Davis Cup

A mediocre man is successful in a game of skill only so long as he can forget drama and concentrate on the physical act; to remember, when aiming his last white tiddlewink at the cup, that his mother is looking on, spells ruin. But champions steal a vigor from exigency and use the electric air of crises as a wine. Perhaps the foremost exponent of this ability is William Tilden. No other personage engaged in sport has an equal sense of the dramatic.

Now gloomy as a Scottish murderer, he strides with downcast head, while battlements rise out of mist about him and chasms open at his feet. Again, in a lyric moment, his face shines with the ardor of a lover, and when he slips off his shaggy sweater his beholders see a long cloak slip from the shoulders of one who stands under a balcony in Verona. Best of all he loves the thrill of impending defeat, when the pitying crowd can read in his visage the despair of one who has striven and failed, and perceive by his labored breathing and frequent potations of ice-water that the end is not far off. Then it is that he truly comes into his own. His racquet twangs like an embowered guitar; his serve crashes over with the sonorous finality of the couplet concluding a soliloquy in an Elizabethan play. Next day he reads:

TILDEN, ON VERGE OF DEFEAT, RALLIES MAGNIFICENTLY--TILDEN COMES BACK FROM BRINK TO WIN

Such were the headlines that appeared last week after he had beaten Lacoste in the Davis Cup challenge round, which the U. S. players, as had been expected, won by a clean sweep from the French.

The match, like the tragedies of some of the playwrights who preceded Shakespeare, was stretched over five acts or sets, the climax coming where it properly should --toward the end of the third. Tilden employed a formula already made familiar to the .public in others of his superbly improvised dramas. He began with the artifice of making it appear that he was playing his regular game and that Lacoste was rising to stupendous heights. The little Frenchman, never a brilliant player, was at first so appalled to find himself facing the champion that Tilden had to retard his own strokes a trifle obviously in order to give him his cue, but once Lacoste had perceived what was wanted of him the drama moved forward with a steadily sharpening curve of emotion. Lacoste took the first set 6-3, the second 12-10. The champion now employed all of those hackneyed stage flourishes that mar his more fervid performances. Even as actors of genuine talent sometimes paw the air and mouth their lines, so Tilden permitted himself an occasional half-stagger; he took off his shoes and played in his stocking feet; he poured buckets of ice-water over his bleak brow. However crude his technique in indicating to the gallery that he was a beaten man, it had its undeniable effect. Women murmured sympathetically. Men gnawed their lips. Lacoste determined to do or die.

Critics who reviewed the play next morning unanimously agreed that the third set was perhaps the most daring ever composed by the lean actor-dramatist. Four times Lacoste stood within a point of victory; four times, with strokes that bit like a fencer's riposte or an epigram by William Wycherly, Tilden beat him back. He took the set 8-6; ran out the match 7-5, 6-2.

Acting Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis and some 10,000 unofficial persons, wrung and tortured by the intensity of the spectacle they had witnessed, were heartened by seeing William Johnston, a weaker player than Tilden, walk over Borotra, an abler player than Lacoste, with the loss of only five games in three sets. Lacoste's inferiority to his teammate was further exhibited in the doubles next day. Borotra, quick at getting to the net, was not so quick as either Richards or Williams but, once there, he was forced to oppose sniping by himself, for little Lacoste was nowhere. The consequence was a 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 victory, and a Davis cup that remains, uselessly, in the U. S.