Tennis Camp

Always Be Worth More Than You're Getting dept.

My first job in Tennis was at the Tennis Service Pro Shop in Cedar Rapids, right there on Mt. Vernon Road. Larry Tabak was the manager who hired me. He and his brother Dave Tabak were both about 5 foot 2 and about the best doubles team you’ll ever see.

Billie Jean King

At the Tennis Service Pro Shop we sold the latest wood rackets, the latest cool clothes, and we strung rackets. I could string a racket in an hour. Weaving the cross strings is what takes time. The guys at the pro tournaments who string for Nadal and Alcaraz and those guys can string in 25 minutes. At the Racket Doctor in LA they wear surgical scrubs and string while you wait, in about 35 or 40 minutes.

Bobby Riggs

Most of what I earned at the Tennis Service Pro Shop went right back into the cash register, as I became quite a spectacle on the courts with my cream colored warm-up suits, new Jack Kramer Pro-Staffs, fresh string jobs and the like.

John McEnroe

The second tennis job I had started during college summers, where I was an instructor at the Bachman-Laing Tennis Camp. The camp took place at my college so I knew the lay of the land and the town. Laing and Bachman were like like a good cop/bad cop combo. But I think that was just their personalities. Laing had nine kids, seven of whom were boys. I think every Laing boy taught at the Bachman-Laing Tennis Camp at one time or another. They were all products of a cool Milwaukee prep school affiliated with the university, and they were all superstars in hockey and soccer and tennis. They were also very cool and various of them would take me to Brewers games and we would sit in the bleachers watching Gorman Thomas and Cecil Cooper and blasting early Beatles from a huge boombox. I’ll Follow The Sun. Mr. Moonlight. Kansas City.

Bjorn Borg

The Bachman part of the camp was just Bachman, who was the tennis coach at the big public school in Milwaukee that pretty much trounced everyone else in the whole state every year. Near as I could figure.

Arthur Ashe

When Bachman was around everyone trembled, and when he wasn’t, everyone talked about him. When I asked for a raise during my first summer when I felt like I was contributing to the camp in irreplaceable ways (hadn’t I written a song and performed a version of it, with the refrain, “Bachman-Laing, Bachman-Laing/It’ll get you on the road to tennis yin and yang/If your volley makes you shiver and your serve goes in the river/You can get them straightened out at Bachman-Laing” before each camp session ended?!), his reply was… “Always be worth more than you’re getting.”

Steffi Graf

I wasn’t very happy about that, but it’s actually probably pretty good advice and I guess I’ve tried to remember that at least some of the time. It was a great environment because there were a lot of great players, but also great teachers and it was there I learned how to teach the game, which has been useful throughout my life when no one was necessarily going to pay me a living wage to foist my songs on a bewildered public.

(Editor’s Note: It cannot be overstated that Bern, the author of this piece, was a complete maniac on the court in the days of which he speaks. Lately he has blamed/credited McEnroe, and Connors, and Nastase, for his frequently boorish behavior on the court, which involved loud swearing, racket-throwing, and, most of the time, combinations of both. And while it can reasonably be conjectured that some of these behaviors were indeed “inspired” by Nastase, any careful checking of timelines would show that Bern’s court tantrums certainly predated McEnroe’s rise to prominence, and while Connors may have exhibited the signs of a bully, none of Bern’s antisocial antics resembled anything Connors was pulling at the time. Bern was a player oftentimes completely out of control, and there’s no sweet nostalgia which can deny or excuse it).

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“Tennis Song”: