Sitting right on the wire of a tough council estate, in a working class town, our school was definitely not what you'd call tennissy, though our maths teacher, Mr. Taylor, was a Wimbledon umpire and he accidentally brought the game of tennis to our Lancashire school's attention in a big way. In the days of Martina Navratilova's Wimbledon reign, she once accused Mr. Taylor of favouring her opponent, Britain's Sue Barker, with line calls (he was no cheat, so most likely he'd fallen asleep!).
'Tigger Taylor loves Sue Barker' could be found scrawled across school blackboards on the day the story hit the back pages of the tabloids, and he endured years of teasing from the pupils: he couldn't walk down a corridor or into a classroom without cries of 'out!' and any number of McEnroe-type rants. Mr. Taylor seemed embarrassed by the fact that he'd been blessed with a big heart, though he nevertheless failed to hide his caring nature from astute, street-wise pupils. He often brought us a bag full of match balls back from Lancashire tennis tournaments and he gave me my first tickets to Wimbledon. 'Tigger', as he was known, never gave up trying to nourish a love of the game in his pupils and he arranged annual visits to a Wimbledon warm-up tournament, at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club in Manchester. I can recall my first trip with clarity. It was the collective view of our 'gang' that tennis was a game for wimps and we only went along to get out of lessons: if I hadn't been thrown out of the beer tent, that myth might never have been exploded by an American with a metal racket and a dodgy basin-cut: one Jimmy Scott Connors.

How I ended up coaching is a longer story, but I did so for over seventeen years. Although I could've made more money working at McDonalds, doing something I love has always seemed a fair price to pay for a lack of riches. The more serious I became about teaching tennis, the less happy I was with the narrowness of the accepted tennis coaching manual, which at the time bore little resemblance to the individuality the top players exhibited on court, so I asked a friend, who taught English at a Paris University, to get tickets for the French Open and in 1987 I first took my cameras to Roland Garros.

A year later I was an accredited photographer at the French Open, in 1990 (or there about) I sold a series of instruction articles to the official Women's Tennis Association magazine 'Inside Women's Tennis' and from 1990 thru 1993 I was stroke analyst for the German magazine Tennis Revue. Pardon the boast, but if the Germans give you free technical rein for such a lengthy period, over three and four page spreads, you know you are getting something right, especially when you consider I was analyzing the tennis technique of players like Graf, Becker, Stich and Huber (the series eventually passed on to Pavel Slozil, who at the time was coaching Steffi Graf).
And back in good old Blighty?
The ability to take the highest technical knowledge and deliver it to a broad base counted for nothing. Apparently, I was supposed to justify somebody's LTA salary by 'feeding' my best kids to a Lancashire County apparatchik, who had a fuller understanding of absolutely nothing but kiss-ass and was less likely to voice disapproval of Soviet-style centralization, which, like all such policies, only benefit those favoured by the powerful.

In 1990, The Times gave me half a page in which to burn my boats and I torched them with gusto. The powerful recipients of Britain's Wimbledon tennis millions do not like criticism, so from then on I was seen as 'a trouble maker', though all the more alive because of it, for 'only dead fish swim with the tide'.

At the height of my enthusiasm for tennis, I went around the primary schools of my hometown-and-beyond, with a bagful of rackets, giving demonstrations of short tennis and tennis: more a pantomime ('Oh no he didn't... oh yes he did!') to whet the appetite than dead-pan seriousness. The demos were completely free and I hadn't learnt how to drive a car, so I went everywhere on the bus with an A-to-Z in my pocket. Some ground to cover when, at a peak, I was giving free tennis demonstrations to over 200 schools in a year.
But I should point out that it was no hardship and these demos had the ultimate aim of getting kids interested enough to pester mummy and daddy to fork out money for a (albeit inexpensive) course. The take-up was minuscule (taking all schools together, it levelled out at less than 1%) but I was nothing if not determined and I got friends who worked in offices to do my photocopying for free; when you are giving out over 100 letters at each school, it mounts up. Ultimately, the demonstrations cost little more than my time and visiting schools has always been a source of joy: if the sound of children's laughter doesn't buoy up the best in your humanity, you are seriously in need of help.

