Advantage Kramer

(See Cover)

Tennis is a game of no use in itself, but

of great use in respect it maketh a quick

eye and a body ready to put itself into

all postures.

It is not of record that Francis Bacon was much of a tennis player, but most tennis players would agree with his estimate of the game. The best tennis player in the world, a 26-year-old named John Albert Kramer, should certainly not take exception to it--though he might want to add a few things. For instance, the kind of tennis he plays is about to be of some use to his country. And shortly thereafter, it might be turned to more immediate profit to himself.

This week, with a breezy step, "Big Jake" Kramer marched into the game's sacred shrine at Forest Hills, L.I. He had a big grin and a quick "Hello" for everybody. He also had a brand-new crew haircut. That, he felt, was pretty important. He huffed & puffed through calisthenics, took a turn at rope-skipping, got in a businesslike three-hour practice session on the court.

The tennis season was at its peak, and there was plenty of work for the champ to do. There was also some relaxing to do, and Big Jake finally found time to read the last pages of a thriller-diller western called Magic of a Killer's Name. Dexer the Cowboy and his sawed-off sidekick. Long Tom, were blowing some varmints to kingdom come.

Big Jake could see himself in Dexer's boots. After all, he had been born in Las Vegas, Nev., and might pass for a cowboy himself. He had clear blue eyes and a chipped front tooth. He was tall (6 ft. 1 in.) and gangly; his face was browned and his legs a little bowed--although he had never been closer to a horse than the bettors' booths on a race track. Just the same, the western he was reading had its points of similarity with his own situation. Ted Schroeder would be his sawed-off sidekick, of course, and they sure would put those varmints to rout, just like in the book.

The chief varmint of all, as Jake saw it, was a brash little guy with a quick trigger finger. His name was Bobby Riggs, twice world's professional tennis champion, and he was always yammering that Bobby Riggs was the world's greatest tennis star. Jake guessed he would have to go gunning for Bobby some day.

But right now he had some nearer varmints to contend with--some visiting Australians, survivors of 22 nations which this year challenged for the Davis Cup. It would be the first cup "challenge round" to be decided in the U.S. since Australia took the cup home eight years ago. And next week, the 67th U.S. singles championship would get under way, with the best of the world's amateur stars trying their hardest to do the unlikely and dethrone King Jake.

Hot Dogs & Accents. At Forest Hills, everyone was primping and preening for the two big shows. Gate receipts for the three Davis Cup days were already $145,000 plus. The ten days of National Singles play would probably bring in nearly $150,000 more. The concessionaires were getting ready to serve up a record-breaking 30,000 hot dogs and 48,000 bottles of soda pop. Each morning, the 23 grass courts were being rolled a little nearer perfection.

On the outer courts, prepping for a crack at next week's singles championship, were some 60 players--about 25 of them with foreign accents. England had sent Tony Mottram and Derrick Barton. France's Robert Abdesselam, Czechoslovakia's outstanding southpaw Jaroslav Drobny were there, along with India's entire Davis Cup team (Misra, Mohan & Mehta) and Sweden's and Belgium's best.

There were also, of course, the Australians: blond, ambidextrous Jack Bromwich, husky, lob-loving Dinny Pails, bespectacled Colin Long (Bromwich's doubles partner) and temperamental Geoff Brown. They, too, had a lot to do. For their final five days of intensive practice, they engaged a sparring partner--U.S. Professional Frank Kovacs, the champion screwball of all tennis players. The Australian problem was clear-cut but tough: in just eight months they were trying to lift their outmoded, prewar game to U.S. standards.

Lesson No. 2. Some Australians had thought that last December's steamy, 100DEG Melbourne weather would melt the starch right out of the challenging U.S. Davis Cup stars, Kramer & Schroeder. The starch oozed out of the Australians instead. They lost five straight matches (and the cup). But instead of acting crushed, the Australians got a gleam in their eye. Sir Norman Brookes, boss of the Australian Lawn Tennis Association and onetime Wimbledon champion, issued a communique: "The aggressive type of tennis played by your men should have a great influence on our future stars. . . ."

The designer and chief exponent of this aggressive, high-pressure tennis is California's Jake Kramer. He is the U.S. singles champion, the Wimbledon champion, the No. 1 U.S. Davis Cupper in both singles and doubles. In other words, he has proved that he is the best amateur tennis player in the world.

