“In Newport, R.I., visitors can stop by the tennis museum’s “Tennis and the Titanic” exhibit as a tribute to Hall of Famers Richard Norris Williams II and Karl Howell Behr. They met in their 20s aboard the rescue vessel Carpathia and became friends, with both tennis and tragedy in common.

Williams, who grew up in Switzerland, was headed with his father to Massachusetts, where he would attend Harvard. As the ship went down, the two prepared to jump in the water, but one of the Titanic’s smokestacks toppled, crushing Williams’ father.

The 21-year-old jumped in nonetheless and found a lifeboat.

“He climbed aboard that and spent the next five hours waist deep, or occasionally deeper, in 28-degree water,” said Williams’ son, Quincy Williams, now 80, who was on hand for the exhibit’s opening Thursday and participated in a public discussion with members of Behr’s family.

Behr, an already successful tennis player who bought a ticket for the Titanic’s maiden voyage in pursuit of a woman, became a member of the Carpathia’s survivor committee, helping other passengers to safety. He proved himself to the woman’s disapproving parents and later married her.

Williams and Behr faced each other several times on the court, most notably just two years after the sinking, in the quarterfinals of the U.S. National Championship, held that year in Newport. (Williams beat Behr in three sets.)”

1. Fabrice Santoro

Probably one of the most well-known players with a weird style is Fabrice Santoro.  He hits both his forehand and backhand with the same two handed grip.  The only times you will see him hit the ball with one hand on the racquet is if he is reaching extremely far.  Otherwise both his hands are on the racquet for groundstrokes, volleys, and slices alike.  His career has been a long one with a lot of success at the end.  He has 6 titles and reached the quarter finals of a Grand Slam once, but most of his success came in doubles.  He has two Grand Slam doubles titles, one mixed-doubles Grand Slam title, and 24 total doubles championships.  Marat Safin (2-7 against Santoro) spoke about playing Fabrice once, saying “Being told I would play Santoro was being told I was to die.”

2. Jan-Michael Gambill

This American tennis player is also known for his two-handed style.  He has had some success with the method, reaching the quarters of Wimbledon in 2000 and the 4^th round of the US Open in 2002.  He has won 3 singles titles in all.  I won’t go into too much detail since the style is largely the same as Fabrice, so have a look at the video to see more!


3. Francoise Durr

This French player won 26 singles titles and over 60 doubles titles from 1965 through 1976.  She was quite successful in fact, having finished second to Billie Jean King in prize money earnings in 1971.  She won 12 Grand Slam finals out of 27 appearances.  Her backhand used an infamous limp wrist which will make most modern players cringe.  She would have to pretty much sit for a low backhand to be hit.  She used to kneel on one knee when hitting a passing shot.  She had an incredibly slow serve (wouldn’t even register on radar) and used a frypan grip with her forefinger going down the edge of the racquet handle.


4. Evgenia Kulikovskaya

This Russian reached a career high singles ranking of 91 back in 2003.  She did reach the top 50 in WTA doubles as well.  Her famous shot was her backhand – or lack thereof.  She was ambidextrous and played with two forehands!  She would switch hands depending on where the ball was going.  She was taught a forehand but when she got tired she would just switch hands and hit forehands with the other.  Her coach decided to go with it and never taught her the “proper” backhand.  She served with her left hand and hit overheads with both hands.  Other famous players with this style include Giorgio de Stefani and Beverly Baker Fleitz.

Sorry, her video does not allow embedding but you can see her playing here.

5. Bjorn Borg

The Ice Man himself.  Bork was an amazing player (and was actually coached by Oscar Wegner at one point) and is widely considered one of the greatest players of all time.  He won 41% of the Grand Slam singles tournaments he entered with a winning percentage of 89% for his Grand Slam singles matches.  He is the only player to win both Wimbledon and the French Open twice in the same year for 3 years.  He had an unorthodox backhand that was considered a 2 handed backhand but had a lot of characteristics of a 1 handed backhand as well.  It was a sort of blend of both of them.  He is different from the others on the list since his two handed backhand is largely credited with changing tennis forever.  The prevalence of the 2 handed backhand in tennis increased dramatically during and after his career.

Skip to about 30 seconds in to see his backhand in slow motion:

1. Richard Gasquet

Richard is definitely not favored by the ball-boys at tournaments.  If he wins a point he will demand the same ball that was just played for the next point.  If he then loses a point, he will demand to use the ball that he last won a point with.




2. Andre Agassi

During Andre Agassi’s 1999 French Open run he initially forgot his underwear for the first round match.  He won that match and then decided to keep the streak going.  He did not win underwear for the remainder of the tournament and went on to win the whole thing.  Many athletes have superstitions about clothes, facial hair, etc, but this definitely takes the cake.  Agassi is also famed for making a ball person unwrap the new racquets he used.  Some might also remember how he would make ball people go to the original place they were at before he serves which frequently involved telling them to go back directly.

3. Rafael Nadal

Rafa has a noticeable superstition if you have ever watched his matches.  He will line all of his bottles up in a very specific spot to the left of his chair.  The labels must be facing the same way.  He then drinks out of the bottles in a certain order while never drinking out of the same bottle twice in a row.




4. Novak Djokovic

Novak is sure to explain that he does not have superstitions, but just “routines”.  Be that as it may, he does have some weird routines.  He won’t use the shame shower twice during tournaments.  Some people list his need to have his pet poodle with him as a superstition but hey, who likes leaving their dog at home?



5. Serena Williams

No one likes dirty socks.  After a long match they can be just downright disgusting – sometimes players even change them multiple times during a match.  Not Serena though, she has a ritual of wearing the exact same unwashed socks for every match.  I guess you can’t argue with success though, yuck.

1. Dinara Safina & Marat Safin

   This pair of brother and sister deserves the mention of being the first brother-sister tandem to achieve #1 rankings in tennis history. Marat Safin is the older of the two and was born in 1980 in Moscow, USSR. Their father managed the local Spartak Tennis Club (mentioned in our History of Tennis article as being quite ahead of the times). At age 14 he moved to Valencia, Spain to continue training. Marat is identified as being one of the most talented players in history. Anyone who remembers his epic semi0final match with Roger Federer in 2005 can attest to this.
   
   Dinara is no slouch though. She also moved to Valencia Spain at age 8 to continue training. In her career she is the first player in the WTA to defeat three different World #1 players during the same year. In 2009 she became World #1 by the WTA. Marat Safin already has retired from professional tennis, and while he made announcements on Dinara’s behalf towards retirement – she has said she does not have any official word about it yet.




2. John & Patrick McEnroe

   This is a pretty famous pair of tennis siblings due to their (albeit very different) success. John Patrick McEnroe (yes, his middle name is that of his brother’s) was born in 1959 and is a very famous tennis player. It is hard to decide what makes him more famous – his outbursts on court or his brilliant play (including many epic matches with Bjorn Borg). He was world #1 on 14 separate occasions between 1980 and 1985 and spent a total of 170 weeks at the top. He is famous for his support of wooden racquets and still competes to this day on the Champions Tour. He was Davis Cup captain for just 14 months before resigning from that job, and continues to make several cameo appearances in movies & other pop culture media pieces. He actually returned to the ATP in 2006 playing doubles with Jonas Bjorkman. They successfully won the title at the SAP Open.
   
   Patrick John McEnroe (yup, has his brother’s name as well) was born in 1966. He may not have achieved the same success as his older brother John, but he does have 16 pro titles to his name. He retired from the pro tour in 1998 and began extensive work with Davis Cup. He represented the USA in Davis Cup with a 3-1 record and in 2000 became captain of the Davis Cup team after his brother John resigned. He led the USA to a Davis Cup championship in 2007 and remained captain until 2010. He now works with the USTA after having the longest stint as Davis Cup captain in USA history.




3. Andy & Jamie Murray

   Andy Murray is of course a famous top seeded singles player. But many people do not know about his older brother, Jamie Murray. Jamie was born in 1986 and is Britain’s number one doubles player. He won the Wimbledon doubles championship in 2007 with Jelena Jankovic and was runner up during the 2008 US Open with Liezel Huber.
   
   Andy Murray was born in 1987 and has enjoyed great success on the singles circuit. Andy actually was born with a bipartite patella – a condition where the kneecap does not fuse but remains as two separate bones. This has caused him problems in the past due to pain including having to hold his knee frequently. An interesting fact about Andy’s childhood is he was present during the tragic 1996 Dublane School Massacre at Dunblane Primary School. 17 people lost their lives that day. Murray was able to take cover in a classroom during the massacre. He is reluctant to talk about the events but does say in his autobiography that he did have frequent contact with Thomas Hamilton, the man who committed the heinous acts. Murray has 3 major tournament finals appearances where he was runner up in all 3. This includes the 2008 US Open, 2010 Australian Open, and 2011 Australian Open. His brother is identified as a British player, but while Andy identifies himself as Scottish and British his interviews suggest he leans towards being a Scottish player by identification.




4. Christophe & Olivier Rochus

   Olivier is the more famous of these two Belgian brothers but some also know of his older brother Christophe. Christophe is the older (and taller) brother of the two. He was born in 1978 and is 5’7” as opposed to his brothers listed height of 5’5”. Christophe had less success than his brother but he did reach the semifinals of the 2006 Hamburg Masters and was the runner up in Valencia and Rotterdam. He retired from tennis in 2009.
   
   Olivier is famous for being the shortest man at the top of the ATP singles tour. He stands at a listed 5’5” but many people contend he is around 5’3” in person. Myself being 5’7” I used to enjoy watching Olivier beat such talented opponents as Marat Safin. In fact Marat Safin has said that he disliked playing Olivier, and Roger Federer also said that Olivier’s serve was quite strange since it came from a lower trajectory. He did use an extra-long racquet at 28 inches to help make up for his reach deficiencies. He has two main titles to his name which are Palermo in 2000 and Munich in 2006. He is still playing on the tour but has dropped quite low from his career high of 24 in the world.




5. Bob & Mike Bryan

   Most everyone knows of this tennis duo but they are on the list because they are the only twins. They are two very close siblings and even share bank accounts (and share a Wikipedia page). Both are very successful as doubles partners having been the year-end number 1 doubles team a record 7 times. They hold two notable Open Era records including competing in seven consecutive men’s doubles Grand Slam finals, and winning their 700th match on August 11, 2011. For those that really want to know – Mike is the older brother by 2 minutes but Bob is taller by 3 cm. When they were juniors their parents forebade them to play each other in tournaments and they would alternate defaulting to each other if they faced off along the way. They play in a band with Bob on keyboard, Mike on drums, and their father Wayne on guitar. Other tennis players they are friends with frequently join in.
   
   What other siblings did we miss? Let us know in the comments!

1. Neoxxline Carving Star

   These racuqets had a rotated head as well as a bent handle. This one looks like it may be onto something as the company says the handle helps generate more spin due to the string angles contacting the ball and that it helps ease pressure on the wrist. Their website lists tons of supposed benefits which you can read about here.




2. The Handler

   There are many double handled racquet makers out there but this racquet was one of the earlier versions. It was designed in 1992 and made for people with two handed backhands. Serving and volleying are both pretty difficult due to the racquet torqueing. Brian and Dann Battistone used these racquets and they managed to reach the top 200 in 2009 – so they must be good to some! Click here to go to their official website.




3. Blackburne Double Strung

   This racquet had two string beds which were each placed near the edge of the frame. The idea was that it would reduce your chances of framing the ball since the strings were so close to the edge and that it would reduce string fatigue. However, stringing the racquet proved difficult and it is a bit pricey at $199. It is approved for tournament competition, but honestly if framing shots is your worst problem you might want to spend that money on some nice DVDs rather than a $200 racquet. Click here to go to their official website.




4. Jenro

   This racquet tried to introduce the ability to have several different heads but just one handle. Your handle would be fastened to the head with a key mechanism. Nicolas Lapentti, an ATP pro, actually used them for a while. Visit their website here.




5. Spaghetti String Racquet

   My personal favorite – although it is illegal. In 1971 Wern Fischer invented this way of stringing a tennis racquet. Basically the strings were not woven so they would move much more independently which would cause a “snap back” effect. This would create obscene amounts of spin on the ball. There were actually 3 layers of strings and where the strings intercepted there would be a piece of plastic tubing over the string to help the sliding. Ilie N?stase used the racquet to upset Guillermo Vilas in 1977. Vilas was so upset that he retired from the match after being down 6-1, 7-5. The racquet was banned by the ATP shortly thereafter. Interestingly enough, Nadal has been recorded as producing nearly as much spin with his modern racquet and swing. However, the spaghetti racquet also produced very erratic spin patterns, not just top spin.

Did we miss any?  Let us know in the comments!

1. Bug-b-gone: If you cover a tennis ball in Vaseline and hang it from a tree it can keep certain types of bugs away when you are outdoors.  I’d imagine this would work with just about any kind of bug spray too – beats making your clothes smell bad with bug spray.




2. Feels like home: Pet rodents like mice and hamsters seem to love tennis balls as shelters.  Just cut an opening big enough for them and drill some holes for air.




3. Cleaner’s dream tool: I knew you could put the tennis balls on chair legs to prevent scuffs, but I didn’t know this janitorial trick of putting a tennis ball on the end of a broomstick to remove scuffs as well.  This can also be done to remove cobwebs since the felt grips well.




4. Covert Operations: You can cut them open and put items inside to hide.  Auction attendants have used this trick to pass receipts to winning bidders.




5. Ergonomic money saver: Wrap sandpaper around the ball to make an ergonomic sanding handle.  Feels great on the hand!




6. Again with the cleaning: If you float tennis balls around in your pool they will absorb body oils from the water via all of their surface area.  Just be sure to replace them periodically.




7. A parent’s best friend: In addition to childproofing edges, tennis balls can also be used to cover door knobs to keep them from being opened (unless squeezed of course).

What cool uses do you have for old tennis balls?  Tell us in the comments!

1. Marathon runners may understand this one: Jan-Michael Gambill had a chaffed left nipple during his 2000 Quarterfinal Wimbledon match against Pete Sampras. As the match wore on Gambill’s shirt constantly rubbed against his nipple causing it to bleed. A trainer and a band-aid were required to fix the problem.




2. Don’t tap the glass: Sam Querry was pronounced to be out for 4-6 weeks before the Thailand Open after cutting his forearm on a glass table. Querry had sat on the glass table and fallen through. The cut required emergency surgery.




3. Watch where you step: Serena Williams cut her feet on glass at a restaurant in Munich in 2010 which required her to pull out of the U.S. Open that year. It required her to undergo surgery for a lacerated tendon on her foot. She was not barefoot but rather was wearing sandals and just recalls looking down after feeling pain and seeing glass all over the floor. You can read the whole article here.




4. Beware of the road: Thomas Muster nearly had his career ended in 1989 when he was hit by a drunk driver. On April 1, 1989 Muster was hit by the driver in Key Biscayne near Miami, FL in the USA. Muster had just beaten Yannick Noah in the semi –finals when Normal Sobie, a 37 year old unemployed man, hit him. Doctors could not rule out the possibility that Muster may never walk again after the cruciate and side ligaments of his left knee were completely demolished. He proceeded only 2 weeks later with rehab, though, and about 6 months later he was back playing again. He went on to have a great career including winning the French Open and becoming #1 in ATP rankings for six weeks.




5. Detached anything is bad news: Thomas Johansson was hit in the eye by a tennis ball being served by Mario Ancic. It was while practicing for a doubles quarterfinal and caused a detached retina. He had to undergo eye surgery but went on to have a successful career afterwards. Mario Ancic had problems dealing with the guilt of the accident. Knowing Johansson had success afterwards had to of helped ease the guilt, though.
   

   Bonus ++ Everyone who was around remembers how bad 2004 was for James Blake. That is why I left him off of the list – it was so well known. However, no one can argue how freakish his injuries were. He broke a vertebrate in his neck after he slipped on clay and ran into a net post while practicing with Robby Ginepri. Then his father died from stomach cancer which greatly added to Blake’s emotional distress. All while this was going on, Blake developed singles which paralyzed half his face and blurred his eyesight temporarily. Poor guy, but he did use this to help push himself to unseen success in the coming years.

Do you know of any freak injuries I have not mentioned? Let us know in the comments!

1. Gritty past: The original tennis balls were to be made of “good leather, well-stuffed with wool.” This was according to King Louis XI of France himself in 1480. Other variations included some made with puddy and human hair – yuck!




2. It just isn’t the same: The famous yellow color was introduced in 1972 as “Optic Yellow” after researched showed it was the easiest color to be seen on color television sets.  Before then most balls were colored white.   Still want white tennis balls?  Whitetennisballs.com has had them since 2007.




3. Squeeze test doesn’t cut it: The official test for a balls bounciness is to drop it from 100 inches with a bounce between 53 and 58 inches.




4. How luxurious: In 1926 a pressurized metal tube was announced that held tennis balls.  It required a Churchkey to open.




5. So many uses! Tennis balls are actually pretty difficult to recycle and most go to their 2^nd life as anti-scuff devices on the bottom of chair legs.  However, the balls from Wimbledon are used as homes for the endangered Eurasian harvest mouse.  Other uses include covering it in vasoline and hanging it outside to deter bugs, cutting them open and hiding things in them, and 50 other great things as seen in this article.

Know of any other cool facts or uses for tennis balls? Let us know in the comments!

I am hoping to make fun tennis lists a regular occurrence on the Official Oscar Wegner Blog here.  Enjoy!

1. What is Roland Garros named after? Roland Garros is named after a French aviator who was the first to fly over the Mediterranean.  He was sent to fight on the Western Front after World War I started and quickly came up with a new way to have greater success during dogfights. He invented a way to fire the machine gun through his propeller (no, not the well-known interrupter gear) by putting angled metal plates on the back of his propeller blades.  He surprised German airmen by approaching them head on and shooting them down through his propellers.  He was eventually shot down behind enemy lines and his machine gun was captured and quickly adopted by the Germans.  In 1918 Garros managed to escape from behind enemy lines in Germany and returned to the Western Front. On October 5, 1918, Roland Garros was shot down and killed at Vouziers in Northern France where he was buried.





2. Lost in translation: The tournament is often referenced as the “French Open” but only as “Roland Garros” in French.




3. A rich (exclusive) history:  A French national tournament began in 1891 and was only open to male members of French tennis clubs.  Women were not permitted to play until 1897.




4. Equal opportunity:  The French Championships was the first grand slam tournament to become an open tournament in 1968.  This meant both professionals and amateurs could compete alike.




5. It’s a small world: The size of Rolland Garros is less than half that of other grand slam venues.  This is leading to major renovations being done to the grounds by 2016.




6. Tennis never surrenders: From 1939 to 1945 the tournament was cancelled due to World War II.  It has been held every year other than those.  Although the official tournament was not held during that time there was still wartime tennis going on.  In fact it played a major role in the French way of life during that time.  During that time, though, only French players were allowed to compete.




7. Grass anyone?  Red clay was first used when the new stadium was built in 1928.  The stadium was built because no other venue existed in France at the time to host the Davis Cup rematch between France and the USA.




8. Maybe the Irish would have better luck:  Of all the winners of the French Open only two men and three women from France have ever won the single’s title.  The last man was Yannick Noah in 1983 and the last woman was Mary Piece in 2000.




9. Tennis Firsts!  Speaking of Yannick Noah – he is also recognized as the first African American player to win the mens French Open single’s title in 1983.




10. Triple Threat: Althea Gibson was the first African American woman to win the single’s title at the French Open in 1956.  She also won the doubles championship that year.  Not only that, but she is the first African American woman to win at Wimbledon as well!




Do you have any more fun facts to share?  Let us know in the comments!

]]> http://www.oscarwegner.com/2012/05/10-fun-interesting-facts-about-the-french-open/feed/ 1 http://www.oscarwegner.com/2012/05/the-real-history-of-usa-tennis-instruction-what-happened-when-and-where-by-john-carpenter/ http://www.oscarwegner.com/2012/05/the-real-history-of-usa-tennis-instruction-what-happened-when-and-where-by-john-carpenter/#comments Sat, 05 May 2012 18:39:07 +0000 Oscar Wegner http://www.oscarwegner.com/?p=1625 This is easily one of the most comprehensive articles ever written on the history of tennis instruction in the USA. This dispels a lot of myths and breaks a lot of new ground. It is 35 pages long but is a must-read for any dedicated tennis coach or fan.

This is Part 1 of a work in progress, one that will change as facts and evidence are considered. This was originally conceived as a book by my former boss Andy Davis and I in 2004 after we browsed 25 years of “Add” and “Tennis” magazines wondering who was really teaching what and when, and wondered why USA tennis lost so many players. What you read in the four parts are excerpts from a book I am writing. No one to my knowledge has ever laid out the history of tennis instruction on a time line for all to look at what really happened versus what we are so often told what happened in revisionist history. Anyone is invited to email me to add facts or correct me as I want to be as factual as possible in order to illuminate what really happened. You don’t have to register for the forum to make your point; my email address is at the top. Please feel free to add any comments and as long as they are respectful, they will be published. If you think someone should get credit for introducing something, or that I have misrepresented someone’s teaching or the facts of an event, then let me know. Tennis in the USA has had enough problems with coaches and egos eager to take claims for this and that despite the fact you can look at most any tennis teaching website and find contradictory data from page to page if not article to article. I’m finally optimistic that the USPTA deciding to do away with conventional tennis instruction is a huge step in the right direction. However, more knowledge of the facts as to why this happened are needed, because as goes the wise adage, “those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it.”

