PROFILE, Page 84TEACHING TENNIS TO TOADSVIC BRADEN, coach extraordinaire, uses humor and physics to shownonstars how to improve their moves on the courts and ski slopesBy Leon Jaroff
It's a warm, sunny day in Southern California, and at the Vic
Braden Tennis College in Coto de Caza, 60 miles southeast of Los
Angeles, a few dozen students are watching a most peculiar
exhibition. At one end of a tennis court, a ball machine flings one
ball after another across the net. Seated on a chair on the
opposite side, a short, chubby man, racquet in hand, rises to meet
each one, hitting it squarely with a looping forehand. Thwack.
Thwack. The balls whiz back over the net, landing just inside the
base line.
Victor Kenneth Braden, 60, has a 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?"
The woman nods, getting the point, laughing. Her classmates
laugh, and Braden joins in. Laughter, in fact, is an essential part
of the curriculum at the tennis college, where every year several
thousand adults take three-to-five-day courses that cost $100
daily. It erupts regularly from the classroom during Braden's
unique lectures, which combine show biz, science, humor and
psychology. It rings out on the 17 courts and the 18 teaching lanes
equipped with ball machines -- and in the four video rooms, where
students guffaw as they view tapes of their own just completed
drills. Even the pro shop is involved. It carries T-shirts bearing
the slogan LAUGH AND WIN.
Laughing all the way, Braden has become a celebrity in the
sports world. Jack Kramer, the 1947 Wimbledon champion, calls him
"the world's best all-around tennis coach," who can improve the
game of anyone "from a beginner to a champion." Braden was featured
on the 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.
Still, Braden has his detractors. While quick to praise able
coaches, he is disliked, and as he admits, "even hated" by many
others. They resent his criticism, his intrusion into what they
think is their turf, and his systematic discrediting of some of
their most cherished teaching methods.
But Braden has never met a sport he didn't like. He runs a ski
college in Aspen, and has made volleyball and badminton
instructional videotapes. Using high-speed cameras and computers,
he has analyzed and critiqued the techniques of such star athletes
as baseball's Reggie Jackson, pro-football quarterback Steve Grogan
and Olympic stars Al Oerter (discus throw) and Edwin Moses
(hurdles). In tennis, his coaching helped launch the careers of
Tracy Austin, Eliot Teltscher and Jim Pugh (a mixed-doubles winner
at Wimbledon this year).
Despite his success with the athletic elite, Braden is more
concerned about the masses. "People have been pushed out of
sports," he says. "What we've done in this society is to build huge
stadiums to let 22 people play on the grass." Most Americans, he
feels, participate largely by watching sports on television.
"People think that's all that's left for them," he complains.
Statistics seem to bear him out. The number of active tennis
players, for example, has declined from around 32 million in the
late 1970s to some 20 million today.
As Braden sees it, sports belong not only to the stars but also
to the "toads" -- his fond appellation for the less gifted. "We
should have 80 million tennis players and 80 million skiers," he
says. One reason we do not, he believes, is bad coaching. "I've
watched coaches say, `Shut up and do it the way I tell you because
I'm the coach.' I've watched coaches abuse people, hit people and
even kick people. There are not enough coaches out there saying,
`Hey, it's O.K. Here, let me show you how to do it. Just hang in
there.' Human caring is very much needed."
Braden provides just that. At the college, he rewards good
performance with cheers and compliments like "Keep that up, and
you'll be famous by Friday." Slow learners feel comforted by his
gentle way of identifying with their struggle to improve. "Don't
forget," he tells his charges, "every day 2 million Americans play
tennis and 1 million of them lose."
Psychology is the softest of the sciences Braden uses in
coaching. Physics and physiology also play important roles. His
lectures are sprinkled with such terms as force vectors and
parabolas, as he explains why he recommends certain strokes and
movements. "The ball doesn't know if you are hitting forehand or
backhand," he says, "or if you're wearing your lucky shorts. It
only knows how the racquet meets it. You can't violate the physical
laws because Mother Nature will get you every time."
Working with Gideon Ariel, an Israeli ex-Olympic athlete and
computer expert, Braden has wired people and fitted out his tennis
courts with high-speed cameras, sensors and other gadgets that feed
data into computers. His goal is to discover what really happens
while an athlete is in action, and to use that knowledge to improve
performance. An example: although Braden is a foremost advocate of
top spin in tennis, he has proved, contrary to conventional wisdom,
that tennis players who roll their racquets "over" the ball to
impart top spin not only waste energy but also unnecessarily risk
"tennis elbow." His high-speed film shows that the ball is in
contact with the strings for only four milliseconds and is well on
its way to the net before the player even begins rolling his
racquet. "Anyway," says Braden, "if the player really hit over the
ball, he would drive it into his foot." To impart top spin, he
explains, the player needs only to swing from low to high, bringing
the face of the racquet to a vertical position as it meets the
ball.
The 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."
Next day he returned to the courts and was caught pilfering
balls that sailed over the fence by Lawrence Alto, Monroe's
recreation-tennis director. "You're going to jail," said Alto
menacingly, "or you're going to learn this game." Braden opted for
lessons.
They took. That summer he captured his first tournament, and
he went on to win the Michigan high school tennis championship. He
also excelled in other sports. He was quarterback on the Monroe
High football team, captain of the basketball team and city
badminton champion to boot.
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."
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 a lot of people
famous," Braden recalls. "The stars would beat us fast and then go
out and see the city."
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 pro.
"It 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 Estates, too,
that he trained Tracy Austin and other young proteges.
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 to buy
both the college and the research center.
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 at all.
What the sport needed, Braden decided, was some good research.
With sponsorship from the Aspen Skiing Corp., he began interviewing
skiers and instructors. "I started hearing some horror stories,"
he recalls. "Arrogant ski instructors got inexperienced people to
the top of the mountain and said, `If you want to have lunch with
us, ski down.'" Braden was aghast. Even with good instructors, he
says, "skiing is the most intimidating sport. It surfaces childhood
fears faster than anything: fear of abandonment, fear of falling.
People haven't fallen for 30 or 40 years, and now they're down in
the snow, groveling, trying to get up. And they're humiliated."
These problems were limiting the appeal of skiing, he told the
Aspen Skiing executives, but could be dealt with in a school "where
people can come in to an unintimidating atmosphere, sit in a
classroom and talk, work things through, and find out how people
learn, just as we do at the tennis college." The company agreed and
in 1987 signed him to a five-year contract. Ski magazine also likes
his method, naming his Aspen school the best in the country this
year.
Will his way bring more toads into skiing, or into tennis or
other sports, for that matter? Braden thinks so but tempers his
optimism. "In my lifetime," he says philosophically, "I've learned
that I'm not going to change the world by Saturday at lunch." But