We all have good and bad days, and the one I now hold before my mind's eye turned out to be both. Making my way from one school to another, I got lost in a maze of council houses. I knew the area of Bolton vaguely. One of my first girlfriends grew up on the estate, and it was (and still is) pretty rough. I don't think I'm being unfair when I say it was the poorest estate for many miles and I've seen drunken mothers leave the pub to pick their children up from school with a full pint of beer in their hand. These days heroin is on literally every street.
Anyhow, there I was, lost, with a bag of twenty rackets on my shoulder and knowing full well there was no business to be had anywhere on that estate. I looked at my watch. I was already five minutes late. Whilst preparing excuses in my head, a bus came round the corner, so I jumped on board. I didn't feel too good about myself, but this thought eased my guilt: they probably don't even remember I'm coming (which wasn't unusual).
The minute I returned home, the phone rang. It was the school.
'Why aren't you here?' demanded the Head. 'All the children are sat in assembly hall waiting for you.'
My heart sank into my trainers. I was disgusted with myself.
'I couldn't find the school,' I croaked.
This wasn't a complete lie; I just hadn't looked too hard. I ordered a taxi and went back.

Every sizable town and city has its poor areas and too often it is the children who pay a price; for the unfortunate circumstances of their parents, perhaps, or those plain bad choices from which no adult life is exempt. When you've been out and about in the world, there are things you cannot help but see. Experience is a double-edged sword, which sometimes affords you a painful glimpse into the future of those around you, and the future I saw in those eager faces was not bright. Two hundred children, some without a pair of 'plimsolls' to their name (let alone tennis shoes), many of the boys had a shaved head to save on the price of a haircut and stop head lice (in the days before Rot Keane and Beckham it was more stigma than fashion), and there were more than a handful who obviously hadn't been in a bath for weeks.
Over future visits I came to understand that the Head had all the best qualities of the old school. To him, teaching was nothing less than a vocation and he did his determined best to make sure that whatever problems those children had (those he could not overcome for them), were left at the door when they entered his school.
By way of recompense for my previous selfishness, I stayed all afternoon. Every child got to join in a game of some sort and they loved every second of every minute, and I had some 8 x 6" prints of a young Agassi, which I gave out as prizes.
I asked the Head what would happen if we gave some of the kids a free course?
'Nothing', he answered with brutal honesty.
Most parents wouldn't bring them and the ones who could be bothered, couldn't afford the bus fare. He gave it some thought, went to have a chat with one of the teachers and decided that he would drive back after dinner (he lived miles away), pick the kids up at their home and drop them off at the sports hall for the 7pm class. One of his teachers came to collect them after the session and took them back home. We chose the two most able, who were both girls: one seven years old and the other eight.
When they arrived for their first session, fifteen other kids were already involved in short tennis games and drills. The two girls edged nervously into the sports hall behind their Head Teacher. Dressed in what were most likely hand-me-downs, they were clearly intimidated but as soon as I got them hitting balls they were transformed.
Beneath all the marketing, hype and idolatry, sport still has the capacity to shatter barriers, especially amongst kids. The one thing I miss about not coaching any more is the laughter and exhilaration which sport can foster, and the sense of community.
In the days before the plush new Bolton Arena, built as a tennis centre for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, I hired sports centres and school halls (in varying degrees of disrepair) all over the town, and started kids from the age of four or five on short tennis courses. When they progressed to the bigger game I had two ball machines running non-stop and an enjoyable little system that turned out some of the best young tennis players for many miles, and the older, more experienced players would gladly come along to the short tennis sessions to rally with little ones. The two girls came for a couple of courses, but from the start the Head had warned that one of them had changed school four times in the past couple of years. Her mother was prone to swap boyfriends at short notice (and move house and district) and this is precisely what happened. And the other child?
I admit with regret that I cannot remember.

