Word: borotra
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...since that nightmarish day in 1926, when Bill Tilden, Bill Johnston and Richard Norris Williams were rudely ousted from the national quarter finals by France's Henri Cochet, Jean Borotra and Rene Lacoste*,had the U.S. suffered such a tennis setback...
...France's own René Lacoste, one of the French "four musketeers" (the others: Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet, Jacques Brugnon) who dominated international tennis 1924-29, was the grandfather of all crocodiles. Recalling one match against Lacoste, Bill Tilden remarked: "The monotonous regularity with which that unsmiling, drab, almost dull man returned the best I could hit ... often filled [me] with a wild desire to throw my racket...