Below, snippets from all matches in 1939 in which Vines' serving was described -- whether positive or negative descriptions.
All of these quotes are from newspaper or magazine reports in '39.
Jan 3 (New York), Vines served 5 aces
Jan 4 (Boston), Vines out-aced Budge 9-6
Jan 5 (Philadelphia), Vines “Scores With Fast Service”. Per ALT, “Budge found the service and forehand drive of Vines stronger and more accurate in this third meeting of the tour.” He out-aced Budge 9-2.
Jan 7 (Chicago), per ALT, “Never has Vines hit with greater power or with more uncanny accuracy. His service was an unleashed thunderbolt.... Time and again Budge stood helplessly by as Vines’ booming services rocketed by him.”
Jan 9 (Pittsburgh), “A capacity crowd of 6000 tennis fans at Duquesne Garden saw Budge break through Vines' cannonball service three times in the first set, while Vines twice cracked Budge's softer serve. Budge won the match with better control of his shots than was exhibited by Vines, as well as a superior net game that gave him point victory every time he went up. Vines hit much the harder ball on service and from the baseline.”
Jan 10 (Cincinnati), Vines “vicious service”
Jan 12 (Detroit), Vines out-aced Budge 9-1
Jan 14 (Minneapolis), Vines “working his ace service ball often”. Per ALT: “Trailing at 1-2 in the second Ellie won five straight games with an unbeatable streak that included five services aces...he left the 6,000 spectators, the largest in the history of Minneapolis tennis, with the feeling that nobody in the world could have stood up against his hitting that night.”
Jan 16 (Kansas City), “only Vines’ service did his bidding”
Jan 17 (St. Louis), Vines “found only his service working”
Jan. 19 (Cleveland), “Vines raised his game to spectacular heights to produce the best tennis of the match as his powerful serve began clipping the lines, enabling him to take the net against Budge’s soft returns and lay them away”
Jan. 20 (Buffalo), after the doubles Jack Castle compliments Vines on his serve: “I never saw anything like it. I knew it was fast, but when you lean on it, it just can’t be seen. Goodness gracious, Don can’t hit a ball the way you do.” Budge says, “It looks that way to me sometimes, too.” Vines led Budge 4-2 in aces.
Jan. 21 (Baltimore), Vines played poorly but “scored an ace now and then, Budge letting the sizzler go by”; he “rallied his service strokes in the sixth game to save a shutout, forcing two faulty returns of the first one and then rifling an ace past Budge”; out-aced Budge 2-0 (match only 15 games long)
Jan. 23 (College Park), “The victor’s placement was excellent and his service more than once too hot for the redheaded Californian to return.”
Jan. 24 (Richmond), “Many remarked, however, that at the rate Vines was whipping across his first serves on this night and gambling with abandon with drives that skimmed the net and cut the lines, little could have been done about it by the world’s greatest player, amateur or professional.”
Jan. 25 (Chapel Hill), Vines “shooting across ace services with set regularity”
Jan 29 (Miami Beach), Vines “won his sets on the service, which experts rate as the world’s best”
Feb. 1 (Everglades Club), Vines’ “cannonball service” was one of “the chief characteristics” of the match.
Feb 3 (Atlanta), Vines served 32 aces. “After breaking Budge’s service in the thirteenth game, Vines went after his prey like a hungry tiger and won the last game at love. Included in the last game were two of Ellsworth’s blistering service aces.”
Feb. 8 (Houston), “Budge outlasted Vines' cannon-ball service to win”
Feb. 9 (Dallas), Vines “won the eighth game at love when for the only time in the match he had his bullet service behaving in old-time style, taking the first three points on as many serves with aces”
Feb 12 (Los Angeles), Vines had “three flashing service aces” in one game near the end
Feb. 15 (San Francisco), “Vines’ cannonball service later forced the Oakland redhead into errors and he lost the set, 7-5.” Also: “Vines' terrific cannonball service proved the deciding factor of the twenty-eighth match of the series.”
Feb. 17 (Seattle), “Vines’ service was brilliant at times”
Feb. 20 (Oakland), “Vines won principally by managing to keep his cannon ball service under control for the first time in several matches.” And “his service almost tore the racket out of Budge's hand time and again—when it didn't pass him completely for an ace.”