Could they have been champions?
What I know now, which in my wilful stupidity and blind zeal I didn't grasp then, is that it really—truly—doesn't matter. Although it ticks all the right boxes at Wimbledon time, and pads out many a bloated news channel, the frenzied 'search for a tennis champion' is a pointless cul-de-sac, because it focuses narrowly on the few to the exclusion of the many, and in the process creates arrogant monsters.
Anyhow, a coach has more chance of winning the lottery than finding a supreme talent like Serena Williams or Andre Agassi, though enjoyment of sport, especially for the young, is something that can be had by the vast majority.
Sport is (or at least should be) bigger than personal gain, pay-per-view and ratings figures. Above and beyond Caesar's currency and ego fuel, it can brighten the dullest day and put smiles on the most sullen faces. Also, it is arguably the best antidote to the difficult years; a healthy alternative to the street corner, and, whilst chasing a tennis ball might not unearth the meaning of life or cure a bruised and battered heart, it certainly beats beating up a granny and chasing down a dealer for your next rock or bag of brown.

Some weeks before what turned out to be my final visit to the previously mentioned school, I was playing a pool match for my local pub in the town's Labour Club, when a woman asked if I wanted to buy a ticket for the raffle.
I asked her what the prize was?
'A teddy bear' she replied.
In that case. no. I didn't want a ticket, because I didn't fancy wobbling home after a few beers, with a five-foot high teddy bear stuck under my arm. The ticket-seller wouldn't take no for an answer, so I bought a ticket to shut her up...but only one.
No prize for guessing who won. When I reluctantly stood up to collect my prize, the ticket seller told the man with the microphone about my reluctance to buy a ticket and everyone heard his distinctly old Labour response over the PA system:
'You what? You mean to tell me the tight-fisted b*****d only bought one ticket?'
Anyhow, I stuffed teddy into my bag on my next trip to the same school. Come the end of the session, when all the kids had gone back to class, I asked the teacher to send for a child from reception class, who had hit the balls particularly well: pointless giving her a free tennis course (the old Head had by this time retired and there was nobody else around to take up a lost cause). When I handed her the teddy, she went into a state of shock. She truly couldn't understand why anyone would want to give her anything. God only knows what turmoil lay within that tiny heart and mind, and when she finally hugged the teddy, she started sobbing.

Moments like this made me so bloody angry. It was about this time that I sat down at my word processor and wrote a five-part TV drama (like you do!). The inspiration was drawn equally from teachers like Tigger Taylor and the Primary School Head, and all those kids who deserve better. Set to dance music, the greater story was the rise of a group of youngsters, each one, for different reasons, having been failed by the adults in their life. Things begin to change when they discover the child of a local heroin addict is a natural tennis player. The youngster becomes their raison d'être and, under the guidance of their teacher, they soar above the lousy cards that life has dealt them.
The fact that my leading character (a teacher) believed there was far more to life than material want made it unfashionable, especially to a media inspired and driven by little else, so I wasn't shocked when TV and production companies refused the script… apart from film Director Ken Loach, that is. The Director of Kes and The Wind that Rocks the Barley wrote to say he thought it was a wonderful story and that they'd all read the script in the Parallax Pictures office. He had time and resources to do only one film every couple of years, but said he'd see what he could do. Despite his attempts, which included personal efforts to get the script represented by the William Morris Agency, it never got before a lens… unlike Footballer's Wives, Dream Team (in the UK) and other soulless testaments to a dying civilisation.

Slowly but surely I let go. There didn't seem much point in building children's hopes up when you could deliver little more than a fleeting appearance: what they needed was constancy, something to which they could look forward with certainty. When I set out with a bag full of rackets and my A-to-Z, I had such great hopes, yet in the end I managed to achieve embarrassingly little. Of course I still have my extended 'family', most members of which have grown up now, but Emma, Mary, John and James have turned out well and Simon Roberts is still Lancashire County Champion.
But they were the lucky ones, because their parents could and would support them in every way. I realize now I should have done much more with my time than I did, but in order to make a sporting difference, you simply need more than an overdraft and a bus ticket, and those who pull the strings in heartless, unaccountable institutions rarely accommodate anything other than puppets, which is why folk like me make them feel very uncomfortable.

