Tennis Open?

After William Tatem Tilden II trounced him in the match that opened their professional tennis tour in Manhattan last month (TIME, Jan. 22), Ellsworth Vines observed: "Give Tilden plenty of rest and he's probably still the hardest player in the world to beat ... in one match. But I'll wear him down before the end of the tour."

Thereafter Tilden got less and less rest. When the touring tennists left Denver each had won four matches. Then Vines took two in succession. At Los Angeles last week Vines won his seventh. That match lasted four hours and made tennis history when Tilden finally took a 44-game set. At Long Beach two nights later it was Vines who needed rest. He blew up, dropped two miserable sets 0-6, 2-6.

The success of the tour pointed up for this week's Pittsburgh meeting of the U. S. Lawn Tennis Association old talk about an open tennis tournament. With crack players like Vines, Tilden, Richards, Barnes, Cochet and Nusslein in professional ranks, many tennis enthusiasts hold that the only real test of tennis supremacy would be a tournament comprised of amateurs and professionals. Much red tape between the U. S. L. T. A. and the International Lawn Tennis Federation would have to be cut before a U. S. open could be sanctioned. Even its most optimistic advocates last week did not expect to see open tennis before 1935.

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