerald Patterson for Australia -- a tall sleek giant, epitomizing in his person all the large-limbed grace and slow-footedness of the western peoples--op-posed Takeichi Harada for Japan, a man like a brown jumping-jack. Patterson drove his mighty shots into the net, swacked them over the backline, was tidily defeated but his teammates, Anderson and Hawkes, won all their matches, eliminated Japan from the Davis Cup tryouts. Australia was scheduled to oppose France to see which will face the U. S.

-Engraven on the bowl are the names of Ichaya Kumagae (1916), R. Norris Williams (1917), William T. Tilden (1919), Clarence J. Griffin (1920), Howard Kinsey (1923).