Sport: Advantage Kramer

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"Look, Brother . . ." Unlike his easygoing partner, Ted Schroeder is apt to be moody, quick to fly off the handle. Once, on an impulse, he wrote a blistering letter to good-natured Alrick Man (non-playing captain of this year's Davis Cup team); as soon as he cooled off, Ted was on the long-distance phone saying, "I just wrote you a letter . . . don't open it." Another time, he was about to pull into the driveway of his new home at La Crescenta, Calif, when a car whizzed by at terrific speed. Schroeder tore after it, forced the driver to a halt, and told him: "Look, brother, I got a wife and a kid and a dog . . . don't drive 60 miles an hour past my house again."

Schroeder likes to pull on a pipe; Kramer doesn't smoke. Big Jake's one vice is betting: he will bet anybody on anything. He once won $20 from friends who bet he couldn't down a jigger of beer a minute for 80 minutes. He likes people, poker, bow ties, Joe DiMaggio, and shop talk like "that day at Rye when big Frank Shields grabbed Bitsy Grant by the belt and held him out a second-story window."

But on the tennis court Jake becomes all business. He never mutters after a bad shot, never throws his racket on the grass in disgust. "Don't talk to yourself," Jake advises. "If you do, you are fighting a losing battle."

The U.S. tennis public would like Kramer better if he were more of a showman. They like the melodramatics of a Tilden, the antics of a beret-bearing Borotra, the Cockney ping-pongery of a Perry. Kramer makes his "big game" look too easy.

Championship Company. When he went over last June to breeze through England's famed Wimbledon tourney, he found that the British spectators were different. Unlike the U.S. crowd, which nearly always pulls for the underdog, they wanted to see the best man win. At Wimbledon, the alert expertness of Big Jake always seemed to be understood by the tennis-wise crowd, expressing itself in cries of "Good shot" almost as soon as the ball met the racket.

Wimbledon's head groundsman, a connoisseur of footwork, says he can always tell who will be in the semifinals by the way the players handle their feet. He paid Jake his highest compliment: "Never made a mark on the court." Jake, in turn, summed up his appreciation of Wimbledon: "It's really high class."

After winning the finals against Tom Brown (both of them thought they had played badly), Big Jake went to King George's box to receive the royal congratulations. As he walked toward the box he thought to himself, "Here I am, a young punk from California. . . ." But was he nervous? "No. I looked at the King the same way he looked at me. ... I guess both of us figured the other was pretty good in his own line." Said London's Daily Telegraph of Big Jake: "The only one of the postwar generation who could have lived in the company of such great champions as Lacoste and Tilden."