This week, Big Jake will walk confidently into the big, horseshoe stadium at Forest Hills to give Australia's Davis Cuppers another lesson. In his unemphatic way, he calls his style of play the "big game." It combines all the game's attacking strokes into a smooth offense, geared to his none-too-rugged 164 Ibs.

Kramer's "Big Game." Just as the model T had to come before the streamlined 1947 Ford, previous California champions had to blaze the trail. First there was the California Comet, Maurice McLoughlin, whose weapons were lethal but lopsided: a smashing serve and volley. Next in the California line came Little Bill Johnston with the big forehand, then Ellsworth Vines with a bullet serve and an even more devastating forehand. After that was Budge, who had an all-court game and an incomparable backhand. Jake Kramer has something from all these predecessors; perhaps the nearest likeness is to call him a cross between Vines (on whom he consciously modeled his game) and Budge.

He plays tennis the way Joe Louis stalks an opponent in the ring. He is always boring in, always making the other fellow feel he is doomed unless he does something tremendous. Both his backhand and forehand carry deceptive depth and pace. All who play against him have the same complaint: "He makes you feel like you are backing up and backing up until you can't back up any farther." And at that point, Jake has most likely worked his way forward to the net for the clincher. Says he: "After a forcing shot, the odds of clinching a point at the net are 8-1 in your favor." He is a thoughtful young man, according to his lights, and he plays percentage tennis.

The cornerstone of Kramer's championship game is confidence. In varying degrees all champions must have a deep belief in themselves. Henri Cochet and Fred Perry had plenty of it; Tilden, the prissy virtuoso, had it to an insolent degree. It is the same quality that enabled Babe Ruth to point to the right-field bleachers at Wrigley Field during one World Series game and slam the most famed home run of his career.

Winning Shots. Kramer is always certain that he will win. His attitude: "When a guy runs up a lead on me, I'm surprised. ... I think he's either playing over his head, or lucky." This kind of confidence has to be acquired early and then be cultivated. Kramer won his first big tournament (the National Boys' crown) at 15. Frank Parker was a winner at 14, Riggs at 13, Budge at 15.

To back up his winning attitude, Big Jake has a winning service. He hits three types of serve--flat, slice, high-bounce--each with equal skill and confidence. His service never sizzles over the net with the brute force of Bob Falkenburg's cannonball smashes, but players agree that Kramer's is harder to handle, and he gets his share of service aces.

Big Jake has complete confidence in his "big service." He is so sure of it that he plans to break through his opponent's serve only once each set. The exception: when the opponent has a weak serve which can be broken without any extra effort. His one & only stroke weakness used to be a backhand that was too flat, but he worked on it patiently, finally got it steadied down until it was as effective as his forehand.

Opponents' weaknesses don't interest him. For one thing, "good players seldom have a real weakness," says Big Jake, who concentrates on putting his own best foot forward: "I always play my own strength, which is to the far right corner." This is the kind of positiveness that has made him a champion.

Hot-tempered, 150-lb. Ted Schroeder, who is Jake's best friend and No. 2 man on the U.S. Davis Cup team, has it too 8#151;but not the way Jake has. They are both the same age (Schroeder is eleven days older), both products of California's humming tennis factory. Kramer's eight-month-old son is named for .Ted, and Schroeder calls his baby boy Little John.

"Look, Brother . . ." Unlike his easygoing partner, Ted Schroeder is apt to be moody, quick to fly off the handle. Once, on an impulse, he wrote a blistering letter to good-natured Alrick Man (non-playing captain of this year's Davis Cup team); as soon as he cooled off, Ted was on the long-distance phone saying, "I just wrote you a letter . . . don't open it." Another time, he was about to pull into the driveway of his new home at La Crescenta, Calif, when a car whizzed by at terrific speed. Schroeder tore after it, forced the driver to a halt, and told him: "Look, brother, I got a wife and a kid and a dog . . . don't drive 60 miles an hour past my house again."

Schroeder likes to pull on a pipe; Kramer doesn't smoke. Big Jake's one vice is betting: he will bet anybody on anything. He once won $20 from friends who bet he couldn't down a jigger of beer a minute for 80 minutes. He likes people, poker, bow ties, Joe DiMaggio, and shop talk like "that day at Rye when big Frank Shields grabbed Bitsy Grant by the belt and held him out a second-story window."

But on the tennis court Jake becomes all business. He never mutters after a bad shot, never throws his racket on the grass in disgust. "Don't talk to yourself," Jake advises. "If you do, you are fighting a losing battle."

