Hail to the Chief

The band struck up With a Little Bit of Luck at Brisbane's steaming Milton stadium, and it seemed the U.S. Davis Cup team would need plenty of it. Australia's Mai Anderson and Ashley Cooper were 10-to-1 favorites in what shaped up as the most lopsided cup challenge in years. The U.S. team had been racked by dissension. Ham Richardson, the U.S. top-ranked player, was dropped by nonplaying Captain Perry Jones as a singles player on the ground that his diabetic condition made him unfit to handle the workload, complained bitterly and publicly that he had been treated shabbily. Even U.S. Pro Promoter (and part-time team coach) Jack Kramer had conceded victory to the Aussies.

But the experts reckoned without a slim, crew-cut young man named Alex Olmedo. Nicknamed "The Chief." for his resemblance to an Inca prince, Olmedo, 22, is a citizen of Peru. He qualified for the team because he had lived in the U.S. longer than the required three years, and Peru had no team of its own. At California's tennis-playing Modesto Junior College and later at the University of Southern California, where he had been sent to have his game sharpened under the watchful eyes of Kramer and other pros. Olmedo had shown promise, but little of the determination most tennis players need to be great. Rather than practice, he preferred dating girls and going to dances, seldom played his best tennis unless he considered the match "interesting."

Tandem Tactics. At Brisbane the Chief led off for the U.S. against Anderson, and from the first serve it was obvious that he found the match interesting. Before the astonished eyes of 18,000 Australian partisans, Olmedo charged repeatedly for killing volleys, managed an upset victory 8-6, 2-6, 9-7, 8-6. Then Barry MacKay lost as expected to Australia's Cooper to tie the match score. But next day Olmedo teamed with Ham Richardson in the doubles against Anderson and Neale Fraser. The U.S. pair promptly lost the first two sets, had to rally desperately to win the third 16-14. In the break before the fourth set, Pro Champion Pancho Gonzales rushed to the dressing room, gave Olmedo and Richardson some sound counsel. Eraser's return of service from the backhand court had been devastating. Gonzales advised the U.S. pair to go into tandem alignment; i.e., have the netman play on the same side of the court as the server, force Fraser to return service down the sideline. The U.S. team went on to win the last two sets and the match.

On the final day Olmedo was matched against Cooper, generally rated the world's leading amateur. Alex seemed unawed, showed up for a strategy workout with Gonzales, displayed to dressing-room interviewers a pair of underdrawers decorated with gorgeous women. "This way I never run out of girls," he grinned. In voluble Spanish Gonzales suggested Olmedo's strategy: keep the ball low on the wet court, use lobs to drive Cooper back from the net, move around to upset the Aussie's second service. It worked. Charging to the net, the Chief forced the attack, punched his volleys accurately, won 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 8-6. Almost single-handed Alex Olmedo had won the Davis Cup for the U.S.

Cheers & Jeers. With the cheers of the crowd thundering in his ears, Olmedo wept on the court. Later, as he quaffed a beer, Alex said he had been confident of victory all along. "I always pick myself," said the Chief. "I figure in this world you got to be optimistic." The U.S. was optimistic, too, about its chances of retaining the cup, when, at week's end. Australia's Anderson and Cooper headed for the professional ranks.

Australian fans cheered Alex to the echo. But Aussie newspapers had some surly second thoughts. Snapped the Sydney Sun: "Australia lost the Davis Cup to Peru." Even the U.S. was a bit embarrassed. Wrote the New York Times's Arthur Daley: "A few more such rousing victories, and the prestige of this country will sink to an embarrassing low. The Davis Cup should be enshrined in an Inca museum."

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