Talk:Mercer Beasley

All of the below is source material that I may use to expand the article

Brook Zelcer's article, to be studied again and mined for info and quotations:

While Beasley's duties included general maintenance and running the pro shop, he started to coach the customers, although his own playing skills were poor. Beasley blamed his uninspired tennis on the "complicated" instruction found in a tennis primer given him by his father, but his eyesight is the likely culprit. In many photos, he is pictured wearing coke bottle glasses, and protégé Phillip Osborne remembers his coach having to drop and hit the ball from his hand in order to demonstrate groundstrokes.

Beasley was a natural, and in no time he had the Notlek regulars playing their best tennis. Word got around, and legends Vinny Richards and Bill Tilden visited with Beasley, offering up advice and encouragement.

Wealthy Midwesterner Victor Elting came to Notlek to hire Beasley, and found his future pro disposing of a wheelbarrow full of cinders. When Elting offered him the job, Beasley said he wasn't qualified. But the persistent Elting doubled Beasley's current salary, and in no time Beasley and wife Audrey were off to the well manicured grounds of the Indian Hill Club of Winnetka, Illinois, where Beasley reinvented himself as a teaching pro.

The Wizard of Winnetka

When Mercer Beasley took up his grip for Illinois in 1921, professionalism of any kind was widely despised in tennis. In fact, the life of a pro at a typical country club was still that of a servant, and tennis very much a sport of the elite. At the Indian Hill Club, Beasley was allowed to eat in the club dining room only through the direct intervention of Elting himself. But no matter, for however out of place he may have appeared to others, Mercer Beasley was always his own inimical self. He arrived at court each morning dressed in a white jockey cap, long flannel pants and a pinstriped blazer. In his arms were instruments such as boxing gloves, hammers, baseball bats and bicycle tires, anything to help teach his system of the game. And it worked.

Five years later his students Louise McFarland and Marjorie Gladman bagged a junior national title each.

In 1932 Time declared Beasley the most significant teacher in the history of U.S. tennis. By then he had developed Vines and Parker, his two great protégés, and promoted the game to hordes of other competitive and recreational players. To the vast majority of Americans, Beasley was tennis. He traded jabs and jibes with lightweight champ Benny Leonard, and even held court with the mighty Babe Ruth, who complained of any game that required him to keep the ball inside the fences. The A.G. Spaulding Company's "Mercer Beasley" model was the top selling racquet for much of the 30's and 40's, outstripping even the ubiquitous "Jack Kramer" in terms of its popularity. Many were the memorable matches played with the "Beasley," including the stellar 1949 U.S. singles title between Ted Schroeder and Pancho Gonzalez.

Mind Game

Beasley’s How to Play Tennis (1933) was a perennial best seller at a time when instructors were scarce. How to Play Tennis approaches the sport from an entirely tactical, scientific perspective. Beasley’s goal: to produce winning tennis players. To this end, he preached the virtue of percentage play, calling good tennis the "avoidance of making errors," and emphasizing that "a point won on an error counts just as much as a point scored on an ace."

About 50 years before athletes cross trained, Beasley's students were already tapping other sports in order to master different aspects of tennis. Boxing taught players to attack short balls in the front court. "Foot up to it on your forehand side and shoot a right jab at it," Beasley would say. Basketball helped teach defensive play and alertness. Ballroom dance and gymnastics were studied. He discovered learning tools everywhere. He even used a marching band for players to rally to while practicing footwork.

While Tim Gallwey's Inner Tennis would later advocate for the realization of athletic spontaneity through deliberate mindlessness, Beasley preached the benefits of constant and focused attention. Of Frank Parker, Doris Hart exclaimed, "you could almost see him thinking out loud, so intense was his concentration." For years, Hart herself was too easily distracted on the court, a tendency that earned for her many heart wrenching defeats. When Hart finally defeated Louise Brough in the finals of the 1955 U.S. Nationals after four unsuccessful attempts, Beasley told her, "If only you had started thinking years ago, the game would have been much easier for you," a sentiment with which the indomitable Ms. Hart wholeheartedly agreed.

Beasley was a stickler for on-court deportment: "What you do on a tennis court during a tournament match is watched by every spectator in the gallery as well as by your opponent. Therefore, you should be perfectly natural in every way. Avoid making any gestures or audible sounds that might cause comment. There should be nothing to encourage or discourage your opponent. Not an action of yours should show elation or dejection. Nothing he does, whether it is to score an ace or to make an error, should change your expression." Indeed, both the mechanical Parker and the larruping Vines were renowned for their polite on court demeanor.

Beasley beginners learned to play "The Little Game," whose object was to develop ball control by shrinking the size of the court to its service boxes. Once they advanced to baseline play, Beasley's players were trained to see the court as a traffic light: when at or behind the baseline (red) the ball must be played safely; when in no-man’s land (yellow) a forcing but never reckless ball is played; while the frontcourt (green) is the area denoting more decisive shot making.

Like grandfather, like grandson

It would seem that courts are a unifying principle. --Howard C. Berkowitz 04:25, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Dunno about the son in between, however -- mebbe he wuz a Court Jester (subject of an article?) Hayford Peirce 04:30, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps the son had an unfortunate confusion between the chalice from the palace with the vessel with the pestle? --Howard C. Berkowitz 04:42, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Get it? Got it! Good! Hayford Peirce 04:44, 11 January 2010 (UTC)