“IS IT WORTH IT”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19904, 14 September 1934, Page 9

“IS IT WORTH IT”

MISS DOROTHY ROUND ON TENNIS FAME Dorothy Round at twenty-four was officially ranked this week by A. Wallis Myers as the No. 1 woman tennis player in the world. She knows what it has cost her to become a champion, and sees more realistically than most girls at Wimbledon just what it is worth. How Miss Round confessed to him what her feelings were on being a world champion is told by C. A. Lyon in a special interview in the London “Daily Express.” “It means,” she told him, “that I am away from home for about four months of the year. I often feel home-sick. It means inevitably that I cannot keep in touch with my old friends. “I have been home two weeks in the last two months. In those weeks I did nothing but answer letters. I still have my sense of values. What are ‘tennis friends’ worth? This: when yoif are up you have plenty of friends. When you begin to decline again, as every player must sooner or later, they don’t want to know you. “Is Often Lonely” “Being a champion tennis player means that I have nothing to do in the winter. It means that although lam homesick when X am away all the travel unsettles me, so that I can’t really settle down again at home. Travelling about to tournaments and being away from home, I really have rather a lonely time. “I am twenty-four. I was nineteen when I really determined to go on until I was champion. I always vowed I would throw my racquets into the sea then, but now I can’t very well stop. “It has cost my father hundreds of pounds, I suppose, in seven years. That money has gone in hotels, travelling expenses and equipment. He gave it willingly because the whole family encouraged me to go ahead. I am delighted for them and they are delighted for me.

“What shall Ido in the future? I honestly do not know. I might have been doing my job as a gym. mistress in a school, but that has gone now. “That is how it is. “What, for instance, shall I do this winter? Xam touring Australia from October to March. After that I. in my particular instance, would like to work in a shop—a really nice shop.” Fate Intervened Dorothy Round might still be unknown to-day if fate had intervened. When she was on a holiday at the age of sixteen with her family at Pwllelli, North Wales, her brother entered her for the local tournament there. She was badly beaten. She would never have entered another tournament of her own accord, but her brother determined that she would go in for the junior tournament. She went and she won it.