Word: bradenism
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...Braden entered Kalamazoo College on an athletic scholarship in 1947, majored in psychology and played on the school's highly regarded tennis team. "I had 38 cents in my Levi's when I started college," Braden says, "and 37 cents when I finished. I had to save up to make a phone call." Later, while coaching tennis at the University of Toledo, he played in professional tournaments with a group of six stars (Jack Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez, among others) and, in Braden's words, six "donkeys," including himself and Chris Evert's father Jimmy. "The donkeys made...
After moving to California and earning a master's degree in psychology at California State University at Los Angeles, Braden had brief stints as a sixth-grade teacher and a school psychologist. But he missed sports and soon abandoned education to help Kramer organize pro-tennis tours. In 1963, when Kramer opened his tennis club at Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., Braden became its manager and teaching...
...seemed that all Vic had to do was to talk to somebody and he could improve their game," Kramer recalls. Word about Braden's magic touch spread; soon people were signing up as much as two years in advance for his half-hour individual lessons, which usually drew an appreciative nonpaying audience of local toads. He also took time to organize a class of blind children, calling out numbers to help them aim their racquets at machine-propelled balls. "Golly," says Braden, "when the kids hit the ball, I was more thrilled than they were." It was at Rolling Hills...
...Braden's activities soon caught the eye of the Great Southwest Corp., which planned to develop Coto de Caza as an upscale resort community and needed a resident tennis pro to lure buyers. Offered the job, Braden accepted on the condition that the company build him a tennis college of his own design and, when that got into the black, a high-tech sports-research center. Six years after the Vic Braden Tennis College opened, in 1974, Arvida Corp., which had taken over Coto de Caza, dedicated a $1.3 million research center on the site...
...Today Braden is comfortably ensconced with his wife Melody and his dog Mousse in a French country-style house in Coto de Caza, a four-minute walk from the college. He owns a piece of another Vic Braden Tennis College, in St. George, Utah, and has an income well into six figures, two jeeps and a vacation house. Both his two children and Melody's three (from previous marriages) are grown and on their own. But Braden once more has to "save up." Arvida is pulling out of Coto de Caza, and he is trying to raise money...