Monster, or mercy? That was the question 1993 French Open doubles champion Luke Jensen was asking the teens and preteens on the clay courts at Augusta Health.
“Monster.” Thwack. A serve not too far from jensen’s 130-mph heights during his professional-tennis career was in short order.
“Mercy” was no less monstrous, nor at all merciful. That serve dipped over the net and retreated impossibly back toward the twine.
“I want to leave them with the lasting impression of, What’s it like to return a fastball from a professional tennis player. Or a slice or a kicker or sinker. All these shots that I have. It’s just another experience for them that they’ll never forget,” said Jensen, an ESPN tennis analyst and the women’s tennis coach at Syracuse University.
Jensen was in town to teach juniors and women’s clinics at Lifetime Fitness.
“The biggest thing is giving them a sense of what this game’s all about,” said Jensen, pointing out that we don’t “work tennis,” but instead “play tennis.”
“It should always be that way. And if you keep that approach, whether you’re a professional tennis player, whether you’re a beginner, wherever you are in life, you’re always going to improve, you’re always going to have fun with it, whatever the score is,” Jensen said.
There’s a low barrier to entry to the sport of tennis – $20 can get you a new racket and a can of tennis balls and on a public court.
“In other sports, you’ve got to be big, like in football and basketball. You’ve got to be fast. You’ve got to be a certain type of athlete. In tennis, you can have all these different qualities. All you have to do is hit more balls than your opponent. Whatever level that is. If you want to get good at it, you go out on a backboard, you go out and find a buddy. You don’t necessarily have to be a certain type of athlete, you don’t have to come from a certain financial demographic,” Jensen said.
We’re in another one of those golden ages in professional tennis, particularly in the men’s game, with Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer dueling for supremacy. It hasn’t escaped the notice of people like Jensen that there aren’t any American names at the top of the world rankings right now.
Jensen has some ideas as to how to turn that around.
“We have got to inspire our junior players to want to be professionals,” Jensen said. “In other sports, if you go to Virginia, Virginia Tech, whether it’s football, basketball, they’re saying, I want to go to this university because they’re going to get me to Sundays, they’re going to get me to that next level. In tennis, in this country, our top juniors, throughout the country, very few are thinking, I have what it takes to be a pro. But the majority who have the talent to be pro sell themselves short.”
Late bloomers like John Isner, who starred at the University of Georgia before turning pro, are out there waiting to be given a chance to develop, in Jensen’s reckoning.
“People mature at different times. I don’t want to lock those guys out. I want to inspire them. I want to say, If you have a dream, there are avenues out there – through college, you can go for it. You may not be ready to turn pro at 17, but hardly anybody is,” Jensen said.
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Chris Graham
