Scorecard

YOUNG TURK FOR TENNIS

For some 30 years the tennis Old Guard in the East has dominated the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association, each retiring administration carefully grooming a successor so that a continuity of conservatism might be preserved. Attempts to overthrow the regime have always failed—until last weekend.

Clifford S. Sutter, an advertising executive with fresh, progressive ideas about tennis, squeaked through in the final set of the ELTA's annual meeting to defeat (5,700 votes to 5,025) Donald O. Hobart, who had held the post for two years. Sutter carried with him his running mate, Daniel S. Johnson, as secretary. Alastair B. Martin, who had lined up many proxy votes for Sutter, was elected chairman of the new nominating committee.

Tennis players were pleased by the election, for Sutter is himself a player, and a fine one. He was ranked third nationally in 1932 and last August, with his brother Ernest, won the National Senior Doubles. It is a novelty to have a player in command of ELTA policy.

Up to now Sutter has expressed no strong views, one way or the other, on the subject of erasing the fake chalk line that separates professional from amateur tennis. But he will have to face up to it sooner or later and one might hope that his view will be more in the direction of progress than that of his predecessors.

BOOKIES OF THE WORLD...!

Bookmakers comprise a proud fraternity except where honest cops make them furtive. In many countries where off-course betting on the horses is legal the bookies are known as turf accountants, and in dress and manner they live up to the decorous implication of the name. They tend to a gentlemanly portliness, conservative dress and the soft accents of urbanity, the way big-time bankers used to act before they took to advertising on television. Now, just as the banker's "image" has been destroyed, the bookmaker's is likely to be. In South Africa the bums have gone on strike, leaving thousands indestitute.

Their beef is against a new law requiring them to turn over 12% of their total handle to the racetracks, whereas in the past their organization, known gracefully as Witwatersrand Tattersall, has simply paid the tracks a fixed sum of �25,000 for information on entered horses and jockeys. The picketing bookies protest that the new dispensation will cost them �60,000. They are opposed to this and so, of course, must their customers be, since inevitably the tax will come out of the bettors.

Our sympathy is with the bookmakers and their clients, but in common decency and common sense our instincts say that a strike, which may well drive honest men to solvency, is no solution to the problem, especially from the standpoint of the licit bookie himself. He is in danger of losing his cachet of respectability and conservatism, an incalculable but clearly priceless vigorish, and of picking up an aura that might remind one of Jimmy Hoffa.

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