Wide Open Wimbledon

French tennis fans have a word for an old hand who plays a steady, smooth-stroking, unspectacular game: "crocodile." In the recent French championships the fans spotted two of the species:* Lefthander Jaroslav Drobny, 32, a self-exiled Czech now playing for Egypt, and South Africa's Eric Sturgess, 29, whose smooth ground strokes are reminiscent of the days when tennis was played, and won, from the base line. By the semifinals of the French tournament not one of the slam-bang U.S. players was left, and the pride of the victorious Australian Davis Cup team, Frank Sedgman and Ken McGregor, fell before the patient craftiness of the two aging veterans.

On the eve of Wimbledon last week, it was beginning to look like the year of the crocodile. Germany's Gottfried von Cramm, no crocodile but still a masterly all-court player at 42, could even now take the starch out of youngsters who could hardly lift a racket in the days when Von Cramm was a Wimbledon finalist three years running (1935-37).

But the real tests were just beginning. As the strain of the big tournaments begins to tell, and the weather heats up enough to wilt the elder statesmen of the game, the crocodiles would be getting some rugged competition from younger saurians. Chief among them:

BUDGE PATTY, 27, defending champion and semi-reformed playboy, a player with a deft, steady touch (and a bad ankle), who has not won a major tournament in a year.

FRANK SEDGMAN, 23, seeded No. 1 at Wimbledon this year, the stocky two-time Australian champion and Davis Cup mainstay, whose siege-gun game, when he is "up," is probably the amateur world's best.

ART LARSEN, 26, U.S. champion, a moody, often bad-mannered lefthander who relies on pinpoint volleys, dogged retrieving and the endurance of a bloodhound.

HERB FLAM, 22, runner-up for the U.S. title, an improving player with little sting in his shots: he particularly lacks a forcing serve.

KEN MCGREGOR, 22, the rawboned Australian newcomer who clinched the Davis Cup last year with a dashing, impetuous "big game," has since lapsed into his normal, gawky style.

DICK SAVITT, 24, the U.S.'s Australian champion, a dogged slam-banger who has come far in the past year, but has also lost to Drobny six times out of seven.

MERVYN ROSE, 21, Australian lefthander and the most Improved player from Down Under--strong on fundamental strokes, weak in experience.

As the first round of Wimbledon got under way this week, the austere ways of the nondrinking, nonsmoking, in-bed-by-11 Australians prompted one U.S. player to call them "too damned earnest." But even Patty and Larsen were buckling down with the other seven U.S. entries to the routine of roadwork and practice they will need if they hope to get past the wise old crocodiles.

* France's own Rene Lacoste, one of the French "four musketeers" (the others: Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet, Jacques Brugnon) who dominated international tennis 1924-29, was the grandfather of all crocodiles. Recalling one match against Lacoste, Bill Tilden remarked: "The monotonous regularity with which that unsmiling, drab, almost dull man returned the best I could hit ... often filled [me] with a wild desire to throw my racket at him."

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