One for the British

The game of racquets (which has nothing to do with tennis) is perhaps the fastest of all sports. In the U.S., only the members of half a dozen clubs ever get a chance to even watch it. London's sportswriters, hungry for a British athletic victory in anything, last week feasted on this caviar sport.

In Manhattan's swank Park Avenue Racquet & Tennis Club, the British racquets team met the U.S. in the first international racquets team match since 1930. The British relied on control, while the Americans concentrated on slugging the ball. Britain's doubles team of Cosmo Crawley and Jack Paule, never beaten, kept their record intact. Final score: Britain 5, U.S. 2.

Even London's penny press, whose readers had probably never heard of the game, crowded stories of the victory into tight sport pages. The London Times, in its famed fourth leader, was moved to recall editorially that Dickens had once written about the game (" 'Very good,' exclaimed Sam Weller as, with his pint of port and his newspaper in hand, he watched the end of a game of racquets in the Fleet Street prison").

Racquets is played on a court of sweat-proof concrete twice the size of a squash court. Even before the war, a court cost $50,000 to build. One London firm has the secret formula for the non-sweating cement, and trusts no one but its own masons with the mixing of it. The balls add to the game's speed and cost: they are golf-ball size but made like baseballs--tightly wound cotton thread covered with leather. They shoot around the cell-like court so fast that experts judge the ball's speed not only by the eye but by the "bock" sound it makes hitting the wall. Racquets, thin-shafted and fragile, are also costly. The late Charles Williams, regarded as one of the greatest of all racquets players, once broke 26 of them in five sets--about $200 worth.

England's tennis-playing ladies had taken a terrible drubbing from the U.S. Wightman Cup team last summer at Wimbledon. Last week the English girls began getting free instruction from an enemy agent, onetime U.S. Women's Champion Alice Marble. The thing she missed most in their playing: the killer spirit.

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