Word: vics
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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...
...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...
Meanwhile, the Vic Braden Ski College is gearing up for its third full year at Aspen's Buttermilk Mountain. Braden's critical eye was cast on skiing several years ago, after he and Melody returned from a ski trip confused by the variety of teaching systems they had encountered. Some seemed logical; others made no sense...