Word: forehanded
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...model T had to come before the streamlined 1947 Ford, previous California champions had to blaze the trail. First there was the California Comet, Maurice McLoughlin, whose weapons were lethal but lopsided: a smashing serve and volley. Next in the California line came Little Bill Johnston with the big forehand, then Ellsworth Vines with a bullet serve and an even more devastating forehand. After that was Budge, who had an all-court game and an incomparable backhand. Jake Kramer has something from all these predecessors; perhaps the nearest likeness is to call him a cross between Vines (on whom...
...plays tennis the way Joe Louis stalks an opponent in the ring. He is always boring in, always making the other fellow feel he is doomed unless he does something tremendous. Both his backhand and forehand carry deceptive depth and pace. All who play against him have the same complaint: "He makes you feel like you are backing up and backing up until you can't back up any farther." And at that point, Jake has most likely worked his way forward to the net for the clincher. Says he: "After a forcing shot, the odds of clinching...
...exception: when the opponent has a weak serve which can be broken without any extra effort. His one & only stroke weakness used to be a backhand that was too flat, but he worked on it patiently, finally got it steadied down until it was as effective as his forehand...
That fixed 16-year-old Jake; Vines became his hero and tennis ideal. Even now, Kramer's forehand is hit with the same bent elbow Vines used; he rolls into his serves the way Vines once did. "I even tried to walk like him," Kramer says (he only half succeeded; Vines walks like an arrested Tarkington adolescent...
Forty Pounds On. In 1937, two years before he quit tennis, California-born Ellsworth Vines took his first golf lesson. He had two handicaps from tennis: a pair of glasses, the result of eye-strain in night matches; and an overdeveloped right wrist that once stroked the most devastating forehand in tennis. By 1942, he had chopped his game from the 90s to the 70s and become golf pro at the Southern California Golf & Country Club. When he became a fulltime playing pro last year, his tee shots were usually long & straight, his irons still wobbly. But on the greens...