Word: vic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...point to make. "See what you can do when you bend your knees and then lift with your thighs as you hit the ball?" he asks his students. The imagery is vivid, but one woman remains dubious. "My knees don't bend that much," she says. "That's strange," Vic responds impishly. "Didn't I see you sitting in the restaurant last night? How did you get into that position? Did the waiter hit you in the back of the knees...
...cover of the August issue of Tennis magazine. In television commercials he is touting Tennis Our Way, a videotape he made with Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith, and millions of sports fans have chuckled at his commentaries on cable and network TV. The best known of his five books, Vic Braden's Tennis for the Future, has sold 200,000 copies...
...third of seven children of an impoverished Appalachian coal miner who moved north to seek work, Braden was born and raised in the industrial town of Monroe, Mich. On his way to play football one day, Vic, then 11, passed the local tennis courts just as someone opened a can of balls. "You could hear the fizz," he recalls. "I could smell the rubber. It was an amazing kind of olfactory thing. I made up my mind I wanted one of those things...
Even then, Braden had the temerity to question his coaches' instructions. As a local newspaper columnist wrote, "Vic Braden is the best tennis player ever to come out of Monroe, but he was pretty hard to handle." His penchant for analysis surfaced early. He made pinholes in 3-by-5 cards, then peered through them at athletes in action. "I was isolating segments of their bodies," he explains, "the hips, the thighs, to see how they moved during play...
...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...