Sport: Near Titan

This year at Forest Hills, with Don Budge a pro, the seeded list for the national lawn tennis singles had mostly sophomores instead of Titans—listless Davis Cuppers Bobby Riggs and Frank Parker; Joe Hunt, Jack Kramer, Don Mc-Neill, Gil Hunt, Elwood Cooke. The foreign seedings might as well have stopped with Australians Jack Bromwich and Adrian Quist.

In the upper brackets Riggs had a cinch. He chopped off Australian Journalist Harry Hopman after Harry had eliminated troublesome Bitsy Grant. He waded through Joe Hunt, after Joe had spent two days (the match was interrupted by darkness) and five endless sets whittling down French Champion Don Mc-Neill.

In the lower bracket, the form favorite was Bromwich, the two-hander who plays tennis like a man batting out fungoes. In the quarter-final he easily dismissed Gil Hunt, the Washington, D. C. mathematician who sometimes uses a tennis court to demonstrate how he can balance a pencil on his bare toes. But in Jack’s next match, he faced no eccentric pushover. He ran up against a 19-year-old, six-foot-one Golden Boy from California, unseeded and unsung, but the nearest thing to full Titan stature U. S. tennis has seen this season. Sidney Welby Van Horn, who prefers Welby because he thinks Sidney sounds like Percy, showed an overhead game like Budge’s, a forehand like Vines’s, a backhand like nobody’s and a service like sixty to nudge the tired veteran Bromwich (a year his senior) out of the tournament.

As it turned out, he was merely clearing a troublesome opponent out of Riggs’s way. Duckwalking Bobby had little to do late in the week but watch Welby wallop stylists like Elwood Cooke and Wayne Sabin (who beat Quist). When the final round came Sunday afternoon, 21-year-old Bobby knew how to handle Welby. Bobby kept him moving, fed him no setup lobs, passed him at the net, caught him flustered and flatfooted with service aces, finished him off in straight sets, 6-4, 6-2, 6-4. Bobby won the title, but the boy they talked about on the way home was Welby. “Next year,” they said. In the women’s singles, Alice Marble breezed through with scarcely a challenge, stood off a grim Helen Jacobs in the final, to the enjoyment of practically everybody but leathery oldster Molla Mallory, who said Alice would never be a tennis player until she learns to put some spin on her forehand.