New Queen?

Nancy Chaffee and Beverly Baker think they have been playing long enough in the shadow of the reigning queens of U.S. tennis, Margaret Osborne du Pont and Louise Brough. This week, with the queens away from Manhattan, the princesses played in the final of the National Indoor championship. Tennis fans got an eyeful, and perhaps a glimpse of a new queen.

Nancy Chaffee, 21, a merry bundle of bounce, tells people, "I'm a ham." Last fall at Forest Hills she was soundly defeated by Mrs. du Pont. Chastened but not discouraged, Nancy went home to Ventura, Calif, and set herself a practice schedule: 3 1/2 hours a day, six days a week. At night, when she wasn't appearing on her thrice-weekly television show (in which she and Tommy Harmon, onetime Michigan football star, interview sport celebrities), Nancy pored over strategy diagrams with her father, a tennis pro. Says Nancy: "I used to overpower 'em. Now I find that tennis takes brains, too."

Trimmed down to 133 Ibs. (from 140), fast-talking Nancy announced that the indoor tournament was just Phase 1 of her campaign to win the Nationals at Forest Hills next September. "You know why I want to "win the championship? I'm using my racket to get ahead. I don't want to be a tennis bum, living off people on the Riviera."

Beverly Baker, 20, a pert, sloe-eyed redhead from Santa Monica, is less singleminded. "I hate the grind of practicing. I don't like living out of a suitcase. In fact, I don't care much for traveling. I like home." But on the court Beverly is all business, takes quiet pride in the fact that she is the only player in big-time tennis who can shift hands for each shot: "I play a gambling game, looking for quick winners. Why drag a match out for two hours if you can get it over with in 30 minutes?"

In the final, which took 75 minutes, Nancy's slam-bang strokes, delivered with the verve if not the skill of an Alice Marble, took the edge off Beverly's gambling game. In a match that was closer than the score indicated, Nancy won, 6-4, 6-4. Said she: "This is the year to bust up the Brough-Du Pont monopoly."

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