Sport: Father & Son

In his tennis-playing days, Sidney Wood Jr. was a wiry scrapper who made up for his lack of strength with a ferocious will that led him to the 1931 Wimbledon championship and a place as one of the game’s international stars. When his son, Sidney Wood III, was eight years old, the old campaigner set out to teach him the game of tennis the only way he knew how. “I don’t believe in halfway measures.” the father says. “I was never satisfied if anything was even slightly wrong with Sid’s game—even if the fault might not be noticed by other people.”

Father and son practiced by the hour, and the boy learned fast. In 1956 the Woods won the national father-and-son championship, played so well together that U.S. Star Dick Savitt says: “They may well have been the finest father-and-son team of all time.” In the winter of 1957, the Woods won the quarter-finals of the men’s doubles at the national indoors by beating Irv Dorfman and Kurt Nielsen. That was a big one. “I saw during that match that Sid had a chance some day of becoming an international player,” says the father. “I was jabbering away at him during the match, and he finally said, ‘Shut up, Dad. I think I get the message.’ I shut up.”

But Sidney III never developed the father’s obsession for the game. He was too interested in too many other things —hockey, baseball and an elaborate game of stickball he invented and played with all his father’s zest. Two years ago, young Sid left Yale to spend the winter with his father in New York. “He was worried about his future in tennis because of some trouble he was having with his back,” says the father. “His marks were down. And some of his depression came from his split home—his mother and I were divorced in 1945. Sid and I talked for hours. He helped me as much as I helped him.”

Far more relaxed than his father, Sid was a likable, lanky (6 ft. 1 in., 165 lbs.) kid who was just beginning to find him self when he went back to Yale in the fall of 1959. His marks improved, his back mended, and his big serve began dropping in. And though Sid was still unranked nationally, Don Budge says: “He was turning into a fine player.”

Last fortnight Wood and two other Yale tennis players were driving down to Miami to start the 1961 season. Their sta tion wagon plunged off the road outside Fayetteville, N.C. The crash killed Team Captain T. Craig Joyner and injured Stewart Ludlum Jr. Last week, after relays of doctors had worked for four days, Sidney Wood III died at 22.

“Sid died without any frustrations, even in tennis,” says his father. “I made a lot of friends and a lot of enemies. Sid only seemed to have made friends.”