Word: wimbledon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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France's towering (6 ft. 7 in.) Yvon Petra stomped onto Wimbledon's famed center court wearing a white jockey cap and a belligerent look. His wife had just found him a steak. Said she: "With a beefsteak inside him, he can always win." She was right...
...opponent in Wimbledon's finals was Australia's ambidextrous Geoff Brown, 22, who serves righthanded, hits with his left hand on the left side, and with a two-handed grip on the right side. Petra, 30, onetime French infantryman who spent 18 months in a German prison camp, barked at ball boys, scowled at the linesmen, whooped when he won a point. He was not so much surly or unsportsmanlike as unable to contain himself. Both Petra and Brown had blinding serves. Seldom had so much power and so little finesse been seen in a Wimbledon finals. Petra...
Jack Kramer, one of Southern California's innumerable gifts to tennis, sipped his tea and said: "Say, this stuff isn't bad." He was impressed, too, by the de luxe valet service in the locker room and the assemblage of 129 stars from 22 nations. It was Wimbledon's first All-England championship jamboree since 1939, and the only cloud in Kramer's sky was a blister the size of a quarter on his playing hand...
America's best hope at Wimbledon had failed, but a little-known fellow Californian-23-year-old Tom Brown of San Francisco-still had a chance. He upset Ecuador's flashy Pancho Segura last week, now had to get past (among others) Czechoslovakia's sizzling Jaroslav Drobny and France's veteran, 6 ft. 7 in. Yvon Petra to win. The U.S. women, led by Pauline Betz and Margaret Osborne, were still going strong...
...Kramer was temporarily excused from his job as a player on the U.S. Davis Cup team to compete at Wimbledon. This week, without him, the U.S. beat Mexico's Davis Cuppers to win the American zone playoffs...