GAME FOR THE AGES : Tennis Tournament Matches Seniors Against Juniors

On one side of the net was Ken Beer, 85, a retired airline pilot from Hillsborough, Calif.

On the other side was Gabe Goldstein, 9, a third-grader from Warner Avenue school in Westwood.

Of all the competition on center court at the Los Angeles Tennis Club--where so many stars have played, from Bill Tilden and Elly Vines to Budge, Kramer, Gonzales, Laver, Borg and McEnroe--there has rarely been a men’s (boys’?) match like this.

Both players were fresh from victories. Beer, the United States 85-and-over champion, had won one for octogenarians Sunday at La Jolla. Goldstein had won one for 10-and-unders at South Pasadena.

Speculation about Monday’s competition at the LATC was divided. It was, as the tournament name indicated: Youth vs. Experience.

Would the youngster’s boundless energy prove too much for the aged veteran? Or would the canny old-timer play keep-away with ball-control tactics?

“We had no idea how it would come out when we put our teams together,” said Jim Hillman, chairman of the Southern California Tennis Assn.’s junior development program, who selected 20 of his top juniors to meet 20 of the game’s elders in this event.

And this was one match for which spectators didn’t need score cards to tell which player was which.

One team featured knee braces, hearing aids, age spots, weather-worn smiles and players walking slowly. On the other, freckles were big, as were freshly scrubbed faces, flying shirttails, two-fisted backhands, high-fives and never-quit running.

For the record, Beer, the oldest player, defeated Goldstein, the youngest, 6-2, 6-1, and the juniors won the team match, 13-7, but there were some interesting developments along the way.

When the very young and the very old were matched, experience won out and the edge went to the elderly. Not only did Beer win, but Dorothy Bundy Cheney, 71, defeated Kristina Kraszewski, 9, in the featured women’s match, 6-4, 6-2.

“I was very mean to her,” Cheney said. “I had to be to win, and I had to win to uphold the honor of all the old folks here. She is such a sweet girl, I hated to do it, but I had to resort to some of the tricks I’d learned over the years.”

Cheney, who has won 188 national championships in a career that goes back to the Southern California championships in 1937, confused the Torrance girl with an array of twisting, slicing, cut shots that would have looked more at home on a Ping-Pong table.

“You can’t feel sorry for these kids, no matter how sweet they are, or they’ll knock your block off,” she said in defense of her tactics.

Beer, who didn’t take up tennis until he was 30 and never played in tournaments until he was 60, moved very little on the court but kept his tiny opponent on the run.

Late in the match, when the youngster stopped for a moment to towel off his sweating face, his father, Earl, observed: “The 85-year-old doesn’t seem as tired as the 9-year-old.”

Both enjoyed the unusual match.

Beer said: “I want to congratulate him on a good match. He’s a tough little competitor, but more than that, he is a gentleman on the court.”

Said Goldstein: “It was fun.”

When the ages began to narrow, though, and the juniors were 13 and 14, the seniors seemed out-matched. No one 13 or 14 lost a singles match and among the casualties were such long-ago champions as Sammy Match, Bobby Perez and Dorothy Head Knode.

Knode, the 1948 California State singles champion and U.S. Hard Court doubles champion in 1961, had the misfortune of drawing Nicole London, 13, perhaps the tournament’s finest junior.

London, a seventh-grade student at Malaga Cove intermediate school in Palos Verdes Estates, won the U.S. Clay Court 12-and-under championship last year, and recently won an international event at France. Last week, she won her class title in the Seventeen magazine tournament at Mission Viejo.

Nicole showed little respect for elders, posting a 6-0, 6-0 victory over the former champion.

Perez, 65, who first played on center court at LATC in 1946 and who later won several Pacific Southwest doubles titles there, found that tactics such as those used by Cheney didn’t work against teen-agers.

When Perez tried to slip across a twisting underhand serve--akin to a quick pitch in baseball--his opponent, James Conda, 14, smashed it down the line for a winner.

“How dare you,” the bearded Perez responded in mock anger.

Perez lost, 6-1, 6-0.

“If I can’t beat these kids, they ought to at least be old enough for me to recruit,” said Perez, who is an assistant coach at UC Irvine. “(Conda) could probably beat some of the players on my team right now.”

Conda, a ninth-grader from La Jolla, won the 14-and-under division two weeks ago at Ojai tournament.

One surprising development was that the longer the matches went, the more likely it was that the seniors would win.

Albert Hughes, 75, and Elbert Lewis, 78, the country’s top-ranked 75-and-over doubles team, outlasted J. R. Chidley, 10, of Riverside, and Bob Bryan, 11, of Somis, in a three-setter, and an even older team of Ron Brandon, 84, and Hugh Weckerly, 80, did the same to a pair of 9-year-olds, Brian Geddes of Seal Beach and Ashley Fickel of Santa Barbara.

