The News-Gazette, Winchester, Indiana.
By Kurt Fishtorn, July, 1977.
So you belong to the tennis set. Racquet in hand, you've discovered an attractive place in the roller coaster '70's. You're not alone either. You're in universal company, numbering in the millions.
Tennis today is something of an addiction. Americans can't seem to get enough. Singles, doubles, tournaments, couples-families, offices, companies-everyone wants in on the act.
As challenging and exciting as contemporary tennis may seem, it wasn't always the people's choice as a means of recreation. For nearly 30 years-from the mid 40's to as recent as about six years ago-tennis played second fiddle to just about every other sport in the books here in Winchester. When the sporting trend shifted to golf, tennis rapidly lost its influence here.
Before the tide, however, Winchester was reputed widely as a tennis boom town.
Wilbur Bullen, a Winchester native since his sixth birthday, picked up his first racquet and bounced a ball back and forth there in 1930. From that day on Bullen, who still plays actively at least once a week, was hooked.
At 63, Bullen can spin endless tales of tennis experiences. his most vivid memories, however, reflect those early years-particularly the turnout and the courts.
"When I started," Bullen said, it seemed like half the people in town played tennis. There were more good players in town by far then than there are now.
You either came early or you didn't play- courts were seldom vacant, he said. And the well maintained condition of the hard -packed clay kept people waiting for an opening. "They were as good as most any clay courts around," Bullen said. "They had to be rolled and relined every day."
While the city offered several other forms of recreation, including softball, Bullen concentrated exclusively on tennis. "I just practically lived on the courts," he said. "I had the time and I put that above all my other sporting activities."
As the sport grew, so did the need for organization. It didn't take high school administrators long to make room for tennis on the athletic program,. It was the fall of 1930 when Winchester's first boys tennis squad hit the courts.
Bob Oliver Sr., a junior that year, was seeded No. 1. As the team's ringleader, Oliver now a Winchester Attorney, got the team pointed in the right direction in it's initial season. The next year (1931), no area school could touch the Winchester foursome, including Oliver, Wright Hiatt, Tom Barnes and Earl Carter. Competing against teams like Richmond, Muncie Central, New Castle, Portland and Union City was a breeze for the Winchester four. They swept through the 20 meet season undefeated.
Once June rolled around, play switched from school vs. school to town vs. town. Summer competition was fierce, most of it geared to tournament play. The annual city tournament and the Tri-County match were the two biggest. The city team, which consisted of six singles and three doubles players, traveled to as many as nine different towns, June through August. Eleven members strong, the team featured such names as Bullen, Oliver, Gerald Alexander, Herb Ryan, Bob Ward, Andy Litchert, Don Overman, Wright Hiatt, Robert Ludy, Jimmy Clark and Bob Study.
In 1933, Oliver, who by then was generally regarded as the city's top player, took his racquet to DePauw University. His high school success carried right over to the college level that year when he and Tom Nicholson represented DePauw-even though it had no tennis team-at the state tourney at Earlham College.
Pursuing a law degree, Oliver headed to Indiana University and was back on the tennis courts in 1935. In no time he was at the climax of his tennis career. Teamed with Ed Tieman of Hammond, Oliver reached the 1936 state finals at Earlham once again-only this time he won it all. After a grueling five game set, Oliver and Tieman finally edged their Notre Dame opponets for the championship.
Meanwhile, the competition continued to rage back home. in July of 1940 Oliver embarked upon another crossroad. Playing in the finals of the annual Tri-County tournament, Bullen knocked off Oliver, ending Bob's reign as the city's No. 1 player. Oliver had had enough.
At the age of 27 Bob called it quits and hung up his racquet. "After Wilbur beat me," Bob explained, "I said I just can't keep up with it."
Not too many years after Bob's departure, tennis in Winchester began to crumble. As far as Bullen can remember, the decline started around '46 or '47, about the time poor maintenance turned the hard, clay surface to powdery dirt. Later, as the new sporting fad moved to Beeson Golf Course, the courts were resurfaced with a "tarvey" substance. Clay tennis courts in Winchester evaporated into history after that.
Although the game is played on a different surface today, it has fully recovered here. Somehow tennis had survived a cruel "forgotten" period from the late "40's to the early '70's.
Steadily gaining acceptance, it returned as quickly as it departed. The rebirth began in 1971 when several WCHS students, including Dane Starbuck, approached school administration officials about penciling the sport into the athletic calendar. If school officials opposed the idea, they thought twice when they learned that competition in the sport was a must in order to stay competitive in the newly formed Tri-Eastern Conference. Adopt a tennis program or lose 30 all-sports points annually. It was that simple.
Under the direction of Jack Skinner, WCHS re-introduced team tennis to the community in September of 1972. It immediately fused and spread like wildfire. In addition to the six high school courts, the city added two more surfaces north of the old courts at Goodrich Park in 1976. All are used heavily, particularly evenings and weekends.
Thirty years of near extinction couldn't bury tennis. It survived. "Tennis enthusiasm here in town has just boomed", explains Starbuck, a Huntington College junior who along with Debbie Sterling, coordinates the city's third annual summer instructional program. "Six or seven years ago there was hardly any good tennis in Winchester. Now you can go out and see men and women playing who are comparable to any city in the country.
The sport's future can be insured mainly through instruction, Starbuck says. Instruction for everyone, not just beginners. "The difference between winning and losing is the strategy of the game," he suggests. "Tennis is a very complex game. The fundamentals are simple, the strategy is complex.
"Six years ago people merely played for a social thing. Now people want to play more competitive. They want to play better."
Though he was self-taught from scratch, Bullen supports Starbuck's theory. "You're better off being taught," Bullen says. "You learn all the bad things when you learn yourself. Getting started right, that's the main part of it now, more so than then," he adds.
But lessons often are discouraging. Tennis' high handicap quickly depletes patience. And abused patience usually separates champions from also-rans.
Though tennis can be played for either pleasure or blood, competition has kept the game alive through the lean years. "Tennis is the most violent exercise there is, "says Oliver. "To play top-flight tennis you've got to be ready to play long, hard hours in the sun."
Most old-timers lose that competitive edge. Some, Oliver for example, refuse to play if they can't go all out. Others, like Bullen, remain active and play for fun. "It's physical now," Bullen says, "harder to get into condition. If you can't go all out, you lose some of your desire to win. I can't get to every ball now, and that was really the biggest asset of my game when I was young-to chase every ball down."
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