TENNIS PROFESSIONALISM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19397, 4 August 1926, Page 10

TENNIS PROFESSIONALISM.

A first-class sensation to those interested in lawn tennis is provided by the announcement that Mdlle. Suzanne Lenglen has become a professional. There are other branches of sport where abandonment of the amateur status by a world-famous player would be accepted with equanimity. Not so in lawn tennis. Professionalism is by no means unknown in it, but those who earn a livelihood directly from the game do so by teaching much more than by playing it. None of them has ever enjoyed the fame of Mdlle. Lenglen. Yet with the growth in popularity of the game some such development has, perhaps, become inevitable. Young players not blessed with independent means have found their engagements on the court so curtailing their earning capacity that they have turned to activities naturally associated with the game to augment their incomes. The lawn tennis authorities have not been unmindful of this development. Not long ago players were forbidden, on pain of losing their amateur status, to autograph racquets for the makers. The player-writer controversy in which Tilden figured most prominently, with Vincent Richards also affected, is too recent to need recapitulation. No matter how genuinely enthusiastic about the game, playerß conscious that their names were enough to attract spectators in thousands cannot but have been affected by knowledge of the great sums controlling bodies made in consequence. Perhaps they should have been indifferent, but they are only human; in some instances they are humans hardpressed financially. Hence have arisen demands for expenses hard to classify as legitimate. If, as is. hinted, promoters, tempted by the prospects of profit, are about to organise exhibition games and world tours, the professional jplayer is a certainty of the future. It may not be good in the ultimate for lawn tennis. It will probably dismay those who guard the sacred ramparts of amateurism. If so, they can reflect, even if it does not comfort them much, that their own assiduous cultivation of the gate has had much to do with what is believed to be portended by the decision of Mdlle. Lenglen to become a professional. ,