Word: borotra
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...considers Jean Borotra the game's greatest showman and most expert faker. The best player: Don Budge, who had "no subtlety, no finesse, little grace and practically no variety to his game, but for hitting power...
...tennis public would like Kramer better if he were more of a showman. They like the melodramatics of a Tilden, the antics of a beret-bearing Borotra, the Cockney ping-pongery of a Perry. Kramer makes his "big game" look too easy...
Winner last month of his twelfth French indoor title, Borotra at 48 is still one of the four or five top indoor players in Europe. Last week in Manhattan-third stop in his current U.S. exhibition tour*-his free-swinging volleys and unorthodox backhand (which looks much like a ping-pong shot) were not in top form, but his ebullient disposition was (chasing a drive, he landed in a spectator's lap, apologized with a winning Gallic bow). Frank Shields's big service was too big for Borotra, just as it had been in the Wimbledon semi-finals...
There was a bald spot now where his familiar blue beret used to be, but his thin face, jerky, stiff-armed strokes and debonair air were unmistakable. It was Jean Borotra all right, back on the same Manhattan courts where he had four times won the U.S. indoor tennis title (1925, 1927, 1929, 1931). The occasion: an exhibition match with an old rival, the U.S.'s ex-Davis Cupper Francis X. Shields...
...been more than a decade since U.S. tennis fans had seen France's Bounding Basque in action. It had been even longer since the Davis Cup matches which established Borotra as one of tennis' all-time greats. In the interim, Borotra had been Minister of Sports for the Vichy government. Fortunately for him, he had been charged with working for the Resistance and fired by Laval in 1942, was in a German prison when France was liberated...