Watching Andy Murray win the Wimbledon last weekend, I got more than a few glimpses of the great Ivan Lendl, his coach, in the stands. Lendl looks pretty much the same as I remember him from the 80’s, maybe a few pounds heavier.
It was probably my dad who got me started on tennis. My brother watched a little too, he didn’t like Lendl. In retrospect, its easy to see why, with his sawdusting and boring groundstrokes. My brother much preferred the young upstart Boris Becker. Those days, there were lots of tennis greats, Mats Wilander, Jimmy Connors (“can’t top-spin a ball to save his life” according to my brother), Mecir (I remembered he came to play an exhibition match here) and Jarryd. McEnroe was on the wane when I started watching, and Andre Agassi still had long blond hair and wore denim shorts at the US Open. Players like Sampras, Courier and Hewitt came a little later.
But by and large, my favourite tennis star was Stefan Edberg. I mean, every stroke he played was stylish. And he seemed like a nice guy in his demeanour and interviews, unlike McEnroe or Natase. Those days there was a one hour show called ATP something where they show interviews and tour matches around the globe. Another reason why i liked him was how he sliced every serve, and my tennis coach pointed out that Edberg used the Continental grip, similar to my style.
Oh yes, I had a tennis coach.
My dad got me started on tennis lessons from a guy called Allan, not sure how we got to know him. Every Thursday night for about 2 hours under the floodlights at the LLN tennis court, he taught me with a group of kids of varying levels of competency how to serve, volley, top spin, etc. i guess he was a much better player than he was a teacher. After about half a year I guess we stopped the classes, probably my parents realized it was a luxury we couldn’t afford.
So with the limited lessons, i continued playing through university. It was by accident my best friend in uni was a good tennis player, having competed at school level. It was easy to book courts in uni because every college had at least two courts. My friend told me that i was probably the third best player in my class, which was high praise considering how good the top two were.