Another Voice About The Farmers Tennis Classic

Written by: Tennischiro on 21st July 2011

Another Voice About The Farmers Tennis Classic |

I look forward to reading Isabelle Rose’s thoughts on the unfolding of this year’s Farmer’s Tennis Classic and how it holds up against her 10 years of memories. I too will be bringing you a blog on the Farmer’s Tennis Classic. I won’t be able to get to quite as many days of the tournament as Isabelle; however, my perspective should be a little different. I started going to the Pacific Southwest at the venerable Los Angeles Tennis Club in 1964. I played in the junior division in 1965 and 1966, thus earning my early round grounds pass. Then, every year through 1970, I would get my pass by playing the qualifying for the main event. Then I was off in NY for most of the 1970s, but I saw that a player I had a win over won the tournament in 1979 and in 1985 a player I was coaching during the summer actually won in one of the most exciting finals every played here. Then a few times in the 90s, I was able to come to the event to recruit players to play in the pro-am I was running in the Hamptons just before the US Open. In recent years, I haven’t been to UCLA as much as I would have liked, but when I did come I have been able to relax and enjoy the matches as just another tennis fan without any special agenda, except occasionally to try to introduce one of my students to some of the subtleties of pro tennis. I will try to give you some different ideas of what to look for when you are watching these matches. And there are plenty of places to find them. If you can’t get there, you’ll find plenty of coverage on ESPN2 and The Tennis Channel; and if you want to see the early matches on line, check the gambling sites.

As Isabelle was so quick to point out, there is nothing quite like being there. The game has changed so much in the time I’ve been involved in it. I am a bit of a classicist and really miss the elements of the serve-and-volley game that dominated hard court tennis for so many years. But at the same time, I marvel at the skill and athleticism that today’s tennis athletes routinely display. And I’ve been blessed to be able to see many of those incredible athletes up close and personal as a fan, a competitor, a coach, a tournament director and even as a chiropractor.

So that you understand and, hopefully, appreciate the perspective I bring to the table here, I want to tell you a little bit about me and my love affair with tennis for the last 49 years. Like most relationships that last that long, there have been ups and downs, but I will spare you most of the downs. (Most of my friends that have heard this before would probably suggest I spare you the whole thing, but they have no vote here! You, of course, can mouse to the next article.)

I was raised to be a baseball player. Even after I was named an All American in college (NAIA), my dad still wanted me to go out for the baseball team. But at 5’2″ and unable to hit the curveball in the ninth grade, I became the batting practice catcher and bat boy for the varsity at Loyola High School. Hey, I was the right height. In the spring of that year, 1963, we moved across the street from the tennis courts at Riverside and Los Feliz in Griffith Park. My dad had dragged me out to play with him a few times the previous fall so he could get some exercise and I kind of enjoyed it, but nothing serious. That summer I started to practice against the backboard a couple of courts over from the teaching pro’s court. The pro was Gordon Sears. He offered me free lessons if I would work as his ballboy during his lessons. His previous ballboy hit the ball great and looked like he was having a great time hanging around Coach Sears. (That previous ball boy was Randy Kramer who soon started to focus more on stringing rackets rather than swinging them and would go on to start The Racket Doctor tennis shop.) It was the best offer I had and so I started picking up balls in exchange for tennis lessons.(As I look back, this must be the ultimate Tom Sawyer “white-wash-the-wall” trick. I’ve never been able to pull it off for any length of time. At the same time, it was my first tennis business deal and one of the few that ultimately really paid dividends.) I was really just a beginner, but at least I was learning to play and I would play quite a few times each week.

During my sophomore year, I went out for the baseball team again and I was still too small and I still couldn’t hit the curveball. Cut from baseball, I tried the track team for a couple of weeks. That was definitely not for me. I couldn’t understand how track athletes and swimmers do their workouts. When I practiced tennis, I was playing a game. You could keep score. That was fun. And all through that year, I was continuing to play tennis for fun. I wasn’t ballboying for lessons and I wasn’t playing very well, but I was getting better. It didn’t even occur to me that I could go out for the tennis team.

