Most people who take up tennis seem to feel that it isn’t worth the effort unless they can master the game in a short time. I can only say that I have never discovered any short cut to learning tennis. I feel that the player who is willing to learn slowly and soundly from the basic foundation of the game will benefit in the end. He will go ahead far faster than one who superficially picks up a flashy but unsound style in a short time, and then stops working. Weeks spent in laying a sound groundwork of correct strokes at the start will save years in the end.
There is nothing mysterious about tennis. It is a game of sound, scientific principles that anyone with an average mind and body can learn to play well if he will take the trouble to work at it. The great champions are not born but are made by their own-and at times their coaches’ efforts. In the years I have played tennis, I have looked for a born tennis player, but I have yet to find one. The best I have been able to do is to find a gifted athlete, but only long, hard work made the player. The two greatest naturals in tennis I ever saw were Vincent Richards and Frank Kovacs, yet neither had quite the willingness to do the long serious practice work that produces a champion of champions, and an all-time great.
I believe one can learn to play tennis in a year or less but it takes five years to make a Tennis Player and ten years to make a Champion. Much that is the trouble with tennis today is due to the unwillingness of promising youngsters to go through the proper preparations in laying a sound, scientific foundation. The result is that once the first flush of youth and athletic prowess starts to fade, the modern game disintegrates because it has no solid and intelligent foundation on which to depend.
Speed and power are essential in the equipment of every great player, but they alone cannot suffice. Attack alone, or defence alone, is not enough; a combination of the two, with the knowledge of how to employ them, is what makes your F.J. Perry, Ellsworth Vines, Jr., Donald Budge, or Bobby Riggs. It was not until Jack Kramer added defence to his attack in his professional tour. with Riggs that he established himself as the outstanding player of the world.
The success of the California game of hard hitting , exemplified by Vines, Budge, and Kramer might have done serious damage to the total picture of tennis if it had not been offset by the equal success of the subtleties and intellectual defence of Perry and Riggs. But all these great stars produced their outstanding performances only after learning the incontrovertible lesson that the combination of attack and defence, in proper blend, is the maximum in tennis skill.
The reader may feel that this explanation should come as a summing up to this book, but to me, if the proper picture is drawn at the beginning, then all that follows takes its place in logical order within the frame. The player who really desires to go high must have an ethical and technical background that will explain the game of today. The champion of today owes his game to the champions of yesterday, just as he will add his bit to the champion of tomorrow. The wise student should learn all he can about the styles and methods of the great players of the past, every bit as much as he does of the players of the present.
It is the fashion of the moment to view with patronizing contempt, as slightly obsolete, the game of any player who has been in the tennis world for a decade. As for anything older than that, the modern youngster either knows nothing or considers it a dead issue. Where would our culture, education, and art be if this became the fashion in these worlds? Why, then, should we ignore our valued heritage in athletics?
School and college coaches should hold regular classes in their sports that would provide accurate knowledge on the changing methods of their game, and of the great stars of the past. I often hear youngsters come out with remarkable but half-baked discoveries of shots or their uses that have been perfected and played years before by great stars of the past. Think how much trouble those boys or girls would have been saved if a coach had told them so, and gone on to explain correct technique.
There is nothing that Jack Kramer does today that players of the past have not done equally well. There are so me very valuable things of the past that have been lost in the wild scramble for speed and power. These should be recovered and brought back into the repertoire of the modern player.