Just click on here and look for the US Open link. It is free and no need to download anything special. http://www.stream2u.me/
This piece was written by his son Jason Gay, a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal sports section. I cut & pasted it below, but you can also see it if you click on to this link. I underlined a couple specific points, which I loved. http://online.wsj.com/articles/from-dad-a-game-for-life-1409257352
From Dad, a Game for Life
Lessons Learned From My Father, the Tennis Coach
Ward Gay, the former longtime tennis coach at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, with his team in 2013.
"Run with your racket back," Dad would say. "Be ready for anything."
It's
a message I never forgot. For 40 years, my father, Ward Gay, was a
tennis coach, at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge,
Mass., the city where he grew up. When he started, rackets were wood.
The No. 1 men's player in the world was Ilie Nastase. My dad studied
tennis bibles written by Rod Laver,
Bud Collins
and Harry Hopman, and taught himself the rest through years of
little victories and mistakes.
He liked
natural gut string, one-handed backhands, the serve-and-volley, the
chip-and-charge. He was also a science teacher at the high school, and
he enjoyed how tennis was a game that rewarded mental acuity as well as
physical skill. His favorite tennis maxim was the well-known adage he
borrowed and passed on to every player: You're only as good as your second serve. "It was the broken record, but in a meaningful way," one of his former players, Adam Weinstock, said the other day.
My
dad admired the pristine grass at Wimbledon and the red clay at Roland
Garros, but the kind of tennis he really adored was city tennis. Cracks
in the hard court. Rusty chain-link fences. Holes in the nets. Trucks
howling by on the street. Country clubs weren't his thing. Tennis was for everybody, he felt.
He
built his high-school teams like that. Every now and then, Dad would
get lucky and find himself with a talented player who arrived with years
of training and smooth, well-taught strokes. But he also cherished the
outsiders, the awkward newcomers who went out for tennis because they
were bored or they got cut from baseball. He was once a kid like
that—and he loved to teach a student a sport he could play for the rest
of his life.
Even as tennis changed, to
open stances and composite rackets and poly strings, Dad stressed the
fundamentals. He'd ramble around the court in his oversized sweatshirts
and chunky black sneakers and quietly emphasize footwork and the high
toss and getting the racket back, even if fewer players did that
anymore. His critiques could be direct. Not long ago, my brother and I
dragged him down to a court and asked him to watch us hit. There we
were, spraying the ball into the back fence, double-faulting, refusing
to come to net and volley.
After 10 minutes, Dad waved a hand and gave up. "You two are brutal," he said quietly. "I'm going to go watch some juniors."
"He
was an old-school Cambridge guy," said former player Laurance
Kimbrough, who was recently named the women's tennis coach at Clark
(Mass.) University. "He wasn't going to tell you he loved you all the
time, but he had a knowledge and wisdom for the game." In
those four decades, Cambridge had good teams and bad teams but my
father seldom got caught up in the standings. Sometimes he said he
wished all they did was practice. "He didn't really care about wins and
losses," said his longtime assistant coach, Skip McCarthy. One season,
he was named a "Coach of the Year" by the Boston Globe. We got to go to a
chicken banquet and his photo was in the newspaper. The following
season was a rough one, wins hard to come by.
"'Coach of the Year' to 'Coach of the Rear'" was how he put it. He thought this was hilarious.
At
the end of every season, my dad would make noise about quitting
coaching, and every season we ignored it. He always came back around to
the job. When he retired from teaching, we figured that might be it, but
he stuck with the tennis. When he got to 40 seasons, it was a nice
round number, but he decided to come back for 41. He needed it more than
he would admit.
But he hadn't been
feeling well. He thought he had stomach cramps, but when the pain became
difficult there were tests and then tests and more tests. In early
March, just days away from the first tennis practice of the season, he
was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He
resigned from coaching the team. He told me about it matter-of-factly,
but stepping away after doing this for so long had to have been
devastating. Spring afternoons on the hard court had been a ritual for
him, a sanctuary.
"I remember thinking,
'There's no way he's not coming back,'" said one of this year's
Cambridge co-captains, Cam Lindsay. "He was invincible. You just
expected him to be coming over to the benches."
My
father's fight went into the disease. Chemotherapy was agonizing.
Within a couple of months he lost 70 pounds. He rallied back, but the
opponent was relentless.
Meanwhile,
Cambridge was having a great year with a new coach, Joe Nicholson. The
team went 16-3, made the state playoffs. Before one of the matches, a
rival coach, Andy Crane of Boston Latin, pulled aside both his own team
and Cambridge's and took a moment to talk about my dad. "I
just wanted to acknowledge him," Crane told me this week. "Those kids
were so fortunate to have had a coach and a mentor like him."
Last
Thursday, Aug. 21, in a Boston hospital that overlooked a pair of
beautifully ragged tennis courts on the Charles River, my dad died. He
was 70 years old. The next day, my
brother and I walked down the street to the courts we grew up on. We
pulled out a couple of our father's old rackets we'd uncovered in the
garage, and hit like we used to hit when we were young. Dad had given us
and so many others a sport we could play for the rest of our lives, but
his reach was much more than that. We ran with our rackets back, ready
for anything.
