Sport: Forest Hills Finale

(See front cover)

One by one, Melbourne, Nice, Auteuil, Wimbledon were crowded briefly by that small, ubiquitous group of young men with white flannel trousers and sunburned noses who make it their business, all year round, to wangle for the world's major tennis championships. Last week the group was preparing to descend on Forest Hills, N. Y. for the last major event of the year, the 54th U. S. Singles Championship. Meanwhile the long series of preliminaries to that tournament were being brought to an end at Chestnut Hill, Mass. and South Orange, N. J.

Doubles. Chestnut Hill last week was the scene of no fewer than five simultaneous U. S. doubles championships— men's, women's, mixed, veterans' and father & son. The father & son tournament was distinguished by the performance of the Davis Cup's donor, 56-year-old Dwight Davis who, with 27-year-old Dwight Davis Jr., beat R. N. Watt & Son of Montreal, holders of the title for the last two years, in the second round. William J. Clothier, U. S. singles champion in 1906, and William J. Clothier Jr., a Harvard sophomore, were the new titleholders. Those veterans among veterans, Frederick C. ("Pop") Baggs and Dr. William Rosenbaum, were finally ousted as champions by a pair of oldsters from Boston named Raymond B. Bidwell and Richard Bishop. Mixed doubles winners, after a polyglot final against Kay Stammers of England and Roderick Menzel of Czechoslovakia, were Sarah Palfrey Fabyan of Boston and Enrique Maier of Spain. Sarah Palfrey Fabyan and Helen Jacobs won the women's doubles for the third time when they ran through Dorothy Andrus and Carolin Babcock, 6-4, 6-2. The most important match of the week—final of the men's doubles—turned out to be a show-down between the two U. S. Davis Cup pairs of John Van Ryn & Wilmer Allison and Donald Budge & Gene Mako. It lasted over two hours and when it ended Van Ryn & Allison had regained the title they held in 1931, 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 2-6, 6-1.

East-West. A salient fact about tennists is that they never tire of their pastime. Twenty years ago, officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association found a few temporarily at liberty between the exhausting string of summer tournaments and the National Championships, promptly and sympathetically organized an East-West series to keep them busy. How frivolous this series has become was demonstrated by the fact that one of the members of the West's team last week at The Orange Lawn Tennis Club was Wilmer Hines of Columbia, S. C., another, Charles Harris of West Palm Beach, Fla. Harris lost his match to Bryan ("Bitsy") Grant, who had beaten Leonard Patterson of Los Angeles the day before, but those were the only points East won. Hines thrashed saturnine Manuel Alonso, onetime Spanish Davis Cup star, playing for the East, 6-3, 7-5, and the series ended, 5-to-2.