PART ONE: The Good
Introduction
I grew up in a wealthy country town in the South of England in the 60s and 70s. We didn’t have any money, but we had a garden and a field behind our house, and being sports-mad from birth, and with the advantage of an older brother who was even more obsessed than me, most of my young days were spent playing football, rounders, jumping off swings and, by the time I was about five, hitting a tennis ball. I remember being given something called a ‘tennis trainer’ at that time, a kind of wooden frame with a ball hanging from an elastic band type device in the middle, for my birthday, and that enabled me to spend hours and hours whacking the ball with an old wooden racket (at least until the elastic kept breaking and the ball flew through windows, neighbours’ gardens and so on) pretty much every day.
By the time I went to the girls’ grammar school nearby (age 11), despite not having set foot on a real tennis court before, nor had any sort of coaching, when we started having tennis lessons as part of our regular curriculum (from a portly elderly lady who had probably never been on a court either) I was way ahead of anyone else in my tennis ability. At 12, I won the ‘junior tennis championship’, and soon I was the tennis star, winning all sorts of school and inter-school matches. I had absolutely no technique at all, just the ability to hit the ball very hard and run all day. (Actually, despite what happened next, that is probably still the case!!).
From about fourteen onwards, I was very keen to play tennis as much as possible, even considering that I could, actually, become quite good. But even though our town was one of very few in England that had a tennis club – most didn’t and still don’t – it was for members only, and the fees were completely out of our league. Other than that, there were a few public courts made of grey concrete, a bit like the surface of a carpark, where I and my best friend went to practice when we could, but since we didn’t have anyone to show us the proper technique, our practice wasn’t that useful. And, of course, in the winter, when it tends to rain a lot in England (😊), playing tennis outside was out of the question, and inside courts didn’t exist. And mostly still don’t.
Any thoughts that I might have had of trying to do something with the talent that I clearly had for tennis, therefore, were soon banished, since without bucketloads of money, and with no real tennis clubs, let alone coaches, within a huge radius from our home, there was absolutely no chance. And added to that, the headmistress at my school, when handing me the award for my latest tennis achievement, would tell me that ‘it was a pity that I didn’t apply myself more to my schoolwork and less to playing tennis’. She was probably right mind you.
Generally, at that time, as far as we in England were concerned, tennis meant Wimbledon. And if we stopped to think about it, I think we all believed that these tennis players that pitched up at Wimbledon each year spent the rest of their time preparing for it – we certainly didn’t realise that there were other tournaments in other parts of the world, all the year around. Actually, that is probably what the majority of people in England still think! And what we wanted, desperately, was a Wimbledon champion of our own.
My earliest memory of that actually happening, was when Virginia Wade won Wimbledon in 1977. Up until then, she had been regarded (not my opinion, note) as a bit of a failure, as despite getting to the later rounds on several occasions, she hadn’t actually WON. And then she did. No-one talked about the fact that she had won the US Open and the Australian Open in the past – we didn’t even know they existed. Or that she was ranked number 2 in the world. That meant nothing. If you didn’t win Wimbledon, you were nothing. How that must have hurt her (and others in the future. Tim Henman immediately comes to mind.).
Whilst everyone in England revelled in finally having a Wimbledon champion, though, a year later, a rather overweight and strange looking creature from Czechoslovakia appeared. We didn’t really know anything about Czechoslovakia or any of the other ‘Iron Curtain’ countries at that time, other than the fact that an awful lot of sports were dominated by athletes from other, similar places, such as the Soviet Union and East Germany. And since they were clearly all on drugs (or so we thought – more on that later), they didn’t really count. This particular person was called Martina Navratilova, a name that the English commentators still, to this day, battle to pronounce. And she played tennis like a goddess, making poor old Ginnie and some of the other lady tennis players look very amateurish. Thank God, said those same commentators, that our ladies still looked a lot prettier and wore nice frilly dresses.
So started the reign of Martina, who soon became ‘not-overweight’ and extremely fit and who could whack pretty much anyone that crossed her path, winning Wimbledon a record nine times, the last one being in 1990. Coincidentally, the same year that I, as a now grown-up working in London, was asked by the company I was working for, if I would like to go to Czechoslovakia to help in the newly opened Prague office. ‘Czechoslovakia’, I thought to myself. ‘Where the Hell is that?’. And then I remembered. First, the home of the Pardubice Steeplechase (horse racing being my other passion, and the ‘highlights’ of the race being occasionally shown on English TV – England also being mad about horse racing). And second, ‘Isn’t that where Martina Navratilova comes from?’. So I agreed to go. In a roundabout way.
And here I am, hundreds of years later, holding myself out as an expert on Czech tennis. OK, maybe not an expert. But I know a bit. Read on to find out more!
Incidentally, and before anyone kicks off – I do know that Jan Kodes was from Czechoslovakia and won Wimbledon before Martina, but that was a bit before my time and wasn’t regarded in the same way, at least not in England, due to so many of the other players not being able to take part (sorry Honza). And I will be talking about the many other Czech players that had, had one known, been making headlines for years before and after, but in my opinion, the start of everything that I am going to talk about was Martina. Just saying.
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