Word: matches
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Billy started off with a bang against Parker. He won the first game of the first set at love, racing into the forecourt in the wake of his stinging service. For a moment or two, the crowd thought they might be seeing a tennis match. But by the seventh game, Parker had figured out the Sidwell serve, and was methodically running the Australian ragged with lobs to the base line and trap shots just over the net. Parker won without cracking a smile or dropping...
Once before, in 1939, Australia had lost the first two matches, then come back with a thrilling three straight to take the cup. But in the doubles match this week, on the second day of play, Gardnar Mulloy and Billy Talbert were too much for Sidwell and Colin Long, winning 8-6, 9-7, 2-6, 7-5. For the fourth time in their five meetings, the U.S. had beaten Australia for the Davis...
...author, Stephen Potter, is an Englishman who insists that he learned "gamesmanship" as late as 1931, and from another gamesman, instead of at his nanny's knee. Students of the British character may challenge this assertion. He was playing a match of tennis doubles against two athletic young men, Smith and Brown. Potter and his partner, the hardened metaphysician C.E.M. Joad, could scarcely touch the first two cannon balls served to them by Smith, and only by accident did the third one hit Joad's racket, rebounding wildly across the net and landing twelve feet out of court...
Timing Is Everything. "Now here comes the moment," writes Potter in his best Punch style, "on which not only this match, but so much of the future of British sport was to turn. Score: forty-love. Smith at 51 [see cut] is about to cross over to serve to me (at P). When Smith gets to a point (K) not less than one foot and not more than two feet beyond the center of the court (I know now what I only felt then-that timing is everything in this gambit), Joad (standing at J2) called across...
...nothing more putting off to young university players than a slight suggestion that their etiquette or sportsmanship is in question . . . Smith sent a double fault to me, and another double fault to Joad. He did not get in another ace service till halfway through the third set of a match which incidentally we won . . . For me it was the birth of gamesmanship...