When my better kids had left for University, or, like Simon, found a full-time squad, I threw my rackets in the shed and concentrated my efforts on words and pictures, which was always going to happen.
But I never seem able to fully shake tennis off and some years later, whilst teaching myself how to design a web site, I realised I could make my 35mm tennis photos move, so I put some instructional articles on-line. For those who do not remember the original tennisforall site, I spent the next 2 to 3 years writing free instructional tennis articles and generally poking the British tennis establishment in the eye, because for all their Wimbledon millions they simply hadn't a clue, as those who remember the LTA's RAW tennis website will attest (or David Felgate's 'tennis tips' for Slazenger, which could've been written by a ten year old).

The quality of the instructional words and moving pictures made tennisforall.org one of the most visited tennis web sites on the planet and got it listed in the 2002/2003 (and 04?) Rough Guide to the Internet, as only one of two tennis sites (the other was the world's biggest tennis magazine).
It was also a featured site in/on the BBC's 'Click Online' television program and web site. However, the novelty of my one-man revolution wore off when my stubbornness not to make people pay for the content almost bankrupted me, and I ended up pulling the plug on my own site.

Last year I spent the first six months preparing the images, writing and designing the first two parts of a digital tennis book: The Forehand and The Serve. As I still have some 35,000 sequence photos (from 20 years of tennis photography) to play with, I could still rewrite the game from top to bottom, and make it palatable to anyone with a grasp of the English language and the willingness to learn tennis or teach their pupils or kids.

This time I ain't giving it away. But for the price of a twenty minute tennis lesson you'll find more technical tennis knowledge than you'll probably ever need... and in sport, knowledge is power.
As hard times approach, you may well be needing as much technical tennis knowledge as you can gather, to supplement the lessons your parents may no longer be able to afford.

The next two 'stages' on The One and Two Handed Backhand, and The Complete Net Game will follow in my own good time.

A tennis coaching odyssey and the reason why these instructional tennis pages exist. I dink, therefore I am....
Click the links to the left for tennis coaching digi-book samples and some technical articles.

Sitting right on the wire of a tough council estate, in a working class town, our school was definitely not what you'd call tennissy, though our maths teacher, Mr. Taylor, was a Wimbledon umpire and he accidentally brought the game of tennis to our Lancashire school's attention in a big way. In the days of Martina Navratilova's Wimbledon reign, she once accused Mr. Taylor of favouring her opponent, Britain's Sue Barker, with line calls (he was no cheat, so most likely he'd fallen asleep!).
'Tigger Taylor loves Sue Barker' could be found scrawled across school blackboards on the day the story hit the back pages of the tabloids, and he endured years of teasing from the pupils: he couldn't walk down a corridor or into a classroom without cries of 'out!' and any number of McEnroe-type rants. Mr. Taylor seemed embarrassed by the fact that he'd been blessed with a big heart, though he nevertheless failed to hide his caring nature from astute, street-wise pupils. He often brought us a bag full of match balls back from Lancashire tennis tournaments and he gave me my first tickets to Wimbledon. 'Tigger', as he was known, never gave up trying to nourish a love of the game in his pupils and he arranged annual visits to a Wimbledon warm-up tournament, at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club in Manchester. I can recall my first trip with clarity. It was the collective view of our 'gang' that tennis was a game for wimps and we only went along to get out of lessons: if I hadn't been thrown out of the beer tent, that myth might never have been exploded by an American with a metal racket and a dodgy basin-cut: one Jimmy Scott Connors.

How I ended up coaching is a longer story, but I did so for over seventeen years. Although I could've made more money working at McDonalds, doing something I love has always seemed a fair price to pay for a lack of riches. The more serious I became about teaching tennis, the less happy I was with the narrowness of the accepted tennis coaching manual, which at the time bore little resemblance to the individuality the top players exhibited on court, so I asked a friend, who taught English at a Paris University, to get tickets for the French Open and in 1987 I first took my cameras to Roland Garros.

