Freshman Enters Tennis Matches In New Orleans

While most collegiate tennis players are idle during the winter months, such is not the case for one Crimson athlete, Freshman Ted Backe, who left yesterday for New Orleans to play in the Sugar Bowl sports week tennis championships continuing through January 1.

With the United States Davis Cup squad in Australia, the remaining sixteen top men in the country including the two-handed racquet-wielder Pancho Segura, Bob Falkenburg, Seymour Greenberg, and Jack Tuero, are being invited to this meet. Its top-flight competition will not be new to Backe who ranked eighth nationally among Juniors in 1942 and in the same year advanced to the Sugar Bowl quarter-finals where he bowed to Billy Talbert only after forcing the doubles star to an extra set.

In his earlier days of tennis playing, Backe led the Bay Shore (L.I.) High School team, and later while at the University of Pennsylvania briefly before entering the service, defeated in three sees George L. Rogers, perennial stalwart of Ireland's Davis Cuppers. While in the service, the Holworthy Yardling played very little tennis, although he did win the Ohio State men's championships in the summer of 1943 when on furlough