Stars and Dollars Meet

With tennis stars spending the winter performing on one of three tours, and the spring and summer competing for one of 16 teams or zigzagging between dozens of tournaments, the once orderly sport has become a blurred kaleidoscope of perpetual motion. Twice a year though, tennis addicts get a reprieve: in July at Wimbledon and this month at Forest Hills, where the world's best players, male and female, gather to battle for top honors. As the U.S. Open got under way last week, it captured the expansive look of Tennis 1974. Items:

> In a game that has gone truly international, the American champion ship competition has the biggest and best field of foreign players in its 93-year history: 80 performers from 26 countries. Some of the most talented competitors are the youngest, led by Swedish Wunderkind Bjoern Borg, 18, seeded fourth after his sweep of the Italian and French opens earlier this year and a recent victory in the U.S. Pro Championships in Brookline, Mass. If Borg falters on the grass at the West Side Tennis Club, Sweden's sorrow could turn into joy for Argentina or Mexico. The hottest player on the men's circuit this summer has been Guillermo Vilas, 22, from Mar del Plata, Argentina. During one hot streak, Vilas won 29 consecutive matches. Mexican Raul Ramirez, 21, seeded 16th, has won $60,000 since June.

> Reflecting an American tennis resurgence, Forest Hills has not had so many strong U.S. contenders in years. Wimbledon Champion Jimmy Connors is seeded No. 1, with Stan Smith ranked third, Arthur Ashe seventh and Marty Riessen eleventh. Behind them is a host of hungry players on the threshold of winning their first big tournament: Dick Stockton, Roscoe Tanner, Sandy Mayer and Brian Gottfried.

> Conspicuous by their absence this year are highly regarded Australians. Only two, second-seeded John Newcombe (the defending champion) and fifth-ranked Ken Rosewall, were rated among the top 16 men.

> The women's division, after a couple of dazzling seasons in which it gained equal footing with the men's, has tamed down a bit. Margaret Court, last year's Forest Hills winner, stayed home in Australia because she recently gave birth to her second child. Superstar-Entrepreneur Billie Jean King has lately been in something of a slump. Thus much of the suspense settled on the question of whether Chris Evert could complete her rapid transit from crown princess to empress of the sport. Grass is not her favorite surface, though that did not stop her from taking the Wimbledon crown this summer. But King's grit could reassert itself, and a number of foreign competitors, including Australia's Evonne Goolagong and Russia's Olga Morozova, are around to keep the action crisp.

> When Forest Hills admitted professionals for the first time in 1968, the prize money was $100,000. This year it is $271,000. The men's and women's singles winners will each get a $6,000 car and $5,000 championship ring plus the $22,500 first prize. The money reflects the general boom in tennis that leads Open Director Bill Talbert to think it is "easily conceivable" that Forest Hills will be worth half a million dollars in five years. This is the kind of inflation the competitors applaud.

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