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Transcript from "Tennis Coach"

Well, I became tennis coach in 1955 actually. Albert Jones was tennis coach. In those days there were very very few schools who had paid tennis coaches. They didn't invest or even have scholarships. And those teams with coaches and scholarships dominated the sport. It was just a spring quarter sport and at most schools if somebody on the faculty had been a college player. Albert Jones was…you know had been captain of Georgia's team in the mid ‘30s. He was a good player and a good coach. And he was certainly worthy of being coach, a paid coach, but they just coached for nothing and it was just a spring quarter sport. He was a law school professor, and when he became assistant to the president, Fred Davison, he had to give up his job coaching tennis. Coach Butts said for me to get a new coach. I tried to get Dr. Gerald Huff, head of the math department. He had played at SMU and coached at SMU, but he didn't have time. I tried to get Dr. Robert West in the english department. He had been freshman coach at Georgia. He was coaching for nothing when I was a freshman, and he didn't have time. So the boys on the team who I had played with in the summertime asked me to coach the team. I said, "Well, I'll do it one year." It was just two months. But I enjoyed it so much it was stress relieving, and I needed to have stress relieving because of all the work I've done. With all my jobs, I got to work at 7:00 about every morning, worked all day long, frequently to 8:00 or 10:00 o'clock, seven days a week, no vacations. I was a very poor husband and father, but fortunately, I had a wonderful wife who did a great job with our children. But it was stress relieving. I really liked it so much that I just kept it up. I really loved it.