GREAT TENNIS AMATEUR

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 36, 11 August 1923, Page 17

GREAT TENNIS AMATEUR

E. M. BAERLEIN ENTERTAINED.

A dinner was given in Manchester recently to Mr. E. M. Baerlein, Britain's greatest player of tennis, as a tribute not only to a great master of a difficult game but to the game itself, that ancient, sport of kings which has mads less concession to time than any other of our great games, says the "Manchester Guardian." Dean Hole described it hot unfairly as "the most fascinating and scientific exercise, but far too expensive and far too difficult to be accessible to the public." And he went on to recall how. "Barre, the Frenchman, beat' the marker in our Oxford Court with a bootjack and made some marvellous returns with a ginger-beer bottle. He was a fat man, with little rapidity of action, but he seemed to know where every ball would finish its course, and was there to meet it on arrival." But bootjacks and gingerbeer bottles are "• of the levities of a game essentially serious. Many politicians have played it, Viscount Grey and Sir William Hart Dyke and Alfred Lyttelton and so forth; but not with that Falstaffian laughter which used to incapacitate the spectators when Harcourt and Henry James played lawn tennis, inventing their own rules- and conducting long and heated legal arguments as to the correct definition thereof. For a tennis celebration there could be no better place than a tennis court, for a tennis court ia 1 a world by itself, with a "language bewildering to all who do not know the game and can only shake their neads over tabours and guiles and chases and penthouses, and so on. Yet, even for the unknowing, it is not difficult to people a tennis court with shadows from the. past—with Francois Premier and Henri Quatre, with the Duke of Beaufort and his celebrated prison games, with Henry VIII., with Charles and his brother James. But none of them, one supposes, would nave made much of a game for.a Baerleiri—.even with a bootjack.