Rob McLean - The long hot summer of 1976
With my four children breaking up from school, the long summer holidays lie ahead and I take on my part-time role as kids' unpaid coach and peace-maker to my daughters, all of whom refuse to wait their turn for a hit.
Unfortunately the days of trips to tennis camps are over unless I win the lottery. I recall that three of the best holidays I had were at the tennis camp of Lew Hoad, the Australian great, near Malaga in Spain. In the early 1990s and with just the one child in tow it was, then, very affordable.
Alas with three more daughters now, two weeks there would set you back something in the region of £6,000. Obviously if you have the dosh and love tennis these are dream holidays, with coaching courses daily and club tournaments as well as the weather and the sea. For the non-tennis lovers, the apartments are beautiful and the beach and pool are in close proximity.
Hoad, one of the all-time great players who came into the game at the same time as the other Aussie greats such as Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, was one of the first former pros to start a camp in the early 1960s.
It was there that I got some idea of where I was on the food chain of world tennis. Not very high. I managed to take four games off a county player in the the first set of our first round match played in temperatues of about 32C.
Subsequently I found out that he had lost in a first round of the National over-35 indoor singles to a player who had partnered Jeremy Bates in the Wimbledon veterans. So there it is, I was about 15 levels below a top line player. Clutching at straws, but some sort of level nonetheless.
If you want to be a pro, you had better start playing before the age of 10, not at the age of 19. In 1976, the hottest summer in living memory, I was so deluded that I thought I could actually make it on the strength of a few matches at boarding school, an assumption reinforced by the fact that so few people in the country appeared to play the game. In those days tennis seemed to played by the rich, girls or sporting geeks.
Thirty five years on nothing much appears to have changed on the landscape of British tennis - harsh but fair - but clubs do have tennis programmes for the summer and my kids will have to be happy with a temporary membership at the David Lloyd, rather than a trip to Spain.
We shouldn't have too much trouble getting a court. A friend of mine played tennis in a south London club last week on a late, warm Sunday afternoon and he and his partner were the only people there. Wimbledon's over, everyone loses interest.
Incidentally, 1976 was also the year Ilie Nastase reached the Wimbledon final before losing to Swede heart-throb Bjorn Borg. Last week the Romanian was 64 years old, which must make everyone who watched him in their youth feel very old indeed.
'Nasty', as he was dubbed, was one of the most naturally talented players of all time but his temperament often got in the way of winning titles and as a result he ended up losing matches he should have won. Nastase was a character but try telling that to the officials who he tormented mercilessly until he left a certain John McEnroe to pick up the baton in 1980.
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Serena Williams' foot injury will keep her out for three months and she is in doubt for US Open. Shouldn't be too much of a problem. She will return having had little practise and will demolish the opposition, again. If she plays at Flushing Meadows it will be a return to the scene of her crime from last year - the foul-mouthed outburst against a linesperson.
Date published :
21 Jul 2010 - 11:24:07
