Bruce Davies Tennis Coach

For over 47 years, I have been learning a wonderful game called TENNIS!

When my Dad to me took a court near where we lived and put a relatively heavy ADD_IN aluminum racquet in my hand, I knew this would be THE GAME FOR ME!

It was a beautiful spring day and the only instruction were, "hold your racquet like this when you hit the ball on this (forehand) side. If yo are going to hit the ball on the other side, don't change it at all, but if the ball is coming really fast, you might want to use both hands. Turn yourself so that your left side faces your opponent, kinda like in baseball, but using only one had. If the ball is coming to you left side,turn so your right side faces your opponent and hit it with 1 or both hand.

Seemed simple enough, then we hit some balls back and forth. Few of mine stayed on our side of the fence and his came kinda slowly, floating over to me and bouncing strait up. My Dad told me that during the Korean war, he was stationed stateside in a warehouse that distributed everything soldiers needed. He play every day during the lunch break with his buddie, who knew the game better than he did and my Dad lost all the time. He never took a lesson, but they had fun!

Well, there seemed to be more to it than my Dad knew, so I started to scrutinized the shots of the masters of the game and my favorite at the time was Bjorn Borg. I noticed something different about how he hit shot's and how instead of 'floating' over the net, they were coming hard and fast, dipping back to the court and scooting away! Wow, This I had to try. So off the driveway to hit balls at the garage door. Soon, I was brushing up the back of the ball and saw it start to dip towards the ground, and now fewer of my shots went over the roof of the garage!

Dad, Dad! Let's go play tennis again! I asked him. "Sure so, and I might even let you when a few this time!" he said, but I just smiled and said "we'll see!" Once to the court thing happened quite differently. I had my Dad having to back off the end of the court, because my shots were hitting his feet! "How are you doing that Bruce? It's almost the same as my Navy buddies shots!

"It's called TOPSPIN" Dad. I watch Bjorn BBorg hit the ball like that and during the breaks, they explained how to hit like that. Here, let me show you!"

Well my Dad's shots were pretty ingrained and he told me that when he was young, they switched his dominant hand from left-to right handed, by having me vacuum the house, every day. He wouldn't play tennis with me ever again, but I found some boys my age who would. We had a blast. I was winning, then showed them how to hit the ball like me and they were winning!

I discovered that I liked to play tennis, but I loved to teach it, to be a coach, to others.!

If you would like to learn how to play like the Pro's, I can teach you. You don't need a court right next to where you live, but if you can find a wall in a parking lot, there EVERYWHERE, you can hone the skills I teach you, like a chef hones his knives, to make them Sharper!

I will explain how the game was created...Did you know that King Henry the 8th LOVED tennis and while it was a slightly different game back then, had the tennis racquet invented because some balls hurt his soft hands when he payed! He then "decreed" that's made a rule that everybody has to follow, that a ball should be made of supple leather, stuffed only with dog's hair....not rocks n'sand like some peoples were", and that was the beginning of the game we call Tennis.