My cause is to grow the game of tennis by providing you with the perspective that since there are only two legs and two arms and so many ways to generate force against a tennis ball; it might make sense that there might be one biomechanically efficient technique that works best, something the USTA has consistently denied as of 2009 on their website. There are a lot of ways to learn to hit a tennis ball well but is there one optimal technique proven to get the fastest results on the court? The Russians claim there is one optimal technique and all their coaches are trained to teach one technique. Last I saw they were approaching 20 top WTA players out the top 100. How does one run down tennis academy called Spartak with one indoor court in Moscow, Russia produce more top twenty players the last seven years than the entire United States? As they say at Spartak, “technique is everything.” See the complete article by Daniel Coyle in my Spartak commentary for further information on this incredible tennis story that inspired a best selling book in 2009, “The Talent Code. Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown. Here’s how.”

There have been many great coaches and there are many methods by which to learn to play tennis well. This article will focus on specifically the evolution of the forehand techniques because that is where the greatest differences have been. I will leave tactics and strategy for others, because if you have the optimal technique, you can obviously execute the widest array of tactics. I do not wish to discredit all the great tennis teachers who bled for this great game. As history marches, Tom Stow has been discovered to not only have coached many top players, but has had a great influence on developing many of today’s well known coaches. The problem of the great coaches in tennis history was, whether they had great success with a few players or even many, they were either unable or did not have a platform to successfully transmit their teachings in practical usable form to grow the game at the grassroots. Charlie Hollis was hailed at his death in Australia as a greater coach than legendary Harry Hopman. Yet Hollis and Hopman, as well as the many great USA coaches, including the St. Louis teachers who produced the Buchholz brothers, Chuck and Bob McKinley, Justina Bricka, Ken Flach, Arthur Ashe, Carol Hanks Aucamp, Trey Waltke, Mary Ann Eisel, Jimmy Connors, and Renee Blount, the first black woman to win a pro tournament (Althea Gibson won Wimbledon as an amateur), all left no lasting teaching methodology or system that would be prove to be popular long term with the masses. Every one of those dozen players I just listed as well as many other top tennis pros all went to high school in the St. Louis area, a record unrivaled by any city in Florida or California during that time. They were produced by the likes of coaching greats Dick Hudlin, Bill Price, Lloyd Brown, and Larry Miller, to name just a few of the many great St. Louis coaches. Yet these coaches had the same problem other great coaches, had: they were unable, for whatever reason, to transmit their teaching methods in writing to other coaches in a systematic tennis methodology that would allow other coaches to duplicate their results. Thus, Australia, England, and the USA quickly lost their tennis prowess because the new modern tennis teaching techniques adopted first by Spain, then South America, Russia, and Eastern Europe allowed other countries’ coaches to quickly crack their players “talent code” while our coaches held onto the old conventional ideas too long.

It’s important to understand how tennis coaching evolved in time and as you will discover, the debates that rage currently are often not very different than the ones that raged one hundred years ago. I’m not even sure that after 1925 there were too many if even one original idea in tennis regarding how best to hit a tennis ball. The English speaking world, mostly responsible for the teaching and spread of tennis in it’s first century, somehow became obsessed with the “turn, step into, and hit” method that became known as “the classic swing” or conventional tennis. Some claim the new rackets are the reason the players swing the way they do today. You will find evidence to believe otherwise in this site.

Any history of tennis instruction cannot ignore primary figures, the shoulders of those whose today’s coaches stand on. It’s important to see a timeline with the teaching revolution that has resulted in the current evolution of instruction. I also seek to separate fact from fiction involving the influence of former Argentinean, now American citizen Oscar Wegner and his revolutionary Modern Tennis Methodology or MTM. There is a reason tennis historian Bud Collins calls Oscar the Johnny Appleseed of tennis. If one looks at the facts at who was teaching what, when, and where, one can easily draw a conclusion that there is very little doubt that Oscar Wegner led this teaching revolution despite a near blackout of his name in the USA tennis hierarchies. Oscar is the first coach I can find that advocated publicly (beginning in 1968) teaching every student what is known as the topspin “windshield wiper” swing used by all professionals today. The advent of high speed video and adoption of many of Oscar’s tenets (though he is uncredited) has vindicated his claims. If tennis is to expand, the USTA, USPTA, and PTR will have to put aside trying to prove each is right and finally look at the evidence objectively as to how to deliver tennis to the masses so that players never want to leave the game.

The “talent code,” based on the title of a 2009 book by Daniel Coyle, is defined as a “zone of accelerated learning that, while it can’t quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how.” This book claiming that talent is not born, it’s made, explains how some coaches in tennis, baseball, art, and music, mysteriously or simply figured out how to unlock the “talent code” in their junior students. This has happened throughout time with Dick Hudlin, Dr. Pete Fischer, and countless other coaches. History will note that a former janitor, Richard Williams was able to unlock the talent code in his two children despite never having coached nor played competitively before he started hitting balls to his daughters when Venus was four. This history indicates Mr. Williams was a lot smarter than he is sometimes given credit for. Not being a certified tennis coach with a preconceived idea of what a player should swing like, he was able to observe objectively and discover what worked best for his girls. In his search for great teaching he tested and thus incorporated many concepts by Oscar Wegner as well as anything else he saw that worked. I have also been fascinated by the story of Oscar Wegner, one man with a single idea that tennis should be taught in a simple manner for all level players, with no organizational support besides his students and the many parents who took his message across the world, who literally winds up revolutionizing tennis instruction. I believe Oscar Wegner’s biggest contribution to tennis to date was that his simple, minimalist tennis methodology, published in 1989′s Tennis in 2 Hours allowed anyone, including parents who didn’t play the game, an unknown tennis coach, or the students themselves, regardless of access to money, academies, or even access to the “famous coaches,” to discover that the secrets of playing like the pros are not that difficult. No one until now has documented the real historical effect of Oscar Wegner behind the scenes. An example is Oscar was asked to implement his methods in an instructors course which he set up in England in 2006 and 2007. Today the largest chain of indoor tennis clubs in the world (owned by David Lloyd of England) is certifying hundreds of coaches through a certification course based entirely on Oscar Wegner’s Modern Tennis Methodology (MTM) and the Lawn Tennis Association that runs Wimbledon is granting those coaches certification points. In 2009, the June British “Tennis Life” magazine noted about the course taught by Modern Tennis International, “It’s so easy that there is no reason for anyone to reinvent their game,” and Joe Dinofer, both a PTR Master Pro and USPTA Master Pro, observed about this system instituted by Oscar himself in England, “The single best concise statement of coaching and instructional philosophy I have read in my 30 years. I don’t say that lightly.” I agree with Joe. The “secret” to tennis being a simple game to play has been here all along. Modern Tennis Methodology has been proven by evidence and history to be the best tennis teaching system yet developed. If anyone can show me anything better that gets better results instantly on court, I’ll dedicate this entire website to that method.

Though there are many who inspired this look back at tennis theory I will mention but a few: Jerry Clark (in the ’70s we practiced entire days in humid St. Louis 100 degree heat) who hit with a big western grip and would likely have been a great pro except no one in 1975 knew how to coach his “weird” grip despite his beautiful natural looking strokes and huge topspin game; Colette Lewis, whose Zoo Tennis articles on junior tennis and her always interesting insights into what she observes always keep me on my toes, Bud Collins, whose mention of Oscar Wegner in a 2003 Wimbledon rain delay forced me to ignore the “experts” and test the data for myself, Andy Davis, (now at Newcombe’s Academy in Texas) who having worked for Harry Hopman, Macci, and with so many great coaches and helped me realize how MTM tied all the great teaching threads together, and Oscar Wegner, for being the real “Yoda” of tennis, mysterious, understated, who while keeping it simple, always give incredible insight into what really matters most in tennis instruction.

Part 1: The Real History of USA Tennis Teaching: Who was teaching what and when.

1) Background history.
Tennis was patented in 1874 and quickly spread because of the English control of colonies (at that time, the sun never set on the British empire). I found at least fifty tennis instruction books written beween 1890 and 1930. Many pics show early 20th century champions using open stance “windshield wipers” including Big Bill Tilden and Little Bill Johnson. However, as I discovered, by 1900 the debate begins about whether open stance or neutral stance (commonly called a closed stance in literature until recently, though anatomically it’s neutral in position) is best. When I mention a “closed stance” I am actually referring to what coaches today call the “neutral stance” with the left foot forward. Because most tennis books were written by English speaking authors, the popularity of cricket (where baseball derived from) in England and baseball in the USA apparently allowed the momentum based closed stance “turn, step, and hit” to be adopted as the preferred method, because both these sports used a closed stance and step forward for more power. This classic momentum based swing would prove to be fine if you were athletically inclined or had the determination of a salmon swimming upstream and the discipline to never quit once you started something, but for nearly 80 years, tennis was subsequently a sport confined to a very small portion of the population. The television age, particularly a 1972 televised match between Rosewall and Laver that was spellbinding, and the subsequent famous Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, caused millions of new players to take up the game. The great USA tennis boom occurred. But millions would find the conventional teaching too difficult and unless you were a gifted athlete or liked climing mountains (figuratively), tennis got pushed aside. In 1984, Gallup 1 in 5 men listed tennis as one of their favorite sports. By 2005, the same poll found 1 in 20 USA men considered tennis a favorite sport while tennis boomed all over the rest of the world who adopted the simple techniques prescribed in a 1989 book that has been virtually ignored in USA media for the last twenty years.

1874: The game of Lawn Tennis is patented in England by Major Wingfield, a Welsh gentleman.

1877: The first championships at Wimbledon, in London were played. In 1881, the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (now the United States Tennis Association) was formed to standardize the rules and organize competitions.

1881: On May 21st, 1881, a small group of tennis club members met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City to form the world’s first national governing body for tennis: the United States National Lawn Tennis Association. The new organization was created to standardize tennis rules and regulations and to encourage and develop the sport. In 1920, “national” was dropped from the name, and in 1975, the name was further shortened to the current United States Tennis Association (USTA).

1884: Lieutenant S.C.F. Peile, writes “Lawn Tennis As a Game of Skill.” At least twenty five books and numerous pamphlets are written before 1903.

[1890: J.M. and C.G. Heathcote,with E.O.P. Bouverieand A.C. Ainger, write "Lawn Tennis, Rackets and Fives" published in London. From page 77-78: "The most valuable hint I ever received at any game was from E. Johnson....Johnson had often watched the cricket....Johnson held the opinion, and he was perfectly correct, this method (adding the weight of the body to the swing of the arms and the strength of the wrist with a closed stance step into the ball to transfer body weight).....the reason for setting so much store on the position of the legs is that the legs, far more than the arms, convey, concentrate, and apply the weight of the body to the ball about to be struck.

1900: Dwight Davis of St. Louis, Missouri donates a silver bowl to initiate the international tennis competition that became known as the Davis Cup, pitting country against country. The first U.S. Davis Cup team consisted of Malcolm Whitman, Dwight Davis, and Holcombe Ward and they defeat Britain.

1903: R.F. Doherty and his little brother H.L. Doherty (1897 Wimbledon champion) publish R.F. and H.L. Doherty on Lawn Tennis. It's very technical but modern by even today's standards, but their accurate observations about serves and advocating an open stance forehand under pressure and for recovery (no explanation of a "windshield wiper") would soon be refuted in print, and when R.F. dies in 1910, there will be no chance to defend their point of view. They describe the serve as leading with the right edge of the racket and ending with the ball near the left edge of the racket, which we now call pronation. Parmly J. Paret publishes How to Play Lawn Tennis and simply tells his interpretation of what he sees the best players doing which differ greatly from the Dohertys' observations.

1904: Modern Lawn Tennis by P. A. Vaile appears. P.A. Vaile was an attorney who wrote what what for years were considered classic books on golf and tennis. Vaile advocates the closed stance forehand but discusses the different playing styles of the then recognized experts, some who advocate hitting with open stance, which Vaile is no fan of. J. Parmley Paret In Modern Lawn Tennis, Its Past, Present and Future writes an entire encyclopedia of how to play tennis. It's full of advice on diet, conditioning, and the latest science. He also advocates a closed stance forehand though he shows an open stance FH being struck by a top player. Page 110: "several others declare that the grip should be relaxed in making some of the strokes....I am convinced that the racket should be gripped as tightly as possible." Even from the earliest days we see contradictory data being promoted between coaches at the top level. Here is a photo in the book titled "Dr. J. Pims Easy Style of Play" taken not later than 1895 since that was Pim's last year.

Notice the wrap finish near the shoulder by Dr. Joshua Pim, English Champion from Ireland in the 1890's.

1905: Great Lawn Tennis Players: Their Methods Illustrated by photographer George Beldam and P. A. Vaile with 229 photographs of top players appears. Quote: "Perhaps the quickest way is to constantly play with those superior to ourselves; possibly the next great thing is to watch the great exponents (meaning the players themselves); and failing both of these, I venture to think action-photographs are good substitutes. But these only show, in the matter of teaching , what one has trained the eye to see. Yet action-photographs will influence where technical knowledge is lacking." This book is a precursor to Johnny Yandell's Visual Tennis written 85 years later.

1913 The International Lawn Tennis Federation was established, now known as the ITF.

1915 P. A. Vaile writes the classic of his time (until Tilden's 1925 book appears) titled "Modern Tennis." Page 25: For the forehand stroke, you should stand with your left side toward the net, your left foot in front.....The body should be parallel with or facing the line of flight of the incoming ball, and not, as laid down by some writers, the direction in which the ball will come." This last statement indicates that open stance was being advocated by coaches of the time while P.A. Vaile now advocates the closed stance with weight on back foot and stepping forward. Vaile disagrees with many of the Doherty brothers 1903 book concepts in particular. This book has incredible still photo shots of mostly the serves as you see Maurice McLaughlin's service pronation exactly as you see the pros today with the racket hanging to the right and the back of the hand facing the net. Vaile is quick to criticize players strokes throughout the book, he even has a chapter titled Personalities in which he even rips the best strokers of his day, a tradition that continues to this day, though it seems odd to me you would want to criticize and claim that a top world ranked player is doing something wrong. He particularly criticizes a top player of the time for hitting off his back foot, claiming he would do much better if he would step into the net while stroking. The "plates" (pictures) are amazing, given they show the serve technique is virtually the same a century later.

1924- Official ILTF ‘Rules of Tennis’ go into effect without much change until the present and ILTF declares authority to control lawn tennis throughout the world. The USA is now a member of the Federation. A new category of Official Championship was created for events in Great Britain, France, USA and Australia – today’s Grand Slam Events.

1925: “Match Play and the Spin of the Ball”, a book by Bill Tilden, is still a classic nearly a century later. It has lots of illustrations showing the major grips and strokes of the day, and this book, along with the other ones I researched written before this one, confirm that regarding tennis play, there is almost nothing new under the sun. Just by instinct and contrary to conventional instruction, top players as of 1925, tried flat, spin, slice, and American Twist serves, topspin forehands and backhand drives, slices, reverse forehands, volleys and overheads. Interestingly, the semi-western and western grips, which have become the standard of nearly all great players in tennis today were already in use in 1925. Though “Big Bill” Tilden himself hit open stance with an eastern grip, his main rival “Little Bill” Johnston, hit open stance with the western. Furthermore, Johnston also used the same grip on his backhand--he hit his backhand on the same racquet face as he hit his forehand, without shifting his grip at all, exactly like Alberto Berasategui of Spain who reached the 1994 French Open final. Berasategui had kept his grip and style despite coaches trying to change his grip in his junior years.

A pic from 1926 showing the open stance forehand used by many great pros during the early days of tennis, yet it was decided by even Bill Tilden, that tennis should not be taught this way, despite the fact he played exactly this way.

1927: USPTA, United States Professional Tennis Association formed and as of 2009 had about 12,500 Tennis teachers in USA. Original membership did not require an exam, since it was formed mainly to represent professional players of that time who also taught tennis to make a living. Before the open era beginning in 1968, players who took money to play tennis were not allowed to compete in amateur tournaments, including the grand slams. It wasn't until the 1960s that USPTA began to institute a testing system, one that has become an example for most of the world's other tennis teaching groups. All I can say is that from the earliest days, the USPTA somehow decided that a momentum based swing based on turn, step and hit was the best way to hit the ball; thus tennis would continually wind up being played mainly by the gifted or the most disciplined instead of being the second most popular sport as it would become in other countries who were well exposed to Oscar's MTM techniques. We know that top pros from the earliest days often played one way and taught another (this is the curse that plagues tennis) as you will find out about Bill Tilden.

1931: Bill Tilden, the most widely known figure in the tennis world, gives an interview to the St. Louis Post Dispatch in which he lists his 10 Commandments of Tennis. Despite the fact that Bill played played open stance over the shoulder or what is known as "modern" today, read #2 and #3 carefully. "#1. Keep your eye on the ball. #2. Make all shots with your body sideways to the net. #3. Always have your weight going into the net. #4. Use a racquet that is well strung and not too heavy."

1933 Tennis great Suzanne Lenglin writes several books in the 1920s but "Modern Tennis" by Helen Hill Jacobs begins with its first words "There is no such thing as Tennis For Women." Helen starts playing at the top level with a western grip but Bill Tilden convinces her to move to an eastern. On Bill Johnston's success with a western grip, she remarks that it's because he played on high bouncing hard courts instead of grass and that he could use that grip because he was so gifted athletically and could time every ball to hit on the rise.

1939 Oscar Wegner is born in Argentina to a German born father who emigrated from Germany before the rise of Hitler and an Argentinean mother.

1948: Tom Stow of Berkeley, California writes "The Tom Stow Tennis Teaching System and Stroke Developer." Tom's name comes up repeatedly in tennis hierarchies as an influence on many of today's coaches. For much of tennis history, there have been great tacticians who focused on styles of play and usually great technicians who focused on mechanics of the swing. Stow is still considered by many the best tactician. Stow might have been the first coach, long before Oscar Wegner, to advocate that players should copy the absolute best examples of a particular stroke, but he like so many great coaches, does not convey it in a defined step by step technique though he is years ahead of his time. Jim McLennan of tennisone.com, who I read carefully and who I think is making a great transition to understanding the modern game, still quotes Stow a lot and now I see why. Though Stow teaches turn, step, and hit, his ideas on court coverage and attack are still great. Gladys Heldman, editor of World Tennis Magazine labeled Stow the "Maestro." Tom, though he emphasizes closed stance forehand, emphasizes some very modern concepts which he calls "pausing," what we now define as "waiting." Page 35: “To insure the pupil is in position in time, he should step to the ball, stop, then step in and finish. As he improves the stop changes to a pause, but a definite pause for some time…As the player continues to improve there should be less emphasis on taking the racquet back.” Tom was right about pausing, what Wegner and younger coaches such as Kelly Jones advocate as "waiting for the ball." Stow emphasizes balance and playing gracefully while teaching an “all court forcing game” in which you borrow pace from the baseline when returning serve, move forward on any and all short balls, and he advocates a simpler more efficient hitting technique. The problem for Stow was that like many other great coaches, he could not synthesize that simpler hitting technique into a tennis methodology that worked for the masses, but there is little doubt of Stow's great influence, even today. Don Budge, the first man to win the Grand Slam, was his most famous student. Stow died in 1984 after coaching one group of top juniors who became fairly well known coaches that included Doug King, Steve Stefanki, Brent Abel, and John Hubbell, and he also taught Jim McClennan, the current senior editor of tennisone.com. Steve's older brother is Larry Stefanki who credits Tom Stow, also. Larry has had success coaching McEnroe, Marcelos Rios, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Fernando Gonzalez, and Andy Roddick to name a few. I got the following info from a July 2009 Kurt Streeter LA Times article tying Andy Roddick's 2009 success to Tom Stow where Larry Stefanki says he's learned something from every great player he's worked with but he credits Tom Stow for his foundation of fundamentals and knowledge of the game. Stefanki says Stow's "principles and understanding of footwork and absorbing speed is second to none. He was a true master in that regard....he understood this game played in a rectangular box better than anyone I have ever come across." In the 1920s, Stow won a national doubles title at University of California. Then, for decades, he taught a distinct serve-and-volley style while coaching at Cal and then at various tennis outposts in Northern California. A maestro: a crafty, chain-smoking, uncompromising sort, a man willing to buck every trend and see the game differently. Stow studied dance and tried to get his players to move like Fred Astaire. He studied boxing, hoping to have them press forward with the steadiness of Joe Louis. Sometimes he'd force his students to spend their afternoons hitting balls while sitting in a chair, to teach the feel of being grounded. He'd focus session after session on two parts of the game often overlooked by other teachers -- returns and serves. Stow almost never watched his charges play matches, not even Budge. He figured tennis' true essence lies in finely tuned practice. The competition would take care of itself." Brent Abel now sells Stow's 1948 book on the internet as an e-book for $27.

