Sport: Forest Hills Finale

Tennis in the past five years has produced few new faces. Last week at Forest Hills it produced not only a new face but a new U. S. champion and a personage whom many experts considered quite likely to develop into the most exciting player of her sex since Suzanne Lenglen. She was blonde Alice Marble, 23-year-old San Franciscan who by beating Helen Jacobs 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 in the final of the U. S. Women’s Singles Championship accomplished the major tennis upset of the year.

Four times U. S. champion, trying to establish a new record with five championships in a row, Helen Jacobs won the first set on steady, well-placed chop strokes. In the second, she got a lead of 2-0, needed only four more games to add the U. S. title to the English one she won at Wimbledon this year. She could not get them. Flicking speedy forehand drives into the corners of the Jacobs court, pounding her American twist serve to force defensive returns, dropping soft shots just over the net when her opponent tried to play deep, Alice Marble won six of the next seven games for the set.

Women tennists lack the stubbornness as well as the stamina of men. Even Helen Jacobs, most tenacious tennist of her sex, was discouraged after that. In the third set the brilliant game with which she had beaten England’s Kay Stammers the afternoon before went completely to pieces and she won only four points in the first four games. She got the next two games but that was merely the brave gesture of a player who knew she was beaten. The crowd, which had been rooting for Miss Marble, showed its understanding by rooting for the old champion. A few minutes later the match was over and it cheered a new one.

To describe Alice Marble as a new face is not entirely accurate. Her tennis career began when she was 14. That year, her eldest brother Dan gave her a racquet and suggested that instead of playing baseball and basketball with boys, she learn a game which might enable her to travel around the world in style like Miss Jacobs and Mrs. Moody. Alice Marble took his advice, improved so rapidly that she won the California State Girls’ title at 16. This brought her to the attention of Eleanor Tennant who, third ranking U. S. player in 1920, had since become Hollywood’s best known coach. When she was 19 Alice Marble left her home in San Francisco, went to live with Coach Tennant who hired her as secretary, taught her not only a new forehand but also numerology, bodybuilding, cooking, how to act in the company of screen celebrities and the fundamental points of Bahaism.

In a year Alice Marble advanced from No. 7 to No. 3 in U. S. tennis ranking.

Experts described her as an amalgam of Mile Lenglen, Mrs. Moody and Miss Jacobs. In 1933 during the Maidstone Invitation tournament at East Hampton, L. I. Alice Marble had to play 108 games in one day with the thermometer at 100°. The effect of such exertion became apparent the next spring when she collapsed in a pre-Wightman Cup match in Paris and doctors discovered that she had pleurisy. That, apparently, ended her career as suddenly as it had started. Two years of careful nursing restored her to the degree of health requisite for high-grade tournament tennis but by this summer tennis enthusiasts had had lime to forget all about her. When Alice Marble won a love set from Helen Jacobs in the final at Essex last month, galleries thought they were watching the rise of a new star rather than the reappearance of an old one.

Influenced by Hollywood theories of fashion, Alice Marble wears abbreviated shorts, a white jockey cap on her bright blonde hair. Last week she got frequent telegrams of encouragement from Carole Lombard and Freeman Gosden (Amos of Amos n’ Andy), also Coach Tennant’s pupils, with whom she often practices. Next winter, she hopes to take singing lessons to improve her pleasant contralto voice, unless the Tennant-Marble menage finds means of going to the Riviera to play tennis. In Beverly Hills, they share a bungalow with Miss Tennant’s sister, Gwen, call each other “Becky” (Coach Tennant) and “Pinky” (Tennist Marble). Pinky occasionally goes to San Francisco to visit her family. Brother Dan is now a policeman and No. 2 U. S. handball player. A younger brother, Tim, last fortnight signed a baseball contract with the Pacific Coast League Missions.

Perry v. Budge. Mildly pestered all week by galleries which somehow failed to be amused by his favorite mannerism —staring rigidly at the spot far beyond the line where an adversary’s erring shot had landed until the linesman shouted “Out!” —England’s Frederick John Perry, world’s No. 1, was less worried by his opponents. Busy little Bryan M. (“Bitsy”) Grant, who fell down so many times chasing shots that he wore two large holes in the knees of his trousers, gave him a good match but this was not until the semifinals.

Against California’s red-haired Donald Budge next day, Perry loafed through the first set, played well through the next two, loafed through the fourth, finally took the fifth—after Budge had twice been within two points of winning. The victory, 2-6, 6-2, 8-6, 1-6, 10-8, gave Perry permanent possession of the huge silver cup, made him the first foreign entrant to hold the U. S. championship three times, prompted his customary statement: “I do not plan to turn professional.”