The U.S. tennis public would like Kramer better if he were more of a showman. They like the melodramatics of a Tilden, the antics of a beret-bearing Borotra, the Cockney ping-pongery of a Perry. Kramer makes his "big game" look too easy.

Championship Company. When he went over last June to breeze through England's famed Wimbledon tourney, he found that the British spectators were different. Unlike the U.S. crowd, which nearly always pulls for the underdog, they wanted to see the best man win. At Wimbledon, the alert expertness of Big Jake always seemed to be understood by the tennis-wise crowd, expressing itself in cries of "Good shot" almost as soon as the ball met the racket.

Wimbledon's head groundsman, a connoisseur of footwork, says he can always tell who will be in the semifinals by the way the players handle their feet. He paid Jake his highest compliment: "Never made a mark on the court." Jake, in turn, summed up his appreciation of Wimbledon: "It's really high class."

After winning the finals against Tom Brown (both of them thought they had played badly), Big Jake went to King George's box to receive the royal congratulations. As he walked toward the box he thought to himself, "Here I am, a young punk from California. . . ." But was he nervous? "No. I looked at the King the same way he looked at me. ... I guess both of us figured the other was pretty good in his own line." Said London's Daily Telegraph of Big Jake: "The only one of the postwar generation who could have lived in the company of such great champions as Lacoste and Tilden."

The Lush Life. Jake Kramer's reward for being champion is the circus-performer's life of the big-time tennis circuit. He is dined, lunched, swum and bathroomed by the rich--and he doesn't particularly like it, but considers it part of the racket. On the West Coast, he gets invitations to visit tennis-minded movie stars, but almost invariably turns them down. "They always want to play tennis," he says, "and with a few exceptions they can't play tennis ... so you have a lousy time."

In short, for all his ability, for all his success, Jake Kramer is a "tennis bum"--as most amateur stars have been for the past 20 years. He isn't losing any sleep over it. "Everybody knows that a good amateur tennis player in America can make a living going around the country playing tournaments," he says, "and if he does, he's called a tennis bum." A tennis pro makes more money, and makes it openly. But the amateur camouflage is a necessary preliminary: it establishes the cashable reputation.

Jake has always understood that fact of sporting life; and he has always understood the all-round value of becoming a champion. Nothing has ever been allowed to interfere with his determination to make good at tennis.

Meat & Potatoes. He spent one semester cutting classes at the University of Southern California and dropped out. He gave Florida's tennis-happy Rollins College, which lured him with a scholarship, the same short shrift. He lasted exactly three hours on a potato-sacking job in a San Bernardino (Calif.) grocery store; now he has an elusive connection with a Los Angeles meat-packing firm, but never really works at it. Except for 40 months in the Coast Guard, he has never really worked at anything but tennis.

From the age of 13, when he first decided to be a tennis player (rather than a baseball player), it has been his whole life. First he became champion of San Bernardino's Arrowview Junior High. Then, at 14, he went hunting bigger game, and got his ears pinned back in the first round of a Santa Monica boys' tournament. It was a terrible shock.

All next day, Jake sat around watching the other kids playing (one of them was Schroeder). He did not know that he was watching the fledgling chicks of California's high-pressure tennis incubator. They had beautiful strokes, and Jake asked someone how a kid learned to play tennis that way. He was told: "Go see Perry Jones." He did.

The Big Four. Perry Jones (TIME, Aug. 12, 1946), mother hen of California's tennis chicks, was the first of four men who helped mold Jake Kramer into a champion. Fussbudget Perry Jones--who says "I don't care how you hit your backhand . . . how do your pants look?"--liked the kid's looks; he was neat and polite. At Jones's suggestion the Kramer family moved in closer to Los Angeles where many of the good tennis players lived.

Benefactor No. 2 was Dick Skeen, one of the shrewdest teaching pros in the business. For $25 down and $5 a month, he began teaching young Jake how to swing a tennis racket. Each day, the youngster spent three hours on trolley cars, traveling the 18 miles between his home and Skeen's Beverly Hills court. Gradually his strokes took on a Skeen sheen. At 15, Jake easily beat Alice Marble, who was then women's singles champion.

The next step was getting somebody tougher to play against. Perry Jones got Ellsworth Vines, ex-amateur champion turned pro, the hardest hitter tennis had ever seen. Ellie Vines, Benefactor No. 3, agreed to play young Jake three times a week for five months.