A year later I was an accredited photographer at the French Open, in 1990 (or there about) I sold a series of instruction articles to the official Women's Tennis Association magazine 'Inside Women's Tennis' and from 1990 thru 1993 I was stroke analyst for the German magazine Tennis Revue. Pardon the boast, but if the Germans give you free technical rein for such a lengthy period, over three and four page spreads, you know you are getting something right, especially when you consider I was analyzing the tennis technique of players like Graf, Becker, Stich and Huber (the series eventually passed on to Pavel Slozil, who at the time was coaching Steffi Graf).
And back in good old Blighty?
The ability to take the highest technical knowledge and deliver it to a broad base counted for nothing. Apparently, I was supposed to justify somebody's LTA salary by 'feeding' my best kids to a Lancashire County apparatchik, who had a fuller understanding of absolutely nothing but kiss-ass and was less likely to voice disapproval of Soviet-style centralization, which, like all such policies, only benefit those favoured by the powerful.

In 1990, The Times gave me half a page in which to burn my boats and I torched them with gusto. The powerful recipients of Britain's Wimbledon tennis millions do not like criticism, so from then on I was seen as 'a trouble maker', though all the more alive because of it, for 'only dead fish swim with the tide'.

At the height of my enthusiasm for tennis, I went around the primary schools of my hometown-and-beyond, with a bagful of rackets, giving demonstrations of short tennis and tennis: more a pantomime ('Oh no he didn't... oh yes he did!') to whet the appetite than dead-pan seriousness. The demos were completely free and I hadn't learnt how to drive a car, so I went everywhere on the bus with an A-to-Z in my pocket. Some ground to cover when, at a peak, I was giving free tennis demonstrations to over 200 schools in a year.
But I should point out that it was no hardship and these demos had the ultimate aim of getting kids interested enough to pester mummy and daddy to fork out money for a (albeit inexpensive) course. The take-up was minuscule (taking all schools together, it levelled out at less than 1%) but I was nothing if not determined and I got friends who worked in offices to do my photocopying for free; when you are giving out over 100 letters at each school, it mounts up. Ultimately, the demonstrations cost little more than my time and visiting schools has always been a source of joy: if the sound of children's laughter doesn't buoy up the best in your humanity, you are seriously in need of help.

We all have good and bad days, and the one I now hold before my mind's eye turned out to be both. Making my way from one school to another, I got lost in a maze of council houses. I knew the area of Bolton vaguely. One of my first girlfriends grew up on the estate, and it was (and still is) pretty rough. I don't think I'm being unfair when I say it was the poorest estate for many miles and I've seen drunken mothers leave the pub to pick their children up from school with a full pint of beer in their hand. These days heroin is on literally every street.
Anyhow, there I was, lost, with a bag of twenty rackets on my shoulder and knowing full well there was no business to be had anywhere on that estate. I looked at my watch. I was already five minutes late. Whilst preparing excuses in my head, a bus came round the corner, so I jumped on board. I didn't feel too good about myself, but this thought eased my guilt: they probably don't even remember I'm coming (which wasn't unusual).
The minute I returned home, the phone rang. It was the school.
'Why aren't you here?' demanded the Head. 'All the children are sat in assembly hall waiting for you.'
My heart sank into my trainers. I was disgusted with myself.
'I couldn't find the school,' I croaked.
This wasn't a complete lie; I just hadn't looked too hard. I ordered a taxi and went back.

