THE GOOD, PART 2: WELCOME TO A WHOLE NEW [TENNIS] WORLD!
I arrived in the then Czechoslovakia in 1990. No need to go into all the details of why, what I was doing, etc (you can find out more if you want to though in my book ‘The Charge of the Brit Brigade – Tales from Post Socialist Prague’!). At some point, after a year of spending about 18 hours a day in an office and the rest of the 24 hours drinking with my reprobate expat friends, I realised that I had to get back to being my former ‘athletic’ self, or I might not survive.
Once I started thinking about how I might do that, I remembered why I had been persuaded to come to Prague in the first place, and it therefore seemed only natural to try to find somewhere and someone to play tennis. So, having asked my assistant if she could research if there were any courts near to our office and, if there were, if there was anyone there that I could play with that spoke English, I soon found myself heading off to a tennis club where, she said, she had booked me a training session. Dressed in a pair of shorts and a T shirt that I had bought in the old department store Kotva (the only place that sold anything vaguely wearable at that time), wearing my tatty running shoes and holding an old wooden Slazenger racket that I had brought from England ‘just in case’, I walked into what was one of the scariest places that I had been to in my life, the 1. Czech Lawn Tennis Club (English translation, shortened to ‘1CLTK’), training ground for just about every famous and retired Czech tennis player, including Jan Kodes himself. And now me.
I actually thought that it must be a mistake. Surely a mere mortal like me couldn’t just turn up and play in such a place, but yes, I was assured, I had training booked with ‘Pan Ulmann’, and I must pay for the court before I went into meet him in case I ran away without paying (being a foreigner). So I handed over the equivalent of about Euro 3 for the hour and off I went. And then I had my training, which I will talk about later, and which cost me about Euro 8. This was, of course, a long time ago, but the point I am making is that tennis in the Czech Republic was then, and is still, just about, a sport that is available to all. People have not had to belong to a club to be able to play, and they do not have to have been rich in order to afford to hire a court in a club or anywhere else. Even now, there are amazing, high-quality courts in Prague that can be hired for less than Euro 10 an hour, which, if you compare with the cost of hiring a decent court in other capital cities (i.e. without being a member of a club) gives a hint of where I am going.
And then there is the infrastructure. 1 CLTK, despite being one of the main tennis training centres in the country with its more than 20 courts and long and successful history, is not the only big club. I doubt that anyone actually knows how many ‘proper’ tennis clubs there actually are in Prague, let alone the many small clubs and random ‘one-off’ courts that you can find around just about every corner of the city, if you choose to look. This is not a new phenomenon as all these clubs have been there and available to all for many, many years. And that is just in Prague. Go out into the country and you will see that just about every village and town has a tennis centre of its own, and whilst they are called tennis clubs or tennis centres, they couldn’t be further from the snooty-tooty members’ clubs that England is famous for. These places are all about the tennis (oh and beer drinking – if there are any facilities at all, they will have at least a small kiosk to serve that up), and all will have the ability to be covered in the winter to enable everyone to continue playing on the same courts and the same surfaces all the year around.
Of course, many countries, including the UK, have been investing huge amounts of money into their tennis infrastructure in recent years, but when looking at the question ‘Why does the Czech Republic have so many good tennis players?’ (not only women either, but I will come to that!), then as a start I think you have to look at its very long tennis history. Communism had a part to play (but I am not going to go into that yet), the huge infrastructure throughout the country that has been in place for almost the last 100 years, and the fact that, again partly due to Communism, tennis is only now starting to become an elitist sport; up until recently, tennis has been affordable to all, and anyone that showed ability was actively encouraged to pursue it.
There is something else in relation to infrastructure that I would suggest here. Many times, when I listen to the English commentators talking about Czech tennis, they say ‘how did a small country of just over 10 million people, manage to produce so many good players?’. My thought on this is that it is precisely BECAUSE it is a small country that they have achieved such results. Let me explain, for those that don’t know it. The Czech Republic has always been, and still is, although it is slowly changing, very Prague-centric. Everything happens in Prague. In the majority of cases, once a child starts to show a talent for tennis (or any other sport or whatever), irrespective of where in the country they live, they are sent to Prague for their education and coaching. Which means that these talented kids train together, play together and compete against each other from a very young age. And there is no doubt that the ability to train with good or better players on a regular basis, as well as compete against each other, is a big part of any young tennis player’s education. I.e. it is very difficult to improve if you have no-one very good to play against.
Add to that, the ability to travel to competitions all over what is a relatively small country, very easily and in a relatively short amount of time, and you are some of the way towards becoming or producing a champion. Which leads me, I think, to the people!
Next up: ‘Coaching anyone?’
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