ROY EMERSON TENNIS CHAMPION RUNS THE BEST TENNIS CAMP IN THE WORLD @ THE PALACE HOTEL IN GSTAAD , SWITZERLAND BY RICHARD EVANS

Written by: Staff on 17th June 2015

ROY EMERSON TENNIS CHAMPION RUNS THE BEST TENNIS CAMP IN THE WORLD @ THE PALACE HOTEL IN GSTAAD , SWITZERLAND BY RICHARD EVANS |

(Photo Above Courtesy of: Ashley Evans)

Emmo at The Palace by Richard Evans.

By the time Roy Emerson had won the Swiss Open title at Gstaad five times in the sixties and returned to lose in the final to Ilie Natsase in 1973, he was falling in the love with the place. For a country boy from the flat Out Back of Queensland, the soaring Alps encased in their mountain greenery which were so visible from his room at the imposing Palace Hotel offered a spellbindingly different view during the summer months.

And right below him were the red clay courts laid out near the terrace where one could feast on some of the best cordon bleu cooking you could find at any hotel in the world. So, after a quick chat with his wife Joy, who loved the glamor and style of the place, Emerson approached Ernst Sherz, the owner the Palace and made a suggestion.

“Why don’t you let me make proper use of those lovely courts of yours and let me run a summer camp here in July and August?” he said. It did not take Herr Sherz long to agree and the pair shook hands on a deal.

“That was 41 years ago,” Emerson said as we enjoyed a dinner prepared by Head Chef Peter Wyss and his retinue of sous-chefs. “And here we are – never missed a year. It was just a handshake. Never seen a bit of paper concerning our agreement.”

It makes you wish more business could be conducted this way. But it does require the level of trust and honor that exists between the Swiss hotel family – Ernst’s son, Andrea Sherz is now in charge –and the straight talking Aussie whose word has always been his bond.

“It’s been an amazing run we’ve had,” said the man the tennis world knows as Emmo who, at 78, is not quite as mobile as he once was but is still enthusiastic enough to get out on court and demonstrate how to hit a backhand. Or even a serve which was not something he would have enjoyed doing at the height of a playing career that brought him 12 Grand Slam singles title and no less than 16 in doubles.

“I had a terrible serve,” he freely admits to the bunch of pupils who cluster round him. He is being a little too self critical. There was not much wrong with the end product – you don’t win two Wimbledon with a terrible serve – but what he meant was that it LOOKED terrible. A series of circular gyrations were required before he could actually release the ball for the toss. It finally got straightened out towards the end of a career that had seen Emerson earned a deserved reputation for being the fittest, fastest player of his generation.

And that did not happen by chance. As a child he grew up barefoot in a little place called Blackbutt where he soon discovered that the first task of the day was to milk his Dad’s cows. There was one tennis court and he played barefoot on that, too, before an obvious aptitude for the sport saw him sent away to school in Brisbane and a rapid progression to State level tennis where he fell under the eye of Harry Hopman, the legendary Australian Davis Cup captain.

“I had to be fit,” he says with a famous Emmo chuckle. “You couldn’t survive with Hop if you weren’t. We played six sets a day and then he’d hit us with two-on-one drills.”

But it was a different world then and although Hopman banned smoking and tried to limit the beer intake of Rod Laver, Neale Fraser, Rex Hartwig, Fred Stolle and others on his squad, there was a drinking culture amongst young Aussies that makes today’s players eyes pop when you tell them about it. You’d lose count of the number of beers Emmo and his pals would put away of an evening – on tour you were expected to be at the hotel bar at 7.00 pm sharp for the first of the evening or face a fine – but, the next morning Emerson would be the least affected. Apparently incapable of suffering from a hangover, he would be singing in the shower at 7.00 am and drag his mates out for a run that would sweat the alcohol out them. Then it was time for a few holes of golf and a nice long five set semi-final or final in the afternoon. The game might not have been as powerful with those wood rackets but let no one suggest that bunch of Aussies were anything less than great athletes.

Emerson always played as good a game in the bar as he did on court and for the first couple of decades that he ran his camp in Gstaad, he kept his clients up till all hours in the Palace Hotel bar, regaling them with jokes and stories. Quite a few found the 9.00 am start time for tennis the next morning a really tough call.

Now Emmo needs his sleep and Joy, who is an integral part of the whole set up, makes sure he gets it. It is Joy who does all the emailing and makes the phone calls necessary to move about 30 people in and out of Gstaad every week and as they come from all over the world, it is no small task.

The week my son, Ashley, and I joined in for a few days, there were some ladies from England, three families from San Francisco; a Mom from San Diego who had dumped the kids on her husband so she could enjoy “her annual treat” as well as a local, Edgard Bovier, who runs three restaurants down the mountain at the Lausanne Palace – headquarters on the Olympic Committee (IOC) – by the shores of Lake Geneva. Bovier is the proud owner of a Michelin star rating but he couldn’t find anything to complain about while enjoying the succulent lunch buffets served up for Emerson’s clients.

With one pro, including Emmo’s son, Anthony, assigned to every three players, everyone gets a good work out and plenty of attention although Marion Schaefer from Palm Springs is not expected to run around quite as much as the others. A refugee from Nazi Germany who was sent by quick thinking parents to a private school in England before emigrating to the US, Marion, after 22 visits to Gstaad, told me she is still capable of hitting some good shots despite her age. She is 90 and she’s not wrong.

Apart from a spell at Williams Island near Miami, the Emerson family have been residents of Newport Beach, California for even longer than they have been visiting Gstaad. Although you could hardly call it visiting any any more. Emmo is part of the furniture and the main court down in the village which hosts the ATP tournament every year is named after him.

“I worked it out that I have spent nine years of my life in room 111 here at the Palace,” Roy said. “And you couldn’t find a better place to be. The staff are wonderful, the service is as good as you will find at any hotel in the world and you know how good the food is. I’m never surprised that we get a lot of repeat customers. We try to give them a good time.”

Emerson calls that handshake 41 years ago “the best thing I ever did” and it’s not hard to see why.

Note: The price per person for six nights at the five star Palace Hotel, including all meals, tennis tuition, a picnic and full use of the hotel spa facilities is $4,025.00. A partner using the same room who is not a tennis participant is charged $3,189.

Topics: Gstaad, Richard Evans, Roy Emerson, Switzerland, tennis champ

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