Word: topflighters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Break. Like most topflight golfers, Texas-born Lloyd Mangrum started as a caddy. And like most, he found that cracking the pro circuit was a discouraging business. For three straight years Mangrum missed meals, slept in fleabag hotels, and was grateful when he was lucky enough to pick up $50 in a match. In 1940 he got his first break: an invitation to play in Bobby Jones' Masters Tournament. Mangrum, then 25, blazed an opening-round 64, the best recorded up to that time in major-tournament play, and still a Masters record...
Promoter Kramer, sporting an even bigger "big game" than he had as a topflight amateur six years ago, gave Sedgman his tennis lesson in the first match at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. Time & again Sedgman slammed over shots that looked like sure winners. More often than not, Strategist Kramer, anticipating Sedgman's every move, slammed the ball right back past the flabbergasted Aussie. Booming his big serve in with pinpoint precision, playing virtually errorless tennis, Kramer forced Sedgman into a disastrous series of outs and nets, won the lopsided match...
...cracked the tennis color line in 1950, she soon proved that she could hold her own with the nation's best women players. Althea, then 22, reached the finals of her first National Indoor championship before losing to Nancy Chaffee. Fast improving with the chance to play against topflight competition, Althea went on to win the Good Neighbor Tournament (in Florida) and an international invitation tournament (in Germany). Last week, already enjoying a No. 9 national ranking, Althea became the first of her race to win another honor: No. 1 ranking from the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association...
Marriage did not slow down Tompkins' breakneck career. Wife Rosemary is the daughter of a rodeo producer and a topflight performer in her own right. Working in his spine-jarring sport where broken arms & legs are commonplace, Tompkins has only had one real injury: a pulled thigh ligament. The enforced month's layoff ("I knew I wouldn't be at my best") made nervous, gum-chewing Tompkins edgier than ever, kept him out of action just long enough to lose the bull-riding title...
...head the commission a year ago, Harry Truman got a topflight surgeon and medical administrator (in the VA), Chicago's Paul Budd Magnuson, who says: "I'm a Republican myself and always have been." The President let Magnuson pick the rest of the commission-14 representatives of medicine, dentistry, nursing, farmers, labor and consumers. And Magnuson now swears that nobody in the Administration "exerted the slightest bit of pressure on the commission...