Sport: Pro Vines

Long-legged Henry Ellsworth Vines Jr., last year’s No. 1 U. S. tennist, last week ended a disastrous year of amateur tennis. Last June, just before he lost his Wimbledon title, Professional William T. Tilden offered him a $100,000 contract if he won. Made dizzy by having lost so much money. Vines talked about it, brought on an investigation by the U. S. Lawn Tennis Association which finally cleared him of having done more than think about turning professional.

Last month Tilden dangled the bait again, this time $25,000 down, $25,000 guaranteed profits from “byproducts” (i.e., endorsements). All Vines had to do was join Tilden and Frenchman Henri Cochet on an eight-month playing tour beginning next January with a Vines-Tilden match in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden Tilden planned to call the tour a “professional Davis Cup series.” He slyly reminded Vines that his amateur career, begun so spectacularly, seemed to have fizzled. Sadly Vines agreed that he “was dead, killed by too much tennis and too many officials.” Last week he took the $50,000 contract, abandoned U. S. amateur tennis. Bitterly chagrined were the other members of the Davis Cup team whose sagging chances of taking the Cup away from Britain next year sagged further with Vines’s desertion.

One of the “byproducts” Pro Vines can endorse is a new string for racquets called Sinu. He and several other players used it in last month’s Pacific Southwest Tournament. Made not from catgut (sheep intestine) with which tennis racquets are commonly strung, Sinu is made from calf’s tendon. Developed by Charles T. (”Tommy”) Davis and Dr. George Aaron Sharp in Brooklyn, it has long been used as a substitute for gut in surgical sutures. It is manufactured like a textile. The gristly tendon is “exploded” into a tuft of fluffy white material like cotton, but much tougher. After being cleaned, carded, twisted into cord, chemically treated, stretched and dried, the result looks almost exactly like catgut.

Retired in middle-age to the sunshine of Beverly Hills, Calif., Davis and Sharp tried stringing their racquets with Sinu. To their great joy they found the sinu racquet much livelier than gut; found that soaking it in a bucket of water did it no hurt. They have built a factory in California, will have Sinu on the market in January.