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Although most clubs and public parks have pros, the new players often seek more intensive training. In 1969, when All American Sports Inc. opened its first three-week tennis camp in Beaver Dam, Wis., 20 children attended. This summer there are four All American camps with 670 children and 626 adults learning the game. Above Manhattan's Grand Central Station, Tennis Pro Clark Graebner has set up a clinic which last year attracted 5,000 students to its 24-hr.-day, seven-day-week sessions. For $50, tennis buffs get eight hours of concentrated practice with a ball machine and videotape recordings to see what went wrong. There are also more lavish teaching setups like John Gardiner's Tennis Ranch in Carmel Valley, Calif. There, 20 students at a time spend $450 for a grueling five-day immersion in fundamentals and tactics. Gardiner's exhausting program is embellished by rubdowns from a masseur who used to work for the Gabor sisters and lessons in "yoga-tennis"—a scheme that is supposed to teach tennis tabbies to psych themselves into becoming tigers. Although most of Gardiner's clients are middleaged, he also conducts three-week summer clinics for adolescent racketeers.
On the Streets. This summer there will also be matches in the ghettos —courtesy of two soft-drink companies. Pepsi-Cola's program will use mobile units, which upon reaching a site in low-income sections of New York, Boston and Philadelphia will stop, mark out a playing area on the street, pop up nets and backdrops, and hold court. The National Junior Tennis League, partly funded by Coca-Cola, is even more ambitious. After a slow start three years ago, it will operate this summer in more than 20 cities, reaching 30,000 youngsters. The idea, says the league's director Ray Benton, is to imitate the spirit of pickup basketball games. "We grab the kids off the street and put them on the court right away, hitting the ball," he says. "We just give them bright-colored shirts, encourage them to yell for each other, and let them go." These programs, says Black Tennis Champion Arthur Ashe, "are tapping a new reservoir of talent and drive. You will find more athletic, agile, stronger kids playing the game in the future."