Every sizable town and city has its poor areas and too often it is the children who pay a price; for the unfortunate circumstances of their parents, perhaps, or those plain bad choices from which no adult life is exempt. When you've been out and about in the world, there are things you cannot help but see. Experience is a double-edged sword, which sometimes affords you a painful glimpse into the future of those around you, and the future I saw in those eager faces was not bright. Two hundred children, some without a pair of 'plimsolls' to their name (let alone tennis shoes), many of the boys had a shaved head to save on the price of a haircut and stop head lice (in the days before Rot Keane and Beckham it was more stigma than fashion), and there were more than a handful who obviously hadn't been in a bath for weeks.
Over future visits I came to understand that the Head had all the best qualities of the old school. To him, teaching was nothing less than a vocation and he did his determined best to make sure that whatever problems those children had (those he could not overcome for them), were left at the door when they entered his school.
By way of recompense for my previous selfishness, I stayed all afternoon. Every child got to join in a game of some sort and they loved every second of every minute, and I had some 8 x 6" prints of a young Agassi, which I gave out as prizes.
I asked the Head what would happen if we gave some of the kids a free course?
'Nothing', he answered with brutal honesty.
Most parents wouldn't bring them and the ones who could be bothered, couldn't afford the bus fare. He gave it some thought, went to have a chat with one of the teachers and decided that he would drive back after dinner (he lived miles away), pick the kids up at their home and drop them off at the sports hall for the 7pm class. One of his teachers came to collect them after the session and took them back home. We chose the two most able, who were both girls: one seven years old and the other eight.
When they arrived for their first session, fifteen other kids were already involved in short tennis games and drills. The two girls edged nervously into the sports hall behind their Head Teacher. Dressed in what were most likely hand-me-downs, they were clearly intimidated but as soon as I got them hitting balls they were transformed.
Beneath all the marketing, hype and idolatry, sport still has the capacity to shatter barriers, especially amongst kids. The one thing I miss about not coaching any more is the laughter and exhilaration which sport can foster, and the sense of community.
In the days before the plush new Bolton Arena, built as a tennis centre for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, I hired sports centres and school halls (in varying degrees of disrepair) all over the town, and started kids from the age of four or five on short tennis courses. When they progressed to the bigger game I had two ball machines running non-stop and an enjoyable little system that turned out some of the best young tennis players for many miles, and the older, more experienced players would gladly come along to the short tennis sessions to rally with little ones. The two girls came for a couple of courses, but from the start the Head had warned that one of them had changed school four times in the past couple of years. Her mother was prone to swap boyfriends at short notice (and move house and district) and this is precisely what happened. And the other child?
I admit with regret that I cannot remember.

Could they have been champions?
What I know now, which in my wilful stupidity and blind zeal I didn't grasp then, is that it really—truly—doesn't matter. Although it ticks all the right boxes at Wimbledon time, and pads out many a bloated news channel, the frenzied 'search for a tennis champion' is a pointless cul-de-sac, because it focuses narrowly on the few to the exclusion of the many, and in the process creates arrogant monsters.
Anyhow, a coach has more chance of winning the lottery than finding a supreme talent like Serena Williams or Andre Agassi, though enjoyment of sport, especially for the young, is something that can be had by the vast majority.
Sport is (or at least should be) bigger than personal gain, pay-per-view and ratings figures. Above and beyond Caesar's currency and ego fuel, it can brighten the dullest day and put smiles on the most sullen faces. Also, it is arguably the best antidote to the difficult years; a healthy alternative to the street corner, and, whilst chasing a tennis ball might not unearth the meaning of life or cure a bruised and battered heart, it certainly beats beating up a granny and chasing down a dealer for your next rock or bag of brown.

Some weeks before what turned out to be my final visit to the previously mentioned school, I was playing a pool match for my local pub in the town's Labour Club, when a woman asked if I wanted to buy a ticket for the raffle.
I asked her what the prize was?
'A teddy bear' she replied.
In that case. no. I didn't want a ticket, because I didn't fancy wobbling home after a few beers, with a five-foot high teddy bear stuck under my arm. The ticket-seller wouldn't take no for an answer, so I bought a ticket to shut her up...but only one.
No prize for guessing who won. When I reluctantly stood up to collect my prize, the ticket seller told the man with the microphone about my reluctance to buy a ticket and everyone heard his distinctly old Labour response over the PA system:
'You what? You mean to tell me the tight-fisted b*****d only bought one ticket?'
Anyhow, I stuffed teddy into my bag on my next trip to the same school. Come the end of the session, when all the kids had gone back to class, I asked the teacher to send for a child from reception class, who had hit the balls particularly well: pointless giving her a free tennis course (the old Head had by this time retired and there was nobody else around to take up a lost cause). When I handed her the teddy, she went into a state of shock. She truly couldn't understand why anyone would want to give her anything. God only knows what turmoil lay within that tiny heart and mind, and when she finally hugged the teddy, she started sobbing.

