The Apotheosis of Tennis.

If the leading universities and colleges of America decide to make lawn tennis a major sport, as now seems likely, the action will mean almost as much to the future good of the game as an entire season of interesting competitions.

For some reason the importance of college games still depends largely upon their possibilities of physical injury rather than their potentialities of skill, and the spectators as well as the governing bodies hesitate to recognize any form of sport in which a player is not likely to be seriously hurt. Men who have played both university football and first-class tennis admit that a five-set tournament match may be a more grueling affair than the most desperate of gridiron battles, but with broken bones, cuts and bruises eliminated, there are usually no external evidences of the punishment. Unfortunately, however, it is also possible for a tennis, player to be an absolute quitter and yet be excused as merely "off his game" or "temperamentally unfortunate."

It is just such a condition that the traditions of collegiate major sport would remedy. A man wearing his college let- ter would think twice before allowing himself to be beaten simply because he was weary and out of breath. A little more of the never-say-die spirit, as promulgated by the collegiate code of honor, would help both the standards of tennis and its popularity with the "red-blooded" variety of sport lover.

By all means let tennis be recognized as soon as possible as a collegiate major sport, where it belongs by every law of popularity, of physical demands and of standards of skill, so that eventually the last vestige of that stigma which has so long marked is as "a mere social diversion," will have been removed forever.  New York Times