Word: borotra
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...Jean Borotra usually makes a tennis match interesting by falling down, laughing at the gallery, wagging his head clownishly, whistling with exaggerated disappointment when his opponent makes an ace. When he plays someone as good or better than himself, he has less time for antics and his admirers have noticed that the more seriously Borotra plays the more likely he is to be beaten. He was serious when he came out on the centre court at Wimbledon last week to play Francis Xavier Shields, a handsome, 21-year-old New Yorker who was anxious to do what only William Tatem...
...Borotra unrolled and adjusted his blue beret, quickly got a lead of 3-1 in the first set. Shields pulled even, kept winning his own serve till the score was 6-5 on Borotra's serve. The Frenchman won the advantage point nine times in a row, but could never win the next one against Shields's superb cross-court backhand drives. When it finally became Shields's advantage, it crossed Borotra's mind that he might lose the set on a double-fault...
...match; netting too many volleys; playing without his usual happy brilliance. The raven-haired Shields, always a favorite with galleries, delighted the Wimbledon crowd by the style and power of his ground-strokes, his serve not unlike Tilden's which he seldom followed to the net. When he had Borotra 4-3 and 40-30 in the fourth set, he seemed certain to win in the next few minutes. Then another unaccountable thing happened. Running for a shot in the forecourt, Shields dropped a ball he was carrying, stepped on it, twisted his leg badly, tumbled full-length into...
...Evening News, announced that he would probably play little tennis in 1931 except to defend his title at Forest Hills. Clifford Sutter last week was winning the Tri-State Tour- nament in Memphis, Tennessee. The other two, Shields and Wood, together with Henri Cochet; John Van Ryn; Jean Borotra, who airplaned back to Paris for business between matches; Bunny Austin, balloon-trousered British Davis Cup player; George Lyttleton Rogers, a big Irishman with a hooked nose; Jiro Satoh, the champion of Japan; and Gregory Mangin and George Lott were last week playing in the greatest single event of the tennis...
...expected, when the semi-finals were reached, Shields and Wood were the only Americans left in the tournament. Their opponents, respectively, were Jean Borotra, who had made Queen Mary laugh by returning a volley while sitting on his haunches, and England's Frederick J. Perry, who, playing an erratic but brilliant game, had eliminated John Van Ryn in the fifth round...