Geddes, a sprite with an infectious grin and a serve bigger than he is, barely came up to the belt buckle of the 6-foot-4 Weckerly.

“It was quite a thrill to play kids like that,” Weckerly said. “They bang it as hard as they can and if it’s good, they win, and if it isn’t, they don’t. But it was great fun.”

The tournament was the idea of Pat Yeomans, 71, and Bill Lurie, 76, two longtime LATC members.

“Most young players don’t even know who we older players are,” said Yeomans, who as 17-year-old Patricia Henry--daughter of the late Bill Henry, former Times sports editor and international news commentator--won the U.S. junior girls’ championship in 1935. “Now that they know we can play, we hope it will give both of us more variety in our matches at our clubs.”

Yeomans did her part for the seniors, defeating Faye DeVera, 10, of Villa Park, and then gave copies of her book, “Southern California Tennis Champions, 1889-1987,” to all of the juniors.

Said Lurie: “We’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time. We felt it would be good for the seniors, good for the juniors and good for the (Southern California Tennis) association. The kids are coming up, the seniors are going down and this seemed a nice place to meet.

“We wanted to show these kids that we’re not over the hill yet. I know how they must feel. When I was a kid, I thought that anyone over 40 was over the hill, and now I’m almost twice that. I used to wonder why anyone over 40 would even want to play tennis.”

Lurie lost to Mikey Bryan, 11, of Somis, in one of the day’s longest matches, 6-3, 6-7, 6-1, but promised, “I’ll get ‘em next year.”

He added: “Next time, though, we may have to make it the 4s, 6s and 8s (age groups) instead of the 10s, 12s and 14s, like this year.”

MEN

Singles

Ken Beer, 85, (Hillsborough, Calif.) d. Gabe Goldstein, 9, (Los Angeles), 6-2, 6-1; Joey Zupan, 10, (Los Angeles) d. Bill Seidel, 80, (San Diego), 6-1, 6-1; Zachary Fleishman, 9, (Playa del Rey) d. Al Miller, 81, (Los Angeles), 6-2, 6-4; Mikey Bryan, 11, (Somis), d. Bill Lurie, 76, (San Pedro), 6-3, 6-7 (5), 6-1; Noah Newman, 11, (Hollywood) d. Nick Lavaneri, 75, (Monterey Park), 6-4, 6-3; James Conda, 14, (San Diego) d. Bobby Perez, 65, (Huntington Beach), 6-1, 6-0; Eric Lin, 13, (Anaheim) d. Sam Match, 65, (Los Angeles), 6-2, 6-2.

Doubles

P.J. Dormire, 14, (Santa Monica) and Glenn Weiner, 14 (Long Beach) d. Glenn Turnbull, 69, (Los Angeles) and Ed Doane, 70, (Los Angeles), 6-1, 6-1; Verne Hughes, 75, (Laguna Hills) and Elbert Lewis, 78, (Los Angeles) d. J. R. Chidley, 10, (Riverside) and Bob Bryan, 11, (Somis), 6-2, 4-6, 6-4; Ron Brandon, 84, (Anaheim) and Hugh Weckerly, 80, (San Diego) d. Brian Geddes, 9, (Seal Beach) and Ashley Fickel, 9, (Santa Barbara), 5-7, 6-4, 6-2.

WOMEN

Singles

Dorothy Bundy Cheney, 71, (Santa Monica) d. Kristina Kraszewski, 9, (Torrance), 6-4, 6-2; Lish Dudley, 74, (Los Angeles) d. Holly Freudenberg, 9, (Orange), 6-1, 6-3; Pat Yeomans, 71, (Los Angeles) d. Faye DeVera, 10, (Villa Park), 6-4, 6-2; Nicole London, 14, (Rolling Hills Estates) d. Dorothy Head Knode, 63, (Los Angeles), 6-0, 6-0; Sandra DeSilva, 14, (San Marino) d. Maria Denker, 62, (Studio City), 6-0, 6-1; Amanda Basica, 10, (Lomita) d. Eleanor Harbula, 65, (Sylmar), 6-0, 6-1; Jennifer Momii, 11, (Gardena) d. Phyllis Adler, 64, (Los Angeles), 6-2, 6-3.

Doubles

Judy Stark, 69, (Los Angeles) and Jane Sutherland, 70, (Los Angeles) d. Shannon Wilkins, 10, (Irvine) and Rondia Morris, 10, (San Diego), 6-2, 6-3; Brandi Freudenberg, 11, (Orange) and Rosemary She, 11, (Cerritos) d. Cheney-Corky Murdock, 69, (Los Angeles), 6-1, 6-3.