On Henry VIII's Benches

Oldest, strangest and most patrician indoor court game is court-tennis, played with curved rackets shaped like little shovels, and hard, heavy balls. During the 16th Century, the game was so popular that people said there were more court-tennis players in Paris than ale-drinkers in England. One Englishman, Henry VIII, liked it so much that he had a court, with benches in the dedans (netted opening in the wall) for his courtiers, built into Hampton Court. Court-tennis has preserved its prestige at the price of its popularity. Henry VIII's benches are still in existence but they are now in the New York Racquet & Tennis Club, which owns one of the twelve court-tennis courts in the U. S. In the Racquet Club last week sat as many spectators as Henry's benches would hold watching the final of the U. S. amateur championship between James Van Alen, the titleholder, and young Ogden Phipps. Since Jay Gould, whose father imported the best professionals in the world to teach his son the game, held the U. S. title for 20 years running, the 200 or so able court-tennis players in the U. S. have shown a tendency to drop the jeu classique, their game's characteristic and peculiar chopstroke, for plain hard-hitting strokes, borrowed from lawn tennis. Neither of last week's finalists had much of Gould's finesse. Van Alen, defending the title he won for the first time last year, used neat, well-timed cuts. Phipps hit harder, tallied many a point on shots into the scoring hazards (grille, dedans, and winning gallery), net-covered openings in the walls of the court. Late in the match, he stopped volleying shots that he should have taken on the rebound off the backwall, ran out the fifth set for match and title, 3-6, 6-4, 6-5, 4-6, 6-2. A socialite product of St. Bernard's, St. Paul's and Harvard (1931), Phipps took up court-tennis in his last year at college. To become the best amateur player in the country took him less time than most men require to learn to score. An amateur bridge player, expert enough to play in professional tournaments, much too good for most of his friends at lawn tennis, he belongs to the New York Racquet Club, plays court-tennis there and at the $250,000 court which Payne Whitney built at Manhasset and on which Payne Whitney died in 1927. Ogden Phipps's grandfather was Andrew Carnegie's partner, Henry Phipps.

In the highest squash tennis court in the world, on the 32nd floor of Manhattan's Shelton Hotel, Frank Ward, Manhattan's City Athletic Club professional, playing Thomas lannicelli, last week won the world's open squash tennis championship, for the eighth year in a row (15-8, 15-3, 15-3).

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