“Well, the University of Denver, in those days, took care of the working public; all of the advanced classes for the advanced degrees started after 4 in the afternoon. So I had all day long to study and be free and, I was contemplating that wonderful idea of having all that free time to play tennis. Clay Benham from the University of Denver Tennis Team — I had played with him — was the Pro at Green Gables Country Club and he liked golf better than tennis at that time. He [dragged] me down there and we played a game and had the tennis chairman out. Clay told the chairman that he didn’t want the job, three weeks after he was given the job, and brought me along to take it and I didn’t even know that. I got the job. I had fifteen students the first year and I was, by God, going to do a good job with those 15 students.
“People who are now in their sixties, whom I had started as teenagers will attest to the fact that, if they didn’t practice during the time I assigned them the courts — we only had two courts so I assigned practice time to each one of the 15 students — and if they didn’t make it, I went and got them. The parents were always playing golf and the kids were either on the lake, sail boating, or were being pulled by a motor boat or they were in the swimming pool. Wherever they were, I went and got them. If they were in the swimming pool, I waded in with my tennis shoes and tennis shorts on, and grabbed them, took them to the locker room, made them get dressed. If they were girls, I made the attendant get them dressed. And I took them on the tennis court and I locked the gate and I told them I would open the gate at such-and-such a time.
“Well, they weren’t very happy, but sitting around on a hot tennis court with no shielding from the sun was less desirable than practice, so they all practiced. They all ran away from me when I went fishing for them or getting a motor boat and going out to pull them off a sailboat. Almost every one of those kids got ranked by the end of the summer in the state tennis rankings in the top eight. I had two first places and the rest of the fifteen were somewhere between three and fifteen. I sometimes used to stay until sundown, to tell their parents that their kids hadn’t practiced enough and take them home myself.”
TAKING KIDS TO WORK AT THE COUNTRY CLUB
“Now some of the grandchildren that I have from the five kids that we raised—Kim, Kelly [Bierenkoven], Brad, Sherri, and Doug—will remember that I dragged them out of the house at 6 or 6:30 in the morning on summer days, treated them to a very inexpensive breakfast, gave them an allowance for lunch at the club and to come home with me late at night and, as long as they practiced tennis an hour or two hours a day, I allowed them to have their freedom at the club to play golf, which is a four-letter word, or swim. And if they made friends with people who had sailboats, they could run out on the sailboat. Sherri loved it the most. They all learned to play a beautiful tennis game, all but Kim who was already 15 when we got married. I didn’t take her out with me. She already had a job. All four of the others lettered at Cherry Creek High School and that is a compliment, because that school won the state championship every year. “
MENTORSHIP TRAINING IN TENNIS
“I was never going to teach school, because it didn’t pay anything and I never thought I was going to be a tennis pro, because there were only two in the City of Denver at that time, the Denver Country Club and the Denver Tennis Club. And Cherry Hill hadn’t even gotten a tennis pro by then. So I had no models, except for the Denver Country Club.
“I won the tournament at the Denver Country Club to become the state champion and the pro there said, ‘You don’t have any structure to your game. Who’s teaching you?’ and I looked at him [perhaps this was Arnie Brown?] and laughed and I said, ‘Nobody is teaching me. I watch people and try to follow the strokes of the people who seem to be successful.’ So he said, ‘Tell you what. You be my ball boy. You can’t use the locker room because you’re Jewish and I would get into all sorts of trouble,’ and he said, ‘You come out and you pick up balls for me and you watch me teach and you can learn your tennis by watching me.’
“So I watched him and I picked up balls, I think, for two years, maybe three, and learned tennis by watching, and then I continued playing tournaments. I didn’t think I was that competitive. I didn’t live, eat, and die by my wins or losses, I just was having a good time.”