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TENNIS SCHOOL: LOVE REKINDLED |
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It's probably the ideal game. No drive
for miles to reach snow-covered mountains. No hanging around for wind
and weather to make the perfect wave. It doesn't beggar you like golf,
and a few lessons in it take you further than in any other sport.
It's tennis, the Sport of Kings. And schools to make it easy have
sprung up everywhere after the initial example of the Rancho Bernardo
Inn in 1971. The Tennis College at Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego
is less active now but it has graduated more than 40,000 students
in the 30 years since it opened as the country's first tennis school. |
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| Although top professionals' tactics
keep changing, the pendulum of style keeps returning to the basics
of good forehand and backhand strokes, a solid serve and volley, and
some ability to handle lobs and overhead smashes. That's what the
Rancho Bernardo Inn has been teaching since it started and what you
can still get there in private lessons.
The original director of the Tennis College, Paul Navratil, took some satisfaction when the classic game came back in favor. "During the Bjorn Borg era everyone wanted to create top spin with a Western grip," he told me. "The idea was stay on the baseline and hit the hell out of the ball. But even then in Rancho Bernardo we were still teaching what we thought important: serve, volley, and still be able to rally." The tennis school today realizes that students come with different expectations and different amounts of an important factor: time. Ray Smith, one of the teaching professionals, reiterated that point as he met the small group he'd teaching for the next two days."It takes time to become an accomplished
tennis player," he said. "Two years, for example, to be
good enough to be a satisfactory rally to become an Open Player
that is, if you've got the ambition or in some cases (looking at
an older physician who had been teasing him), the longevity." |
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Today, Smith's students include a stockbroker,
a legal secretary, a school teacher, and a physician who hasn't played
tennis for 47 years and who intends to get a lot of mileage out of
that excuse. The instructor covers points like grip, footwork, and
the moment of contact, but he stresses the importance of anticipation.
"Every stroke has a preparation," he says, "and that's
often the most important part." Constantly he tells his students,
"Your middle name is 'Get Your Racket Back.' " |
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According to Smith, "The volley is mechanically the simplest shot to play but in terms of reacting to where the ball is going, it's one of the hardest." The overhead smash is the shot that makes you look like king of tennis when you get it in, or like the court jester when you miss.
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