My friends and I got sidetracked a little bit by golf. Just a few minutes walk from our apartment was the Coolidge par 3 course that we could play for 25 cents. Really, 25 cents. The real challenge was whether or not you could find more balls than you lost; otherwise, you couldn’t afford to keep playing. The golf was really pretty weak, but at least it was a game; it beat the hell out of running circles around the track and up and down hills, at least for me. That summer we played quite a bit of golf.

At the same time, I was continuing to play some tennis and gradually I was learning. I had just about given up on making the baseball team; I couldn’t even find a team to practice with. Marshall High School played at the Griffith Riverside courts and I started to play with some of the team members. But one of my friends went to a different high school where Bob and Don Lutz played, St. John Vianney. Their high school team was not as good overall as Loyola High School’s team, but Bob and Don were national champions. And my friend Larry Demos had earned a letterman’s sweater, and I could beat him, at least part of the time. Now I’m not sure about today, but in the 60’s at Loyola High School, having a letterman’s sweater was a big deal. I started to play more tennis.

Then towards Xmas break of my junior year, I went to Mr. Sears and told him about my plan to go out for the tennis team. I wanted to take some lessons. He suggested I start picking up balls again. I was 16 and lo and behold, I had finally grown a little bit; I was almost 6′ tall. But I started hanging around the courts and picking up balls for Mr. Sears again for a lesson at the end of the day. I was a pretty serious academic student, but I played every chance I could and a couple of months later I went out for the tennis team. Well, the coach, Fr. Carroll, wasn’t impressed. After just a couple of weeks, I was cut from the junior varsity tennis team! The JUNIOR Varsity!! I’ve taken you through all this gibberish, because you have to understand what a profound disappointment this was for a 16 year-old boy. I was pretty bad, but I don’t think I was that bad. To this day, I don’t know why Fr. Carroll didn’t give me more of a chance.

However, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Except for the days I was hanging off the balcony watching matches at the Pacific Southwest until dark and the few days of rain we had, I barely missed a day of practice for the next couple of years. I entered every tournament I could get into. In those days, we had lots of B,C,D tournaments for adults. If I couldn’t play a junior tournament (where I got killed), I would play C’s and D’s. And I could barely win a round in the D tournaments. I would sometimes enter 3 events in the same weekend. Invariably, I would get pounded.

I was very fortunate. Marshall High School had a legendary tennis coach, Lou Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler let me practice with his team members during their team practices. He didn’t care if I wasn’t going to play for him. I was just a kid who wanted to learn to play and I offered some competition for his players. So although getting cut from Loyola’s team was heartbreaking, I probably got a better level of practice than I would have gotten playing with Loyola’s junior varsity. I would have been more likely to accept my fate on the JV’s. But I never gave in. DON’T EVER GIVE IN! A little over 19 years later, one of my buddies on Marshall’s team, Guillermo Oropez, and I won a gold ball at the USTA National 35’s Grass Championships at the International Tennis Hall of Fame 10-8 in the third set tie-breaker in the finals! Not bad for a couple of kids from the park. Guillermo had played number one for Marshall in 1965.

I played as much as I could that summer and began to make some progress. I even began to win some matches. I had a potato sack full of about 100 tennis balls and I would carry it over to the courts and hit it a couple of times every night. I still didn’t know how to hit a spin serve, but all those years of baseball had given me a great snap. I could literally knock my opponents down with an effectively placed body serve…hey, they were only c and d players!

In the fall of my senior year in high school I went to play at the LA Tennis club in the Pacific Southwest junior championships for the first time. I got blitzed. But the Spalding representative thought enough of my game to offer me free Spalding rackets. Things were looking up. More importantly, participants were granted grounds passes for the first few days of the men’s championship as well.

I think this was my first exposure to the Pacific Southwest. I couldn’t get too close for the main matches, but at the end of the day, they would play doubles matches until dark and the stands would empty out. You have to remember the world circuit was completely different. The players had just completed the grass schedule, wrapping up with the US Open. The Pacific Southwest was the biggest tournament in Southern California, but to the touring world class players it was little more than an exhibition. And until 1968, the only money was expenses or under-the-table appearance fees that only a few players could demand. So at the end of the day in 1965, 1966 and 1967, I could move over to the balcony on center court hanging right over the players. That meant Newcombe, Roche, Emerson, Stolle, Ralston, Pasarell, Bowery, Davidson, Ashe, Graebner, Riessen, Santana, Nastase, Okker, Pilic and many more literally just a few feet away from me as they tried to retrieve overheads before they went into the balcony seats; and they were having so much fun.