1949: Pancho Gonzalez, coming from a poor background, at age 21 is forced to turn pro and thus is banished from ever playing Grand Slams until 1968. Pancho is rated by Jack Kramer, who organized the pro tour and “wrote the early pro history” in most publications of that time, as number one in the world from 1955 to 1962. Kramer rated himself number one 1948 thru 1954, though the records show that Pancho consistently trounced Kramer from 1951 onwards and should have been objectively rated number one from 1951 through 1962, an astonishing 12 years in a row as World Champion. Kramer, once Pancho started beating him, appears to have avoided playing Pancho much the next three years to protect his won loss record and over the next decade even personally trained players to beat Pancho without any success. Pancho never plays Wimbledon during this period but played ten different Wimbledon champions in single matches within a year after they won Wimbledon and beat them all, even trouncing Tony Trabert, winner of two Grand Slams in 1955, 75 matches to 27 after Trabert was recruited by Kramer to beat Pancho but would never succeed. Pancho, after age 40, not only won top pro tournaments but beat Newcombe, Rosewall, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Rod Laver, Andre Gimeno, and Tony Roche in their prime, attaining a #6 ranking in 1969 at 41 and winning his last ATP Pro tournament in 1972 just shy of 44. It can easily be argued he would have won twenty Grand Slams during his 12 year dominance of professional tennis as he won on clay as well as grass. His tennis achievements are truly remarkable.

1962 Argentinean Oscar Wegner, who grew up playing tennis with a fierce open stance forehand and a severe western grip, is now good enough to leave his study of engineering (and his accomplished ping pong game) and prepares to join the international tennis tour. He has been counseled to change his open stance western grip forehand to the “conventional method”, a change that affected the realization of his potential. He thus plays the Tour with a weakened forehand groundstroke but otherwise all his strokes were copied from his favorite pros. On tour he plays the greats: Roy Emerson, John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Fred Stolle, and many other top players, around the world. He meets and befriends Manuel Santana of Spain, four time Grand Slam winner who’s forehand would later serve as the model of inspiration for Modern Tennis Methodology.

Quote from a new revolutionary tennis book: "It seems odd that up until now no one has called attention to the fact that “name” tennis players teach one method and play according to another………Why is this so? The players themselves, when asked this question, often reply, “The way I play is for experts and should be used only be experienced players. It should not be attempted by beginners. But I do not agree, for two reasons. First, on theoretical grounds, I believe that a beginner learning anything should learn it correctly from the start, to avoid the formation of bad habits. And secondly, on practical grounds, it has been my experience in teaching tennis that the correct stroking, which the experts would reserve for themselves, can be taught to beginners with complete and rather startlingly satisfactory results. I have taught pupils who had never played tennis before in their lives, and within five minutes had them hitting ....... with the actual footwork and the swing of the champions. This Is not to say that all their shots were perfect, for precision in tennis comes from long practice against all the variables in the bounce of the ball. Their shots, if not perfect, were fundamentally correct—for they were using the stroke of the champion; they were using what I call......." Can you guess who wrote these words? You might be surprised. Taken from a 1962 book by New Englander Dick Bradlee, "Instant Tennis, A New Approach based on the Coordination, Rhythm and Timing of Champions." Oscar Wegner was not the first, as has been commonly believed, to notice that the pros played one way and taught another, nor was he the first to advocate teaching open stance forehands in print. "Instant Tennis" advocates open stance forehands with the right foot forward and also, strangely enough, open stance one handed backhands (the two handed backhand was so rare no one ever taught it back then). This is the second book since the 1903 Dougherty brothers book that advocates open stance forehands, but the first I can find that actually shows how it should be done. Bradlee attacks the tennis establishment of the time who have ignored his constant pleas. Dick Bradlee is so adamant that open stance forehands should be taught (he calls it the Ballistic Swing) that he had bugged Jack Kramer incessantly until Kramer granted Bradlee a demonstration. Here is Vic Braden, then working for Jack Kramer, in his own words: "While I was on the court, Jack Kramer was being bombarded with daily calls at his home from Dick Bradlee telling him about the virtues of the "Open stance". Kramer's patience finally wore off and he told Bradlee that he would honor his request for a demonstration, but that Bradlee was not to call him again. A date was set and Jack, Bradlee and I met at the Kramer Club for this weird demo of the "Open stance". Jack started the ball rolling by hitting an easy forehand to Bradlee. It could have been the result of sheer nervousness, but the ball on Bradlee's forehand came off the frame and went over a 40 foot fence that separated the tennis courts from the next door golf driving range. That pretty much ended the demo, and even some spectators couldn't stop laughing. We were never again asked by Bradlee to perform a demo."

I'm not sure Braden's story makes much sense given Bradlee himself used his open stance forehand to become New England senior tennis champion in 1956 and 1957and had convinced some coaches his ideas had merit. Bradlee took his claims to TV shows in New York area and other top coaches but quickly faded into history. He failed, possibly because he had incorrect technique though he had many correct obervations on forehand footwork and what was wrong with tennis instruction in general. The problem with Bradlee's technique is that he advocated a linear swing with a half finish, the racket in the air (the classic sword in the air finish, as it's known) and he also taught an open stance one handed backhand which is not very practical or modern at all given it rarely occurs in todays' game except inadvertently. This book makes my top ten list of all great tennis books for despite the fact that he did not teach a windshield wiper swing, it makes a lot of great points that would be echoed by Oscar and coaches such as Todd Martin about the positioning of the feet for the forehand. "Instant Tennis" was reviewed by Sports Illustrated in the Feb 2, 1963 issue and the review wryly notes: "There is a fellow running loose around the country now, a teacher no less, who says you should face the net and, at the moment of impact, have your weight planted on the right foot. It is a radical departure from tradition, like refusing to pay amateurs, and it is creating a certain uproar in the guild. He even has rotten things to say about SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S book on tennis, written by Bill Talbert, and showing, among other things, Don Budge's academic approach to the serve. He despises it. Some men (and magazines) might resent this, but we don't." I have not been able to find information on Bradlee, who if he is alive today, would be about 87. If anyone knows what happened to him, I would like to contact him or his heirs.

1963. Australian Rod Laver, as an amateur, wins all four Grand Slams in 1962, turns pro in 1963, and discovers a rough road. Cas Fish describes the debacle in Tennis Today: "Contracted to play Hoad 13 best-of-five set matches, Laver won the first set of the first match, but was unable to win another…Hoad won 39 consecutive sets from Laver. . . Hoad at that time had virtually retired from the game, was suffering with a chronically bad back, and had had only three weeks to practice before the match. It rather makes nonsense of Laver’s first grand slam. Dave Anderson writes, "Laver was thrashed [by] and rated Hoad as ‘the best I’ve ever played against.’ The next day he lost to Rosewall. ‘I thought Lew was good, Laver said . . ., ‘but Kenny is twice as good as Lew. . . . If I’m going to beat Rosewall consistently, I’ve got to learn how to play tennis all over again.’” Laver did improve quickly, but is banned from Grand Slams for the next five years missing the next 21 Grand Slams. Ken Rosewall’s greatness rivaled Gonzalez in terms of longevity. Rosewall won the French in 1955 and 1973, made a Grand Slam Final in 1975 at age 39, and missed 45 Grand Slams before 1968.

1965: If this one event is all Oscar Wegner had done, he would have had a huge indirect influence on the spread of tennis. In London, in front of the ILTF, Oscar Wegner was asked to represent Argentina and make the motion to adopt the Davis Cup “home and away” rule for the American Zone. This rule change, adopted by the ILTF after Oscar argued successfully, forced Americans to defend their Davis Cup reign on South American soil, meaning on clay, losing at times, and is credited with helping spread tennis in Latin America to a new level. Oscar still has his typed out speech with his hand written notations from that 1965 London meeting.

1967: Wilson introduces a metal racquet (metal racquets had first appeared in 1889 without success) called the T-2000, popularized by Jimmy Connors (though Billie Jean King won the first pro tournament with it before Connors). In 1976, the Prince Class and Prince Pro were the first popular aluminum oversized racquets with a string area more than 50 percent larger than the standard 65 square inch wood racquet. Pros needed stiffer frames, however, and so “graphite composition” racquets quickly became popular with advanced players. The last grand slam won with a wood racquet was the 1984 US Open by John McEnroe.

1968: A breakaway tennis circuit called World Championship Tennis (WCT), organized by Lamar Hunt, a Texas billionaire, runs in opposition to the official ILTF circuit, and attracted top players, who turned pro. The so-called “Handsome Eight” were Nikola Pili? of Yugoslavia, Butch Buchholz and Dennis Ralston of the United States, Pierre Barthes of France, Cliff Drysdale of South Africa, Roger Taylor of Great Britain, and John Newcombe and Tony Roche of Australia. This group and the earlier one, now called the National Tennis League, organized by George McCall, an American business man, who had taken over the tour from Jack Kramer and had Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Andres Gimeno, Pancho Gonzales, Roy Emerson and Fred Stolle and his ranks, and occasional participation of Pancho Segura and Alex Olmedo, had taken over the cream of international tennis and gotten them off the amateur tour. This forced the hand of the major tournaments, especially Wimbledon, who publicly announced their 1968 Championships would be open to amateurs and professionals alike. Thereafter the ILTF, at an emergency meeting in Paris,with 47 countries agreeing in principle to the issue of admitting professionals to their majors, Open Tennis was born. . Furthermore, with interest now running high in seeing everyone allowed to compete, the ILTF arranged sponsorship money and allows Grand Prix tournaments, with players now competing openly and legally for money. So began the “open era’ of tennis, whereupon Rod Laver promptly wins the 1968 Wimbledon and all four Grand Slams in a calendar year for a second time in 1969 after winning the Grand Slam in 1962 before a five year ban from the Slams.

1968: Modern Tennis Methodology begins when Oscar Wegner retires from the pro tour in late 1967 due to injury and moves to Los Angeles. Fully recuperated, he decides to to pursue a coaching career instead. He starts teaching tennis in the beautiful Hollywood environment he has become accustomed to, under the tutelage of the legendary Pancho Segura, at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, a hub of celebrities of Hollywood fame. Wegner notices a huge division between the way the game was taught and being played by the pros of his time. By studying and breaking down, with his engineering background the best pro strokes, he draws the connection between the physical universe laws and tennis, and realizes that force is generated most effectively by hitting “up and across the ball” which today is known as the “windshield wiper” swing. Observing that tennis was the only sport that did not teach beginners to copy the pros, he uses his ability to differentiate between reality and fiction and thus break away from false assumptions. Oscar worked backwards from the best pro strokes to find biomechanical techniques that would build in amateurs step by step progressions to emulate the best strokes ever in the game. He took note of his friend Manuel Santana’s forehand over the shoulder finish as the easiest and most efficient model to emulate, including noting that the original greats of tennis played with an open stance forehand and finished across their body. He reduces the beginner tennis stroke to one mechanic, “from the ball to the shoulder,” preferring to put all the attention on “finding” the ball with the hand and allowing the backswing to develop naturally. He noticed that the conventional teaching was very mechanical and involving a lot of thinking. Oscar sensed that his own experience and the way the players he practiced with, such as Pancho Gonzales, almost daily in 1968 and occasionally Pancho Segura, that tennis is played by “feel,” that there was something wrong in the way tennis was being taught that made the game appear difficult to learn. Experimenting with Hollywood celebrities his new found techniques, he starts developing and refining a methodology that would change the way the game was played and subsequently how it was to be taught. From Charlton Heston, to Dean Martin, Dinah Shore, the Kirk Douglas and Robert Taylor kids, the results were astonishing. Everyone loved how easy the game was, and how much and how quick their improvement felt.

1970: If you don’t think Oscar Wegner truly believes he is onto something that he feels strongly about, while Rod Laver is writing his autobiography “The Education of a Tennis Player” with “how to” tips at the end of each chapter, he asks Oscar Wegner to be his hitting partner during the photo shoot for the book. Oscar obliges to the request, but as Rod starts demonstrating the “conventional” techniques, not his own, Oscar leaves the court with an excuse and asks the local coach to go and hit with Laver. Oscar was truly distraught that his early hero, Rod Laver, was betraying the techniques that had gotten Laver to two Grand Slams. How many coaches today would show such conviction? When Oscar told me this story, I thought it relevant here because it partially explains why Oscar would later have to operate almost alone for so many years in the USA, as revolution in most industries always comes from one person, never from the industry itself.

1971: Oscar, as a USPTA member and Tester (still in the early #6000′s), presents his theories to the Florida President of the USPTA, Bob Sasano for the first time. Sasano completely rejected his ideas even though Oscar was coaching his son, Mike Sasano who loved the big topspin game Oscar taught him. But some coaches in Spain became intrigued by his MTM and Oscar, eager to test his theories with anyone who will listen, heads off to Spain to test his theories.

1972: Tennis Magazine puts together a panel of the best known coaches, from Vic Braden to Jack Kramer along with some top players to write articles for “The Classic Instruction Series from Tennis Magazine,” a soft cover book that appeared from 1972 to 1975. See the Tom Okker analysis below in 1975 as this article appeared all four years and explains as well as anything I can find what went wrong in USA tennis and why we have a lot of catching up to do.

1973: Oscar Wegner starts gaining attention of tennis royalty as the Spanish juniors he is teaching MTM to start to appear on the world scene in tournaments such as the Worldwide Sunshine Cup, where Oscar first meets Bud Collins who notices Oscar’s players (in 1973) “hitting extra hard and with plenty of topspin in a way that startled spectators—and me.” Oscar is appointed Junior Davis Cup Captain, a great honor because this coach is responsible for bringing along the next generation of your country’s professionals. We think it remarkable when Russia has four players in the semifinals of tournaments which is amazing enough, but imagine ONE coach having four players. In the junior semifinals of Monte Carlo that year, all four players left in the 18 and unders were coached by Oscar Wegner. The Spanish players demand more of Oscar’s open stance, topspin emphasis, and Oscar is made one of three National Coaches for Spain, thus the National Tennis School of Spain adopts Oscar’s tenets over the initial objections of their coaches. Spain is about to become a world tennis power that continues to this day with an average of 15 players in the top 100 men’s rankings as of 2009.

1974: The best selling tennis book of all time appears and stands up well in any list of Top Five of All Time. Timothy Gallwey’s “Inner Game of Tennis” was the first book to postulate tennis was played by the non-thinking mind, something he called “self 2” versus the thinking side “self 1.” The book is far ahead of it’s time and struck a huge chord of resonance with millions of USA players who knew he was close to something instinctively they knew to be true: tennis is not played by thinking or by mechanics on the “conscious” level. From page 6: “I too admit to overteaching as a new pro, but one day when I was in a relaxed mood, I began saying less and noticing more. To my surprise, errors that I saw but didn’t mention were correcting themselves without the student ever knowing he had made them.” Though Gallwey’s original edition advocates the conventional closed stance forehand beginning with the movement of the feet first, it’s far ahead of it’s time regarding the mental game. Gallwey also brought up the concept of “visual imagery” which had been promoted in 1903 and then again in Johnny Yandell’s 1990 Visual Tennis. Gallwey notes that the best athletes know their peak performance never comes when they’re thinking about it. This has been confirmed by pros repeatedly such as when in 2009, Serena Williams noted, when asked was she thinking about anything facing match point against Dementieva at Wimbledon, “Thinking? You guys give me too much credit. On court, thinking is not a good thing.”

Gene Scott starts Tennis Week magazine in 1974 and his “Vantage Point” column, which became one of the most widely-read and influential columns in the sport. Scott was a thought-provoking tennis journalist who constantly challenged the game’s guardians to grow the game as an inclusive sport with integrity and chided them when they fell short of expectations. My great admiration for Scott comes from this statement which is so true and yet explains my own frustration at the lack of a foundational simple tennis method such as MTM being adopted to make tennis grow. “Tennis can be a recreational mantra,” Scott said. “It’s about exercise. It’s about doing a sport for your whole life. One way for tennis to grow is if tennis courts were considered as crucial as gymnasiums whenever any new school was built in any city in America. Tennis is played in more countries around the world than any other sport. The U.S. could have an edge in developing tennis, but we don’t take advantage of it.”

1975 Oscar Wegner, after returning to USA from Spain, teaches and then becomes Head Pro at Aventura Country Club in North Miami Beach and becomes one of the highest paid coaches in the U.S. In 1976 Oscar is owner and Head Pro of Tennis Club International in Ft. Lauderdale. He sells it in 1978 and dedicates the next three years to studying technical aspects of the relationship and actions of the spirit, mind, and body while refining his Modern Tennis Methodology while teaching tennis, windsurfing, and sailing at the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel in Florida. Oscar by now is convinced tennis is best played by instinct and feel. He begins to believe that Gallwey might only be partially right; that tennis in the “zone” is played by the “spirit” or “being” of the person which would explain why the best tennis science, especially trying to measure the brain’s thought processes, can’t measure certain things felt by players nor force players to play like robots nor account for their physiological differences which result in different technical styles. He postulates it was the “spirit” rather than the subconcious that kept a player playing their best. I think of how we describe athletes with a “fighting spirit” (Jimmy Connors was a perfect example of a tennis warrior) and this concept of tennis being played by the “spirit” has always had a ring of truth to me since I first heard it.

1975: Jack Kramer, World Champion for seven straight years, and first Excutive Director for the ATP tour formed in 1972, is part of the best team of coaches assembled in the early 1970s by Tennis Magazine to write articles for The Classic Instruction Series from Tennis Magazine. This 200 page plus book is a compilation of “The Classic Instruction Series from Tennis Magazine” and it appears with the Tom Okker article below by Jack Kramer appearing in the 72, 73, 74, editions also. This one article shows how one of the game’s best players ever and also considered one of the best teachers didn’t have a clue as to the future of tennis and the best way to teach how to hit a tennis ball. Tom Okker of the Netherlands was rated top ten seven consecutive years from 1968 to 1974 and as high as number three. John Alexander was a top pro chosen by Tennis Magazine to represent the players viewpoint on forehands. In “The Best Forehands in the Pro Game” Alexander notes in this 1975 edition his belief the three best forehands in tennis at the time (and he played against all three) are Newcombe’s, Gimeno’s, and Tom Okker’s while noting that a young Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas have severe topspin forehands also, Borg hitting like Okker does with a more western grip. Alexander writes: “Okker has one of the most unorthodox forehands in tennis, but certainly one of the most effective…..it’s a very difficult shot to deal with, because even if the ball lands short, it will kick up very high and long, making a return approach shot very difficult to produce.” Below is a frame by frame analysis Jack Kramer uses to comment on what he sees as the best forehand in 35 years. Notice how Okker’s “unorthodox” forehand looks exactly like almost any top windshield wiper forehand in the year 2009. This is the exact forehand style Oscar taught in Spain at the same time this article first appeared in 1973. The National Tennis School of Spain would adopt this forehand method as their model and the spread of “modern tennis” begins until every pro player is using a windshield wiper thirty years later.

From “Tom Okker’s Lethal Topspin Forehand” by Jack Kramer:
“Tom Okker, seen in this high-speed photo sequence, has the most unusual forehand in the tennis today. It is probably the most potent topspin forehand since Fred Perry’s (he won Wimbledon in 1937). What makes Okker’s forehand all the more amazing is the fact that he does so many things “wrong” with it: (yes, those are Jack’s italics, he emphasizes WRONG); he uses a lot of wrist, puts almost no weight into the shot and hits the ball late. Thus it is not a shot the average player should imitate, and yet it is obviously effective. Why? Simply a case of tremendous natural ability overcoming a mechanical and cramped style. Probably the only orthodox part of Okker’s stroke is his ready position (frame 1 on page 36), where he stand with his feet apart, his racquet out in front, and his eyes on the ball. But then, as he goes into his looping backswing (3 and 4), he does it with very little arm motion. His wrist is undercocked—that is, he takes his wrist back before his racquet in order to get more zip as he flicks it into the forward swing. Okker has a very late backswing, since he seems to wait for the ball to bounce before he starts. As Okker starts his looping forward swing (5 and 6), he transfers his weight to his right foot and maintains a relatively open stance which helps to deceive his opponent about the direction of the shot. His racquet goes back (6) with a very loose grip and wrist which will help him whip the racquet around like a piece of spaghetti. As he flicks forward (8), his forehand looks like a Ping-Pong stroke with the racquet going up perpendicularly (9, 10). In meeting the ball, which he does very late, Okker brings his shoulder around extremely quickly (6 through 11), showing that he does not shift his weight forward for the shot. This shoulder turn, rapid forearm movement and exaggerated wrist snap produce the power in Okker’s shot.” No wonder I was told by top tennis instructors not to try to copy Borg when I was coming up the local rankings quickly. They changed my swing to copy Stan Smith and I wound up a hacker losing to juniors I used to pummel when I played like Borg. Remarkable that Kramer proceeds to attack exactly how the pros play today, open stance, windshield wiper, finish with racket wrapped around the body as unorthodox and wrong. Kramer observes Okker even takes the racket back “AFTER THE BOUNCE” something that is a key ingredient to Oscar’s MTM.



