Sport: Advantage Kramer

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Benefactor No. 2 was Dick Skeen, one of the shrewdest teaching pros in the business. For $25 down and $5 a month, he began teaching young Jake how to swing a tennis racket. Each day, the youngster spent three hours on trolley cars, traveling the 18 miles between his home and Skeen's Beverly Hills court. Gradually his strokes took on a Skeen sheen. At 15, Jake easily beat Alice Marble, who was then women's singles champion.

The next step was getting somebody tougher to play against. Perry Jones got Ellsworth Vines, ex-amateur champion turned pro, the hardest hitter tennis had ever seen. Ellie Vines, Benefactor No. 3, agreed to play young Jake three times a week for five months.

That fixed 16-year-old Jake; Vines became his hero and tennis ideal. Even now, Kramer's forehand is hit with the same bent elbow Vines used; he rolls into his serves the way Vines once did. "I even tried to walk like him," Kramer says (he only half succeeded; Vines walks like an arrested Tarkington adolescent).

Vines taught him strokes, but he did not teach him the "big game." Jake figured that out himself—along with such lesser notions as eating football-style steaks before big matches and drinking warm tea between sets as energy boosters. Finally, along came Benefactor No. 4, a brilliant automotive engineer named Clifton Roche.

When to Press. Engineer Roche, just a dub player himself, worked out his theories with geometry. He got hold of Kramer one day at Beverly Hills' La Cienega tennis courts and casually began explaining the "mathematical unsoundness" of hitting the ball to certain spots in certain situations.

Jake found that Roche's theories worked. Sample: when running to the left sideline, never hit the ball down the line unless you are trying for an ace—it gives your opponent too big an angle for a cross-court return.

Jake began calling his new engineer friend Coach Roche. The Coach was a fanatic on psychology and energy conservation. In "third-stage" tennis, as Roche calls the big-time game, he says that players are often so evenly matched that an iota of stamina cdn mean the difference between victory and defeat. He argued that it was scientifically sound to press only on the right points. One time to press: when serving from the left court; the two big points, "thirty-fifteen" and "ad," begin there and it is less hazardous (for a right-handed player) to come into the net than from the deuce court. Another Roche tip: after a long set, when it is human nature to let down, give the first two games of the next set everything you've got.

Lifts & Luck. Besides Kramer, Coach Roche adopted just two other tennis protégés before going to Detroit to design new automobile gadgets. One was Ted Schroeder; the other was a youngster named Doug Woodbury, who died in an airplane crash.