Sport: Advantage Kramer

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Every now & then, Coach Roche drops in unannounced to watch his boys play. Says Big Jake: "Just knowing he's there is a big lift." A year ago, in the finals of the National Singles at Forest Hills, Jake spotted the Coach in the stands. Kramer was leading Tom Brown, 2-0, in the third set and was about to ease up a little when he saw Roche clenching a raised fist (meaning "go for it"). Jake closed out the set, 6-0, for his first U.S. singles championship.

With better luck, it might have been his ' third or fourth title. Big Jake thinks that he is playing no better now than he did in 1942, the year he swept through ten straight tournaments and was stricken with appendicitis on the eve of Forest Hills. The next year it was ptomaine poisoning. In the 1944 and 1945 seasons, he was off on Coast Guard duty. He talks about it as though it happened to somebody else and was all a big joke.

The Big Jump. Now, at last, Big Jake Kramer is sitting pretty. It is no secret that he has had at least two juicy offers to turn professional. Bing Crosby Enterprises Inc. is dangling a fat guarantee, $35,000 for the first four months (or 35% of the take, whichever is larger), to get him to go gunning for Bobby Riggs. Another proposition comes from a Chicago promoter named Jack Harris, who says he will meet Crosby's offer and go higher. Harris also wants Schroeder and Pancho Segura as a supporting feature: Crosby prefers a second billing of ex-Lady Champions Pauline Betz and Alice Marble.

For the present, Kramer is not even nibbling, and he definitely is not talking. If he can add the Davis Cup and the 1947 U.S. singles crown to the doubles championship which he and Schroeder won at Longwood last week, he can almost name his own price.

Right now Jake is pretty tired of hotels and laundry problems. As soon as possible he is going back home to Montebello, just outside Los Angeles, and he is looking forward to playing some golf—which he hopes to take up seriously some day, as Ellsworth Vines did after he made almost $200,000 out of pro tennis. (Last week, by tying in the Reno Open, Vines added $1,600 to the approximately $50,000 he has earned in five years as a golf pro.) Late in the month, Kramer will play in the Pacific Southwest Championships at the cement-courted Los Angeles Tennis Club.

After that, he might get to thinking about that cocky Bobby Riggs. During the past seven years, Big Jake and Cocky Bobby have often played against each other in doubles, sometimes for big side bets. Last fall at the Los Angeles Club, Big Jake (teamed with Segura) won $1,000 from Riggs (teamed with Frank Parker). But, by unspoken agreement, the two have never so much as suggested playing singles against each other since 1941—even for fun. When & if they do, it will be in Madison Square Garden, before a packed house, for important money. For Jake Kramer knows that, although "tennis is a game of no use in itself," it is useful to a man—especially a champion—with a desire to improve his position in the world.