Episode 2- Coach's Corner Podcast with Geoff Masters 

In Episode 2 of Coach's Corner Podcast with Geoff Masters, ATP Coach and Australian former tennis player, and Brian Teacher talk all things tennis. Masters was part of doubles winning pairs in the US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon tournaments during the 1970s. Listen as he and Brian discuss starting off in juniors in Australia, the world of tennis commentating, and much more.

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi, I'm Brian Teacher, and our guest today is Geoff Masters, who started playing on the ATP tour. In the 70s, Geoff was a top 20 singles player in the world, and he won three major doubles titles, including Wimbledon doubles with Ross Case. Geoff is also a high-performance coach where he has worked with the likes of Samantha Stosur and Bernard Tomic as juniors growing up. Geoff has been a tennis commentator on TV in Australia for over 40 years. So Geoff offers a wide range of skills and expertise at the highest level of the game and is on Full Court Tennis App platform, where you can hire him for an in-app virtual lesson.

Hi, Geoff. Welcome to Full Court Tennis Coach's Corner.

Nice to see you.

From down under, right?

Down under, yeah. It's late in the morning, it's a sunny day here in Queensland. Life is good.

I never get used to the difference. When I call Europe, it's always typically nine-hour difference, same day. But you're literally Saturday, November 5, and I'm still in November 4. It's always a strange thing, but great to have you here and, and so looking overlooking your tennis career, your professional tennis career. You've been involved in the sport, I think, for oh, my God. It's the high end of the sport for with different hats for about 50 years. So you've got an incredible perspective with all these different hats, and I want to get into a bunch of it right now.

So first, let's start with your pro career. So I'm not sure, because we played kind of on the tour at the same period, the same guys and stuff. The back of my mind, I'm thinking you played somewhere between ten and 13 years on the tour.

Yeah, eleven all up. I guess that the first year that I started traveling. I was 18. That was in 1969. I finished the end of 1980. So about eleven years all up from beginning to end. It went from basically towards the end of the amateur era to the professional era. So I saw an enormous change, even that eleven-year period.

So you've been there from the start, from the beginning of sense the pro tour through the current tour today, which is incredible changes. So in singles, you got to as high I've seen, at least it was reported 42 in singles, is that correct?

Yeah, I think that was the end of year rankings. One stage early in the year, I was in the WCT finals for the top eight, which was pretty exciting. I was in a very elite group then with Mackenzie Borg and Connors and Gerulaitis in the top eight. But yeah, because I always yeah, I thought I always thought of you as being a top 20 singles player. That's why I was so that was a year-end thing. So at one point, maybe you were higher in your singles ranking.

Yeah, I would have been higher in those days. They basically just finished. Well, that's a year-end finish. The end of the year wasn't so good, but, yeah, during the year it was better than that. I won a few tournaments, but certainly more in doubles and singles, but I won a few singles titles. Someone I know, I've talked to the ATP, and they have not kept good records of guys in our generation back in those days. So you got to get on them and tell them.

Would you say you were almost better known as a doubles player because you won three majors in doubles and, of course, Wimbledon doubles is quite an incredible accomplishment. And would you say that's your happiest moment in tennis or most exciting, or were there others?

Certainly one of with due respect, all players played doubles in those days, like Borg and Vilas and Newcombe and Roche and Gottfried Ramírez. Everybody played doubles. It was best to five sets, so it was very exciting. And it probably had a little bit more kudo in a sense than it does now, even though the level of play now is so much better. But everybody was playing then because frankly, there wasn't that much money. So everybody played singles, doubles and mixed off and if they could. But, yeah, look, winning Wimbledon was fantastic. It happened to be the year that the Queen of England actually showed up, and it was the final. 1977 was the centenary year of Wimbledon, and fortunately for the Brits, Virginia Wade was in the final, and it was the year the Queen was going to show up anyhow because it was a centenary year, so she was there to present the women's single trophy to Virginia Wade. And then the doubles final was on next. So we met the Queen in the little ante room waiting to go on and spoke to her for a couple of minutes before going on. What we said, I have no idea, but that's a long time ago.

In the finals, did you beat Dent and Alexander? Was that then or not?

We did, yeah. Two other Aussies the year before, Ross Case and I had lost in the final, the Brian Gottfried and Raúl Ramírez, like 75 and the fifth. So we sort of got a little revenge the following year.

Yeah, Nail Bags (Bob Carmichael) and I lost to Dent and Alexander in the finals, I mean, in the semis in five sets. So we were excited to get to that point and, you know, obviously disappointed, but I was very excited to see you guys, you guys win it. So you when you played, you were playing against all these guys the same as I, Borg, McEnroe, Connor, Gerulaitis, Vilas, all these guys, yeah.

Who who was your who did you find day in, day out, was the toughest competitor of these guys and why?

