TENNIS was something I discovered on my own when I was eight. I found an old fence paling and had endless hours of fun hitting a battered and hairless old tennis ball against our garage wall with it. I soon graduated to whacking the ball at gang members in the street who were happy to fetch for me. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to play a real game of tennis on a real court with a net and markings with a real racquet.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
My mother’s friend, Maggie Frauenfelder, took pity when she saw me swinging the fence paling and offered to give me her old racquet. I counted the minutes till her next visit. Maggie was as good as her word and I became the owner of an unwieldy adult- sized, square-headed, wooden racquet.
It had been left out in the sun and rain, it was chipped and cracked, and the leather grip on its thick wooden handle had long ago disintegrated and fallen off. The strings that weren’t broken were slack. I put stickers on it to make it look pretty. But we simply couldn’t afford to replace it so I cleaned that racquet and repaired it as best as I could. It would become my most prized possession. When in 1952 I won my first competition, I won it with Mrs Frauenfelder’s gift.
I often wonder if I would ever have played tennis at the highest level if we didn’t live right across the road from tennis courts. Not 20 metres from our front gate was the Albury and Border Tennis Club with its twenty-five exquisitely manicured grass courts. From our place I could see immaculately white-attired boys and girls and men and women playing and wished I could join them. Only problem was, the courts were for paid-up club members, not neighbourhood urchins.
This unfortunate circumstance was never going to thwart the Smith Gang, so we commando-crept through long grass and stinging paspalum to a hole in the complex’s perimeter fence and crawled through it onto one of the back courts.
We chose this particular court because it had been laid in the shade of a cypress tree and a hedge obscured two-thirds of it from the view of anybody gazing out of the windows of the clubhouse, especially from the laser vision of Wal Rutter, the club’s fearsome curator and coaching professional.
Once on our court and sure the coast was clear, I took up position with my racquet at the net and three of the boys stood on the baseline and hit balls to me. Because we’d be sprung and evicted by Mr Rutter if I missed their shots and the balls bounced into the back court where he could see them, I used my natural speed, athleticism and long arms to cut off the balls and hit them back to the lads. I didn’t know it then, but I was learning to volley, a shot that would win me grand slam tournaments in years to come.
I was born left-handed. Growing up, I had done everything left-handed. When I started playing tennis I switched to my right hand for no other reason than a couple of the boys assured me there were no good southpaw women tennis players. (Goodness knows how they knew!)
This is why, in my career, the backhand was a more natural stroke for me than the forehand, and I’ve often pondered whether I’d have experienced so many serving problems in the early tournament years if I’d remained using the hand that God intended. Apart from hitting a tennis ball, I do everything else with my left hand.
Mum had reservations. All she wanted was for me to stay at home with her, but even she could see how keen I was. She put her personal feelings aside to sew me a white tennis tunic and somehow she and Dad scraped together the two precious shillings that she pressed into my hot little hand each Saturday morning as I set off with my racquet to join around 150 other boys and girls – tennis was the game to play in Australia back then – having their rough tennis edges honed by Wal Rutter.
Dad’s mates used to say to him, ‘Smith, aren’t you wastin’ your time shellin’ out for Marg’s tennis coaching?’ and he’d say, ‘Nope.’ Coming up with the money each week was a strain, but he battled through. Tennis spoilt any chance I may have had of being a pianist. Mum was keen for me to play the piano, but piano lessons cost two shillings and tennis lessons cost the same. It was one or the other.
One day, soon after I started attending classes, a little girl ran to Mr Rutter’s wife Edna in tears, wailing that there was a girl on the courts who hit the ball too hard. Edna, thinking that some big bully was aiming hard shots at the littlies, stormed down to put a stop to it. What she saw was me standing on the baseline, serving. Unfortunately, the children I was serving to, who were my age, couldn’t return my shots and were sometimes hit.
I didn’t mean to hurt them, I was simply playing as well as I could and was stronger than I knew.
GROWING UP FAST
At fifteen, it was time to follow the Murray River out of town.
Wal Rutter understood that if I were to make a serious career in tennis I would have to leave Albury and move to Sydney or Melbourne, where there was intense competition and the chance to be sponsored by a tennis equipment company that would allow me to work for them while playing.
This country kid cried at the prospect of saying goodbye to my little stamping ground, but I knew that Wal, as usual, was right.