For the next 6 years, I would be at the Pacific Southwest every chance I got. Loyola High School didn’t start it’s school year until the end of September, so I had little if any conflict there and then when I went to Harvey Mudd in 1966, classes didn’t start until late September. In the 1966 Junior Pacific Southwest I didn’t get such a great draw. I drew Jim Rombeau who was one of the top 3 juniors in the country. After he got done trifling with me, a few days later he was giving Dennis Ralston a hard time in the men’s draw. But that was my relationship with the Pacific Southwest: I played Jim Rombeau and a few days later he was playing the number one men’s player in the US. It was just one degree of separation. In 1971, I would get to practice with Dennis Ralston in NY. The same winter I would get to practice in NY with the 1966 champion, Allen Fox.

I had other experiences like that in the men’s qualifying draw in later years. One year I had to play a Beverly Hills lawyer who had played some tennis at UCLA, or so I thought. More than some tennis, he had won the NCAA singles, doubles (with Fox) and team championship for UCLA in 1960. His name was Larry Nagler. We had a nice match. He won in straight sets. In 1970, just before I took off for NY, I played a 17 year-old kid from Ensenada and I let him get away in a couple of long sets. I remember Earl O’Neill (Earl had just won the NCAA Div II’s that year and I had caught him on a bad day the year before in a dual match singles victory at Irvine) telling me to be tougher on the young kids; not to let them get the upper hand. That young kid won a match in the main draw as a lucky loser. But 6 years later, Raul Ramirez became the first player to finish the year number one in the Grand Prix standings in singles and doubles. And I actually thought I could have beaten him… Fool! On the other hand,a little less than a year later on horrendous NY city public clay courts, I beat the #3 Mexican player, Vincente Zarazua in a satellite qualifier for the US Open. The courts were so bad, he really didn’t want to play! The service box looked like a bombed out runway and I was really pumped up.

In the meantime, I want to tell you that there is a great opportunity to see some excellent tennis up close and personal at the Farmer’s Tennis Classic, beginning this Friday. I had such a great time in the old Pacific Southwest at the LA Tennis Club. The atmosphere at the club inspired a certain kind of reverence enhanced by the great players I saw there. The chance to get close to them and see exactly what they were doing as they practiced on outside courts and as they played those doubles matches until dusk and beyond on a deserted center court was invaluable to me. It inspired me as well as taught me what they were doing. This weekend you will have a chance to get close to the players without all the crowds. If you want to see the big name players, they will be practicing at the main courts at the LA Tennis Center all weekend. You may have to go to one of the back courts, but the crowds will be much lighter this weekend. On Friday, a number of players will be playing in the Wild Card Shootout. It’s a wild event and you will be able to get close. Then, Saturday and Sunday, the first two rounds of qualifying take place at the Sycamore courts. Seating is immediately behind the courts and you are literally just a few feet away from the players much like my old balcony seats at the LA Tennis Club. And admission is free!! I’m planning on being there Saturday.

The player that won the tournament in 1970 was Rod Laver. Just 4 months after I lost that match to Raul Ramirez, I would end up going through a blizzard in NY from Grand Central Station to Madison Square Garden to play with Rod and Ken Rosewall to help them prepare for their $10,000 winner take all match the next day. I’ll tell you more about how that came about from selling printing for the Pacific Southwest to Jack Kramer in my next post.

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Don Brosseau teaches tennis for LA Tennis at the same Griffith Park courts where he learned to play almost 50 years ago. He also works with the Peter Smith Tennis Academy in Seal Beach. And at least one day a week, he works part-time as a chiropractor in Thousand Oaks. He was one of the founders and for 20 years was the TD for the Huggy Bears Invitational in the Hamptons.