On the 12th Try

The turf was green and firm; the weather was good; the flags flapped gaily; everything was right for the 63rd National tennis championships--except for an acute shortage of championship-caliber tennis. Of the 32 entrants in the men's singles at Forest Hills last week, 16 were servicemen-on-leave, four were juniors, several were near-veterans. But with the help of three Latin Americans, this wartime talent nevertheless managed to put on a good show.

At the start, most experts picked Ecuador's flashy Francisco ("Pancho") Segura as the ultimate winner. Pigeon-toed Pancho of the two-handed drive delighted the crowd with audible pep talks to himself in Spanish, with dramatic gestures of disgust when he flubbed a point. But Pancho got a head cold, and in the semifinals a headache; there he came up against Indianapolis' lanky, steady Bill Talbert, 4-F (for diabetes). A sound stylist with good ground strokes and a solid net game, Talbert drove Pancho to distraction and defeat in five long sets.

Labor Day was Talbert's 26th birthday. He hoped it was a good omen for his finals match with Sergeant Frank Parker, the onetime boy wonder and Davis Cupper, whose mechanical, methodical steadiness had often carried him close, but never quite to, the title. Parker, with a day of rest after his four-set semifinal win over Lieut. Don McNeil, was on the top of his smooth game. Talbert's only hope was to reach the net, and he seldom managed it except in the second set. Parker won 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3.

Thus the U.S., in 1944, had its two most colorless tennis champions in two decades. For the winner of the women's title was California's strawberry blonde, Pauline Betz, whose strokes are less brilliant than those of any first-ten competitor, but who rarely makes a mistake. She is also good-looking.

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