Word: backspins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...doors. Behind the receiver is another slot called a grille. Sloping down toward the court over these recesses and over the wall behind the receiver is a shedlike roof called a penthouse. The server serves the ball with a mighty cut, the deadliest trick being to make the ball backspin when it hits the penthouse roof and drop to the court "like a poached egg, limp, lifeless and with little bound." If this fails and a rally starts, the players may try to sink the ball in certain of the apertures for points...
...means that luck rather than skill has a large part in determining the winner. For U. S. players the chief hazards always are the wind (invariably a cross one), a course studded with thick gorse and tricky sand traps, greens that require a pitch-&-run shot rather than the backspin approach most U. S. golfers play. More serious than these natural hazards last week was the luck of the draw which placed the unseeded U. S. Walker Cuppers in the same bracket, necessitated their killing one another 0:1 in the early rounds...