Word: wimbledon
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...afford $30 rackets. Life became a good deal easier after Arthur met R. Walter Johnson, a Negro doctor from Lynchburg, Va., whose avocation was encouraging promising young Negro tennis players. Years before, Dr. Johnson had befriended a girl from Harlem named Althea Gibson and started her climb to two Wimbledon and two Forest Hills titles. Impressed by Arthur's raw talent, Dr. Johnson started him on the junior tournament trail, paid his traveling expenses and entry fees...
Like Childe Harold, the folks who run Wimbledon should have known what kind of fruit would spring from those seeds. Ever since open tennis went into effect this spring, amateurs have been beating pros with astonishing regularity. Yet when the seedings were announced for last week's 82nd All-England Tennis Championships, nine out of the top ten were pros. Tournament officials obviously assumed that professionals, by definition, are better players than amateurs, and that the pros would be at the top of their game for the first truly big open tournament. With two exceptions, they were wrong...
...Tony Roche (No. 15) turned back the amateurs' challenge and fought it out between themselves for the title, with Laver winning 6-3, 6-4, 6-2. But not even that all-pro final could alter the fact that in the main it was Amateur Week at Wimbledon...
What was the matter with the pros? Partly, it was the playing conditions. Said Gonzales: "We are used to playing on poor courts at night under indifferent lighting in smoke-filled halls" -a far cry from Wimbledon's outdoor grass courts. The biggest problem was probably the pros' very professionalism -their tendency to hit "percentage" shots (while amateurs gambled on riskier shots that proved to be winners) and their basic disdain for their amateur opponents...
That is likely to change now. Losing to amateurs at Wimbledon certainly did nothing to improve the pros' image or their drawing power. And as for the amateurs: If they can lick the pros, why shouldn't they join them, instead of playing...