Moments like this made me so bloody angry. It was about this time that I sat down at my word processor and wrote a five-part TV drama (like you do!). The inspiration was drawn equally from teachers like Tigger Taylor and the Primary School Head, and all those kids who deserve better. Set to dance music, the greater story was the rise of a group of youngsters, each one, for different reasons, having been failed by the adults in their life. Things begin to change when they discover the child of a local heroin addict is a natural tennis player. The youngster becomes their raison d'être and, under the guidance of their teacher, they soar above the lousy cards that life has dealt them.
The fact that my leading character (a teacher) believed there was far more to life than material want made it unfashionable, especially to a media inspired and driven by little else, so I wasn't shocked when TV and production companies refused the script… apart from film Director Ken Loach, that is. The Director of Kes and The Wind that Rocks the Barley wrote to say he thought it was a wonderful story and that they'd all read the script in the Parallax Pictures office. He had time and resources to do only one film every couple of years, but said he'd see what he could do. Despite his attempts, which included personal efforts to get the script represented by the William Morris Agency, it never got before a lens… unlike Footballer's Wives, Dream Team (in the UK) and other soulless testaments to a dying civilisation.

Slowly but surely I let go. There didn't seem much point in building children's hopes up when you could deliver little more than a fleeting appearance: what they needed was constancy, something to which they could look forward with certainty. When I set out with a bag full of rackets and my A-to-Z, I had such great hopes, yet in the end I managed to achieve embarrassingly little. Of course I still have my extended 'family', most members of which have grown up now, but Emma, Mary, John and James have turned out well and Simon Roberts is still Lancashire County Champion.
But they were the lucky ones, because their parents could and would support them in every way. I realize now I should have done much more with my time than I did, but in order to make a sporting difference, you simply need more than an overdraft and a bus ticket, and those who pull the strings in heartless, unaccountable institutions rarely accommodate anything other than puppets, which is why folk like me make them feel very uncomfortable.

When my better kids had left for University, or, like Simon, found a full-time squad, I threw my rackets in the shed and concentrated my efforts on words and pictures, which was always going to happen.
But I never seem able to fully shake tennis off and some years later, whilst teaching myself how to design a web site, I realised I could make my 35mm tennis photos move, so I put some instructional articles on-line. For those who do not remember the original tennisforall site, I spent the next 2 to 3 years writing free instructional tennis articles and generally poking the British tennis establishment in the eye, because for all their Wimbledon millions they simply hadn't a clue, as those who remember the LTA's RAW tennis website will attest (or David Felgate's 'tennis tips' for Slazenger, which could've been written by a ten year old).

The quality of the instructional words and moving pictures made tennisforall.org one of the most visited tennis web sites on the planet and got it listed in the 2002/2003 (and 04?) Rough Guide to the Internet, as only one of two tennis sites (the other was the world's biggest tennis magazine).
It was also a featured site in/on the BBC's 'Click Online' television program and web site. However, the novelty of my one-man revolution wore off when my stubbornness not to make people pay for the content almost bankrupted me, and I ended up pulling the plug on my own site.

Last year I spent the first six months preparing the images, writing and designing the first two parts of a digital tennis book: The Forehand and The Serve. As I still have some 35,000 sequence photos (from 20 years of tennis photography) to play with, I could still rewrite the game from top to bottom, and make it palatable to anyone with a grasp of the English language and the willingness to learn tennis or teach their pupils or kids.

This time I ain't giving it away. But for the price of a twenty minute tennis lesson you'll find more technical tennis knowledge than you'll probably ever need... and in sport, knowledge is power.
As hard times approach, you may well be needing as much technical tennis knowledge as you can gather, to supplement the lessons your parents may no longer be able to afford.

The next two 'stages' on The One and Two Handed Backhand, and The Complete Net Game will follow in my own good time.