Sport: Racquets

Clarence C. Pell and Stanley Grafton Mortimer have been playing racquets so long that doormen, stewards and resident members of almost every club that has a court know them by sight. Pell is the shorter one, with the row of ridges in his forehead. Mortimer is the lean one, with the sharp nose and thinning hair. They won the national racquets doubles championship in 1915, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1927, 1929. The two gentlemen they were playing in their semi-final match at last week’s national doubles championship in the Racquet Club at Philadelphia possessed less formidable reputations. One was Duncan Cambridge and the other Peter Kemp-Welch. They constituted the English second team. But which was Cambridge and which Kemp-Welch was more than most people in the gallery could say. Racquets is fast enough as singles, but doubles is so much faster that if you found someone who knew these Britons apart and he pointed one out, the other was sure to be on the spot by the time you looked. It was the opinion of the knowing that Pell and Mortimer would make such mince-meat of Cambridge and Kemp-Welch that their identities would not only be indistinguishable but unimportant.

Pell and Mortimer were slow starting. They often have been before, so it was not a shock when the Englishmen took the first game by six points. Pell and Mortimer won the next, and then Kemp-Welch and Cambridge put on what seemed to be their last desperate spurt. They took the third game. Pell and Mortimer squared it with the fourth. The great moment had arrived — the moment when Pell and Mortimer, according to their usual routine, should have carried the match away. Instead, Kemp-Welch and Cambridge lifted their pace another little bit and easily ran out the last and deciding game, 15-5.

Astonished and impressed spectators forgot for the moment that Kemp-Welch and Cambridge were only the second English team. They remembered this next day when Dr. H. W. Leatham and his partner, Lord Aberdare, who with another partner won the national U. S. doubles championship two years ago when he was the Hon. Clarence Napier Bruce, stepped on the court long enough to give Kemp-Welch and Cambridge a brisk lesson and lift the title, 15-4, 15-7, 15-10.