Sport: A Pair of Jacks

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In Australia, boyish Jack Kramer, the player on whom the U.S. relied most heavily to win back the famed Davis Cup, didn't try to look too good too early. He passed a preliminary singles tourney so that he would not reach top form before he wanted to. But last week the workmen were building temporary stands in Melbourne's Kooyong Stadium to accommodate the Cup crowds, and Jack let go.

His big serve sizzled over the net. Aggressive as ever, California's Kramer scrambled in behind his serve and put away shots with overhand smashes and light teasers. He still had one fault to work on: his forehand drives were floating instead of zipping. But he-beat Teammate Frank Parker in two quick sets and said, "Boy, it feels good to be hitting them again." If he kept on hitting them, he could spoil a big Christmas Week for confident, sport-crazy Australia.

Cricket and T-Bone Steaks. Australia, whose land is nearly as large as the U.S., but whose population is only about one-twentieth as big, turns out bigger sports crowds than the U.S. All last week, Australian radios blared the latest news of the play for "The Ashes,"* the traditional cricket matches with England. Before 80,000 noisy fans in Sydney, down went England again in the second of the five test matches. (In London, a man who feared that England was not taking its defeat with proper "lightness of heart" wrote the Daily Telegraph: "Some will say that it is one of our national characteristics to appear to take our battles less seriously than our test matches. We are mechanizing our playing of the game and souring our enjoyment of it by treating it like negotiations for the American loan.")

Hospitable Australians saw to it that the U.S. Davis Cup training table was filled with pitchers of milk—which is scarce in Melbourne—and T-bone steaks, which are scarcer. U.S. players got so many party invitations that they finally turned them all down. Jack Kramer got word that he had become a father—and was allowed one beer to celebrate.

The man he had to whip this week was an old crony—Australia's ambidextrous Jack Bromwich. Their games were unlike: Kramer is an enthusiastic big hitter, Bromwich is strictly a baseline hugger. Says Kramer: "I have the kind of game that can beat him if I am absolutely right." On their match would probably turn the Davis Cup of 1946. Experts agreed that none of the other three Americans—Frank Parker, Ted Schroeder, Gardnar Mulloy—nor Australia's Adrian Quist, Dinny Pails and Newcomer Colin Long were any match for the Jacks.

Flats & Splits. Since they rode in a borrowed Ford together from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1939, the two Jacks had felt that they would have a showdown some day. Kramer, then 18, did the driving, was arrested twice and spent one night in a Nebraska jail. The car burned out a bearing, lost a rod and had plenty of flat tires. There were additional refreshment stops for Bromwich, 20, who became acquainted with banana splits and ate four or five a day. That was the year that Bromwich and Quist upset the U.S. team and took the Cup home to Melbourne. There it has stayed, unplayed for—because of the war—ever since.