Sport: Champions at Forest Hills

(See front cover)

As predictable as the sun whose course it follows around the world, international tennis is a grand tour with Christmas in Melbourne, May at the French championships in Auteuil, June in the heroic blaze of Wimbledon. Last week international tennis and the small bronzed band of young men & women who play it best made the last stop on the circuit. The place was the stadium of the West Side Tennis Club in the otherwise undistinguished New York suburb of Forest Hills, the event the U. S. Singles Championships for men & women.

Championship, One of the most fiercely competitive of all games, amateur tennis has no international championship. To answer the constantly perplexing question as to who is the best amateur player in the world, the chief contenders must rely on meeting either in team play for the Davis Cup of in the grand tour’s series of national championships. In the days when Tilden, Richards and Johnston were the world’s three top-ranking players and the U. S. won the Davis Cup with monotonous regularity, the U. S. Singles was as great a championship as any tennist could win. Since then a new generation of players, headed by the gaunt-faced figure of England’s Frederick John Perry, has shifted the spotlight inexorably to Wimbledon. For the past four years Forest Hills has been notable to tennists chiefly because Fred Perry appeared there.

Last week it was the fact that Fred Perry would not appear there that made the U. S. singles once more promise to be not only the conclusion but the climax of the tennis season. Having withdrawn to the professional ranks, Fred Perry has, like Ellsworth Vines before him, given the season that refreshing stimulation that follows the abdication of a recognized champion. The question he left behind him was one that Forest Hills would go a long way toward answering. It was simply whether J. Donald Budge of Oakland, Calif., having achieved almost single-handed the return of the Davis Cup to the U. S. this year for the first time since 1926, and having smashed his way to an unprecedented triple victory in the All-England singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at Wimbledon, is the best amateur tennis player in the world.

The U. S. field was good but there was no one in it whom Donald Budge should be expected to fear. Of his Davis Cup teammates, Frank Parker is a precise but lacklustre youth who has never fulfilled his apparent potentialities, and Atlanta’s bantam Bryan (“Bitsy”) Grant is a highly erratic performer. California’s most recent schoolboy sensation, 19-year-old Robert Riggs, who was seeded No. 2 among his countrymen and proceeded to put Gene Mako out as the matches got under way at Forest Hills last week, had bowed to Budge when they met at Newport last month.

The foreign field seemed to present a more effective picture. It was one of the largest and best to appear at Forest Hills in recent years, including Japan’s No. 1 Jiro Yamagishi, France’s No. 2 Yvon Petra, England’s No. 2 Charles Edgar Hare. England’s No. 1 Bunny Austin was not there, but Budge had already given him a conclusive beating this year in the Davis Cup challenge round. The player who seemed to stand firmly in Donald Budge’s path, however, was none of these. At Forest Hills for the first time in his life and representing his nation there for the first time since the War was the man who is currently supposed to be at least the world’s second best amateur and may well be the best, Germany’s Baron Gottfried von Cramm.

Champions. Tennis’ unofficial No. 1 and unofficial No. 2 are technically almost twins. Both hit with apparently effortless length and accuracy, forehand and backhand; both have a deadly overhead, a stinging service. Both are stylists whose repertory takes in all the shots that tennis knows. All-court players, they can chop, drop-shot, lob or volley with equal fluency. But no two characters could be so antipodal as 22-year-old Donald Budge and 28-year-old Gottfried von Cramm.

Even more than his contemporaries, Parker (ne Paikowski) and Riggs, the offspring respectively of a Polish laborer and an impoverished minister, Donald Budge, son of an Oakland laundry truck driver, is the archetype of the thousands of prodigious youngsters who since the War have taken U. S. tennis away from Society and made it the remarkable thing it is. When he became an international celebrity at Wimbledon two years ago, Donald Budge’s sophistication was such that he cheerily waved his racket at Queen Mary in the royal box. Gottfried von Cramm, who put Budge out in the semi-finals that year, greeted the Queen with the courtliest bow of the dav.

Today a maturing international competitor at an age when many a great U. S. tennis player has flashed and expired, blond, green-eyed, handsome Gottfried von Cramm stands a husky 6 ft., plays with the sureness and ease of a methodically trained master. One of the seven sons of an Oxford-educated, tennis-loving Junker, he used to roll the courts for his father and brothers on the family estate, Oelber, near the little village of Nettlingen in Hannover. He started to play at the age of 9. Four years later, asked what his plans for the future were, he soberly replied: “World’s Tennis Champion.”

By that time he had attracted the attention of two of his father’s guests at Oelber, Professional Roman Najuch and Otto Froitzheim, the finest tennist in German history. Froitzheim commented that young Gottfried’s brand of tennis was “good.” But Gottfried foreshadowing the day when he would become the most self-critical player of his generation, noted: “Good (but, unfortunately, not very good).”

In 1927, preparing to enter the German junior championships, young von Cramm smartly telephoned the tennis club to find out what brand of ball would be used, religiously used the prescribed brand in practice. The committee at the last moment shifted to another brand and methodical von Cramm was quickly eliminated. The next year he decided to move to Berlin where he could receive better instruction.

So, aged 19, Gottfried von Cramm leased a flat in swank suburban Charlottenburg, simultaneously entered the University of Berlin as a student of law (his family wanted him to go into diplomacy) and the exclusive Rot-Weiss Club as a student of tennis. He was soon spending most of the money that came from Oelber on lessons with famed Professional Robert Kleinschroth. Two years later, after he had progressed to the point of beating Tilden-trained Wilbur Coen Jr., he got his father’s permission to marry his childhood friend, dark, vivacious Baroness Lisa von Dobeneck, and to abandon his studies in favor of a career in tennis.

