Sport: Champions at Forest Hills

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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.