Gould Out

Last week an item concerning Jay Gould, for 19 years the world's court tennis champion, appeared on the front pages of several metropolitan newspapers. The story of his life and his athletic successes was recounted with much picturesque detail, prefaced by the sad particulars of his recent and disastrous illness. His photograph also--a plump, animated, swarthy face with a short mustache and a very round high forehead--was published near the stock photograph of Henry Miller, the actor (see MILESTONES), who had died on the same day.

A closer scrutiny revealed that Mr. Gould was not dead. Far from it. He had merely defaulted his U. S. and international court tennis titles to Charles Suydam Cutting* because, as the result of a bad attack of influenza, his muscles were so stiff that he could not play in the challenge round of the national court tennis tournament at the Racquet & Tennis club. The funereal tone of the newspaper notices merely emphasized a statement made by a wise man that "athletes die twice--once when Death takes them and once when they retire from sport."

In 1906, at the age of 17, Jay Gould won the national court tennis championship from Charles E. Sand. He became the sporting sensation of the decade. He went abroad to get a match with Eustace H. Mills, champion of England, who did not want to play him at all, for he had heard the laconic comment of Major Cooper Key that "America has put the brains of a veteran into a youth of 17." Public sentiment forced Mills into the match and he won. Jay Gould returned to the U. S., entered Columbia, was elected captain of the freshman track team, led his class to triumph over the sophomores in the annual class rush, waited on table and shined shoes (as an initiation rite). In 1907 he beat Vane H. Fennel for the right to play Mills again, and after one of the hardest court tennis matches ever played in England (it lasted two and a half hours) he won the world title, five sets to three. Mills said that he had lost because of cramps. From that day Mr. Gould has dominated court tennis. No amateurs and very few professionals could even give him a game. He will still compete in doubles matches.

*A member of Theodore Roosevelt's recent Ovis poli hunting party.