Word: borotra
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...ball. There was never a more machinelike player than Lacoste in his heyday. He won so consistently because his ground-strokes could not be faulted; and he was a past master of that now neglected piece of tennis finesse, the lob. His teammates, Cochet, with his half-volley, and Borotra, with his catlike ballet at the net, were the crowd-pleasers, not Lacoste, whose stroke-production always seemed to be rolling off one of those assembly lines he has since dominated in the business world...
...Lacoste dropped out of mechanical engineering studies to play tennis. He played so well that he was twice Forest Hills and Wimbledon champion as well as three-time champion of France. He was a member of the only French team that ever won the Davis Cup (1927, with Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet and Jacques Brugnon as fellow team members). Lacoste played so fiercely that sportswriters dubbed him le Crocodile. When he left the tournament circuit in 1929, he remembered the name. Competitors like Big Bill Tilden had worn starched long-sleeved men's shirts on the courts, but Lacoste...
...pelotari. Sunday mornings, after Mass, his priest would take him to the local court for an hour-long workout at main nue. At 14, he quit school to become a carpenter's apprentice, but his heart was still at the fronton. French Tennis Champion Jean ("The Bounding Basque") Borotra, a fine pelotari himself, took the youngster under his wing, brought him to Paris and taught him tennis. Urruty was soon good enough to go on an exhibition tour with French Tennist Henri Cochet...
Stunning as the facts were, to the French Half-Wets they were infinitely more potable than the drastic solution proposed by the British and Scandinavians: total abstinence. Tanned, fit Jean Borotra, onetime (1927 through 1932) tennis champion of France, told the congress that a glass of vin ordinaire with meals is just what the doctor should order. "You can't change people's habits," Borotra concluded. "We can't ask [the French] to give up the wine they love so much...
...Anti-Alcoholism Superhuman? "A sinister plot engineered by the wine industry," frothed Briton Wilfred Winterton. Over fruit juice at a nearby cafe the Drys held a council of war, resolved to censure Borotra's scandalous remarks. But the Half-Wets fought back. "They want to prevent us from drinking, smoking, even making love," snorted Andre Mignot, secretary-general of France's National Defense Committee Against Alcoholism. "We're French. You can't be an abstainer in France unless you're a hero or a saint...