Court Career

Because there are only 12 racquets courts and about 300 racquets players in the U. S., racquets might seem to offer a choice field for any able-bodied young man who wanted the distinction of championship at some well-publicized and patrician indoor sport. Last week, this point of view appeared to be substantiated when a wiry, darkhaired young Manhattan stockbroker named Robert Grant III, in his first season of serious racquets competition, won the U. S. amateur championship in New York's Racquets & Tennis Club after playing four tournament matches in the course of which he lost only one game.

Actually racquets, fastest of all indoor court games, takes years to master, and Grant's achievement last week was the climax of a court career which, for variety as well as brevity, is probably the most extraordinary on record in the polite history of U. S. court games. At Harvard, where he graduated in 1934, Grant captained the squash racquets team. A year later, he played on the New York Harvard Club's squash racquets team, won New York's Metropolitan squash racquets championship. Last year, Grant gave up squash racquets for squash tennis, soon became so proficient that experts predicted he would this year take the national championship away from Harry Wolf who has held it for the last seven years. Instead, Grant gave up squash tennis to concentrate on racquets, which he had first played in England where he lived until ten years ago. Three years ago, when Grant was devoting most of his time to squash racquets, he found time to be runner-up to Philadelphia's Edward Mitchell Edwards in the 1934 national racquets tournaments.

This season, Grant sent in his name for tournaments which few men would have had the temerity to enter before they had been playing the game five years or more. He won every tournament he entered with ridiculous ease: the Canadian singles championship, the Canadian and U. S. doubles championships (with Clarence Pell Jr.), the Tuxedo Gold Racquet tournament and the Racquets and Tennis Club championship. That he would acquire the U. S. championship as summarily as the others became apparent last week in the semi-finals when, in what most observers considered the most brilliant performance ever seen on the Racquets Club's court, Grant polished off Warren Ingersoll of Philadelphia, one of the country's five ablest, in 19 minutes: 15-5, 15-2, 15-4. In the final, two days later, his opponent was again Champion Edwards. This time it took Grant just half an hour to win match & title, 15-2, 15-14, 15-9.

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