Off a Monastery Wall

The court, in the fashion of the game, resembled a medieval courtyard; shedlike roofs slanted down along three sides. A huge net drooped limply across the floor. The low walls were pierced by openings that looked like windows in ancient outbuildings from which spectators peered out like court nobles in an old print. At the exclusive Racquet and Tennis Club on Manhattan's Park Avenue, devotees were watching Northrup R. Knox, 30, challenge 41-year-old Albert ("Jack") Johnson for the world open championship of the ancient game of court tennis.

Court tennis has changed little since it was played by monks in French monasteries some 700 years ago. and the court itself still reproduces many of the original hazards. The opening in the wall called the dedans might have been a water trough, and the player who can hit a ball into it wins the point. The serve is rolled along the side roof into the opponent's court, comes off it with an erratic spin. The oddly shaped racquets have changed little in design over hundreds of years. The game combines the strokes of lawn tennis with the problems of squash, compounded by the planned irregularities of the walls themselves.

Rich Man's Game. Court tennis in the U.S. is restricted largely to the wealthy. There are just seven courts in the whole country, only one private one--built by Payne Whitney in 1915 on his Long Island estate at an estimated cost of $250,000. But its adherents find court tennis endlessly fascinating, and in the last five years the game has experienced something of a revival, as Harvard, Yale and Princeton organized teams.

"Nordy" Knox comes from one of the U.S.'s most sports-minded families. Father Seymour Knox, board chairman of Buffalo's Marine Trust Co., was a ranking squash player, holds a seven-goal polo rating, combined with his two sons to form a powerful polo team. Nordy began learning the rudiments of court tennis at the Aiken Tennis Club in South Carolina, where the family has a winter home, took it up seriously after he graduated from Yale ('50) and moved to New York. For his teacher, he had the very best: tiny (5 ft. 6 in.) Pierre Etchebaster, now 65, a bouncy Basque who held the world open title from 1928 to 1954, is still probably the world's best for one set.

Unexpected Trouble. Johnson, an Englishman who is a teaching pro at the Racquet Club underrated his amateur opponent ("I didn't think he'd give me any trouble"). But in last week's match Johnson found Knox's "bloody bobbly little serve" difficult to return. Knox was deadly in putting the ball into the dedans and grille, often hitting the tambour, a jutting buttress off which the ball caroms almost parallel to the net. In three days' play, he ran through Johnson seven sets to two, became the first amateur to win the world open title since Jay Gould (grandson of the famed railroad tycoon) held it in 1914. True to the aristocratic traditions of the ancient game, there was no cup to change hands--only a gentlemanly handshake.

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