Dennis Ralston writes in the same 1975 “The Classic Instruction Series from Tennis Magazine” that when volleying on the forehand side, that regarding footwork, less is more. In the next sentence he writes contradictory data when he instead puts all the emphasis on the feet instead of the hand, when he writes “when you get into the proper position to hit the ball, the weight should be back on the foot on the stroking side, with that foot remaining still pointing. The other foot should be moved forward and placed at an angle approximately 45 degrees to the net. Your weight shifts, but your feet don’t.” Most pros today volley open stance on the forehand side and lift upwards per McEnroe or the Bryan Brothers. MTM teaches to volley with the hands with the finish at the impact point. Film of Federer at 19 being coached shows him volleying one legged on a trampoline, which is a great way to teach to volley with the hands and not worry about feet.

1976 Dennis Van der Meer forms a second coaching certification organization in the USA, the Professional Tennis Registry PTR. From Hilton Head South Carolina, Dennis would trains over ten thousands coaches in the USA and extend his reach to training coaches overseas. Van der Meer probably was the first coach to advocate a single tennis methodology to be taught exactly the same by all coaches using a highly programmed, step-by-step teaching method he calls the Official Standard Method of Instruction. It breaks each of the basic strokes down into a series of specific steps. Students start by mastering simple skills (like bouncing a ball off the ground with their racquet), which can then be combined to produce whole strokes. The idea is to create confidence by building on successes and thus minimize the frustration of learning a difficult sport (Oscar would claim tennis is simple as “touch the ball, touch the shoulder” if you know MTM techniques). Dennis teaches a closed stance forehand with a variation of the “turn, step, and hit” method in which the classical “turn with racquet back, take adjusting steps forward towards the ball, and hit” are taught. Dennis taught the big “C” loop that was popular then and was known to place a piece of wood on the fence to get the student to “loop” around the wood against the fence. Van der Meer believes that his methods “can teach a beginner the basics of the game faster and more efficiently than any other method.” History and evidence tell us otherwise, and in 2005, I witnessed Dennis ask to sit down with Oscar and admit even he (Dennis) used Oscar’s stuff, which I relate in the 2005 entry in Part III.

1977 “Tennis for the Future” written by Vic Braden, the man Jack Kramer calls “the world’s number one tennis coach.” Closed (neutral) Stance, racket back at earliest moment, hit through the target line finishing with arm extended straight in front with the sword pointing straight up in the air. Vic has lots of pics drawing the big “C” loop swing on the fence windscreens with tape to teach the student to trace the loop in the backswing. Page 53: “It’s impossible to be too early on your backswing…..the loop swing is not continuous but is taken in two parts…..” Page 57: “To test for unwanted wrist layback and a wrap-around follow-through, the hitter places his back (pic shows his entire back against the fence if right handed) against a fence and practices a backswing and follow-through without ever touching the fence with his racket.” As much as I loved Vic for his incredible passion and his work to grow the game at the grassroots, little did he, Tennis Magazine, and the other “gurus” know this book and the turn, step, and hit techniques they were all advocating at the time would one day describe “Tennis for the Past.” No wonder my game and millions of USA players never felt natural or we never got much better as this turn step and hit model would never become popular with the tennis masses when offered a choice versus playing naturally hitting up and across the ball.

This is Part 2 of The Real History of USA Tennis Instruction: What Happened When and Where.

1978: The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (NBTA) opens at The Colony Beach and Tennis Resort in Florida, with a one year tuition of $12,000. Nick’s philosophy: “When you put good players with good players, you get better players. From better players, you get champions.” Nick’s philosophy proved correct. Other than national association’s tennis schools, such as existed in Spain, the NBTA was the first full-time tennis boarding school to combine intense training on the court with a custom-designed academic curriculum and would later evolve and set the standard for a world class tennis academy that addressed physical, academic, and mental conditioning for players. John McEnroe, not impressed by Nick’s teaching, would state publicly that Bollettieri ‘doesn’t know anything about tennis’. What’s even funnier is that Bollettieri in his 1995 autobiography, quotes McEnroe and admits: “When I first started coaching, I faked it. I pretended to know more than I did. I bullsh***ed my way through. But I looked and I listened, and I learned.” For ten years NBTA was the only academy where the best players could gather to play fulltime. One of his first year groups included a 14 year old kid from Buffalo, New York named Jimmy Arias who hit a “unique” forehand, jumping off both feet from an open stance with a strong, semi-western grip followed by a long wrap around follow through around his opposite shoulder. Nick observes this forehand’s effectiveness which looks very much like the forbidden aforementioned Tom Okker forehand that Jack Kramer and other USA coaches claim is so incorrect but which Oscar Wegner is teaching as the model forehand. Arias was brought to Nick after being taught by his father, who just happened to be an engineer, which I find ironic given Oscar applied engineering principles to determine that the open stance windshield wiper forehand technique was the “future of tennis.” The importance of Jimmy Arias’ forehand should be noted because though it was already used by pros before him as well as a growing number of Spanish players who had learned it from Oscar Wegner as one of Spain’s National Coaches, it was the first time American kids in the television era got to see the “modern windshield wiper forehand” from one of their own. No one in USA tennis royalty then taught players to hit like this, because Oscar was only recently back from Spain and would again be ignored by the USPTA when he made a second argument while teaching below the radar in Florida. Yet players all over the USA, including Jim Courier, who reached number one with a full western grip in 1991, credit watching Arias as a primary influence. After Ivan Lendl appears on the pro scene with a huge “inside out” forehand, within a few years, Nick decides to adopt and market the Bollettieri “Killer Forehand,” but Nick, like most coaches, was not able to transmit belief into a written formula for the masses. Arias turned pro at 16, reached number 5 in the world, came down with Mononucleosis at 20, and after a layoff from tennis, after 21, never regained his forehand mastery, even though coached by Nick, who blamed it on the transition to graphite and composition racquets from wood. This is odd given coaches today, including Nick, claim the “new” racquets are why players all play the new way. Arias no doubt influenced Bollettieri, who admits Arias inspired his “killer forehand” philosophy. In 1981, Nick moved permanently to 34th Street in Bradenton, Florida where to this day, Nick continues to draw the world’s top juniors into his sandbox, from which emerges a champion, which of course, he is always personally responsible for. Many people consider him the greatest coach ever in terms of influence on the game, given Nick finally recently reached ten in terms of #1 players he’s worked with. Robert Lansdorp would disagree that Nick’s assertion that he (Nick) is the best coach in the game because Lansdorp lays claim to that title (I cover Lansdorp later) . Whether Nick’s teaching is what actually made those players champions is a subject for another debate as Nick is not without his critics, even among prominent tennis royalty. Arguments will always rage over whether to count achievements of players, like Boris Becker, who only turned to Bollettieri having established themselves as champions, but Nick has earned clout and respect that makes him a key figure in any tennis history. Bollettieri, maybe in order to attract players he might otherwise not, used to give scholarships too freely and was forced for financial reasons to sell to IMG in 1987 who run it as part of IMG business. In Jan 2009, IMG fired the three top heads at NBTA and Nick suddenly appeared full time instead of his previous part time commitment while he coached players on tour. In the 1992 heading I discuss Nick’s personal gift and what he hoped would be his teaching legacy to the game of tennis: System Five. Nick is one of the titans of the game.

1979: A book that still stands up well from my viewpoint is “If I’m the Better Player, Why Can’t I Win?– Psychology of Competition” by Dr. Allen Fox, former top ten US player and a famous coach at Pepperdine University. In 1966, player Allen Fox did something that might never be equaled again (and maybe for the foreseeable future because Federer can’t currently play himself). At the Pacific Southwest tournament in Los Angeles, Fox defeated in four consecutive rounds, Manuel Santana, Tony Roche, Fred Stolle, and Roy Emerson, the then current holders of the four major Grand Slams. This book was thought provoking and it’s comments on not trusting tennis instruction led me to start testing every tennis theory I could find because Fox basically told me tennis was full of charlatans, and after I had lost my top junior game because a very well known coach told me at a summer academy in 1976 I could not swing like Bjorn Borg without injuring myself; he advised me to copy Stan Smith. I promptly went from a junior with great promise to a tennis hack. Thus, when I started teaching tennis in 1980 for money, I started to test every theory I could find on court with students and observed the results. Fox attacked most coaching theories and pointed out truths few dared to. Fox also examines the “mental game” of tennis in new ways with new theories. He also suggested we model after the pros, though like all coaches back then, he did not provide a step by step method for amateurs to emulate pro strokes, even in his later videos. He even had 26 world ranked players take the 16 P.F “personality/intelligence” test and published the results (not attached to names) in this book to try and discover any differences compared to the general population.

Fox is the first I could find who uses the word computations in regards to how a players has to learn to process cause and effect. Fox was on the right track. “Page 81: “Learning by reward and punishment: Once the ball is in play, there is no time to think at a conscious level. What occurs after the serve is struck is achieved by what people commonly call “instinct.” But what is instinct? Basically, it is a complex calculation being made at a level of the nervous system below voluntary, conscious thought.” Page 83: “The muscles do not move by themselves. That is where programming comes in. As soon as the correct set of answers to a whole host of varied and complicated problems is stored, you will be able to play tennis like Ken Rosewall or John McEnroe.” (Note: bad data in, bad data out. We must provide our players with the correct set of answers, known as technique.) Fox’s Chapter 10, titled “Getting the Most from your Teaching Pro” is sometimes genius in it’s truth and in asking the right questions. Page 136: “Unfortunately, tennis is still something of a black art. The game abounds with charlatans and people peddling their own pet theories. In many cases, advice from two tennis pros will be directly contradictory. It is a nasty position to find yourself after approaching both in a state of ignorance. If you knew enough to decide which was right, you probably wouldn’t be taking lessons in the first place. Although it might not be much consolation, it should be known that the problem is not resticted to beginners. Many of the top players in the world are equally confused by a myriad of conflicting advice when they they suddenly develop trouble with their serve swing or backhand. I wish there was an easy answer, but there isn’t”

This last statement about there not being an easy answer at the time was true until as Oscar Wegner pointed out the problem with tennis coaching is that every coach or even a single coach introduces contradictory data you should never teach anything that contradicts the correct biomechanical techniques that will be needed at the higher levels. [/i]Oscar sought to fill that void for simple and clear, concise statements of biomechanical efficiency in tennis instruction. The Power of Simplicity is the real secret to Modern Tennis Methodology. Oscar’s MTM starts the swing from the contact point to the shoulder (the finish) and then allows each student to progress per their natural instincts and biomechanical capacity. Back to Fox….Page 137: “In tennis teaching, as in medicine, there is no simple forumula that the layman can use to decide which expert is right. But in both areas, common sense applies. After all, the motions of the ball are determined by the basic laws of physics. If something your teaching professional tells you does not make sense, ask him why. Never be afraid to ask why things are done in a particular way. If you are left feeling uncomfortable by many of the answers, change teachers.” A basic premise of MTM is when students are faced with competing theories, we MTM coaches always suggest to “test the data.” The student will invariably, if presented with the correct data, be able to figure out what is the best information. Fox, despite his astute observations did not know himself how to present teaching tennis in a methodology that could be passed onto others that would grow the game. In the same chapter, he lists the obvious great pros, such as Vic Braden, Tony Trabert, Bob Harman, Barbara Breit Gordon, Jean Drysdale, Tommy Tucker, etc.. He recommends students select pros from the USPTA who as we will discover, in 25 years, throws out conventional teaching after countless damage was done to USA tennis from which we are just now recovering. Fox himself made several tennis videos that did not teach anything like the way he played, another case of playing one way and then teaching another, the curse that has killed tennis.

1980: USPTA President Tim Heckler, no fan of two teaching organizations, negotiates a secret agreement with Dennis Van der Meer that both feel is fair to merge the USPTA and fast growing PTR. The USPTA 45 member board votes it down over Heckler’s objections. “Teaching Children Tennis the Vic Braden Way” appears. This was my tennis bible for teaching kids until Nicky B’s 1989 Tennis for Kids video. To be fair, it has a lot of great info about how to treat children learning tennis. Page 62: “My position—until research proves otherwise—is to have youngsters use as heavy a racket, with as large a racket grip, as they can comfortable manage.” Jack Groppel in 1984 used science to prove Braden’s claim, but history tells us the pros wound up heeding Oscar’s opposite advice about grips (nearly all pros use smaller grips) because again, as you will discover if you listen to the players and understand how MTM works, SCIENCE CAN’T MEASURE “FEEL.” Page 74: “Always try to finish with their upper arm under their chin, and the racket face aiming towards their opponents back fence and raised to the sky. This is called the follow-through.” This particular closed stance forehand with the “sword held out in front finish” is still the one taught in the 2009 USTA Quickstart manual despite the fact no top level junior anywhere on earth swings like that and this swing would never be allowed in any Russian tennis academy for tiny tots.

1981: Oscar becomes Junior Program Director at The Rod Laver Racquet Club in Delray Beach, Florida where he starts giving lessons to three youngsters who at the time were not taking tennis seriously. Mr. Vince Spadea Sr. was a piano teacher with a wife from Columbia. Vince Spadea, Jr, would win the 18 and under Orange Bowl and later be top 20 in the world. Luanne won three Orange Bowls and scholarshipped at Duke, later joined by her younger sister Diana, who was All-American at UCLA and transferred to Duke to play with her sister.

Oscar behind the scenes: All three Spadea kids would become national junior champions. Oscar later on coached the family in 1991 where he was coaching privately at St. Andrews High School in Boca Raton, also preparing Vince to turn pro under his father’s tutelage as Oscar preferred not coaching players individually into the pros in favor of reforming tennis instruction and working with coaches and parents who wanted to coach their children, such as Vince Spadea Sr. St. Andrews would win the state title in 1991 and Vince Sr would coached Vince Jr. until age 26. In 2007, I took a Michigan coach with me to California to set up MTM in Laguna Beach, California, and Kalamazoo’s James Gleason became Vince’s hitting partner as Vince was then coached by Pete Fischer, the doctor/coach who developed Sampras. I’ts probably not a coincidence that coached by Fischer, Vince reached the quarters of the Australian in 2008 as one of the oldest professional players to reach the quarters in recent years. I had extensive conversations with Pete Fischer about how he coached the young Pete Sampras by looking at photos of top pros and being a doctor, biomechanically relating what they did to Sampras. Fischer did something very few coaches have ever done; he raised two juniors from scratch who would become top 20 players, the other being Alexandra Stephenson, who Pete coached from 8 to 17. Stephenson reached the semi’s of Wimbledon at 18 as she had won the US Open Juniors Doubles Championship the previous year. Stephenson had the third hardest woman’s serve ever recorded at one time, so it was no accident how Fischer taught Sampras to serve and her one handed backhand looks like Sampras’. I learned Fischer’s serving methodology which I admire very much because he figured out that it was the long muscles that mattered the most in the serve and used the small muscles to just direct the ball. I talked with Fischer about finally publishing some things he had written and then asked him to sum up how he developed Sampras in one sentence. His reply, which I recorded knowing I would be writing this book someday: “If you want to develop the number one 12 year old in the country, allow them to play naturally.” Fisher did get help from a local pro, Robert Lansdorp, given Fisher had a medical practice and thus could not coach Sampras full time, but when Lansdorp was touting the two handed backhand as the future of tennis, Fischer stuck to his belief and converted young Sampras to a one hander. Fischer said he always emphasized Sampras playing the right way over winning (here’s that reference to technique, again, something we see from Russians to great coaches like Rick Furman who taught the same thing to Todd Martin). Though Fischer told me he had never heard of Oscar Wegner during Sampras’ younger days, Fischer had figured out something key: natural biomechanically correct movements which happen to be the basis of MTM’s technique. I have asked Fischer to write something for our site. Pete Fischer being the developmental coach for Sampras and Stevenson should not be taken lightly. Nick Bollettieri says there is no doubt he is the best coach in the world, yet by his own admission, in a 2007 interview, admits he has never taken a junior from scratch into the pros. Fischer took two from scratch….very well done, Pete Fischer.

1981: Peter Berwash’s Tennis for Life. This book is very modern for it’s time yet he still advocates “turn, step and hit” despite some great observations such as not taking the racquet back too early. Like Oscar, Peter played the pro tour but by that time was allowed to play Grand Slams and unlike most pros who taught, he had a sense of playing by feel. Page 27: On volleys, eliminate the backswing. A person who learns to play tennis by the “racket back” method usually has trouble understanding and “feeling” the volley.” Page 47: “Get your racquet back! That one phrase has probably destroyed more potentially good tennis player than any other piece of advice. The racquet back/follow-through brand of coaching ignore the most important part of the game—the contact area, or hitting the ball.” Page 56- 57: The open stance forehand is hit with the weight on the right foot. PBI tests with radar speed guns showed that the speed of a players forehand varied little whether it was hit from an open or closed stance…In fact, many could hit slightly harder with an open stance.” Page 72: “A good checkpoint on topspin is to notice if your racket finishes on edge (or perpendicular to the ground) in front of your body.” (This is the old sword in the air finish with the straight arm finish). Page 92: With pictures showing what not to do, he writes “Don’t get too elaborate with the follow through. Avoid wrapping the racquet around the stomach (per many players today) or around your neck.”

1982: Oscar is starting to get invitations overseas again as word of his theories start to spread. Carlos Alves brings Oscar in for a month to institute Modern Tennis Methodology in a small unknown telephone company tennis camp for sixty kids with no tennis tradition on the island of Florianopolis, Brazil. Oscar then accepts an invitation in the Spring by former World #10 Jurgen Fassbender to go to Germany to coach a junior and adult team at the Weiden Tennis Club, Weiden, Germany, where Oscar’s teams win both the Jr. League (going undefeated) and the adult Liberliga. The Germans study his theories carefully. It was in Germany where Oscar became known as “the American who teaches tennis in two hours” by his German students and this nickname would inspire the title of his books. Oscar is invited to stay and coach top German juniors but he decides to accept a move to return to to Brazil in South America. It might be a coincidence, but Graf, Becker, Stich all appear shortly thereafter as a German tennis boom begins.

1983 A Yugoslavian girl, Monica Seles, wins her first tournament at age nine without knowing how to keep score. In 1985 she won the 12 and under junior championships at the Orange Bowl coached by her father, Karolj, a cartoonist who studied physics and sports science to come up with her distinctive two-fisted groundstrokes. Gloria Connors had been the most prominent parent to coach a pro player previously, but Monica Seles and Jennifer Capriati both credit their fathers as their primary coach though both attended top academies for free with handshake agreements with Nick Bollettieri and Rick Macci respectively. Capriati had been started by Jimmy Evert and her father Stefano had even contacted Oscar about coaching her at age 8 but Oscar was returning to Brazil and had to pass, and by the time she went to Macci’s in 1987, though only ten, she could already beat most older girls from the baseline. This starts a parent/coaching trend that would only start to increase in the pro ranks rattling many top coaching theories and leaving Nick and Rick with bruised egos behind as both leave Nick and Rick to be coached by their fathers exclusively though Capriati went to Saddlebrook to train with her father Stefano and Tom Gullickson after leaving Macci’s.

1983 -1985: While Owner-Head Pro for the American Tennis Academy in Sunrise, Florida, Oscar travels to Brazil a few more times as MTM is being implement with great success and the coaches want more. The facilities lease in Sunrise Florida expired in 1985 so Oscar decides to start traveling again and heads back to Brazil as they are reporting that the players at Florianopolis are developing something special using MTM.

1984 Jack Groppel’s “Tennis for Advanced Players” is the first popular book with scientific studies determining how best to hit a tennis ball. I first encounter here the phrases seen even now touted by the USPTA and many coaches, “linear momentum versus angular momentum” explaining how to hit a tennis ball. On page 51, he states, “Remember, however, that most players don’t hit from an open stance because it might be more effective, but simply because they’re lazy.” The book also hooks up rackets to machines and determines bigger grips are better while of course, Oscar claims “smaller grips are better.” Note that Nadal uses 4 and ¼ and Federer and all top pros use smaller grips. Nearly everything advocated in this 1984 book turned out to be useless as far as explaining how the top pros and top juniors all play today. This book proves science is only as good as it’s premises. Groppel, like many coaches, only after Oscar’s first two books are published (which could be a coincidence), starts figuring out the modern game quickly except for the concept of “feel”, which science can’t currently measure and Braden, Ray Brown (another PHD), and so many “experts” would struggle with explaining why all pros think it’s so vital. Groppel would write another book in 2001 “World-class Tennis Technique” with another PHD guy, Paul Roetert with a collection of truly renowned players and coaches chipping in.

1985-1989: Oscar returns to Brazil for most of the next four years as the small telephone company group of Florianopolis kids start improving very quickly and Oscar helps develops programs in Brazil in the State of Santa Catarina. Several of the players would start achieving international junior and professional rankings, including Gustavo “Guga” Kuerten, future 2000 World Champion and Marcio Carlsson, winner, with Guga, of the 1993 World Junior Davis Cup. Guga even came back to the United States various times to be coached by and/or stay with Oscar until Larry Passos took over Guga at age 14 to serve as his professional coach. Florianopolis would turn into a Brazilian tennis power and make Oscar a near legend in Brazilian tennis annals. One of the many Brazilians I met who were college scholarship players in the USA, Fernando Pereira, played for an opposing Brazilian academy yet learned MTM from Oscar and won an SEC Division 1 scholarship to Mississippi. He told me how he personally watched Oscar create one good player after another from Brazil, many whom went on to win college scholarships. “Fendo” as he’s known, does occasional work for the Brazilian Tennis Federation.

