Los Angeles, Feb. 26.
Some of my best friends are bees, and I wouldn't say anything against them for anything, but they are not such models of industry as they are made out to be.
You begin to realize this when you sit down and talk with Alice Marble, the greatest woman tennis player in the world. There never was a bee that kept as busy as Alice does. She has an occupation for each hour in the day. When she isn't playing tennis she is designing clothes. When she isn't designing clothes she is before a microphone crooning of a lovely flame that has died away. In between times she confers with the motion picture studio that wants to make her a second Sonja Henie, and plays golf and a little baseball.
The chances are that by next week she will have taken up midget auto racing, trapshooting, or throwing the taber. Sitting with her yesterday after a round of golf it was difficult to make her talk of tennis, so varied are her interests, But we finally did get around to tennis and she told me rather remarkable thing. Remark-lo, that is, for a champion. She admitted that the one thing which had held her back as a tennis player Gf you can consider a girl who has won three of the last four national championships and holds the Wimbledon Title as well, held back) is a lack of what we sports writers call the "killer instinct."
No "Killer Spirit"
"I just haven't got it," she said. "When I get a few games or a set ahead I cannot keep myself from letting up. Consciously, I soften my game and ease up on the pressure And I know enough about sports to know that the great champions never did that. When Dempsey knocked a rival down three times he wanted to knock him down three more times. Bobby Jones~and Walter Hagen increased the pressure when they got ahead of an opponent. Tilden, Budge and Helen Wills Moody Roark were the same way in tennis. I've te make myself do the same thing, but it was no use. I know I would have won more matches and championships had I possessed what you fellows call the "killer spirit.
I asked Alice if that were the reason for her slump against Helen Jacobs in the final round of the nationals at Forest Hills last summer. That was the time, you will recall, when Alice won the first set at love with scarcely the loss of a point, and then was just three games away from losing the title in the third and final set.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.