That fixed 16-year-old Jake; Vines became his hero and tennis ideal. Even now, Kramer's forehand is hit with the same bent elbow Vines used; he rolls into his serves the way Vines once did. "I even tried to walk like him," Kramer says (he only half succeeded; Vines walks like an arrested Tarkington adolescent).

Vines taught him strokes, but he did not teach him the "big game." Jake figured that out himself--along with such lesser notions as eating football-style steaks before big matches and drinking warm tea between sets as energy boosters. Finally, along came Benefactor No. 4, a brilliant automotive engineer named Clifton Roche.

When to Press. Engineer Roche, just a dub player himself, worked out his theories with geometry. He got hold of Kramer one day at Beverly Hills' La Cienega tennis courts and casually began explaining the "mathematical unsoundness" of hitting the ball to certain spots in certain situations.

Jake found that Roche's theories worked. Sample: when running to the left sideline, never hit the ball down the line unless you are trying for an ace--it gives your opponent too big an angle for a cross-court return.

Jake began calling his new engineer friend Coach Roche. The Coach was a fanatic on psychology and energy conservation. In "third-stage" tennis, as Roche calls the big-time game, he says that players are often so evenly matched that an iota of stamina cdn mean the difference between victory and defeat. He argued that it was scientifically sound to press only on the right points. One time to press: when serving from the left court; the two big points, "thirty-fifteen" and "ad," begin there and it is less hazardous (for a right-handed player) to come into the net than from the deuce court. Another Roche tip: after a long set, when it is human nature to let down, give the first two games of the next set everything you've got.

Lifts & Luck. Besides Kramer, Coach Roche adopted just two other tennis proteges before going to Detroit to design new automobile gadgets. One was Ted Schroeder; the other was a youngster named Doug Woodbury, who died in an airplane crash.

Every now & then, Coach Roche drops in unannounced to watch his boys play. Says Big Jake: "Just knowing he's there is a big lift." A year ago, in the finals of the National Singles at Forest Hills, Jake spotted the Coach in the stands. Kramer was leading Tom Brown, 2-0, in the third set and was about to ease up a little when he saw Roche clenching a raised fist (meaning "go for it"). Jake closed out the set, 6-0, for his first U.S. singles championship.

With better luck, it might have been his ' third or fourth title. Big Jake thinks that he is playing no better now than he did in 1942, the year he swept through ten straight tournaments and was stricken with appendicitis on the eve of Forest Hills. The next year it was ptomaine poisoning. In the 1944 and 1945 seasons, he was off on Coast Guard duty. He talks about it as though it happened to somebody else and was all a big joke.

The Big Jump. Now, at last, Big Jake Kramer is sitting pretty. It is no secret that he has had at least two juicy offers to turn professional. Bing Crosby Enterprises Inc. is dangling a fat guarantee, $35,000 for the first four months (or 35% of the take, whichever is larger), to get him to go gunning for Bobby Riggs. Another proposition comes from a Chicago promoter named Jack Harris, who says he will meet Crosby's offer and go higher. Harris also wants Schroeder and Pancho Segura as a supporting feature: Crosby prefers a second billing of ex-Lady Champions Pauline Betz and Alice Marble.

For the present, Kramer is not even nibbling, and he definitely is not talking. If he can add the Davis Cup and the 1947 U.S. singles crown to the doubles championship which he and Schroeder won at Longwood last week, he can almost name his own price.

Right now Jake is pretty tired of hotels and laundry problems. As soon as possible he is going back home to Montebello, just outside Los Angeles, and he is looking forward to playing some golf--which he hopes to take up seriously some day, as Ellsworth Vines did after he made almost $200,000 out of pro tennis. (Last week, by tying in the Reno Open, Vines added $1,600 to the approximately $50,000 he has earned in five years as a golf pro.) Late in the month, Kramer will play in the Pacific Southwest Championships at the cement-courted Los Angeles Tennis Club.

After that, he might get to thinking about that cocky Bobby Riggs. During the past seven years, Big Jake and Cocky Bobby have often played against each other in doubles, sometimes for big side bets. Last fall at the Los Angeles Club, Big Jake (teamed with Segura) won $1,000 from Riggs (teamed with Frank Parker). But, by unspoken agreement, the two have never so much as suggested playing singles against each other since 1941--even for fun. When & if they do, it will be in Madison Square Garden, before a packed house, for important money. For Jake Kramer knows that, although "tennis is a game of no use in itself," it is useful to a man--especially a champion--with a desire to improve his position in the world.

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