Sport: Bright Australian Future

The U.S. hope in the final match for the U.S. tennis championship was no hope at all: at 38, Gardnar Mulloy was drained by the years, and he was to face one of the finest players ever to hop a net. Yet the crowd cheered as Mulloy walked out to the famed center court at Forest Hills, lean, fit-looking and brisk, but stiff in his stride, and greying at the temples. It was his 18th year in the singles matches, and Mulloy, decorated veteran of World War 11 (lieutenant commander skipper of an LST) and four-time U.S. doubles champion (with Bill Talbert), was making his first appearance in the finals. But the gallant, uphill fight against the youngsters of the U.S. and Australian teams was useless, and everybody in the stadium knew it. Across the net stood the world’s top tennis player: 24-year-old Frank Sedgman.

It was quickly over. In one of the worst drubbings in U.S. tennis final history, tired Gardnar Mulloy went down—6-1, 6-2, 6-3. The match took only 47 minutes. Said Mulloy simply: “I’m sorry I messed up the final.” Then he added: “Tennis players never die. Sedgman will be a year older next year and I’ll get him.”

Predictable though Sedgman’s victory was, it pointed up two unpleasant facts about the state of U.S. tennis:

1) The U.S. has reached such a low point that Gardnar Mulloy was the best it had to offer.

2) Australia, which already boasts three of the world’s best amateur players (Sedgman, Ken McGregor and Mervyn Rose), has such strength in depth that a pair of downy-cheeked 17-year-olds named Kenneth Rosewall and Lewis Hoad may well keep the Davis Cup in Australia for another decade.

In the early rounds of the tournament, Australia’s two precocious youngsters displayed the all-court attacks and canny tactics of veterans. They were not even tested until they tried to reach the quarter-final round against two of the U.S.’s best, Vic Seixas, the U.S.’s No. i and a finalist a year ago, and Art Larsen, third U.S. seeded and 1950 champion.

Dazzler & Blaster. Rosewall, dark, smallish (5 ft. 7 in., 147 Ibs.), and affectionately nicknamed “Muscles” by his strapping teammates, was first matched against Seixas’ blazing serve—one of the best in the game. Rosewall not only stood firm, but made such dazzling returns of service that Seixas was caught flatfooted in midcourt. Seixas dropped two of the first three sets, found himself at match point in the fourth (all matches are the best three of five). Rosewall, with victory in sight, failed and lost the fourth set. But unruffled, he won the fifth set and match, 3-6. 6-2, 7-5, 5-7, 6-3.

Before the crowd at center court had time to catch its breath, broad-backed (5 ft. 10 in., 170 Ibs.), blond Lewis (“The Truck Driver”) Hoad, who balefully blasts the ball, in contrast to Rosewall’s defter touch, was meeting 1950 Title-holder Larsen. The U.S.’s No. 3, a retriever, was whipped 6-3, 6-4, 6-4.

Not since that nightmarish day in 1926, when Bill Tilden, Bill Johnston and Richard Norris Williams were rudely ousted from the national quarter finals by France’s Henri Cochet, Jean Borotra and Rene Lacoste*,had the U.S. suffered such a tennis setback.

Ouster & Outlaster. The double upset by the youngsters left four Australians in the round of eight (McGregor defaulted in the first round because of a pulled muscle). Next day, thanks to the luck of the draw, Sedgman ousted his teammate, Hoad; Mulloy, playing one of the best games of his career, outlasted Rosewall jn five sets. The other semifinalists: Rose, Aussie No. 3, who whipped Dick Savitt, the U.S.’s No. 2, in straight sets; ig-year-old Ham Richardson, the U.S.’s No. 7, who outlasted Straight Clark in five sets.

Again the luck of the draw worked to pit the Australians and Americans against teammates. Sedgman whipped Rose in straight sets; Mulloy outfought and outthought Richardson, also in straight sets, to go on to the final.

In land-rich Australia, where tennis courts sprout in people’s backyards, the game, along with cricket, is a national pastime. Youngsters are well coached as soon as they are old enough to toddle; the tennis season is ten months long. Only the once-famed California tennis factory, which produced such stars as Don Budge, Bobby Riggs, Ted Schroeder and Jack Kramer, can match the Aussie output. But the California factory has obviously slipped a cog. The U.S.’s weak answer last week to the Aussie production line: naming Seixas player-captain of the Davis Cup team, with Richardson as nucleus.

In the women’s final, all U.S., Defending Champion Maureen Connolly, still only 17, won her second title by outlasting Doris Hart, 6-3, 7-5. Onetime Wimbledon Champ Hart, who had already failed twice to win the U.S. title after reaching the final, won huge applause from the fans. Champion Connolly joined the exclusive company of Helen Wills, Alice Marble and Pauline Betz, the only other women to win both Wimbledon and U.S. crowns the same year.

-This trio, with Jacques Brugnon, made up France’s famed “Four Musketeers.” They held the Davis Cup for six years until Great Britain’s Fred Perry and Henry W. Austin won it in 1933 and held it, against all comers, until 1937.