Feb. 21 (San Jose), “Vines’ crash-service was too hot for Budge”
Feb 27 (Milwaukee), Vines out-aced Budge 13-1. “Vines’ booming service still as effective as ever”, had 3 aces in one game
Mar. 2 (Rochester), “Vines’ own service was not broken once as he outhit his powerful younger opponent.” Vines may have hit 22 aces in this match, or possibly later in Providence.
Mar 3 (Troy), Vines served 11 aces
Mar 4 (Providence), the crowd “thrilled at the steam of Vines’s service late in the second set when he put over several aces on his red-headed opponent.” The next day Budge told the press: "Elly’s big gun is his service. We’ve figured out that in every game he serves against me he wins a point and a half outright, on that cannonball! It’s terrific! He serves three or four aces to my one. But the other night when he walloped 22 aces against me in two sets he still had to go 7-5 and 8-6 to beat me!"
Mar 6 (Montreal, last match of U.S. tour), “Even Vines’ cannon-ball service failed to dent his rival’s armor, Budge breaking through the truly terrific delivery seven times”
March 27, doubles match in San Francisco, ending 12-10 in the fifth. Vines/Gledhill vs. Budge/Perry. Per the Auckland Star, the four men held serve at one stretch in the fifth for 16 consecutive games. "Throughout the match the crowd was thrilled by the cannon-ball serves of the ‘lanky’ Vines. He put over ten aces in his 16 games, clean beating Budge no less than seven times and Perry thrice. He also won four of his games at love."
April 2, Los Angeles, the same doubles pairs again. From 5-all to 18-19 in the fifth set, no one was broken.
May 16 at Wembley, Vines served 30-32 aces in a three-set win over Nusslein.
May 18 at Wembley, Vines made “wonderful serves” against Budge. Per the press, “He even ‘aced’ Budge with his service which seemed, if such a thing is humanly and mechanically possible, to be occasionally faster than Donald’s.”
May 20 at Wembley, Vines served “severely” in his loss to Tilden.
May 26 at Dublin: “Vines thrilled the large crowd with some glorious driving and serving” against Budge. “He held his own service games easily with terrific cannonball deliveries, while Budge had to fight deuce and vantage battles for most of his.” Vines’ service also “proved a useful weapon” in a close win over Stoefen.
May 29 at Cheltenham: “Vines’s cannon-ball service seemed to have lost none of its power, and this, combined with some superlative drives, kept him always ahead” of Budge.
June 1-3 at Southport: “Vines slammed his big service home time and again” throughout the three days, but in a win over Tilden he "was listless, his drives being erratic and his service faulty."
June 25 at Scheveningen, The Hague: “... that which Tilden, Vines, Budge, and Stoefen displayed, belongs indeed to the strongest tennis that one can think of. The most difficult shots were performed with miraculous ease, canon serves thundered within the lines and the sharpest volleys were fired.” Of the Budge/Vines meeting: “It was a fierce battle, in which the speed [power] of Vines initially triumphed over the fine touch of Budge.”
July 2 in RG final: per the AP, Vines’s “service was powerful but he failed to follow it up.”
July 21, Bristol: Vines had 16-18 unreturned serves in a 7-5, 6-1 win over Tilden (who had 10 himself). “The wooden court was often rendered treacherous by the rain, but completely failed to check a brilliant stream of terrific services, sizzling drives and crisp volleys from W. T. Tilden, J. Donald Budge, H. Ellsworth Vines, and Lester R. Stoefen.”
Aug. 4-5 at Southport: "Vines, suffering from a strained back, was unable to serve fast against Dan Maskell." The next day, "Vines was still deprived of his big service by back trouble and so he had perforce to play Nusslein at his own game. If there is one thing impossible it is to 'out Nusslein' Nusslein. He can only be beaten by being blasted off the court, and Vines without his heavy artillery cannot do that."
Aug. 15, Glasgow: “tremendous driving and cannon-ball services of Vines” against Tilden.
August 25, Edinburgh: “a crashing service” by Vines in the second set against Stoefen, though Vines was implied to serve poorly in the third.
Oct. 22, US Pro: Vines was reported to have a lame shoulder at this tournament but he “had too many cannonballs for Gorchakoff” in the quarterfinals, and he out-aced Perry 22-6 in the final. In a doubles semifinal Vines “was serving cannonballs” and “did not lose a service in the entire three long sets” (7-5, 10-8, 6-3).
