When Tennis Was King
When I was a boy growing up in my old home town of Box Hill tennis was one of those sports we all dearly loved and one which most of us shared.
At the Box Hill High School, the 900 boys were all encouraged to be very active in sports. Athletics was my primary love with winter cross country and summer track and field events. Then we were all expected to be in swimming teams either for our house or inter house competitions or with inter school competitions. These were interspersed during summer with our cricket teams and cricket competitions. In winter we all played a variety of football games and in my time I played for the school in Australian Rules, Soccer and Rugby.
But tennis was special. Many students stayed back after school every night to practise on our school tennis courts under the eyes of several school masters who were excellent tennis coaches. Our courts were concrete with black painted lines. There were occasions when the concrete cracked and tar was used to fill in the cracks and on hot summer days black tar prints could be seen all over the white concrete. The school did possess one entoutas court which was only used by the very best players, but we hired a score of entoutas courts in the community around about to have our regular Wednesday afternoon tennis.
I remember my racquet with great affection. It was a Dunlop Maxply. It was a matter of great joy when it became my companion as a Christmas present one year. It had a wooden frame, wooden handle with catgut stringing. It had to be kept in a press each night with four screws, one on each corner of the press, to keep it from warping. All of us wore all white costumes. It was absolutely forbidden to wear any piece of colour in any of the tennis outfits. If someone had worn a pair of white tennis socks with coloured tops it would have been an outrage. What on earth our school masters would have to say about the way people play tennis these days is left to the imagination.
We were greatly encouraged in our tennis because a former pupil of the school and captain of our school tennis team was at that moment the toast of Australia.
Frank Sedgeman was a pupil of Box Hill Boys’ High School, captain of our school tennis team, and in 1948 with John Bromwich he won the Wimbledon Doubles. He was to dominate tennis for the next five years. With Ken McGregor, Frank Sedgeman won Wimbledon Doubles in 1951 and 1952. He won Wimbledon Singles and Doubles in 1952 and the most exciting match of all, won the United States Singles in 1951. He was the first Australian ever to beat the Americans on their home ground. At school the next day Mr. Lyons, our senior master, a cranky, gruff fellow who was a former World War I sergeant and now close to retirement, brought the entire school to attention, announced the news that overnight our former school mate, Frank Sedgeman, had won the United States Singles and led us in three rousing cheers for Sedgeman hip, hip, hooray; hip, hip, hooray; hip, hip, hooray. The boy from Box Hill was certainly showing them. Sedgeman went on with Bromwich to win the American Doubles and then, in 1953, to win the grand slam of singles around the world and the grand slam in doubles with Ken McGregor.
Probably Sedgeman’s greatest win was the time he and McGregor successfully won the Davis Cup back from the Americans in 1950 in New York. We all sat up during the night and listened to our radios crackling out the broadcasts from New York. It was the first time Australia had managed to defeat the Americans and win back the Davis Cup in eleven years.
Ken McGregor and Frank Sedgeman went on to win 25 out of 28 Davis Cup rubbers.
Only those who lived in that era can remember, however, the dark shadow of Jack Kramer as he crossed the Pacific to try to lure our tennis champion Frank Sedgeman into becoming a professional. He offered an irresistible amount of money and in 1953 Frank Sedgeman, our first great post war champion, turned professional and left the ranks of the amateurs. How this devastated many of the sporting hearts of Australia.
Australia was not left bereft of course. We still had the foxy Harry Hopman bringing up a tremendous line of young Australian champions. The 17 year old lads, Hoad and Rosewall, were to be followed by Mal Anderson, Ashley Cooper, Neil Fraser, probably the greatest Australian singles player of all and the only one to win two grand slams Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe, Fred Stolly, Rex Hardwick there was a long line of great Australian men and women tennis players following the trail blazed by Frank Sedgeman.
Kooyong was on everybody’s lips each summer. In Sydney, White City was home of the world record crowd of 25,578 who saw Australia successfully defend the 1954 Davis Cup. This was big news for a confident Australia.
They were great years for sportsmen and no one who did not live them cannot fully understand what the Olympic Games in 1956 did in capping off a most remarkable era of post war sporting achievement.
At Box Hill we understood. Frank Sedgeman was one of our boys and we all knew that any boy from Box Hill could make it if he only tried.
So every night after school and every Saturday there were hopeful aspirants clad in white pounding balls around tennis courts.
My girlfriend, Beverley, played in competition tennis. Every night after school, before athletic training, I would practise hundreds of serves from one end of the court aiming at a tin can placed at various points along the receiving line in order to improve my serving accuracy.
I think one of the reasons why so few of us were delinquents was the fact that almost all of us were heavily involved in the energy using, character building, sporting competitions of our community.
Frank Sedgeman was later to visit our school and to speak to the students. He came back into Australia as a businessman launching a new product flavoured straws. He had this idea of putting an impregnated wad inside a drinking straw flavoured with chocolate or strawberry or some other flavour so that when the straw was placed in a half pint bottle of ordinary milk, the milk would change flavour as it was sucked up through the straw.
The vision of being able to take out of a packet a flavoured straw and drop it into a half pint and instantly have chocolate or strawberry milk sold hundreds of thousands of flavoured straws. Sedgeman was on another winner.
However, the straws had one great drawback. The first mouthful or two was full of so much flavour that it was hard to drink and by the time the half pint had run its course the flavour was so weak it was indistinguishable from ordinary milk. There was no way the flavoured straws could give a consistency of taste. So Frank Sedgeman’s great business empire, built on the fortune raised at the end of his tennis racquet failed to eventuate.
But that did not matter. In the eyes of all of us boys at the Box Hill High School Frank Sedgeman was and always will remain one of our great old boys, the first Australian to win Wimbledon and to defeat the Americans after the War.
I often thought of Frank Sedgeman and wondered whether I could reach some of his competence as I walked home from high school, up Devon Street, opposite the cow paddock, to No. 55 Birdwood Street, Box Hill, a great city which was then only a village, where the adults were kind and where the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