1986 A 31 year old tennis coach at the Grenelefe Tennis Club is named USPTA Florida Coach of the year for the next two years. Rick Macci, in an effort to bring players to his Academy, installs three year round grass courts to train youngsters for Wimbledon and decides to limit his academy to 40 students at a time for a more “personal” touch. Rick might have been the first prominent coach in the United States to encourage parents to get involved, the importance of which he might have observed when Stefano Capriati brought ten year Jennifer Capriati to him in 1987. A St. Louis born tennis coach named Andy Davis, after working for Harry Hopman and being exposed to the teachings of the great Australian coaches, is hired by Rick Macci. Davis would later become Tennis Director for the famous Triple A 15 clay court club in St. Louis for fifteen years where he became a well respected coach with the largest junior boys program in the city, producing many nationally ranked juniors even before he (then my boss) and I both converted to teaching Oscar’s MTM in 2004 when we both worked with Oscar extensively on court in St. Louis. As of 2009, Rick’s personal tennis court still has an assembly of his often used instructional “SAYINGS” listed on signs on the fence that have come to be called … MACCISMS!” They are still listed prominently on his website (as of 2009). Here are four that are very suspect and contrary to Modern Tennis Methodology and would not be taught by many who coach pro players: 1. Get your racquet back yesterday. 2. If your feet are always moving, you’re in the right spot 3. Early preparation is the key. If you prepare, start to prepare early. 4. Use your legs to hit shots, not your hands. I wonder how Rick would feel when great player turned tennis coach Todd Martin join Oscar in the attack on overemphasis on moving the feet. To quote Todd Martin at the USPTA TEnnis Teacher’s Conference in 2005, “there’s no more damning myth than to tell somebody to move their feet more.” In 2007, one of my students at age 4 was the then youngest student ever admitted to Macci’s and I have some interesting observations on that experience when the father had to call me on his son’s fifth birthday after Macci had finished working with him.

1987 Charlie Hollis, the great Australian coach dies after 50 years of coaching prominent players that included Rod Laver, Fred Stolle, Mal Anderson, Wally Masur, and Roy Emerson, just a few of the 24 Australian Davis Cup players he coached. Though Hopman is generally credited with Australian dominance of the 50s and 60s, he rarely worked with juniors. Hopman was an admirer of Hollis, who like Oscar Wegner, prefered developing younger players. Charlie Hollis never left Australia despite offers to coach for big money in the USA. Upon his death, he is hailed by much of Australia’s tennis community as the greatest coach the world has ever seen.

1987: Tennis Science for Tennis Players by Harold Brody appears. I loved technical books like this and read this one at least three times,though looking back, based on my experience with MTM, if it can’t be explained in words understood by a child, it’s probably not a good tennis instruction. Brody introduces COR, coefficient of restitution to stand for power of the racket. Needless to say this book, like many obsessed with technical explanation, has no real application on court to students. Page 119: “The Solution (to getting your shots in): Increasing the radius of your swing will improve your accuracy and control…If you keep a firm wrist and use your shoulder as the pivot point for your shots, you will double the radius of your swing (the distance from the ball impact point to the pivot) and reduce by half the angular error caused by the timing error associated with that shot.” Guaranteed paralysis by analysis.

1987 Dennis Ralston’s Tennis Workbook. Page 35: “Open versus Closed Stance: As a beginner you want to get your shoulder turned and be sideways to the net ((shows frame by frame pics of himself turning and toes facing the sideling and finishing in the sword up finish position). At that early stage, a closed stance is what you will want. …..As you improve and advance beyond the beginner’s stage, you can start hitting the forehand from an open stance. The better players can hit with an open stance because they are using the racket and not trying to hit it with their body. (notice how contradictory this is to those coaches who claim you use your legs and your shoulders and such to hit with, eg. Macciism: use your legs, not your hand to hit the ball). Page 36: “The Mechanics of an Effective Forehand: *To hit a good forehand, reach back with your hand and your racket and get ready early…*your weight should go forward as you hit the ball; move your weight through naturally with the stroke….*your weight transfer should come automatically if you get your racket and hand back and you hit through the ball.” Page 37: The racket starts everything back for the backswing. If you had all the time in the world it would be ideal to hit the forehand from the closed stance standing sideways to the net. But you find out quickly in competition that you often will not have the time to do that, so then you have to compensate and hit from more of and open or a semiopen stance.” Page 44: “How to Avoid Excessive Topspin on the Forehand: Many players get carried away with topsin and start thinking they are Bjorn Borg. They you look at their grips and you immediate see why they hit so much topspin. They are so far over in the western position that they have almost no other way to hit the ball than to do it with too much topspin. My suggestion to this kind of player is to shift the grip around toward an eastern so he or she can learn to hit the ball flatter. Tennis Tip(in big bold print): An eastern or a continental forehand makes it easier to avoid excessive topspin.”

1988 Louis Cayer, a prominent Canadian ITF member tennis coach, develops a tennis methodology known as the “Action Method” a game based individualized rather than situationalized approach to tennis that over the next decade would spawn and inspire a lot of interest in looking at newer and different teaching methodologies including the constantly swinging pendulum between technique and tactics. Tennis Canada adopts Action Method in ‘88 as it’s foundation to this day. Cayer writes one of my favorite doubles books and is a world renowned doubles coach. Cayer probably was the first coach to have his methodology outright plagiarized in the infamous Tennis System 5 scandal in the 1990s which might explain hesitancy to advocate one teaching method by the USA governing bodies due to their previous experience with supporting System 5 and the embarrassing aftermath in which accusations flew. It started when one coach plagiarized another, sold what he plagiarized to a very famous coach, who tried to take credit for inventing it, then later had to recant, and then comes the accusations that it was stolen from Tennis Canada. Very embarrassing for the tennis coaching world.

1989: What a year as Berwash, Bollettieri, and Oscar Wegner all hit the market with their own products. First up is a videotape, “Tennis with Kids” by Nick Bollettieri. I decide that since Braden’s methods with kids didn’t get good results it was time for a change. I had observed everywhere coaches were losing players faster than we could take them in…I just thought it was because as they told me, tennis was a difficult game. Since Nick has so many great players coming out of his academy, he must know how to get good results with kids, or so I thought. I buy the tape and transcribe it word for word onto paper and laminate it to put in the bottom of my ball basket, to repeat all key words and phrases to my students. Here is an excerpt of what Nick was teaching on film in his own words in 1989: he shows every student on the video with their feet sideways with a closed stance to the net and with their arms holding the racket with both hands pointing to the sideline as the starting point. . Although Nick says to “keep it simple” the swing looks very much like what Vic Braden taught. Here is Nick in his own words.

Forehand: “Two ways to take the racket back. Either straight back or a little semicircle motion. Always have the big follow through and use the left hand at the end of the follow through. Teach them to hit out to that left hand. Having that left hand out there helps. Parents, if you can’t hit it to them, just pitch balls to them.”

Backhand: “Take the racket back on a two handed backhand. Very simple, straight back and arms extended out to the target area. Drop the racket head underneath the ball on the forward part of the swing. Keep both hands on the racket and keep the hands next to each other. At the end of the backhand, finish and stay. You can finish and release with the other hand if you feel comfortable doing so. Take it back in a comfortable manner straight on back and have your arms and racket extended outward at the end of the stroke. The one key to the backhand is to have your elbows out away from you when you are finished. Don’t roll your wrists over and tuck your elbows in at the finish. Extend your arms out on the two handed backhand and look how high the elbow is. Extend those arms outward.” Sorry Nick. Nothing that looks even close to modern tennis that even your best players were playing with by then. Both forehand and backhands you teach feet sideways to the net with the finish ending with the arm extended straight whereas Jimmy Arias, the player you claim to have inspired your killer forehand, bent his arm after hitting up and across his body. Why not teach beginners to build the same muscle memory they will need as they grow?

1989: “Total Tennis” by Peter Berwash, another book by Berwash who actually is observing more than most coaches that something is changing. Looking back it’s apparent Berwash always tried in his writings and coaching to teach tennis somewhat by “feel” and was thus ahead of his time but again not very close to proper technique. Berwash makes observations instead of laying out a systematic tennis methodology teachable to all players. Though the book was filled with some accurate and modern information for it’s time, even noting that an open stance forehand, contrary to what is being taught in tennis circles, is balanced and effective, it’s filled with concepts such as “minimum potential,” a rather technical term for just letting the racket strings rebound the ball over the net with no backswing. It is filled with misconceptions despite it’s very forward (for the time) comments. Berwash even plugs vegetarianism, as he is a true vegan. Peter, like Oscar, on page 20 says “forget footwork,” claiming footwork is secondary to balance, but very unlike Oscar, Peter teaches that the mental focus should be directed to the “belly button” which is the center of gravity for most males (for balance.) Oscar of course, believes that all mental focus should be directed to the hand (angle of the racket); that balance is an instinctive individual thing brought out through drills and practice. Berwash also missed, like so many coaches who get one thing right and then a very important thing wrong (or multiple things wrong), something that is essential and one of the key fundamentals to the modern tennis swing: the finish. Page 21: “….contrary to popular belief, it (follow-through) has nothing to do with hitting a good shot….Basically, just let your arm finish the movement freely and the follow-through will occur naturally.” Not one picture in the book shows a wrap finish on the forehand groundstrokes.

Berwash still advocates the straight arm finish. In MTM, the effort to finish the shot is what helps shape the shot as you move across the ball shaping the shot with your hand and forearm. The only real mental image we introduce on the groundstrokes is that of the finish wrapped around the body and shoulder. Oscar teaches that in the beginning stages all students should learn to associate the butt of the racket near the shoulder with where the ball goes; this explains why all beginners, young and old alike, are taught to finish near their shoulder almost covering their chin with their elbow. The finish to every shot is much misunderstood as to how MTM teaches it on a gradient scale. Ray Brown of easitennis.com recently has tried to dispute Oscar’s assertion about the finish with his own studies, but as I indicate on this website, science in tennis is not always applied properly. What matters is results; not how techical and complicated something can sound as science still cannot measure how the “fighting spirit” of a tennis player operates through instinct and feel.

3) The First Shot is Fired and the Revolution Begins:

Fall 1989: Oscar returns from Brazil, sets up in Boca Raton, Florida, and prepares to reform USA Tennis Instruction by self publishing “Tennis in 2 Hours: The Techniques that Make Tennis an Easy Sport to Learn”. The book lists 19 myths and advocates a windshield wiper swing exactly per Tom Okker’s swing that is described as “wrong” in the 1972 through 1975 Tennis Magazine Tennis Strokes and Strategies editions. In looking back now, Oscar is not falsely modest as he now has twenty years of testing and refining these techniques behind him and thus decides to take on the entire USA teaching industry literally trying to “move mountains” by wiping out conventional tennis instruction, an incredible goal if you think about it. The book is about mechanics of the strokes, because Oscar claims unless you have the proper technique, you won’t be able to execute tactics to their fullest; therefore, technique is everythigng. Oscar dedicates the book to the USA for making his life very pleasant and writes, “In exchange, I want to help America reconquer it’s former tennis glory, and my hope is that this book will help achieve that goal. My teaching techniques emphasize the development of a strong feel and control of the ball. ……The less you have to remember, the easier it will be for you to get a feel for it….And yes, you can learn to play tennis quickly. It is an easy sport to learn but only if you know the correct technique.” He writes, and this statement should be examined very carefully for it’s profound implications by anyone wanting to coach a student, child, or pro, “Students who learn from the beginning with these methods, without interference from harmful techniques, develop their game to high standards over the years.” “The purpose of this book is to clean up the misconceptions about this wonderful, exciting sport, and to teach a natural, new way of learning tennis. This book may be a rude awakening for many wonderful people involved in the tennis teaching profession. It is meant to be my contribution to your success.”

The book is filled with simple words that convey powerful sensory images….. “Instead of taking the racket back right away, you “stalk” the ball with the racket face, as if you were going to touch it……Feel that you touch the ball before you hit it, then emphasize your follow-through.” Oscar emphasizes starting with an open stance from the very first stroke, bending of the arm at the elbow and hitting across the ball and ending with the butt of the racket associated with the direction of the shot. He recommends approaching the ball or stalking the ball with the hands in front of you, today it’s commonly called “tracking,” as if you were going to catch it. Oscar claims “finding the ball” is the most important fundamental in tennis. He also advocates starting every beginner with their feet facing the net, and if anyone wants to claim they were teaching open stance forehands and open stance two handed backhands in print as their main technique, which would become the hallmark of the Williams Sisters, before Oscar or this 1989 book, now is your chance. In browsing ADD, Pro, and Tennis Magazines from 1980 to 2005, not only could I not find a single mention of Oscar Wegner’s name other than the single negative review in Tennis Magazine, I could not find a single advocate of the open stance on both sides until after Oscar’s second book came out in 1992. I now teach the three basic fundamentals of tennis are “find it, feel it, and finish it” or some variation thereof. You could ask ten tennis pros today at the grassroots today what is the most important fundamental and not hear “finding the ball” as the answer and almost never the words feel and finish though we know the Russians use these two key words in their famous Spartak Academy. In Part 3 of his History I show pics and proof of who Russians start their tiny tots versus the USTA method in 2009.

Oscar prints an initial 300 copies of his book, and sets up a booth at the Sunshine Cup in December ’89 in Plantation, Florida. He meets the Junior Davis Cup Captain for Russia who takes a copy of the book with an inscription “For the Russian Tennis Federation with my best Wishes, Oscar Wegner” back to Russia as a present for the Russian Tennis Federation. Bud Collins confirmed that the book was being used in Russia the following year in his Dec ’90 visit to the Kremlin Cup, when Russian coaches were asking him for more copies of Oscar’s book. If you have any doubts of Oscar’s influence in Russian Tennis, read my article on the Spartak Tennis Academy in which I provide proof that the Russians still train their children from their first swings with the techniques advocated in this 1989 book, which are very different from the swing still being taught in the 2009 USTA Quickstart manual.

1990: Oscar, despite no sponsorships or support from any tennis organizations in the USA, is obviously confident because he prints another 3,000 books, and gets his book in libraries around the U.S from Connecticut to California as he would spend the summer as Tennis Director for Camp Cedar Tennis Academy in Maine, of all places, before returning to Florida in the fall. In the December 1990 issue, Tennis Magazine reviews Oscar’s Tennis in 2 Hours book and gives it a bad review claiming, and I quote, “Wegner advocates an outdated brand of tennis that over-relies on topspin for defensive rallies….Teaching ordinary folk to play like the pros is like teaching a baby to sprint before it can walk.” A great majority of US tennis coaches including me are influenced by this initial negative review and thus did not buy the book. Since Oscar’s more famous second book in 1992 is never even reviewed by a single major tennis publication, USA coaches would continue to believe Oscar’s materials irrelevant to their profession. Other than printing Oscar’s Feb 91 letter to the editor refuting their review, most likely due to Editor in Chief Donna Doherty realizing Oscar’s techniques were a threat to her personally espoused views and the coaching icons that Tennis Magazine espoused, as of 2009, Oscar’s name and open discussion of his theories have never appeared in the pages of Tennis Magazine, while overseas, Oscar became the most popular tennis teacher in the world. I will say that since Chris Evert has been the editor, Tennis Magazine has begun advocating more modern tennis techniques and I even saw in Jan 2007 issue an article written by a tennis coach with pictures demonstrating a drill exactly as Oscar did in his 1989 book. But then today, many at the top appear to be trying to figure out how to copy Oscar and rename his stuff without even acknowledging him, it seems. Hopefully Chris Evert will have Tennis Magazine write about Oscar one day.

Also in 1989 USPTA President Rod Dulany secretly meets with PTR President Dennis Van der Meer for the second time about merging, but a new federal bylaw now requiring 2/3 approval of USTA membership appears to be a stumbling block and talks break off.

In 1990 a book with a videotape appears, “Visual Tennis” by Johnny Yandell. Tennis Magazine, in the same issue as they dismissed Oscar’s book, doesn’t like Yandell’s book, “it’s all a bit complicated and effortful, especially for beginners. A private lesson might be time—-and money— better spent.” I didn’t buy Visual Tennis until the 1998 edition which Yandell admits is great improved whereupon I noticed my students getting somewhat better using these concepts. Now that Oscar’s books have been out and Yandell is involved with the Advanced Tennis Project, Yandell is starting to see things not pointed out in his first edition of Visual Tennis. Yandell, however, like most coaches, and this is natural in a competive capitalistic environment, wants to come up with his own definition to relate how the pros play, whereas Oscar prefers the Power of Simplicity. Yandell advocates to visualize what you want to accomplish right before you stroke the ball. I have a Masters in Education and understand well the premise that most humans are visual learners. This book would put Yandell on a path to making great contributions to tennis and Visual Tennis is very good if you have MTM to help you separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to contradictory data. Here are a few nuggets from the pages 2 and 3. “Many great players recall that they learned to play simply by watching others. John McEnroe put it this way. I just watched Rod Laver, and tried to do what he did……The success of Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert was directly responsible for the acceptance of and eventual dominance of the two handed backhand, a stroke that previously almost no coach or teaching pro would teach. Bjorn Borg started the movement to western grips and heavy topspin-despite universal criticism of his strokes from the tennis establishment……..Great players may have the natural ability to develop their games simply by observing and modeling their games after other great players. As former world class player Barry Mckay put it, “A great athlete can instantly copy a swing pattern.” The problem is for most coaches, they don’t know how to teach the proper step by step biomechanical techniques used by the pros which is what might be Oscar Wegner’s greatest contribution to tennis is: teaching a simplistic biomechanically efficient path to bring out your athletic potential as a tennis player. I still read everything Yandell writes because I admire him for doing two things most tennis coaches don’t do: first take on Oscar’s ideas directly in honest debate, and second, he is honest about his journey to modern tennis, always testing theories, and never afraid to admit he’s learned something new, and he doesn’t sugarcoat or revise history to make himself look better like so many well known coaches do. I think he is fast moving ahead of the curve of most coaches who claim to now teach modern tennis and Yandell is fast realizing the power of simplicity as noted in his excellent 2009 backswing video article series.

The summer of 1990 the NY Times assigns a female sports beat writer living in La Jolla, California to interview Dr. Pete Fisher for an article about how Pete Sampras was raised. The reporter happens to have a tall eight year old daughter that the mother has reason to think is a very good athlete. Intrigued by Dr. Fischer, she decides to start making the nearly two hour drive for her daughter to take lessons from Dr. Fischer. The reporter’s name: Samanatha Stevenson. Her daughter Alexandra (discovered by the press in 1999 to be Julius Ervings daughter) would be coached by Dr. Pete Fisher for nine years until Dr. Fischer would have to quit teaching for a few years due to legal problems. Alexandra would make the semifinals of Wimbledon in 1999 as well as set the record for aces in a professional match by a woman.

1991: Editor note on Tennis Academies: By 1991 there are over 300 tennis academies in the USA when there were virtually none in 1970. Within a couple hours of each other, the three most famous tennis academies open up, each adopting a different approach. The Evert Academy charges $42,000 per student and Nick is now getting over $50,0000 a year including room and board and Macci’s is now at least $700 a week or just under $40,000 a year. I find these amounts interesting given Russia spends less than $400,000 on their entire junior development and literally kicks their already incredibly stroking juniors out of the country to the various tennis hotbeds with already well developed games, many of them being scholarshipped. But then in Russia, they all teach the same technique which you’ll discover if you do your research on this website. NY Times article Nov 21,1991 about tennis prodigies and competition in Florida between Saddlebrook, Rick Macci’s Academy, and Bollettieri’s: “The Camps co-exist but not without behind the scenes sniping. The competition mentions a Bollettieri “production line” where everybody is taught to hover standing at the baseline cracking Andre Agassi forehands, where the International Management Group is the resident landlord, and readily available agent for any teenager who figures to turn pro, where “quantity” is not a dirty word, where Bollettieri, even if he only visits the premises a week or two out of every month, carries the clout of the Wizard of Oz behind his sunglasses……. If there were 200 kids here, I wouldn’t know the names of 120 of them,” protested Macci, a former coach of Capriati who limits his full-time operation to 40 students preferring a more personal touch. At Saddlebrook, which emphasizes personal attention on court and in classrooms and occasionally takes transfers from Bollettieri’s who complain of a “factory” atmosphere, the method is sedate but serious; nobody waits in line to hit, and drills simulate match scenarios. At Bollettieri’s, the mood is more raucous, the drills louder, the instructions more generic, in keeping with the namesake’s latest teaching innovation, System Five, where tennis becomes a matter of offensive and defensive zones rather than nuance……A common thread is the young players, all of whom, regardless of their level of play, attack the tennis balls. When you’re in a tennis academy,” explained Saddlebrook’s O’Connor, “your self-esteem is based on your tennis.”

