Pros & Contretemps

For two years, Pro Tennis Promoter Jack Kramer has struggled to get Australia's Powerboy Lew Hoad, 22, king of the amateurs, to play-for-pay against America's Powerman Pancho Gonzales, 29, king of the pros. After his smashing victory at Wimbledon (TIME, July 15), Hoad last week agreed to meet Gonzales on a two-year tour for the juicy sum of $125,000. Head's defection turned him from hero to ingrate among some of the tennis crowd back home in Australia, but that did not seem to ruffle Lew Hoad. And it set the stage for a tennis duel that may be historic.

Cannily, Kramer postponed the tour for six months to give Hoad time to rev up his game to the pro pace and the fast indoor courts on which many of the pro matches are played. But as a preliminary, he scheduled both Hoad and Gonzales for this week's round-robin Tournament of Champions at Forest Hills. (The other entries: Australia's Ken Rosewall and Frank Sedgman; America's Tony Trabert, and Ecuador's Pancho Segura.)

Gonzales grumbled. Hoad, he suggested, was not ready to play with the men. A Gonzales-Hoad meeting so early, he huffed, "will hurt the gate of our tour." Kramer whistled for his lawyer, waved Pancho's contract and snapped: "This is like a horse telling a trainer when he should run." When Kramer finally tempered his strong words with an offer of $1,000 extra in "appearance money," Pancho gave in, traveled east to defend his status this week as the finest tennis player--pro or amateur--in the world.

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