Tampa, Florida					Monday, September 06, 2010

Jim Courier, Champion of Tennis for Everyone
Saturday, December 13, 2003
TAMPA—This is about Jim Courier and a part of his thank-you for all the good things that have happened to him, the world class tennis player from Dade City, a town north of here a bit. Courier was in Tampa, a favorite place of his, the other day to declare he was arranging a top-notch tennis exhibition, with the money made to go to First Serve, a proposition to teach tennis and that which the sport encourages to those in what he described as “financially challenged areas’’ in nearby St. Petersburg’s Bartlett Park area. Once, Bartlett Park in South St. Petersburg was a high class area where tennis was a big deal and there it spawned some top players, including Wimbledon champion Shirley Fry and where the sport flourished among juniors, regulars, and seniors, with the late icon Dan Sullivan as the professional forever, it seemed. The red-haired Courier, a big young man with a big game and a big build and a big heart, held his announcement at the St. Petersburg Times Forum, once the Ice Palace and still the home of the Lightning of the National Hockey League, where his exhibition, featuring Andy Roddick, the best player “on the planet,’’ as Courier said, will be played. It is a fine, modern arena in downtown Tampa. The show is set for next late winter. Courier, a television analyst now, who shattered his left shoulder so badly in a golf cart accident not so long ago he can’t play tennis, or golf, or his guitar, “the three things I want to do so much,’’ he said, and his pal, Pete Sampras, played an exhibition some years ago when they both were in their prime for a lot of money raised for the Children’s Home in Tampa. Now, he’s back again, to stage another big one for a kids who so need help, he believes. Jim Courier was for 58 months the number one male tennis player in the world. He won Grand Slams. He was a powerful, unrelenting competitor. Never gave out or up. Others with bigger games copied him. They learned his work ethic, his conditioning, his endurance won for him. Yet, he said, “conditioning doesn’t win big matches, but the lack of it loses them.’’ Neat, eh? Red-haired Jim Courier, the son of Linda and Jim, Senior, took the sport up early and was successful early, becoming in time best. His first Grand Slam he won in Australia. Yet, he never changed and hasn’t to this day. He is still humble, thankful and uses his big brain and ability to converse to sell his sport and the good it can do. So, now, there he was the other day, back home again, saying he wanted to do more for his sport if others did. It was a pretty simple circumstance, really. A fundamentally nice man who made himself a world champion tennis player, Courier told this story the other day when in league with the Tampa Bay Lightning he held a press conference here: He’d come home to the Tampa area of his youth to play in a	second exhibition and got a call from a man he did not then know, Rick Crockett, sitting beside him at the conference. Crockett did not know Courier. He only knew of him and knew him to be compassionate. Crockett had found “this jewel,’’ an almost forgotten Bartlett Park tennis facility in South St. Pete, overrun by the “the financially challenged,’’ part of town, as he said it. Crockett had been with the Harry Hopman Tennis Academy, in Largo, then north of Tampa at Tom Dempsey’s Saddlebrook Resort. He chose to involve himself with First Serve, the new arm of tennis that has declared tennis is indeed for anyone. He raised some dough, asked Courier to stop by Bartlett and see what he was doing, back then, and Courier did. Courier said on his drive back to Tampa “on the Frankland Bridge, after the experience of seeing Crockett trying to take the sport to so-called inner-city areas and the kids, mostly black and Hispanic who live there, he wept. He wanted to help. Crockett showed him he rundown facilities that once were stylish and where Chrissie Evert played tournaments but where “you can’t imagine how a kid looks when you give the kid a used but useable tennis racket and start working with them. “They had no idea who I was,’’ said Courier. “The only words they knew in tennis were Venus and Serena (Williams). They were only impressed when I told them I knew them and played tennis with them.’’ But, on the drive back to Tampa, “I almost wept, thinking of it,’’ said Courier. So, he and Crockett stayed in touch, “because I knew Jim was so helpful and so honorable and wanted to help those who could not help themselves, we went for it.’’ Courier has long been involved in exhibition tennis to help those who need it. Now, partnering with Crockett and Courier and the Lightning people, also dedicated to such noble deeds, Dominic Ford of Mercedes-Benz, who will be a co-sponsor of this new deal. Good. Mercedes is an additional impact, not to mention money, though “the deal is,’’ said Courier, none of the players want a dime for coming.’’ So, it is going to happen. Jim Courier is coming home again, and he will come to help his sport and show those who could not know about it to play it, with the drive and contacts of Crockett, Courier and Ford and the Lightning. There will be a high class tennis exhibition, in high class circumstances, that will cost a lot to see with the money made going to help teach this sport to those who might not otherwise know anything of it, except the words Venus and Serena. “Do we think First Serve and what we hope to do might turn up a tennis pro tour player of championship quality down the line?’’ Courier asked. “Yes, it certainly may.” “Do we think First Serve might uncover another Venus or Serena or Arthur Ashe?’’ Asked Courier. “Why not?’’ He prophesied. ##
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