Forest Hills Finale

(See front cover)

One by one, Melbourne, Nice, Auteuil, Wimbledon were crowded briefly by that small, ubiquitous group of young men with white flannel trousers and sunburned noses who make it their business, all year round, to wangle for the world's major tennis championships. Last week the group was preparing to descend on Forest Hills, N. Y. for the last major event of the year, the 54th U. S. Singles Championship. Meanwhile the long series of preliminaries to that tournament were being brought to an end at Chestnut Hill, Mass. and South Orange, N. J.

Doubles. Chestnut Hill last week was the scene of no fewer than five simultaneous U. S. doubles championships-- men's, women's, mixed, veterans' and father & son. The father & son tournament was distinguished by the performance of the Davis Cup's donor, 56-year-old Dwight Davis who, with 27-year-old Dwight Davis Jr., beat R. N. Watt & Son of Montreal, holders of the title for the last two years, in the second round. William J. Clothier, U. S. singles champion in 1906, and William J. Clothier Jr., a Harvard sophomore, were the new titleholders. Those veterans among veterans, Frederick C. ("Pop") Baggs and Dr. William Rosenbaum, were finally ousted as champions by a pair of oldsters from Boston named Raymond B. Bidwell and Richard Bishop. Mixed doubles winners, after a polyglot final against Kay Stammers of England and Roderick Menzel of Czechoslovakia, were Sarah Palfrey Fabyan of Boston and Enrique Maier of Spain. Sarah Palfrey Fabyan and Helen Jacobs won the women's doubles for the third time when they ran through Dorothy Andrus and Carolin Babcock, 6-4, 6-2. The most important match of the week--final of the men's doubles--turned out to be a show-down between the two U. S. Davis Cup pairs of John Van Ryn & Wilmer Allison and Donald Budge & Gene Mako. It lasted over two hours and when it ended Van Ryn & Allison had regained the title they held in 1931, 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 2-6, 6-1.

East-West. A salient fact about tennists is that they never tire of their pastime. Twenty years ago, officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association found a few temporarily at liberty between the exhausting string of summer tournaments and the National Championships, promptly and sympathetically organized an East-West series to keep them busy. How frivolous this series has become was demonstrated by the fact that one of the members of the West's team last week at The Orange Lawn Tennis Club was Wilmer Hines of Columbia, S. C., another, Charles Harris of West Palm Beach, Fla. Harris lost his match to Bryan ("Bitsy") Grant, who had beaten Leonard Patterson of Los Angeles the day before, but those were the only points East won. Hines thrashed saturnine Manuel Alonso, onetime Spanish Davis Cup star, playing for the East, 6-3, 7-5, and the series ended, 5-to-2.

For people who cling patriotically to the myth of U. S. supremacy in sport, the game of tennis has lately been a painful disappointment. Not since 1926 has the U. S. won the Davis Cup. For the past two years the ablest amateur tennist in the world has been that convivial young Englishman, Frederick John Perry, who last week made his 1935 U. S. debut by beating old Manuel Alonso in an exhibition match at South Orange. That Perry will win at Forest Hills next week tennis experts are unanimously agreed. If he does so, he will, for the first time, actually become owner of the Cup which stands on a card table beside the court during the final and which, for the last two years, has merely been handed to him to fondle for newsreel cameramen before watchful U. S. L. T. A. officials restored it to its Black, Starr & Frost-Gorham vault. To take the $500 silver Cup away from Forest Hills, a U. S. champion tennist must win the tournament three times. Since the late William A. Larned, who held the championship seven times, won his second Cup in 1910, only one player has actually got his hands on a U. S. Men's Singles Cup. That was William Tatem Tilden, who did it twice, once in 1922, again in 1925, and holds one leg on the present trophy. If Perry succeeds next week where McLoughlin,* Williams, Johnston, Lacoste and Vines failed, he will be the first foreign player who has ever won possession of a U. S. Singles trophy. Moreover, he will have done so against a field which includes, except for Australia's Crawford, Germany's von Cramm and England's Bunny Austin, all the best amateur players in the world. If he fails, it will be the biggest upset in a sporting year full of surprises. Scanning the field last week tennis enthusiasts could pick out at least half a dozen players who might conceivably accomplish the impossible.

Wilmer Allison is ranked No. 1 in U. S. tennis today largely because he was the finalist who carried Perry to five sets at Forest Hills last September. A sunburned, drawling Texan who has been in the first ten since 1928, Allison's main assets are a well-rounded assortment of dependable, aggressive strokes, a good tennis head and a desire to make some reparation for his calamitous failure in last month's Davis Cup challenge round (TIME, Aug. 5). Equally impressive are his drawbacks. He has never beaten Perry. At 30, he finds two five-set singles matches on successive days more than he likes.

Roderick Menzel, with the exception of Perry, is the ablest foreigner in next week's tournament. An enormous, shaggy-looking Czech, who frequently plays in shorts, he is celebrated off the court for writing mediocre poetry and novels, speaking five languages, and teasing his 4 ft.-11 in. wife by putting her on a closet shelf from which she is too small to clamber down. Neither his domestic eccentricities nor his tennis technique -- awkward but effective volleying, a serve with a pronounced top spin -- seem adequate grounds for his reaching the finals unless he catches one or more opponents on an off-day.

