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 Having withdrawn to the professional ranks, Fred Perry has, like Ellsworth Vines before him, given the season that refreshing stimulation that follows the abdication of a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.