Again, Perry

When the U. S. Davis Cup team was selected for European play last June the country's second ranking player, Wilmer Lawson Allison Jr. of Austin, Tex., was not on it. Later in the month Allison was asked to join the team in England. When he got there, he was told that he would not be needed. Last week, in the National Singles Championship at Forest Hills, L. I., Allison got a chance to show how he felt about a team on which he had not been considered good enough to play. First he beat huge, handsome Lester Stoefen of California, in a match that took most of an afternoon and part of the next. Then he polished off the No. 1 Davis Cup singles player, towheaded Sidney Wood, 6-3, 6-2, 6-3. By that time, the other two members of the Davis Cup team were already out of the tournament. Allison's only available means of increasing the chagrin of the Davis Cup committee was to win the title by beating Frederick John Perry of England (TIME, Sept. 3) in the final.

Beating Perry is something that the best tennists in the world have been trying unsuccessfully to do since the French championship matches last May. At Forest Hills last week Perry whisked through the first two sets against Allison 6-4, 6-3. As if impatient for the rest period that would enable him to slick down his black hair and change his floppy trousers, he flicked away the third, 3-6. Allison had the fourth too, 6-1, before Perry again settled down to serious tennis, and took the championship set 8-6. It was the first time since Lacoste (1927) that a foreigner had won the U. S. title two years in succession.

P: A huge Czechoslovakian and a slight South African were the foreigners the galleries watched most at Forest Hills. Annoyed at being made to play his second-round match in an intermittent shower, Roderick Menzel amused himself by uttering Czechoslovakian epithets, tottering about at snail's pace between points. He was put out in the fourth round. Vernon Gordon Kirby, whose father fought in the Boer War, first gained world recognition when he defeated Baron von Cramm to reach the quarter-finals at Wimbledon this year. At Forest Hills last week he put Frank Shields out in the quarterfinals, only to lose to Perry the next day.

P: The three young hopefuls most mentioned as candidates for next year's Davis Cup team are red-haired Donald Budge, Junior Champion Gene Mako, and Coach Mercer Beasley's prize protege Frank Parker. Yet last week not one of them lasted beyond the quarterfinals.

P: Liberty last month published an article by onetime champion Ellsworth Vines, flaying the U. S. Lawn Tennis Association for being ungrateful to the players who support it. At Forest Hills last week, Vines, now a professional, appeared to broadcast the matches. He was asked to leave.

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