Two years ago Frank Shields was usually described as a foolhardy play boy. Cannier as well as more handsome than most of his confreeres, he profited from his tennis fame by getting a Hollywood contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer last autumn, spent the winter trying to act and flattering young cinema executives by playing tennis with them. In the three major tournaments he has entered this summer, Shields has indicated that he is, if anything, a shade better than he was a year ago, when he was ranked No. 1. He hits the hardest serve and probably the fastest forehand drive in tennis, suffers from a temperamental inability to take the game more seriously than any other pastime which he finds agreeable.

Ever since picayune Bill Johnston appeared on the scene in 1915, there has been at least one high-class tennist who looks as if nature had designed him for ping-pong. Currently, Bryan ("Bitsy") Grant, a 5 ft. -3 in. Atlantan, holds this distinction. Equipped with almost nothing except a superhuman ability to get the ball back, his qualifications as a dark horse at Forest Hills are: 1) a grievance against the Davis Cup Committee for not putting him on the team for European play, 2) the fact that he has at one time or another beaten almost every able player in the tournament except Perry.

Towheaded Sidney Wood is generally conceded to be a tennis genius. This merely means that he can play well enough to be ranked as one of the world's greatest players but rarely does so for two days in succession. If Wood should play Perry on his best day at Forest Hills next week, he has a better chance than anyone else to keep the U. S. Singles trophy in the U. S. for another year. Unfortunately, since he played inadequately at Rye three weeks ago and has done nothing since, he seems more likely to be put out at Forest Hills before he gets a chance to distinguish himself.

Gravest defect in the championship chances of Wood, Grant, Shields, Menzel and Allison next week is the fact that none of the five has shown noticeable improvement during the past two years. In this respect the sixth player in any well-advised list of U. S. hopes to win the 54th Singles Championship is certainly their superior. Redhaired, freckled, 20-year-old Donald Budge of Oakland, Calif. has never beaten Perry but he came close to doing so last year in the Pacific Coast final when he forced him to five sets. His performances at home and abroad this summer have made him the sensation of the tennis year. He is the first U. S. player since Vines who really appears to have the potentialities of a world champion -- provided he does not turn professional before he reaches his peak game. Furthermore, whether he beats Perry next week or not, experts were agreed that if he goes on improving at his present rate, he may well do so in the future.

Born in Oakland, Calif. in 1915, son of a laundry wagon driver, Donald Budge began to play tennis at 8, taught by his elder brother Lloyd who sawed off a racket for him to play with, on the dirt courts of a public park. His first tennis costume was a pair of blue overalls and a khaki cowboy hat. Lloyd Budge, who became good enough to be tennis coach at St. Mary's College, beat Brother Donald regularly until 1933. That year the younger Budge, not yet 18, won the California Championship for men. A diffident, stringy, surprisingly agile youth, he appeared in major Eastern tournaments the next year, impressed critics with a sounder repertory of strokes and more tennis intuition than any of his contemporaries. Last spring, he and his fellow Californian, Gene Mako, were named for the Davis Cup team more to give them competitive seasoning than because anyone actually expected them to help bring back the Cup. As soon as he reached England, Budge made it clear that he not only deserved a real place on the team but that he was by far the ablest member of it. In the Wimbledon tournament, where he distinguished himself by making Queen Mary smile when, arriving late to watch the matches, she saw him waving his racket to welcome her instead of standing still and bowing, he reached the semi-finals after defeating Bunny Austin. He beat Baron von Cramm in the Davis Cup interzone final and took a set from Perry when the U. S. played England in the challenge round. His only serious rival for No. 1 in U. S. ranking this year--unless something unpredictable occurs at Forest Hills--is Shields. When they met in the final of the Newport Casino invitation tournament last fortnight, Budge won in five sets.

At 20, Donald Budge has already collected more than 70 tennis trophies, which are scattered about the Budge home at Oakland. He has a taste for white tennis rackets; the Wilson Sporting Goods Co., for whom he was a wrapping clerk last winter, has designed one especially for him called "The Ghost." A phlegmatic, gentle youth, so homely that even his mother smiled when a friend said that, if not the best tennis player in the world, her son was certainly the ugliest, young Budge is likeable but undistinguished off a tennis court. He barely graduated from high school a year ago, spends his spare time imitating Bing Crosby or the Mills Brothers, drinks nothing stronger than milk. On the court, the quality that marks his game is the one in which he sometimes seems most lacking elsewhere --savoir-faire. The quality which he will need most if he is to develop into a Class A tennis champion is confidence, and his demeanor this summer indicates that he is rapidly acquiring it. In the final at Newport, Shields returned a first serve by mistake and then courteously called: "Take two. . . ." Replied grinning Budge: "One's plenty." He served once, won the point.

*Now a well-to-do "investment counsellor" in Los Angeles, red-headed Maurice (''California Comet'') McLoughlin, who won his last national championship (doubles) in 1914, has given up tennis for golf which he plays in the low 70's. Last week, photographers found him giving pointers to his red-headed son Maurice Jr., 16, on his famed ''cannon-ball'' serve which revolutionized tennis in 1910.

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