For methodical Gottfried von Cramm that meant a rigid training schedule with no alcohol or tobacco, eleven hours’ sleep every night, long hours of practice at the Rot-Weiss club with Teacher Kleinschrroth, who, he now believes, “contributed more to my game than any other instructor.” What Teacher Kleinschroth contributed was not only an array of effective sV , s but the habit of not depending on iy one of them. Froitzheim had taught him the necessity of sound ground strokes and good physical condition. All these qualities were beginning to be apparent in 1931 when he handily won his first big tournament, the Greek National Singles Championship, but when Gottfried von Cramm returned to Germany, he was not included in the German Davis Cup team. The team lost to South Africa, and von Cramm had the satisfaction of giving a sound beating to the South African No. i, Louis Raymond, in a later tournament. When he further distinguished himself that year by reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon, he became Germany’s white hope on the Davis Cup team.

Since then Gottfried von Cramm, the only great post-War player in a country where until recently tennis and squash courts were discouragingly rare, has put Germany into the Davis Cup interzone final four times (1932-35-36-37). He has played 74 Davis Cup matches and lost only 14, five in his first season. He has defeated every leading amateur in the world. Last year in the French champion ships, fortified by a cleaner backhand stroke he had learned from William Tatem Tilden, he beat Fred Perry for the title. Then the following month at Wimbledon he strained a thigh muscle and lost to Perry in the final.

This year at Wimbledon, with Perry out of the way, von Cramm had a chance to become the world’s No. i amateur by beating Donald Budge in the final. But he failed, 3-6, 4-6, 2-6. A fortnight later they met again—in the Davis Cup interzone final, with the matches between the U. S. and Germany standing at two all— in a match which, as an exhilarating display of two great tennis machines was not so much a contest as a cumulative spectacle. It made a gloriously crowded hour of Wimbledon history. With both men constantly attacking, it seemed to the crowd as if every hard-hit rally had its incredible gets, its finishing shots whipped back for aces. “How pleased we all were,” said a reporter for the London News, “with the admiring gasp of ‘Oh Baby!’ that burst from Budge when von Cramm left him standing with an astonishing stop-volley from the centre of the court.” When after splitting four sets, Budge worked up from 1-4 in the fifth set to 7-6, the well-behaved Wimbledon audience crumpled as von Cramm, having saved five match points, finally had to yield, 6-8, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 8-6. There were many spectators who agreed with the London News Chronicle that they had seen “the greatest match of all time.”

Although the fact that Gottfried von Cramm came to the peak of his deft, flawless game along with two players so formidable as Perry and Budge may keep him at No. 2 as long as Budge remains an amateur, this misfortune has helped him to become another kind of champion even more impressive to the tennis public. He is by far the most gracious loser in the game. In the Davis Cup interzone final in _1935, he and Kay Lund had Wilmer Allison & John Van Ryn at match point four times. As von Cramm served and came in for the volley, he just checked himself from hitting Van Ryn’s high return, let it sail out. The umpire called match point for Germany again. Von Cramm walked up to the umpire to explain that his racket had touched the ball, a piece of Quixotry that cost Germany the match. And when he had come within an ace of his first Wimbledon championship only to be nosed out by Budge this year, his remark at the net was typical: “I played the best tennis in my life, and if you can beat me, it is a pleasure to lose.”

Gottfried von Cramm speaks some French and Italian and a reasonably fluent English, is equally amiable in any of them. Although umpires may insist on pronouncing his full name as resonantly as possible, his fellow players call him Gottfried or Cramm. He likes dancing, field hockey, swimming, hiking, the cinema, Wagner and after tournaments, night clubs and champagne. He also likes to race his Opel limousine from Berlin to Oelber. Independently rich, he is currently the only outstanding amateur who is certain not to turn professional, may thus some day be unquestionably the world’s best amateur. From Forest Hills, he plans to go on to California. He will go alone, for this year he and the Baroness, who used to knit and read during his matches, are divorced.

Says tennis’ modest No. 2: “For three years Tilden has been saying that I am the best amateur. It is the only time I have known him to be wrong.” With Tilden’s judgment still in doubt, von Cramm and his 22-year-old doubles partner, Henner Henkel, prepared for Forest Hills last fortnight at Chestnut Hill (Mass.), where they met Budge & Mako in the final of the U. S. doubles championship, neatly reversed the two defeats they suffered earlier in the season (Wimbledon semi-finals and Davis Cup interzone final). 6-4, 7-5, 6-4.

As the Forest Hills matches got under way, von Cramm put out young Alfred Jarvis and Donald McNeill, but had to work his hardest to beat Hal Surface of Kansas City, who twice was within a point of making it a five-set battle. With much greater dispatch, Budge put out William Winslow, Joseph Abrams.

In the women’s singles Defending Champion Alice Marble faced a domestic field headed by Helen Jacobs, whom she rudely upset last year. But she too was expected to find her chief difficulty with the foreign field, most notably with Chile’s Anita Lizana and Poland’s 154-lb. Jadwiga Jedrzejowska, who has met Champion Marble five times this year and beaten her four.

The women’s field also had its early upset, when twinkle-toed Sarah Palfrey Fabyan, No. 3 in national ranking, was put out in the first round by the weighty forehand of Dorothy Andrus of Stamford, Conn., 10-12, 6-0, 5-7.