Sport: Advantage Kramer

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The Lush Life. Jake Kramer's reward for being champion is the circus-performer's life of the big-time tennis circuit. He is dined, lunched, swum and bathroomed by the rich—and he doesn't particularly like it, but considers it part of the racket. On the West Coast, he gets invitations to visit tennis-minded movie stars, but almost invariably turns them down. "They always want to play tennis," he says, "and with a few exceptions they can't play tennis ... so you have a lousy time."

In short, for all his ability, for all his success, Jake Kramer is a "tennis bum"—as most amateur stars have been for the past 20 years. He isn't losing any sleep over it. "Everybody knows that a good amateur tennis player in America can make a living going around the country playing tournaments," he says, "and if he does, he's called a tennis bum." A tennis pro makes more money, and makes it openly. But the amateur camouflage is a necessary preliminary: it establishes the cashable reputation.

Jake has always understood that fact of sporting life; and he has always understood the all-round value of becoming a champion. Nothing has ever been allowed to interfere with his determination to make good at tennis.

Meat & Potatoes. He spent one semester cutting classes at the University of Southern California and dropped out. He gave Florida's tennis-happy Rollins College, which lured him with a scholarship, the same short shrift. He lasted exactly three hours on a potato-sacking job in a San Bernardino (Calif.) grocery store; now he has an elusive connection with a Los Angeles meat-packing firm, but never really works at it. Except for 40 months in the Coast Guard, he has never really worked at anything but tennis.

From the age of 13, when he first decided to be a tennis player (rather than a baseball player), it has been his whole life. First he became champion of San Bernardino's Arrowview Junior High. Then, at 14, he went hunting bigger game, and got his ears pinned back in the first round of a Santa Monica boys' tournament. It was a terrible shock.

All next day, Jake sat around watching the other kids playing (one of them was Schroeder). He did not know that he was watching the fledgling chicks of California's high-pressure tennis incubator. They had beautiful strokes, and Jake asked someone how a kid learned to play tennis that way. He was told: "Go see Perry Jones." He did.

The Big Four. Perry Jones (TIME, Aug. 12, 1946), mother hen of California's tennis chicks, was the first of four men who helped mold Jake Kramer into a champion. Fussbudget Perry Jones—who says "I don't care how you hit your backhand . . . how do your pants look?"—liked the kid's looks; he was neat and polite. At Jones's suggestion the Kramer family moved in closer to Los Angeles where many of the good tennis players lived.