Untitled

Hokitika Guardian, 16 July 1927, Page 2

I he best tout can lie said about British lawn tennis champions to-day is tnat they are good losers. For several seasons past they have fought stubbornly at- the great international tournaments with very little prospect of success to cheer them on, and now the Wimbledon meeting has closed with an honours list which includes no British players. There are probably two principal reasons for this temporary eclipse of British athletes in a field of sport in which they were once supreme. One is the obvious fact that the present generation of tennis players abroad has produced an unprecedentedly large percentage of experts endowed with something very like genius. The other is that British players do not take the panic so seriously as their rivals. The Americans, whatever form of athletics they take up—running or jumping, golf o rtennis—begin, by analysing iho game in minute detail, and then train and practise with as assiduity and persistency that their British rivals have never yet imitated or approached. The American example has been followed in France with results revealed plainly

enough at Wimbledon. It is possible that this great game has lost more than it has gained through the modern tendency to reduce it to a mechanical system. and then treat it as the chief duty of life.