“But I don’t think we’re encouraging false hopes,” said Tommy Thompson, Hopman’s director of coaching at Saddlebrook, where Capriati is his star pupil and Davide Sanguinetti, an Italian player who didn’t speak any English when he arrived at the age of 16, will decamp and begin a full scholarship at U.C.L.A. in January. “The worst thing that’s going to happen is they’re going to get a college scholarship.”

1991: Oscar starts the year teaching at St. Anthony’s High School in Florida privately developing their top players including the Spadea kids he had started in tennis ten years earlier. Bud Collins didn’t even know Oscar had written a book until the Russian coaches asked him for more copies. Bud meets with Oscar at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort in Sarasota, Florida and challenges Oscar to prove his revolutionary claims on the court. He brings Oscar a group of beginners and players of various ages young and old alike. The instant results spoke for themselves and Bud decides that he should endorse Oscar’s MTM admitting “I’ve had to unlearn many things I long considered gospel.” Bud decides to write the foreword for Oscar’s upcoming new edition of his book to be published by Thomas Nelson Publishers of Nashville, Tennesee, the biggest Bible publishers in the world.

1991, Oscar, still receiving numerous invitations to teach, decides to teach as a Pro at the Creek Club in Locust Valley, Long Island, NY for the summer season. In NY, he meets Brad Holbrook who is intrigued by Oscar’s new claims and thus invites him to appear on the New Tennis Magazine TV show in November, not realizing he would put his job as the show’s host in jeopardy. Brad compares Oscar’s revolutionary ideas to the other coaches Tennis Magazine is promoting and realizes that Oscar’s method might be the best way as well as the future of tennis instruction.

Note on Venus Williams: Doing my research, I realize Richard Williams is a marketing genius as well as a brilliant coach who observed what works best when it comes to coaching. Richard starts each of his girls hitting balls at age 4. As they get older, he homeschools the girls so he can hit with them six hours a day. He take his eight year old daughter and six year old Serena to Paul Cohen, a tennis coach in Brentwood, Ca, and in 1988 Venus hits with John McEnroe, who was working with Cohen. In 1990, on the heels of 13 year old Jennifer Capriati’s signing million dollar endorsements, an outspoken black father with two young daughters starts claiming that his ten year old Venus Williams of Compton, California will be the next tennis phenon. Without ever having played outside of the Los Angeles area, he gets the NY Times to write a front page story about ten year old Venus on July 3, 1990. In 1991, he gets her in Sports Illustrated and a TV appearance on the Today show. then takes the girls to Nick Bollettieri’s and to Jimmy Evert (father of Chris Evert) to get their opinions. Michael Mewshaw would write a special report about what he heard at the 91 US Open in the Oct 92 Tennis Magazine titled “Exporing Venus” when he would challenge Richard Williams to prove his claims (with no response from Richard) that his girls were already being offered huge endorsement deals. An unnamed top player agent is quoted, “lemme tell you, we’re the ones being hustled. Her father is priming the pump, building a market for his daughter. He’s playing the press like a harp. He keeps claiming he want to protect Venus from exposure. But every time you run around, she’s on TV, she’s in Sports Illustrated, she’s on the front page of the New York Times. And nobody, not even the Times, asks a single hard question.” The article notes that Richard Roth of CBS is granted permission to film the girls practicing on the Compton courts, but when CBS gets permission from the tournament director to film them playing in a tournament match, Richard Williams says no. Roth believes “Williams didn’t want Venus to be seen on national TV in a disadvantageous setting. What if she loses? He was being careful to develop and foster not only a tennis star, but an image and an aura. Presumably that would make her more marketable. Roth pointed out that for all his (Richard’s) protests about commercial exploitation, Willam had distributed a booklet about his daughter to potential sponsors. “I was determined to tell her story” Roth said. “They were determined to tell her story themselves. Williams wouldn’t give up his conditions and control.” In all his years of reporting, Roth said he’s never seen such micromanagement, not even when he covered George Bush’s presidential campaign. When they couldn’t reach an agreement about the ground rules, Roth abandoned his piece about Venus Williams. Though the CBS piece never ran, shortly thereafter, Richard got Venus on the Today Show. In May, Rick Macci visits California at Richard Williams’ invitation to see the girls for himself. Macci after watching them for an hour, doesn’t see anything special on court, and would likely have passed on them (as did others) when Venus heads out the gate toward the bathroom and promptly starts walking ten feet on her hands, then does backflips and cartwheels, amazing Rick with her athleticism. Rick tells Richard he may have the next Michael Jordan on on his hands when Richard points at his youngest daughter and says “I have two.” Rick, seeing a great business opportunity, tells Richard if he moves to Florida, he will scholarship them at the Haines City Tennis Academy, which charges $2,200 per month for room, board, and tennis instruction per student. Venus and Serena go for free against a percentage of future earnings. Richard sells his security service (his wife is a nurse) and upon arriving in Florida, Richard pulls them from playing tournaments, against Macci’s advice. The girls train at Macci’s for three and a half years though Richard maintained control and never allowed them to play junior tournaments, instead working on their technique while practicing “game situations.” In Nov ’94, 14 year old Venus plays her first pro tournament and wins her first round match in Oakland against the #58 world ranked player before losing to World #2 ranked Arancha Sanchez Vicario in three tough sets. With one pro tournament under her belt, Reebok signs Venus and Serena to a five year $12 million deal allowing the family to buy a Florida mansion where Richard installs two clay courts, one for each daughter, and in early 1995, Richard decided he would solely coach the girls and fires Macci. Macci prepares a lawsuit and would publicly claim to this day he regrets settling for an undisclosed amount. Richard moved from court to court in a golf cart watching each girl as they trained with various hitting partners. Venus would not play another tournament for ten months after her first one. Kudos to Richard Williams for going against every convention in tennis instruction and both girls would dominate professional tennis for at least a decade.

In 1991, a young Australian tennis coach Brett Hobden starts piecing together a new tennis tactical system called System Five. Brett Hobden’s name would be heard publicly over the next twenty years as he like many coaches, would undergo a huge evolution in how they teach the game of tennis.

1992: February…ten year old Ana Kournikova, discovered by Gene Scott at the ’91 Kremlin Cup, comes to Bollettieri’s as the then youngest player he’s ever worked with. The USPTA publishes “The Five Keys to Tennis-Universal Language for Tennis Learning…A Future for the Game- And a Game for the Future” copyrighted by Nick Bollettieri about which Nick states “It is my gift to the game” The books authors are listed as Nick, Brett Hobden, and Patricio Gonzalez. The 5 Keys of Tennis introduces System 5, which for the next few years tennis coaches are told is the “Holy Grail” of tennis methodologies. Some quotes, “The game has always needed a user friendly system for both teachers and students. System 5 appear to fill this void. For Bollettieri, this will be his legacy to the game,” says Bob Kain, VP, IMG. “In the world of tennis education, no one has all the answers. We’re all looking for the best way to access the genius in each human. And, when Nick and the USPTA say they have it, I listen,” says Vic Braden. USPTA CEO Tim Heckler writes in the foreward, “System 5 was not approved by USPTA as a pretentious marketing tool, or as the only way a person should teach tennis. It is not intended to compete with or offend anyone else who claims to have an excellent method of teaching or who might be concerned that System 5 will cause them undue business competition. Furthermore, it does not suggest that teachers should change from one method to another, or that those who do not adopt Sytem 5 are inferior to other teachers. System 5 meets the criteria for USPTA approval since it enables USPTA professionals to retain their individuality (which has become a trademark of the association), while still providing an excellent system of teaching guidelines….USPTA is developing System 5 in cooperation with Nick Bollettieri and Tenotec (two talented USPTA members who did part of the research in Canada). It will be complete in steps, with new modules being updated and added as research and industry trends dictate……..We hope Sytem 5 will represent yet another step to substantiate the slogan – “IT TAKES COURAGE AND INGENUITY TO ORIGINATE– NOT IMITATE.”
From The Five Keys of Tennis, published in 1992, page 3-2: “The 5 Segmented Swing: Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as an ideal swing. This statement is confirmed when one considers that no two world-class players (male or female) hit the ball in exactly the same way. What each does have in common, however, is a specific backswing and followthrough pattern that they have adapted to various court locations, situations, and phases of play…..Visual your swing in terms of two separate motions, each with five equal segments: a preparatory backswing beginning from the point of contact backward; and a fully completed follow-through, forward from the point of contact.”….the maximum distnace of both your backswing and follow-through will be divided into five equal segments from the point of contact…in the example below, 4/5 refers to a backswing that goes back four segments form the point of contact and a follow-through that comes forward five segments after contact has been made.”

Oscar, whose 1989 book teaches beginners to “find” the ball from the contact point forward to the wrap finish to the other side of the body, is asked a lot by coaches about System 5 and predicts the system will fail because all the attention paid on the backswing takes attention from “finding the ball,” which Oscar teaches is #1 fundamental in tennis. In my first 25 years of testing tennis theories on court, nothing was touted by the USPTA and Nick Bollettieri as intensely as System 5, though doing my research for this article I discovered Tennis Magazine ignored it also, probably because of their constant promotion of Dennis Van der Meer who wrote Tennis with Dennis for them. I memorized System 5 completely; you could take it on court since the first two manuals were soft cover books on hard coated pages making it easy to place under the balls and repeat every phrase perfectly. Five zones, five phases of play, five segments to every swing, five shot heights, 5 responses….. you get the picture. I did get some good results from System 5 probably because I observed that when I shortened the backswing I had good success with 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, and 1/5 swings, but average students couldn’t control their backswings like I could. It quickly faded and in hindsight, it was silly to think you could reduce an infinite number of possibilities to 25 components you had to instantly calculate on court. It was too complicated for all but the most gifted athletes to utilize and players started rebelling against it. Below is a photo with the 4/5 swing example System 5 refers to above. This is the only forehand shown in both manuals: closed stance and swinging around and through the target line. Various books based on System 5 started to come out until interest waned in the system, which evidence and history proved did not work on court though many coaches like me still are aware of it.


Editors note: I wonder how much pride the USPTA had to swallow when in Nov ’04 the USPTA announced they would be phasing out conventional tennis instruction eventually. The USPTA still publishes “The Five Keys to Tennis” which is odd given they no longer advocate closed stance forehands and even Nick in 2008 admitted publicly he is finally teaching open stance to beginners. If you look at the finishes they are advocating in this System 5 swing finish and think that has any relevance to the pros groundstrokes, then let me know because I don’t see it.

1992: At the same time Nick Bollettieri’s “legacy” and “gift” to tennis is published, the book that would be called “the bible of tennis” is published at the same time. You Can Play Better Tennis in 2 Hours is published within weeks of “The 5 Keys to Tennis.” In March, in Key Biscayne, Florida, at the International Players Championships, (what is now the Sony Ericsson Open), Bud Collins is the Master of Ceremonies for Oscar’s new book release banquet for the international press. The new book, with lots of pictures added, is otherwise essentially the same as the first book except Bud Collins is on the cover with Oscar and Bud writes the foreword documenting Oscar teaching this way in Spain as far back as 1973 when Bud first met Oscar at the Orange Bowl. Oscar by now has become a regular at the New Tennis Magazine show as host Brad Holbrook is determined to promote him. Tennis Magazine then demands from Brad that Oscar be taken off the TV show. Brad, now convinced that Oscar is the future of tennis, responds by severing his association with Tennis Magazine and renaming the show and decides to syndicate the new show to give Oscar more exposure. While at Macci’s Academy, Richard Williams, always looking for every edge he can find, tapes these weekly nationwide syndicated tennis shows and seven years later, meets Oscar in Miami in 1999, thanks Oscar personally for all he has done for tennis and tells him that his techniques made so much sense he had his daughters watch them everyday. For years USPTA coaches would discuss at conferences and with me how the sisters had “ugly footwork” because coaches could not conceive how they hit open stance off both sides with such success given no top USA coach besides Oscar was publicly touting open stance off both sides in the early 1990s, at least. I now teach all my students to have such “ugly footwork” such as the Williams Sisters which in MTM means natural footwork according to the students skillset, not forcing patterned footwork on them, allowing them to develop better footwork through drills and experience. It’s ironic that this 1992 book which has had so much impact with so many coaches and players around the world has never been reviewed in the USA despite incredible influence. In all, fifteen thousand copies of this book were sold to coaches and the public as Thomas Nelson shortly thereafter folded their Sports Division. The videos and book are promoted nationwide through national syndication of Holbrook’s tennis show which airs until October 1995.

One more great piece of irony. I switched to MTM as my foundation in 2004 permanently after watching students get better at lightspeed regardless of athletic ability. I was shocked hardly anyone in the USA seemed to have heard of Oscar Wegner but all the South American college players all basically told me they grew up with Oscar on TV. I quickly discovered Oscar has a rampant grassroots following and though many pro coaches praised his influence, most USA coaches were convinced by his detractors to ignore him, even though many privately hailed him as the greatest tennis coach ever. I started my own website http://www.ez-tennis.com promoting Oscar’s MTM and within two years, people from 54 countries signed up wanting more info on Oscar, which I started forwarding to him to get him to put out the rest of his methodology which I discovered was more complete than anyone realized. Oscar, reading my emails sent to my website from all over the world, such as from the Galex Academy in Russia who told me in an email (they had one coach who could speak English) they translated all his materials and his weekly tennis tips into Russian for all the coaches to read, decides he should start coming out with some advanced material and thus made three more DVDs to add to his first classic five titles. Oscar had agreed that since I was an expert on tennis theory, he would allow me to test and challenge his theories against every known contradictory tennis theory and someday write about it, of which this article is a part of that future ongoing project. I quickly discovered many coaches (and it still happens) referring to the 1992 book as “the bible of tennis instruction.” The irony: Thomas Nelson Publishers, who published that book, is the largest publisher of Bibles in the world.

1992: Oscar is Director/Advisor for the Summer Tennis Camp at the National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, NY. In the fall, Brad Holbrook and Oscar Wegner undertook publishing video compilations of his instructional segments on Brad’s TV shows. Between 1992 and 1995, Oscar and Brad complete five videos that will be credited as a primary influence on players from Paradorn Scrichaphan to the Williams Sisters to Strong Kirchheimer (#2 USTA ranked 12 year old in 2007) to Jan Silva, the 4 year old boy prodigy taken to France (since returned to USA at age 7), to countless other players and coaches around the world. As of 2009, the growing list of copycat coaches, videos and slogans include Tennis in 1 Hour, Tennis in Ten Minutes, Tennis in Minutes, Tennis in No Time and Instant Tennis are just a few (can’t wait to see Tennis in Nanoseconds, lol). These original 5 videos, now part of a nine title DVD set, are in my very informed opinion still the best teaching videos ever put together and should be considered the foundation of all great tennis teaching. No one has yet done it better and if they do, I’ll promote them ahead of Oscar’s DVDs. I’m not afraid to recommend other tennis DVDs as long as they have the correct biomechanical data and respect the power of simplicity. Modern Tennis Methodology is still the best recognized teaching system out there until someone provides evidence otherwise. The proof and the test is the Scientific Method and the adoption of these methods by much of today’s tennis world, even if they don’t acknowledge or credit Oscar. The test is whether other coaches get similiar results using the proscribed method.

Editor’s Note: In browsing twenty five years of Tennis magazines for this article (or should I say book?), I think I now see the danger a magazine editor can unknowingly or maybe intentionally do by not being an unbiased reporter of what is going on in tennis instruction. To observe if any changes in Tennis Magazine occurred after Oscar’s 1989 book, I had every issue from 1990 to 1995 in front of me on a table at one point while I looked for anything changing. Surprisingly, I noticed that Oscar Wegner was not the only coach being ignored by Tennis Magazine. After the poor first book review Tennis Magazine didn’t even mention the more publicized second book with Bud Collins on the cover, nor Oscar’s appearances on The New Tennis Magazine TV show, though they did demand Oscar be taken off the air forcing host Brad Holbrook to form a competitive show which not only got syndicated appearance all over USA TV but it also touted the second book and videos for nearly three years. I discover that Nick Bollettieri apparently was not a favorite of Tennis Magazine which coincides with the same time frame Donna Doherty was editor. In fact, one mention of him in 1995 as the 16th most influential person in tennis begins almost sarcastically, “No one really knows if Nick can play tennis but……” and because Editor Donna Doherty was a student of Dennis Van der Meer, and Tennis Magazine published “Tennis with Dennis” every month as a column……I think it can be deduced that anything that threatened the way Donna Doherty thought tennis should be played was not published or given it’s due. That would also explain why Tony Trabert’s Oct ’95 (twenty years after the Tom Okker analysis I cited in 1975) frame by frame analysis of Kafelnikov’s modern forehand attached by Trabert who notes he hits off the back foot and as being “too open.” This constant attack of top ranked players form continues to this day, when you think coaches might appreciate the individual’s ability to create such an effective shot- no one doubted Kafelnikov’s forehand was one of the best in the game. Despite the highly touted System 5 being published in early 1992, no review of discussion nor even a mention of System 5 occurs until Nick is interviewed over three years later and mentions how proud he is of it as his baby. Tennis Magazine went on as if System 5 didn’t exist, never reviewing it nor taking an objective look at it while it was being touted as the savior of tennis. I can understand ignoring Oscar given his unorthodoxy, but how can you ignore the USPTA’s and Nick’s self acclaimed legacy to tennis?

Regarding when did it appear USA coaches were starting to address issues Oscar has raised in his first two books, it appears the October ’92 issue of Tennis Magazine is about the turning point (though they never mention Oscar’s name). Jack Groppel, who had advised me as a young junior to quit trying to copy Borg, and whose 1984 book proved science is easily improperly applied to tennis instruction, appears with his “Busting 8 Stroking Myths” on page 42. Several of the myths agree with Oscar’s claims, but Jack Groppel, PHD, and later his fellow “science gurus” draw a line in the sand against Oscar (without mentioning his name), when Groppel claims in number six, “Feel the ball on your strings” is a myth. Oscar’s MTM teaches that “feel” is one of the keys to every player playing their best tennis and that Groppel is totally wrong, but this claim by Groppel caused myself and countless other coaches to ignore Oscar’s claims that tennis is played by feel. From this point onward, Braden, Groppel, Brody, and later joined by Ray Brown, PHD, join a chorus of coaches who claim that science has proven that the tennis ball stay on the strings for 3/1000ths of a second and the nervous system won’t register that experience we define as feel in the brain until the ball is 22 feet away in a 60 mile an hour shot; therefore, science, according to these “experts”, has measured that the player does not feel the impact until the ball is well on it’s way to the other side. Here is the exact quote, this time cited by Dr. Ray Brown (it has been quoted by countless other “experts” in media) in 2008 trying to refute Oscar’s claims of tennis by feel, “Neurological point. The human body cannot feel the ball until over a quarter of a second after the ball has left the racquet. If the ball speed off the racquet is 60mph (88fps) then the ball has traveled 22feet by the time you feel the impact of the ball on the racquet. After the ball has been struck, not much else is important except to get ready for the next shot.”

Oscar continues to claim to this day, when asked about this study, that “feel” from the players viewpoint is perceived by awareness mechanisms not measurable by the science used in the decades of studies done by Braden and others and claims this misconception is one of the lasting barriers to tennis instruction. This study is used repeatedly in debates to refute Oscar and for years kept myself and more prominent coaches like Mike Miller of St. Louis (son of the great tennis coach Larry Miller) repeatedly from taking an objective look at Oscar’s theories of tennis by “feel.” When I was trying to determine should I trust Oscar’s video claims, I asked the well respected Mike Miller about him. Mike cited this same quote that made him wary of believing Oscar’s claims though he had heard from some very prominent coaches that Oscar had all these “weird theories that somehow worked with the students” and made you look at tennis in new ways, thus Mike was curious to see Oscar in person, so we set up clinics to pay for Oscar’s first St. Louis visit. Until Mike and Larry Miller, Andy Davis, and I got on court with Oscar with Oscar in 2004 and hit balls with him while he explained how this misconception hurt our coaching by denying the perceptions of our students in favor of preconceived notions of what we think our students can feel, I don’t think any of us realized until that demonstration the power of Oscar’s simple theories and why they register so well with a player’s instincts, something not easily measurable by science. All four of us would start using Oscar’s teachings after that demonstration. To this day, I can always tell a Mike Miller St. Louis student. They play like the pros. Mike Miller would form his own St. Louis Miller Tennis Academy which still flourishes today. Andy Davis, despite being shunned by many of his former coaching colleagues for converting to teaching MTM, watched his program overflow the 15 courts he managed (I was his assistant) and within two years was hired at Newcombe’s Academy in Texas. I became known as a coach who could get anyone to hit a tennis ball well, worked with Andy Davis at the famous Triple A clay court club, served as Head Pro of Dwight Davis Tennis Center, then went off to train high performance players and coaches in SoCal, and joined Oscar in spreading the message that tennis is simple and easy to play if you use the correct biomechanical techniques.

