"Poker Face"

TENNIS--Helen Wills--Scribners ($2.50). Champion Wills' game misses monotony by the power and deadly accuracy of her one great stroke. Failing the power, Author Wills' book is deadly in its repetitious monotony. A little editing would have cut from page 15 the description of her first forehand drive described in almost the same one-syllable words on page 5, or from pages 8, 25, 108, the repeated precept of playing only two sets at a time and stopping though keen to go on to the third.

But no editing could delete the copybook banalities: moderate exercise (tennis) spells health, health spells good complexion; nor improve the laborious heaping up of sentences that recall Freshman compositions in which every preposition helped to attain the required thousand words. In this case the required 214 pages contain the usual directions for shifting the weight from the right to the left foot; a lucid diagram of the centre theory (advising for net play a deep ball centre, which opens up less of the player's court to the opponent's return); repeated admonitions to practice "for is it not so in everything--the more one learns the more one realizes there is still more to learn?"; and 32 drawings by the author of various tennis stars in action. These drawings are reminiscent of photographs one has seen of the stars in question, and have therefore caught realistic and characteristic motion.

For the rest, one learns that Author Wills requires three new balls a set though she remembers the time when she was "delighted with any ball as long as it would bounce."--She once realized in a tournament that something was wrong, but did not discover until after the match that her opponent was left-handed.--Her "Poker Face" ("a point I have never before discussed") is due to concentration rather than, as popularly supposed, lack of emotion.--When they pinned the Phi Beta Kappa key over her fast-beating heart she experienced one of the happiest moments of her life.--All players who have turned professional she mentions in the pluperfect tense.--And though she declares Jean Borotra well-named the "Bounding Basque," Betty Nuthall one of the best liked visitors we ever had, Senorita de Alvarez the most fascinating figure of the courts, this is as far as she betrays the inside knowledge she must have of the dramatic personnel of the tennis world.