AMATEURS AND WRITERS

If a recent recommendation of the Amateur Rule Committee is accepted, tennis players will no longer be allowed to write articles on teals "sub-stantial compensation" and retails their stains as amasser. The Committee explains that it has made this decision because some players have gone so far as to make their living almost exclusively by capitalizing their reputation at tennis. But since the Committee does not believe that any player can support himself by printing wholes books on tennis, this is still to be permitted. Tennis for the amateur must be strictly an avocation; but a player may earn small sums on the side.

Here is a subtle distinction. A man must have some outside business or source of income so that he may engage in tennis merely for pleasure. But if he earn a small amount, he is still and amateur.

In saying this, the Committee goes only half-way. If authorship of tennis articles constitutes a violation of the spirit of the rule, than writing tennis books is also a violation. If the good name of tennis demands a stricter standard, well and good. There is no doubt that a player like Miss Wills, who refused a syndicate offer from twenty-five papers, does much to keep the sport on a strictly amateur basis; but so many minor abuses are present that either all of them should be recognized as legitimate, or all ruled out as harmful. The story of the man who made his living by melting silver cups which he had won in tournaments, is merely an exaggerated example. Either tennis should proclaim a complete house-cleaning, and dust the shelves as well as the floor, or else it should let the dust lie still. Luckily the dust is not yet very heavy.