1992 Editor’s Note: A lot of people do not know that Oscar Wegner coached Bjorn Borg during his second comeback in 1992, or even know that Borg had a second comeback diametrically opposed to his first failed try. Bjorn Borg, winner of 11 Grand Slams by age 24, has praised Oscar’s coaching so enthusiastically in writing, and I quote: “Oscar is a great coach. He makes the most advanced concepts of the game simple and clear. In a few days he helped me regain my strokes and my feel for the ball.” signed “Bjorn Borg”. (notice that phrase “feel for the ball” that many coaches do not acknowledge as being a key coaching fundamental, so this is a good time to clear up another misconception about Oscar’s teachings. MTM’s efficacy is confirmed by the real experts: THE PLAYERS.

In Jan 1992, Bjorn Borg was staying at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort and practicing daily at Nick Bollettieri’s. His 1991 comeback at the Monte Carlo tournament had been a disaster. Borg had tried numerous tennis coaches including a British and Asian coach without success and was getting beat by satellite players. At Bolletieri’s he was losing to junior players in practice. Bud Collins, by now a proponent of Oscar’s MTM, together with Murf Klauber, owner of the Colony, asked Oscar to help Bjorn Borg because he had lost his forehand and his game was a mess. Oscar worked with Bjorn Borg the last week in January through Feb 20, 1992.

After three weeks of working with Oscar, Borg is so pleased with his game he sets up a practice match with Pete Sampras at Bolletieri’s indoor hard courts to determine if he is ready to play top tennis. Oscar and one of Nick’s coaches (with a student who recently recounted to Oscar and Marcelo Grouts his witnessing the match) watch courtside as Borg fights his way through a 7-5, 7-6 loss, with two set point of his own in the second set tiebreaker, to the hardest hitter hitter in the world, then ranked #3 and shortly thereafter number one six years in succession. It was a great performance for someone out of competitive tennis for ten years. Borg is confident of the regain of his game and makes a public press announcement he will come back one more time at age 35 before joining the senior tour in 1993 with Jimmy Connors. He also gives Oscar the above signed statement about his help. Oscar not only gives Nick a copy of his brand new ’92 book with an inscription: “To the Best American Coach ever,” but also corrects Nick on his unsolicited observation to Bjorn that he may want to step onto the ball on his backhand, grabbing Nick’s hands and asking: “Nick, don’t you want him to focus on his hands?”, shaking poor Nick and leaving him speechless. If you read this, you may understand Borg’s powerful statement about the effect of Oscar’s coaching.

To be objective, here are Borg’s subsequent results reported in the press:

Steven Herbert reports on February 26, 1992 ” Phase 2 of Bjorn Borg’s comeback was far more successful than Phase 1. The five-time Wimbledon champion defeated John Lloyd, 6-4, 6-3, Tuesday night in an exhibition in front of 7,865 at the Forum. It was Borg’s first competitive match since a 6-3, 6-2 loss to Jordi Arrese in the first round of the Volvo Monte Carlo Open April 23 (1991). And that had been his first since leaving the pro circuit in 1981.

Washington Post, April 3rd, 1992 Bjorn Borg rekindled memories of past glories with a crowd-pleasing comeback before losing in a second round match to eighth-seeded Nicolas Pereira of Venezuela, 6-3, 6-7 (5-7), 7-6 (7-5), last night in the River Oaks International in Houston. “Even though I lost, it was a good tournament for me,” Borg said. “This is exactly what I needed, to play a lot of matches like this. I got going well in the second set. It just took me a while to get into the match.” He looked much stronger than in his first-round victory over Peter Svensson of Sweden.

April in Montecarlo: Ferreira vs Borg (7-6, 6-2) Ferreira is ranked 22d in the world and beat John McEnroe in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. Borg is currently tied for 1,094th. After a first set that lasted 71 minutes, Ferreira raced through the second set in 25 minutes. After losing the opening set despite having a set point in the 10th game, Borg said he became frustrated.

Bjorn’s parting shot, in Moscow’s Kremlin Cup, was as close as he got, holding a match point in a farewell tiebreaker while losing to Aleksandr Volkov, 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (9-7). (Trivia: Volkov was ranked #14 in the world and in 1991, may have been victim to one of the unluckiest shots in history. In the 4th round of Wimbledon, Volkov is up 5-3 in the fifth set serving at 30-15. Volkov hits a great approach and closes for the put away volley. Stich’s shot is headed out when it hits the inside edge of the net post and takes a crazy bounce up an over Volkov’s head and lands just in, sparing the German from having two successive match-points against him on Volkov’s service game. Stich went on to take the game, the match and the Wimbledon Championship.) In 1993, Borg confined himself to senior events, renewing his rivalry with Connors, against whom he had been 10-7. He was 7-7 lifetime against McEnroe.

1992 November Tennis Magazine’ Mark Winters interviews then 51 year old Robert Landsorp who at this point is struggling with the modern windshield wiper which he sees taking over the game. Robert is a legendary coach who from his California courts has worked with a parade of juniors who went on to become great players. I must have read about forty articles about Lansdorp and it’s been tough to choose one to introduce him with and yet be fair given he, like Nick and Rick, has many detractors in tennis circles. “Sampras is the last of the Mohicans,” Landorp says. “The pure flat ball Pete hit to win the 1990 US Open, I don’t think it’s possible to find players who hit like that anymore….It’s just not as simple to teach anymore…I used to feel I could teach almost anybody to play the game. No more. Now, kids are hitting so hard that I have to teach topspin more than ever. In the last five years, there have been only a few kids who hit through the ball. It’s almost a lost art.” This last statement about Sampras hitting a pure flat ball is odd because it demonstrates my observation that tennis coaches are known for stating contradictory observations that when examined, appear to have very little basis in relation to reality. In the 1995 entry Sampras’ states that when he hits flat he’s not hitting well. A good example is you will hear announcers such as Mary Carillo state that players got that racket back early on a great shot when replays show the player had the racket in front of them until the ball was very close or even on the ground. At the Australian Open in 2009, super slo mo showed Nadal and Verdasco hitting the ball below the sweet spot near the trailing edge consistently and the announcers were amazed they didn’t hit the sweet spot, which of course if they knew Oscar’s MTM, is easily explained. We have a lot of catching up to do to truly get rid of all the bad data in our tennis programs, including announcers. I’ve learned to trust the players much more than the coaches when it comes to contradictory data though often times the player does not know how to explain himself what is going on. Much more on Landsdorp to come.

1993 Having to stay near New York so he and Brad can work on the TV shows, Oscar is Head Coach at the Newfield Bath and Tennis Club in Stanford, CT.

1994: From April 1994 through the end of 1999 Oscar hooks up with ESPN International as a tennis commentator for the ATP tournaments and both the Australian and French Open. His commentary becomes very popular when he uses the telecasts to highlight Modern Tennis and show in his unique way what the top pros were actually doing. These broadcasts reach deep into Latin America, and cause a complete revolution in South American tennis, both in coaches and young players. This leads to the extraordinary success of many of those countries in the international tour.
On May 9, 1994, Sports Illustrated cover story asks, “Is Tennis Dying?” written by Sally Jenkins, who based the title on concerns by Billie Jean King and Chris Evert that something was wrong with the growth of tennis. Millions had, as Oscar Wegner claimed in his 1989 book, quit the game. Five years later they were continuing to quit despite great American champions such as Michael Chang, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Todd Martin, and Jim Courier. It should have been a golden age given most sports flourish when there are so many champions for kids to copy. Just why they quit, is the real question. Oscar continues to publicly attack teaching the closed stance forehand as a barrier to the growth of tennis and argues that tennis is driving away potential athletes by being the only sport that does not start beginners out emulating the best strokes of the pros, in particular, and open stance forehand.

1995: New Playing Instructor Pete Sampras writes in September Tennis Magazine about a frame by frame analysis of his famous running forehand where he brings the racket up over the right shoulder (known today as the reverse forehand): “When I’m hitting well, I put just enough spin on the ball so it’s a hard shot but I’m careful to control it. The actual whipping action of my arm, wrist, and contact is just natural–I can’t explain it. When I have a bad day….it’s often because I’m hitting too flat. If I’m having a bad day I’ll try to hit more topspin.” (Contrast this with Robert Landsdorp’s claims in 1992 that Sampras hit a flat ball consistently. In addtion, the Advanced Tennis Project would prove that Sampras hit with a lot of spin on his groundstrokes, much more than Andre Agassi.) Compare Sampras’ response to Rafael Nadal, in the May 2005 Sports Illustrated, when Jon Wortheim tells Rafa, “People ask, ‘Who did you model your game after?’” Rafa’s reply , “I never thought like that. I just played the way I was comfortable playing.”

Oscar behind the scenes: A tennis photographer who has never played the game decides at age 39 to take up the game. In 1995 he runs into Oscar, then the Spanish commentator for ESPN International. He hears about Oscar’s “unorthodox” methods and compares Oscar’s claims to his own observations and begins to believe Oscar’s theories account for things the pros do that are not explained by conventional theory. Ron Waite would bring Oscar a group of soccer players who had never played tennis that he and Oscar coach together during the week. By the weekend, they win some matches for Ron, the Albertus Magnus tennis coach, a Division 3 school. The Director of Athletics is so astounded he gives Oscar a lifetime membership to their fitness center facility. Ron Waite not only becomes an accomplished college coach but would start an internet column “Turbo Tennis” (based on the theory you can learn tennis quickly) which becomes one of the most widely read columns on the popular Tennis Server newsletter. I recommend Turbo Tennis to a lot of my students as an excellent tool in our MTM toolbox. Ron, unlike many coaches, has repeatedly given credit to Oscar as a great influence in his modern point of view.

Oscar behind the scenes: Oscar gives a presentation at the at the 1995 Intercollegiate Tennis Association Coaches Convention which draws tremendous acclaim from top college coaches such as Bob Hanson, Ray Still, and others, and he would discover years later that these coaches were heavily influenced by him, of which this is just one plaudit: “It only took one presentation from Oscar Wegner (at the ’95 ITAC) to understand that there was a better way to teach and play tennis. Over the past 11 years I have seen some of the most rapid development of collegiate level players take place largely through the application of these concepts and principles. Even players that have trained a different way for many years can adjust almost every stroke so that they are taking advantage of the methods Oscar teaches.” Mark Guilbeau – NCAA National Coach of the Year, Head Coach – Women’s Tennis – University of Virginia.

1997: Oscar’s growing list of allies convinced Oscar is correct about how to best play tennis now includes his friend Andy Rosenberg, the Director of Wimbledon and French Open for NBC, as well as the US Open night shows for the USA Channel. Andy as of 2009 has filmed dozens of Grand Slam tournaments over the last thirty years and if anyone has watched more film of the pros than Andy Rosenberg, I would think it nearly impossible given Andy’s unique up close and experience as NBC Director. When McGraw-Hill calls him for the 2005 book he states, “Oscar has broken the mold, demystifying the modern tennis stroke. There’s genius in his analysis of pro techniques—the dynamics of what the racquet does to the ball, how power and spin are added. He understands how top pros really stroke the ball, and always have, all the way back to Tilden.” Oscar and Andy produce 40 revolutionary tennis tips which are broadcast from June 1997 through October 1999 both in English and in Spanish to 150 to 170 countries around the world. Those tennis tips, broadcast by ESPN International on every sport, including the NBA finals with Michael Jordan and the Super Bowl of 1997, ’98 and ’99, reach hundreds of millions of people, to the tune of billions of impressions. Unfortunately, (possibly to the detriment of USA tennis) those famous tennis tips, seen by millions of international juniors and coaches around the world, have never to this day appeared on American television. Oscar also in 1997, in preparation for the worldwide broadcasting of these tips, creates his first website tennisteacher.com. Still with no support from the governing tennis bodies, he is determined to get his techniques out to the general public however he can, so he offers the entire first 1989 Tennis in 2 Hours book online for free. This was pretty smart to get visitors to flock to his site because after all, where can you find a free tennis instruction book much less maybe the best one ever written. After the release of the ESPN International tips, which were broadcast for three seasons, the “hits” to Oscar’s website were over 5,000 a day. This led to another tennis instruction revolution that has affected Asia as well. As an example, Paradorn Srichaphan’s father bought Oscar’s book and videos when Paradorn was a teen, in his own words “to develop him as a pro”. Paradorn went on to beat Andre Agassi at Wimbledon, and to become a Top Ten ranked player later on. Another example is the group of coaches that contacted Oscar in 1999 telling him that they had been using his book with great success and wanted permission to translate it to Chinese, to which Oscar obliged, without receiving any royalties. As an example of Oscar’s continued influence behind the scenes, when the Srichaphan Tennis Academy opened up in Thailand in 2006, Oscar received an order from them for more sets of his DVDs.

1998: Tennisone.com starts and would become the largest internet tennis subscription site on the web. It has grown to hundreds and hundreds of articles and videos discussing and debating the latest tennis theories and spreading them worldwide in an instant. The problem for students is that you can read ten articles and get too many different viewpoints emphasizing contradictory data. How do you separate the good data from the bad? That is the magic of MTM, which allows each student coach to test the data and see if it gets the right results.

2000: The USTA teams with NASA, Johnny Yandell, and others to publish the Advanced Tennis Project, the largest scientific study done to date “pursuing a complete synthesis of the elements of speed, spin, and ball trajectory in world class tennis. The Project is also seeking to create the first 3 dimensional understanding of shot making by top players in actual competition.” Yandell publishes the results of the Advanced Tennis Research Project on advancedtennis.com after conducting a high speed video analysis of over twenty top pros from Agassi to Sampras to the Williams Sisters. This study, like Oscar’s theories, contradicted much of the conventional beliefs about the way pro tennis was played. Using high speed digital video analysis of the Pros strokes, the study surprisingly validates much of Oscar’s controversial theories although Yandell’s conclusion on groundstroke topspin being overrated would now be considered incorrect and I’m sure he regrets that finding now as his latest writings seem to be very in line with MTM. I consider the Advanced Tennis Project one of the ten most important developments in tennis. Among the coaching implications and findings that are important in understanding Modern Tennis Methodology:
1. “high speed digital video shows that in virtually all cases, the wrist plays virtually no role in generating the stroke and releases only long after the ball is off the racket. (confirming Oscar’s claim that it is the long muscles that propel the best tennis strokes and that to overemphasize the wrist or anything with little muscles in teaching is to invite trouble)
2 . ”The key to timing the return and all other shots is focusing on the bounce of the ball and the dramatic changes in the flight of the ball after the bounce.” (exactly as Oscar advocates, find the ball after the bounce)
3. Finding Sampras generates 2500 rpms on his first serve, more than twice that of most pro players, “there is no such thing as a “flat serve” in pro tennis. Serving excellence requires spin and control on the first serve as well as the second. Players who want to increase velocity must also generate corresponding increases in spin.

The influence of the Advanced Tennis Project Studies and development of high speed video to analyze pro strokes cannot be overemphasized. These high speed videos literally forced USA coaches and players to start examining what were the real basic fundamentals of tennis. It inspires a ton of research though I’m not sure when it comes to tennis more science is a good thing. The Easi Tennis project by Ray and Becky Brown starts examining ways to incorporate heretofore unrecognized fundamentals such as getting the elbow out front on the forehand. However, Brown neglects teaching topspin to beginners, which neglects the importance of feel as well as control, the keys to MTM.

2000: Oscar is the Tennis commentator for PSN (Pan-American Sports Network) for Wimbledon, the WTA and ATP Tours, and Fed Cup. If you have never heard Oscar comment on a tennis match, you would be amazed at how different it is. Keep in mind if you lived in the Spanish speaking world, Oscar was likely your tennis commentator. I once watched Mardy Fish against Guillermo Coria for the Gold Medal in Greece with Oscar on the phone teaching me what to look for, giving me his commentary. Fish had no business losing that match, he was up 2 sets to 1 and Coria was cramping up badly and tired from an earlier five hours doubles match that went until 3am local time giving Coria only a few hours of sleep before the 10am start for USA prime time viewing. It appears Fish is about to win the match in the 4th on default when Oscar points out to me that if Coria makes it through this cramping, Fish is done. I’m thinking Oscar is nuts. The commentators are pointing out Fish is confident and playing well and that Coria would just like to finish. No room to explain why here, but need I say Fish lost the match, exactly as Oscar predicted.
Oscar writes some articles for tennisone.com promoting the windshield wiper and and playing naturally. In the Feb 2000 issue, Tennis Magazine lists Nick Bollettieri as #16 on their list of 50 Most Influential People in Tennis. No mention is made of Oscar Wegner.

2001: Oscar spends much of the year teaching in Los Angeles developing the commercial aspect of his website, including adding an Online Tennis Academy where people could study and read his 2nd book with video clips added and view the famous ESPN International TV tennis tips, which to this day have never been seen on USA television. When I taught tennis in Laguna Beach and Encino in 2007, I discovered Oscar had a lasting influence with various coaches, who upon discovering I teach MTM, mentioned Oscar had worked with quite a few young kids in 2001 who were now highly ranked juniors. Two such examples were the Ritz sisters, whose father Tom got the DVDS, then he and his daughters took lessons from Oscar, and Tom Ritz later coached both his daughters to Division 1 scholarships. This is an example of the kind of influence Oscar has behind the scenes, quietly, through the coaches, helping more people play their best tennis.
Viewing the Internet potential for business, Oscar spent 2001 in Los Angeles developing the commercial aspect of the website, including an Online Tennis Academy where people could review his 1992 book as well as video tips. School, coaches, universities over the years as well as students signed up for this online tennis academy which was discontinued in 2008.

2001: Nick Bolletieri publishes his “Bolletieri Tennis Handbook.” which the USPTA still recommends as a primary book. More on this book later. In October Gene Scott assembles a panel with Nick Bollettieri, Vic Braden, Rodney Harmon, Robert Lansdorp, Rick Macci, Dennis Van der Meer, Lynne Rolley and Nick Saviano to discuss how to best develop young players. From SCTA Newsletter Oct 2001 account: Lansdorp was adamant about introducing youngster solid fundamentals. He lamented that there is no standard for teaching tennis. “I’m a USPTA Master pro” he noted. “Some of the guys who are in this group (USPTA Master Pros) should be sued for malpractice. They just don’t know how to teach the game.” Macci comments, “if you don’t have the horse, it will not win the Derby.” Note to Rick from me: maybe you and others had thoroughbreds many times over, but nothing destroys natural athletes like incorrect technique or mechanical form based teaching. You can’t tell me Serbia, France, Spain, Russia, and Croatia have all the genetic thoroughbreds. I know a bit about Macci’s teaching personally because I taught a 4 year old who I have on film who I brought up on MTM and at the time he went to Macci’s, was the youngest student Macci had ever admitted.

2002: Oscar moved to Clearwater,Florida and in February 2002 creates a company, Oscar Wegner Enterprises, Inc., a Florida Corporation. Together with an increasing Online presence, his sales of DVDs and book gradually cross the $200,000 yearly range. From his headquarters in Florida and in trips around the USA and some to Europe, he spends the next 7 years helping coaches with the transition into Modern Tennis coaching. Though there have been many presentations all over the world by Oscar, his presentations in England in 2007 to the Next Generation/David Lloyd clubs, resulted in their management recommending that all 770 coaches of these clubs transition into Modern Tennis Methodology. Modern Tennis International in England is responsible for on court certification of coaches in Oscar’s Modern Tennis techniques and the Lawn Tennis Association awards 25 points for every coach certified in MTM.

2004: Oscar Behind the Scenes: In July ’04, after spending a year finally figuring out I can’t mix conventional with modern tennis theory, Oscar tells me via phone to ditch the old ways and just liberate my students using their own creative natural movements with his techniques. By August I am finally convinced Oscar Wegner’s techniques work because every student suddenly gets instantly better and never appears to get frustrated. Some coaches and I pay to bring Oscar Wegner in for some tennis clinics and we are quickly exposed to his unorthodox teaching methods. The first clinic is for coaches. He starts by asking the coaches a question, “What is the first rule of coaching?” No one gives the answer he wants so he replies, “Never tell a student what to do.” His reasoning and explanation opened a lot of eyes and we all felt humbled at not seeing what should have been the obvious answer. Andy Davis, with St. Louis’ top boys program with many nationally ranked players, gathers all the top juniors to meet Oscar, most of them high schoolers. Oscar tells us he is going to show these top juniors the source of real power in the serve. Andy tells the group to pick their two strongest hitters to try and outhit a 65 year old man.” Brett Waite and Blake Strode step forward. Oscar tells them to look down the four clay courts to our right and to hit a ball into the air as far as they can across the courts. Blake and Brett hit several but the farthest one by Blake goes just over 3 and 1/2 courts down. Oscar steps up and smashes the first one landing in the far alley of the fourth court. The next one he crushes trying to hit the fence but it goes over four courts bouncing to the fence. The players are stunned at how he did it. He points to his tricep and says, today you will learn the real source of power in the serve, the long muscles such as the tricep, and how to hit up on the ball, which always produces more power. You never saw a more captive audience after that demonstration. Oscar would spend much of the next year in St. Louis working with coaches and juniors, even giving two hours of private lessons to Blake Strode, raised and coached by Carl Walker, who had developed Blake into St. Louis’ top junior. Oscar told Blake he would have a world class forehand as long as he was aware of a few things he had to keep doing to develop it. He then showed him several advanced serve and volley concepts, and Blake Strode spent the entire winter season in Andy Davis’ MTM clinics where we finished changing his volleys to open stance on the forehand side while lifting up per McEnroe, and though I would never take credit for having just worked with Blake in clinics, when Blake made it to the finals of his second pro tournament and won his third, I wondered how differently things might have been if we had not introduced Blake to MTM, which he adopted like a fish to water given he was already using much of it. Credit also goes to his coach Carl Walker for having the openmindedness and humility to let Blake try some new things with a new coach, even allowing Blake to take two hours of privates with Oscar, something most coaches would be very hesitant to do. Carl Walker not only set the foundation for Blake, but then was open minded enough to build on top of what Blake learned and would coach Strode to the Missouri Large School State Tennis Title in Singles.

