A People's History of Tennis by David Berry;

Author:David Berry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

10

Immigrants

In the middle of Crouch End in north London – hemmed in by suburban streets, million-pound houses and a school proudly describing itself as ‘truly comprehensive’ – is an open expanse of woods and meadows that has provided exercise and enjoyment for local people since the 1920s. Every weekend the area’s residents can be spotted here tending organic vegetables on their allotments, walking their Labradors and Labradoodles, or indulging in a game of cricket or tennis in one of the half-dozen clubs that jostle for territory here in this space known as Crouch End Playing Fields.

As you enter the fields from the main entrance in Park Road, the first tennis club you come to is called Georgians. It is a relatively new club with an array of clay, carpet and artificial grass courts painted in red, blue and green. The club house is well equipped with a coffee machine, bar and satellite television and there are four coaches who offer a wide range of courses to club members including cardio tennis, a Monday evening ladies session and a performance programme for talented youngsters. Fifty years ago, long before Georgians existed, the tennis played on this spot was more basic. In the late 1960s, there were four red shale courts here, all of which had seen better days, a dilapidated club house with no heating or showers and just one coach. That coach, however, was Cas Fish.

Cas Fish was an autodidact with a goatee beard and confrontational manner who first played tennis in his native Caernarfon in North Wales in the early 1950s when he was 15. The game quickly became his passion and teaching tennis to youngsters his life’s work. For five decades, until his death at the turn of the twenty-first century, Fish gave tennis lessons which emphasised ‘character, grit and courage’ rather than sound technique and correct strokes, the conventional coaching goals of that time. Never the most tactful of souls, Fish also found plenty of time to take on a self-appointed role as the Lawn Tennis Association’s ‘most outspoken critic’. He constantly lampooned the British tennis establishment and dismissed most tennis clubs as ‘social gatherings for middle aged people’. ‘The wrong people are playing tennis in this country’, he maintained. ‘If we ever want to be good as a tennis nation we are going to have to find ways of getting the right people into the game.’1

In the autumn of 1967, Fish set out to do just that. On those four battered shale courts in Crouch End Playing Fields, he set up the Dolphin Squad which would meet on Saturday and Sunday afternoons throughout the year for fitness training and tennis drills. The squad would be open to any promising junior to join as long as they committed to 15 hours of practice a week and accepted that there would be ‘no more parties and late nights, no more boy and girl friends’. ‘You get up early in the morning and get in an hour or more

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.