He Was More Like A Regiment

Stated simply, in the tennis record books, the result achieved at the Davis Cup Challenge Round in Charlotte, N.C. last week was that for the fourth consecutive year the U.S. had scored an emphatic victory, this time over Rumania. But seldom has a journey to the inevitable been so strewn with menacing entrapments. Until towering Stan Smith, the Army Pfc. who won the recent U.S. Open championship at Forest Hills with his big guns, beat Rumania's brooding, shaggy-haired Ion Tiriac 8-6, 6-3, 6-0 on Sunday and clinched the U.S. defense of the cup, the foregone conclusion was forced to survive an unfriendly playing surface, dark-horse candidates, untried youth, squelching rain and even the gloom of night. The events in Charlotte marked the last time the Davis Cup—now entering its eighth decade—will be held in its present king-of-the-castle format, but the old familiar shape went out with an ear-popping bang.

Next year the competition will take the form of a full-scale elimination tournament in which every Davis Cup nation, including the defender, will have to get in there and slug it out in the qualifying rounds for the right to play in the final. The new system may well succeed in ending the total domination that the U.S. and Australia have enjoyed in the Davis Cup matches since 1936—the last year in which somebody else ( Great Britain, on that occasion) managed to win the Challenge Round.

But that is for next year. A few weeks ago the Rumanians, who lost to the U.S. 5-0 in the 1969 Challenge Round, suddenly had visions of themselves as being able to finally break this chain of Yank-Aussie successes. The reason was only partly due to the fact that Arthur Ashe and Bob Lutz—veterans of Davis Cup play—had become contract professionals and were therefore ineligible. It was chiefly because the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, in what seemed to be an extraordinary sporting gesture, had chosen a venue where the playing surface would be clay—a substance as familiar to the Rumanians as a glass of Tsuiza—instead of the usual vigorously buffed cement that brings aid and comfort to the big serve, volley and smash game at which the Americans excel.

The court, made of blue-gray composition clay called Hartru, is in the Julian Clark Stadium, a $150,000 structure seating 6,200 spectators that must be rated just behind Forest Hills as one of the finest tennis tournament facilities in America. As U.S. Team Captain Ed Turville pointed out, the slower clay surface produces a totally different kind of game than that seen on fast grass or cement, one that creates longer rallies and a wider variety of shots. "There's no doubt that people would much rather watch tennis played on clay," said Turville, a fatherly, good-natured lawyer from St. Petersburg, Fla. "It's really the game at its best."

The Rumanian team, Tiriac and waifish Ilie Nastase, were more delighted at the choice of a clay surface than any spectator was likely to be. Clay is what they play on at home and around Europe and is what best suits their dogged ability to retrieve and their assortment of topspin drives, chops and lobs.

Nastase, Rumania's No. 1 player, was also pleased and surprised when Turville decided to enter Frank Froehling in the singles in place of Clark Graebner, who has beaten him in five of their six meetings. "Every time I walk out on a court with Graebner I am scared," he admitted. Froehling, 29 and once ranked No. 2 in the U.S., married in 1965, dropped out of big-time tennis and settled down behind a desk in Fort Lauderdale to work as a stockbroker. Now divorced, he got the itch to play full time again and has made a successful comeback this year, earning about $30,000 on the tennis circuit to date. Wearing a white tennis hat on his head that, along with his skinny 6'5" height, helped create the illusion of a white-feathered flamingo on the court, Froehling seemed to have reached a very high peak in practice, beating Graebner in eight of the 10 sets they played. So Turville picked him to help Smith.

The day before the announcement was officially made, Graebner, already apprised of this decision, sat in the stands watching the two Rumanians charge through their final hard practice session and assessed the situation.

"What they should hope for is that the draw puts Nastase up against Smith in the opening singles match," he said. " Nastase can beat Stan here, and if he does, it will be all over for us. Tiriac will be so charged up no one could stop him. You've also got to favor Tiriac and Nastase in the doubles for another point. But if Stan wins, it will probably go the other way. In fact, you could almost say that the entire Challenge Round would hinge on such a match."

Graebner's game may not have been sharp enough to earn a place in the starting lineup, but there was nothing wrong with his theory. Smith did meet Nastase in the opening singles; Smith beat Nastase, and the Rumanians never caught up. Nastase could not have been more thoroughly defeated had the match taken place on an ice-skating rink instead of the slow surface he is supposed to love. Smith shot home only one service ace (in the seventh game of the second set), but he charged to the net behind a spin serve that was kicking high to the Rumanian's backhand, and then earned a steady flow of winners with some deft volleying, quickly running off the first five games. But then Nastase bounced back to win the next five when Smith's first service suffered a brief lapse, and he froze the gangling American at the net with a string of zippy passing shots. Smith finally won the first set 7-5 after 47 minutes, breaking Nastase's serve when the Rumanian butchered three backhand volleys. After that, 47 minutes was all Smith needed to race through the two closing sets, which he won by scores of 6-3 and 6-1.

Tiriac, with a newly acquired black mustache, his mane of black curls, his massively sized head, his rounded shoulders, resembles something cut from a herd of bison. For a while in his first day's singles match against Froehling, it appeared that the bison was going to horribly gore the big white bird. In just under an hour he won the first two sets by 6-3 and 6-1.