In 2004, Brett Hobden, the man who claimed he invented System 5, then took it to Bollettieri, who claimed he invented it, then both had to backtrack when Tennis Canada claimed it was “taken” from them, starts a new modern tennis website and announces he is CEO of Modern Tennis in Naples, FL, by providing this definition of the modern game: “Modern tennis is a faster-paced, greatly expanded version of the traditional game. It has been developed over the years by innovative professional players who – ever in search of a competitive advantage – have discovered new and better ways of hitting a tennis ball. Today’s top players continue to expand the game and bring it to new levels. Can the recreational player hit like the touring pros? Absolutely, and we can help you maximize your power and efficiency and help you prevent injuries.” It’s hard to argue with the observation it appears Brett pretty much copied Oscar’s system and incorporated it with a different twist, though he still makes it much too complicated, though he did make two decent DVDs on the Modern Forehand. Brett even trademarks “Think and Play Like the Pros” and “Tennis in One Hour” which appear to be obvious takeoffs off Oscar’s book titles and Oscar’s Modern Tennis Methodology Play Like the Pros slogan. Brett even references System 5 for swing size on the DVDs. I bought the DVDs personally from Hobden one year and listened attentively as he (not knowing I’m writing down notes of every tennis coach I talk with) claims he figured all this out in the 1980s (he had first been USPTA certified in 1985, I’ll give him that) but out of politeness I did not ask him why he advocated the turn step and hit closed stance forehand in his System 5 manual in 1992 as well as numerous articles I could point to featuring him not advocating the open stance across the ball method he now claimed to me he was had been teaching forever. I wonder what he would have told me if he knew I was doing a Ken Burns historical look at tennis instruction for the record.

Nov ’04: The debate with the USPTA about teaching conventional closed stance is over. Without mentioning Oscar Wegner’s name as usual, the USPTA announces a five year plan to phase out conventional tennis teaching. They announce they will not advocate one teaching method and will introduce five master libraries in the future. Five Master Libraries? I thought Modern Tennis was supposed to be simple. At least MTM is.

2005: Proof that Dennis Van der Meer is not even advocating using his own Standard Method and acknowledging the power of modern tennis techniques? From USA Today online interview with Dennis Van der Meer 1/21/2005: Question from Yakima,WA: I noticed that the Williams’ sisters often hit their backhands with an open stance. What do you think of this? Advantages and disadvantages? Dennis Van der Meer: “Remember there are 3 stances in tennis-either open stance where the feet are parallel with each other, or a stance where your feet are aligned to the net and the closed stance where your feet are facing the sideline. Modern players are playing with a great deal of angular momentum, which means that they are rotating their hips and shoulders far more than the players used to. This technique allows to hit the ball very powerfully and has one other benefit that the stroke can be disguised, i.e. opponent cannot determine whether the ball goes down the line or cross court.”
Tennisone.com introduces high speed video. Tennisplayer.net follows suit. In the May/June USTA issue, Franklin Johnson, then President USTA, admits in an editorial that tennis growth, despite quick blips in growth that eventually proved temporary over time, in the USA, remains stagnant and courts continue to close all over the country.
In September 2005, I attend the USPTA Tennis Teachers Conference as a guest of Oscar Wegner. I spend three days talking with coaches, checking out all the booths, giving the impression I’m a new coach learning, listening and taking notes, soliciting feedback on their opinions of the new “modern tennis” being touted as the future, and ask their opinions of Oscar Wegner, who is speaking at the Tennis Teacher’s Conference for the 5th time in 6 years. Most coaches, particulary the top college coaches, all acknowledge his work, but a few coaches have nothing positive to say. As one very prominent former top player and now a coach, an admirer of Oscar’s, told me when he realized I was with Oscar, “Too bad there is no halfway with Oscar, you either love him or you hate him.” Dennis Van Der Meer asks to sit down at lunch with Jonathan Hertlein, Oscar, and myself. Dennis starts to praise Oscar’s work and his videos, telling Oscar he now uses many of his techniques with his players with great success. He praised Oscar’s videos as “still great stuff” and asked a lot of questions demonstrating great knowledge of the videos and I was speechless. I essentially heard Dennis say words to the effect, “we should have listened to you (Oscar) a long time ago.” When Dennis finished explaining how much tennis teaching had changed because of Oscar, I asked Dennis to pose for the picture below because I told him this was a historic occasion that I wanted to record for posterity because I planned to write about tennis instruction someday, and Dennis was more than gracious to oblige, an incredibly humble thing to do given he and Oscar had been such fierce rivals for decades about the direction coaching should go. I remain a PTR Pro today because of Dennis’ kind words. I am currently not a USPTA coach becauses twice, on two different occassions, when I was coaching very good players, two different USPTA coaches walked onto my court and dared tell my students and a parent that was watching that my teaching students to move away from the ball and lift into the air (as the pros do) was not the proper way to teach. One told my student that the western grip she used caused elbow problems (a total lie for which there is no such evidence). He actually told the father his 13 year old daughter (ranked in top 170 USTA) should be teaching me and that no professional coach should be teaching a student to move backwards during the shot. He didn’t believe I was certified until I pulled out my coaching card to shut him up which he looked at carefully and told the parent that neither the PTR nor the USPTA taught to hit moving backwards. This is a snapshot of what is wrong with USA coaching. The father apologized for that coach, because his daughter was not even in top 500 when I got her. What an impression to give to the public!
A young Spanish lefthander with a different “run and gun” swinging style using the reverse forehand as his main weapon with a big western grip, Rafael Nadal, appears on the scene. HIs style is distinctive and inspires many nicknames, the best I’ve heard is Tennis Coach/Writer Mark Carruthers calling him “John Rambo with a racquet”. Nadal was right handed and hit with two hands off both sides until he was eight when his Uncle decided to teach him lefthanded, which might account for his initially weak serve when he came into pro tennis. Rafa would be come the first lefthander since Macelos Rios in 2000 to make the top ten which is odd given the left handed dominance of players in the 1970s. Tennis instructors before the 1960s used to be fairly strict about even forcing lefthanders to play righthanded; Ken Rosewall and Margaret Court were both natural lefthanders forced to play right handed, with their coaches often tying their left hands behind their backs, and Carlos Moya, Rafa’s mentor, plays right handed though he is left handed, though in Moya’s case he claims as a young child he chose to play right copying others and no one stopped stopped him, though he now says he would have learned left handed given the choice.

November 2005: From Volume 2 of the USPTA Manual top of Page 2: “ Many respected USPTA coaches have been involved in this evolution and have studied modern tennis extensively. However, few have done what most of us would like to see—record their teaching theories, strategies, and techniques so we can learn from them (Editors question…Is this a true statement? Are they kidding? If anyone thought they had an idea about teaching tennis, they were never shy about writing it down somewhere as far as I can tell. The internet allows anyone to publish their ideas, also. This is an example of a statement that misleads people and makes excuses as to why the tennis instruction to date is so poor in the USA. Did Serbian coaches write it all down? Their wave of players puts ours to shame….I apologize for digressing with a rant.) USPTA has coined a phase to describe the modern style of play: load, explode, and land. While technique-specific resources for this style seem scare, especially compared to those that explain the traditional “turn, step, and hit” style…. We’ve created USPTA Player Development to help all USPTA members learn about modern tennis……”

Dec 2005: McGraw HIll, the largest educational book publisher in the world, publishes Oscar’s new book, “Play Better Tennis in 2 Hours” distributed worldwide again expanding his influence around the world. This is the “black book” with an often overlooked troubleshooting guide in the back of the book. His book and system have now been endorsed by many players and tennis personalities, including Bjorn Borg, Guga Kuerten, Bud Collins, Martin Mulligan, Jurgen Fassbender, leading tennis federations, players, and a multitude of coaches that have benefited from these revolutionary techniques. By now, there are a multitude of copycats all over the internet who often list the “myths of tennis” as if they had discovered them. Some give him credit, some don’t.

May 2006 tennisone.com declares, regarding Oscar’s theories, “history proved him right.”

2006: The Russian domination of women’s tennis is drawing a lot of attention and England decides to do their own investigation. August 3, a report is delivered by Sue Mappin to the LTA regarding grassroots development in England. Quotes include: It really is all about community tennis. If 80% of adults could be persuaded to take up the game on a regular basis and to compete locally our problems would be solved. We have more park courts than any other European country but we are not using them, although, of course, there are some good examples out there. Why do we have Club Development Officers? They should be Community Tennis Officers. The LTA pours money into clubs but the message from the coalface (in USA speak that is the general public) is that our system is way too complicated with too many initiatives such as Play Tennis, Raw Tennis and so on and far too few coaches at base level delivering sound technique.” Aaah….that word technique again. But the USTA claims there is no one optimal technique. Is it possible they are wrong in their most important premise?

August 2006 USPTA symposium in Austin Texas: “Kissing a Pig, How to Stop Tennis Players From Leaving the Game” is still a hot subject.

Sep 2006 Andy Murray in 2005 had created a stir when he blames the LTA coaching system for ruining his brother Jaime and states that he had to go to Spain to find good coaching for himself. Coaches in England start inviting Oscar Wegner to do coaching clinics as they are looking at the success of the Spanish and Russians and seek to find a common link (Oscar Wegner) and the largest indoor tennis chain in the world, owned by David Lloyd, decides to train all their coaches in Modern Tennis Methodology. John Littleford and Andy McGrath bring Oscar to England to set up a coaching certification system with five levels. They form Modern Tennis International, and set up a training course to certify over 300 coaches in England and a few clubs owned by David Lloyd in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Cyprus. The Lawn Tennis Association, in an effort to retrain their coaches, hires Bill Mountford, Head Pro for USTA.com and also Head Pro at the Flushing Meadows Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open. Bill Mountford is a big advocate of the modern game as taught by Oscar Wegner and he moves to England for the next couple years as Director of Coaching for the LTA. The LTA, not wanting to lose the growing list of coaches who want to join Modern Tennis International, decides to officially recognize Modern Tennis coaches trained in Oscar Wegner’s MTM by granting certification points to all MTI trained coaches.

2007: USTA implements Quickstart tennis with foam balls to start tiny tots playing tennis. March issue of Play, published by the New York Times, contains an in depth article on the legendary Spartak Tennis Academy, by Daniel Coyle, about how a run down Moscow tennis academy produces more top twenty players than the entire USA the last few years. The article focuses on a the Little Group, a group of four to seven year old kids. At Spartak, students are not allowed to play tournament tennis for their first three years while they focus on “correct technique.” I link to this complete article and have also posted pictures not seen in the original article in the MTM library if you go to the Spartak article in the MTM library.

2007 December, Oscar Wegner meets at my then home in Encino, California with Jorge Aguirre, Dany Van der Rieten of Belgium, Fernando Pereira of Brazil, Susan Nardi, Jonathan Hertlein, Lucile Boshe, and myself where it is decided to form Modern Tennis Methodology Coaching Association (MTCA) to unite the growing list of coaches who are convinced MTM is the grassroots solution to the problems that plague USA tennis instruction. We set up a certification exam process and by word of mouth, without a single press release, start certifying coaches through on online testing program. The mission is to gather those uncertified coaches who have no real training in biomechanics such as the grassroots parks and school coaches as well as promote those coaches who want to be identified as teaching Modern Tennis Methodology. We work out the kinks for a year and a half before deciding to go public Summer of 2009.

2007: In the latest edition of the 2009 USTA Quickstart Tennis Manual first printed in 2007, here is the forehand they choose to start children with. Scroll down to see the Spartak picture below it taken in 2006 of tiny tots being taught to play. In Russia, I quote, “Technique is everything.” Read my Spartak analysis if you haven’t.



Now contrast the USTA forehand being taught above to children with the Russian forehand being taught to beginners at the legendary Spartak Tennis Academy with it’s one indoor court. Notice the extreme finish with the “racket in the backpack” as tiny tot expert Susan Nardi Unger likes to say. Notice the hips open to the net. The Russians correct every little thing and all their coaches teach the same biomechanical techniques, very much unlike the USA. The little girl to the far right awaits to hit her forehand with a western grip, something Robert Lansdorp is on record recently still claiming ruins American juniors, and Macci also until very recently has never allowed (I speak from experience on this one). When author Daniel Colye asked for translations of what the coaches were yelling at the kids, he was told “finish more thoroughly” and “feel” as two of the most common phrases, words always used by Oscar Wegner and every MTM coach but not taught hardly ever in the USA grassroots.



2009: April: NY Times Article which is a good update on the debate: http://www.blacktennispros.com/2009/04/ … nd-in.html

2006: If you want proof the USPTA is starting to copy Oscar by incorporating many of these techniques with their own terminology and take on it, all you have to do is read all their literature like I do. Sometimes they just copy him almost word for word because they can’t find a new phrase to replace the beautiful simplicity of MTM. ProPrenn, who makes tennis balls, hires the USPTA to put out a small “Tennis Instructional Handbook” in every package of Pro Pren T.I.P. balls, the foam balls now advocated to start tiny tots with before transitioning to real balls. I quote “…in a rally, concentrate on getting your racquet to the ball. Just “find” the shot and finish with your racquet over the shoulder. Don’t worry about a backswing, you don’t need it right now.” These concepts will get you hitting your best shots faster.” Drill 4 on full swing rallies from 3/4 court states, “hit back and forth to each other with a full finish…No big backswings are necessary, just find and finish. This will help you develop full strokes.” These words are almost verbatim from Oscar’s 1989 book.

2008: Sept/Oct issue of Racquet Sports Industry contains a letter from Tim Heckler telling the secret prior history of merger attempts between the USPTA and PTR which occurred in 1980 and again in 1990 and failed for various reasons. Heckler announces that recent merger talks have been initiated and that the USTA and TIA have been informed. Heckler also admits that with such large organizations and intertwined interests the merger is difficult to accomplish but pubicly states the USPTA’s desire to honor Dennis’ body of work and he publicly in writing invites Dennis and Pat Van der Meer to discuss ways of merging the two associations. Heckler also claims that two million new players have taken up tennis in the past two years, the first real indication that tennis might be growing. However, only time will tell. New racquet sales only tell you how many people might be taking up the game. The only real number that matters is how many people are playing the game five years after they take up the game.
At the National USPTA convention in California, Nick Bollettieri admits after 40 years of teaching closed stance, he is now teaching open stance also. He has finally rewritten his Killer Forehand Article, currently published on tennisone.com and tennisplayer.net, which used to advocate a closed, semi-open,and open stance forehand, to say, “hitting a killer forehand from a closed stance is like trying to shoot a cannon from a canoe” something he had not given any indication of in his 2001 Bollettieri Tennis Handbook.

2009: In the summer of 2007, Dr. Ray Brown, a prodigious writer of tennis articles as well as a fanatic when it comes to applying science to tennis, opened up his EASI Tennis Academy in Virginia. Ray is an interesting guy who I’ve followed for years and I use a lot of his advanced ideas in my coaching because he now teaches modern tennis though I think like many,his obsession with only what science can currently measure is why I think he misses some very important points and he does not appear to understand the power of simplicity. In fact, he claims on his website today he only wants the most dedicated hardest workers to attend his EASI Tennis Academy. His website claims, “Typically, a novice training at the EASI Academy will develop significant skills in as little as 6 months that will require two years to develop using classical tennis training methods” (sounds like MTM). Ray for years, as did many coaches who were skeptical of Oscar, always quotes that study about the ball only staying on the strings for a few thousandths of a second therefore the idea that you can “feel” the ball as Oscar claims or even “hold” the ball as Kelly Jones (Kelly, besides being a world #1 doubles player, has coached a lot of world class players, more than Ray Brown ever has) claims is totally bogus. More on Ray Brown and the roll of scientific research later.

2009: May, Johnny Yandell admits in tennisplayer.net since Tim Henman switched early in his pro career, he can find no one in professional tennis that does not use the windshield wiper swing. In July, the first DVD showing how you can build tennis preskills in Tiny Tots to teach them to look like little pros in form and style comes out. Susan Nardi, PTR Tester/Clinician, USPTA P1, and MTM Pro certified (I worked with her for six months in California so I can say she’s actually an expert in MTM as well as the best coach I’ve ever seen on video or in person with tiny tots), puts out “Mommy, Daddy, and Me Tennis” DVD where she shows how you can quickly get three children playing like pros with open stance and over the shoulder finish in no time at all and in my opinion, it’s a perfect application of MTM. She even gets one child rallying back and forth with the father, both hitting across the ball with a complete finish, looking very pro-like. Susan incorporates educational principles to teach children tennis pre-skills and one 5 year old, of obvious average athletic ability, picks up a racket for the first time and in ten minutes is rallying back and forth emulating the pros.
Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.” quickly becomes a best seller. It deserves it. This book is groundbreaking in it’s challenges to many misconceptions held not only in tennis, but in most fields. It brings up the subject of how certain techniques applied a certain way build excellence.

2009: June 30, ESPN shows an interesting comparison between “old school” and “new school’ tennis. The end of the discussion deals with a discussion that surprisingly Sampras and other pros who tested out wood rackets versus the new rackets recently did not find that much difference in power. I don’t think I’d be surprised by that given I and other pros have hit with a wood racket and discovered only the “feel” seemed to make a difference but we could still hit pretty well. Remember that Bollettieri claimed Arias could not regain his forehand due to the inability to make the transition to the new rackets when every other pro on earth was able to make the transition. I would love Arias to come on this site and comment as to if he still believes that, given what Arias has seen regarding modern tennis instruction regarding his personal discussion with Oscar Wegner about how he hit his forehand. Click here: http://www.espnregionalmedia.com/now/?p=1705
In July, Tennis Life Magazine in England does a two page article on the effect of Modern Tennis International, the MTM certification process Oscar Wegner set up in England a couple years ago. Now, they are halfway through to training 700 coaches in MTM. Click here to read the article:
http://www.tennisteacher.com/UK-News.htm

Where are they now in 2009?

Nick Bollettieri: In early 2009, IMG fired the three active coaches running the NBTA and Nick returned to a more hands on role coaching full time at the Academy. Nick’s greatest contribution to tennis was that though tennis schools had existed before his, he redefined the concept of “tennis academy.” The success of the academy has given rise to a number of myths. It is not dominated by Eastern European teenagers being groomed or thrown overboard, depending on their tennis ability. It is an elite sports boarding school, housing close to 300 tennis scholars from 70-plus different countries, most of them paying their own way. Anyone can apply, if they can meet the annual fees of roughly $50,000 for a junior boarder for the September to May program which includes room and board. Another myth is that every student wants, or even expects, to be a professional. In fact, around 70 per cent have aspirations no greater than being good enough to win sports scholarships to American universities. That still leaves 70 to 80 students who are dreaming or at least hoping to enjoy a career-sustaining level on the professional tour. ‘Our message is always you’re more likely not to make it than make it,’ says Carolina Murphy, the admissions director. ‘I’ve lost count of the amount of parents who apply for trials or scholarships only to find that their kids were big fish in small ponds back home, but actually average or lower by our standards.’ What is certainly not a myth is the Bollettieri work ethic, embodied by long, physically tough days, months of practice, and crucially, competitive action. ‘You’re not just coming here for a tennis lesson,’ says David ‘Red’ Aymes, one of Bollettieri’s best known coaches. ‘You’re here to compete, and competition is at hand, at all levels, 365 days a year.’ Courts packed with a mix of youngsters and pros, even in the late-afternoon sun, are testament to that. The attention to detail on non-tennis development is staggering, including a mind coaching unit, media and drama department and video analysis suites. And never far away is the founder and figurehead, Bollettieri.

Vic Braden: Vic Braden at 79 still studies biomechanics and in particular is fascinated with the role of the brain in sports science research. His latest technical research uses APAS software which requires 3 cameras to be set up and a grid to be placed on the court before filming which he uses to film pros and calculate every angle, speed, and trajectory of player movement for his analysis and sharing with others. Vic Braden was helping Jack Kramer keep the pro tour in the days when they used to set up in city streets and have pros give demos to publicize the upcoming matches. He has trained countless players and coaches over the years and no doubt his enthusiasm and passion which inspired me in video and print (I only saw him speak in person once and he was passionate as ever) kept a lot of people playing tennis. He still works with many coaches whenever called and helps and supports many people behind the scenes. He recently started a tennis ambassador program where kids travel teaching other kids tennis. He writes for several publications as well as the internet and is determined to promote the game of tennis as much as ever and to keep sharing what he has learned.

]]> http://www.oscarwegner.com/2012/05/the-real-history-of-usa-tennis-instruction-what-happened-when-and-where-by-john-carpenter/feed/ 0