GLADIATORIAL TENNIS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 134, 9 June 1925, Page 6

GLADIATORIAL TENNIS.

THE DAVIS CUP CONTEST. ONE OT THE HARDEST SPOBTS. NATIONAL POINT OF VIEW. Two of the members of the Australian tennis team that is challenging for the Davis Cup, in <ierald Patterson and Jack Hawkcs, loft by the Niagara this morning after having spent a day in Auckland. The incident reminds one of the great strides made in popularity throughout the world by tennis, a game that was held in some contempt by vigorous young New Zealanders fifteen or twenty years ago. Any mention of tennis at that time among a male assembly of athletes was certain to bring some slighting comment about "lady's game." Yet only a few weeks ago the late Walter Camp, who was regarded as one of the leading authorities in the United States on sport, seriously suggested that tennis, of the sort played in the Davis Cup, more than rivals boxing, rowing and football as the hardest physical test in sport—the sport that takes most out of a man in muscle strain and nerve strain. Incidentally, he mentions the Demp-sev-Firpo fight, which he saw, and remarks on the fact that after Firpo (only half trained) was knocked down seven times in a single round by the merciless Dempsey and was finally knocked out in as furious a fight as the ring has ever known. Yet one hour after the fight Firpo was in an. Italian restaurant of Kew York, smiling, jovial and apparently unhurt. "Consider another picture," says the critic. "The place was Forest Hills. The chief figures in the picture were big Bill Tilden and a member of the Japanese Davis Cup team —I think it was Kumagac. The Japanese entry was perfectly trained and endowed with plenty of courage. The match went to five sets. At the finish the perfectly* trained and huskily-built Tilden was almost at the point of exhaustion, and his Japanese opponent had to be carried up the stairs to the locker room. There is also the picture of Red McLaughlin to consider in determining the physical demands of championehip tennis. "Restnac was gifted with a superb physique and amazing energy, but the pace he set in tennis, and the pace tennis demanded of him, burned him out in only a few short years."

This point of view of the game was put to Jack Hawkes in the course of a chat with a "Star" representative, the Australian having taken part in two of the Davis Cup competitions, and he agreed that tennis was probably the hardest game of the several kinds he had taken part in. It demanded the highest physical fitness for a five-set singles match with a champion, he said. At the same time he hardly felt inclined to go so far as Walter Camp suggested, for it was his opinion that in nerve and muscle the demands of a 15-round or 20-round championship boxing bout made a greater call on a man's reserve of energy, spirit and reserve. At any rate that was his view of the respective games as they were played in his experience from the Australian angle. There is probably something in the reservation made by Hawkes about the difference in the national point of view. Tt ifi recognised by some of their athletic specialists, and one of them recently commented that the American athletic successes against their British brethren is due to the American slogan of "Speed, speed, and yet mor« ?.peed." "It is contended." he 'says, "that an Englishman goes in for sporting pastime almost solely for the sheer love of the game. It is of secondary consideration to him. we rj» told, whether he wins or the other fellow wins, so long as they both enioy themselves. An American, on the other hand, is generally credited with going into any sport or pastime for the sheer love of winning. It is contended that he subordinates every other impulse to the desire for victory. Hence he comes out the victor, but he shortens his days of actual sporting competition." Perhaps the Australian angle lies somewhere between these two extremes.