Tennis: Success for VASSS

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Tennis is a curiosity among competitive sports: the players outnumber the spectators. An estimated 8,500,000 Americans play tennis, but only a handful ever attend top amateur or professional tournaments. The reason, according to James Van Alen, 63, president of the tennis Hall of Fame, is the sport's 85-year-old scoring system, which belabors spectators with archaic terminology ("love," "deuce," "advantage"), places no time limit on the duration of a match, and encourages a brand of play—the wham-slam "big game"—that often makes the match a bore to watch. Van Alen's answer: a totally different scoring system called VASSS (for Van Alen Simplified Scoring System), which he invented in 1957 but really tried for the first time in a pro tournament last summer. Last week VASSS got a bigger test at the richest pro tournament in history—a $30,500 round robin in Forest Hills, N.Y.

Actually, the system used at Forest Hills was only half-VASSS. Pure VASSS resembles table-tennis scoring: each successful shot earns one point, match is 31, and the player who reaches 31 first must have a two-point margin to win—otherwise, the match goes into an eight-point overtime. Service changes hands after every five points. On fast surfaces such as grass, big serves are discouraged either by 1) limiting the players to one serve per point, or 2) making them serve from a line 3 ft. behind the base line.

"I Hope You're Satisfied." At Forest Hills, early-round sets were 21-point affairs, and the two-point-margin rule was eliminated, causing Van Alen to complain: "They're not playing VASSS. It's not my system at all." He was nowhere nearly as upset as Pancho Gonzales was when Gonzales discovered that he was required to serve from the 3-ft. line—thereby taking the steam out of his serve, the hardest in the game. Gonzales blew his first-round match to Chilean Luis Ayala, 21-18, then blew his top. He challenged heckling spectators to put their muscles where their mouths were, stormed over to Wally Dill, director of the pro tour, and snarled: "I hope you're satisfied."

Dill openly allowed as how he was. So did the 6,000 spectators, who were treated to a dazzling display of ground-stroke techniques in the prolonged rallies encouraged by the longer, slower serves. And so did the rest of the pros, particularly redheaded Rod ("Rocket") Laver, who beat Fellow Australian Ken Rosewall, 31-29, to take home top money of $6,321—"the biggest check I ever won." The Laver-Rosewall match was a triumph for VASSS: a furious, cliffhanging battle between the two most accomplished shotmakers in tennis today. Best of all, it lasted exactly 25 min. The experiment proved so successful, in fact, that the pros are planning to use VASSS in several more tournaments this year. A few more such successes, and maybe the International Lawn Tennis Federation, which controls amateur tennis, will fall out of love with love.