Well, I remember the ATP tour, or even in those days that they used to ask all the players all the peers, various questions about what they found interesting, and one of which was, if you had to have a player play for your life, who would it be? And the winner almost invariably was Jimmy Connors because he was just the ultimate competitor. I mean, he was just brutal. And I was on the receiving end of a flogging from him in the final of the Australian indoor singles one year. I'd won the indoor tournament, I think in '76 and lost to him in maybe '78. And he beat me like six love 6-1, 6-3 something like that. Absolutely flogged me. But he was a competitor beyond anybody else's ability to just fight and feel like he just loved the scrap. And, you know, he was ready to tear your throat if he could. And I mean that in the best sense.

I mean, he was good to me, but on the court, yeah, he was ferocious, I think. Yeah, I played against him quite a few times in practice, and he always seemed to bring the best out. It was always a struggle just to get games. The more games you got, the better you'd feel, and then maybe you’d give him a match one day. It was always incredible.

So when you weren't playing tournaments, what type of training did you do primarily on the tour? Was it mostly playing sets? I know the guys today do all this cross-training, but back then, it was quite a bit different, not as sophisticated. So tell me how you trained.

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. It's much more sophisticated today. The era just prior to my playing was where Harry Hopman was Davis Cup coach, and he was quite revered in Australia. He used to train the players pretty hard. But it was a lot of on-court stuff, a lot of running and things like double knee jumps—or you might call them kangaroo jumps, I'm not sure—where you bring your knees up to your chest.

You’d do a lot of distance running, push-ups, that sort of stuff. But a lot of running—it was all about running. So you'd run distances, four and five miles as it was then, on a regular basis to get endurance. Then, a lot of time on court basically was the thrust of it.

These days, these people—men and women—they're physically fantastic. The work they're doing off court is awesome. They're leaving nothing to chance. And, yeah, it's wonderful to see the athleticism that they bring to the table.

I think it's a great point. I remember McEnroe saying that he used to get pushed by Borg to be better. And so it's true that you need people to push you to want to keep reaching. That’s so true. Now, the women's game is also, in a sense, kind of more open now in the last few years than it's been in a long time. Do you think the women's… how do you pronounce her name? Swytek? Am I saying it right? Sweet tech. The Polish… Shelley, how do you say Swansea? Okay. Pardon me for goofing that up. She's got three majors already, right?

Yeah, she does. She’s motivated, she hits the ball very well. Big game, doesn’t serve big like Serena, who dominated. So it'll be interesting to see. I’m not sure if you can dominate the women's game today without having a big serve to do the type of damage that Serena was able to do on the tour with 22 majors. It’ll be interesting to see.

Yeah, well, Serena, I think, was for me as well as that she's the best female player that I've seen. I mean, people will say that she's been the best player, full stop, and that's a legitimate point. At her best, just huge. Fabulous serve, very aggressive from the back of the court. So if you had an ordinary serve, she stepped in and dealt with it. It’s so hard to see someone coming along of that caliber in the near future. And Świątek is a terrific player, as you quite rightly say. A serve is probably the weakest part of her game, and we might see some players trying to jump on that.

But she's disappointed, of course, that Ash Barty retired, but she says that Barty's success was one of the reasons she wanted to get better and better, and she was very disappointed when Barty retired. So, yeah, she's looking to be pushed. She looks the sort of person who wants a challenge. She wants to bring it on. I did some commentary matches on her last year in Adelaide before the Australian Open started, and she lost to Barty a couple of times and looked okay. But by February, March, she was a better player. She was faster, she was stronger, she was more aggressive, and she's dominated. Here in 2022. So she's a great athlete, great competitor. Love her attitude, but she needs someone to push her along as well.

It’s amazing. Years ago, we had a group of women that I thought was one of the most competitive groups, when Serena, Venus, Davenport, Mauresmo… what was the Dutch Belgium girl… what was the top girl in the world? The Belgian girl. Yeah. Henin, yeah. When they were all playing, I mean, they had phenomenal, like, different little bit of different styles of game, and they were all kind of switching back and forth. It was an amazing group, and it'd be exciting to see if we can get a group like that in the women's game again.

So I want to move on just to you as a high-performance coach now, overall working with… So you mentioned you were at Queensland, I think the head coach of the Queensland Academy, and that you were able to kind of be there when Stosur and Tomic came through the academy. So when they came through, could you tell as young kids, or what ages were they when they came through, that they were different and they were going to be top players? Was it easy for you to see that, or did they have to develop?

Well, you certainly believe strongly that they had a chance. I mean, Samantha Stosur, she was at 14 or 15, playing 18-and-under events. ITF events. She was going exceptionally well because she was strong. She had a very good kick serve, a very good topspin kick serve, which really worried a lot of the younger players. But because of that, you thought, well, she's a chance and she was motivated. Her attitude was good.

Tomic, he was driven, not necessarily self-driven, which is a bit of an issue. His dad drove him very hard, but the hours and work that they were putting in, you could see that sort of commitment was going to get some sort of success. He always had good hands, but physically, he was not as quick as perhaps he needed to be, but you always knew the work ethic that he was putting in was going to take him so far. Just how far was going to be up to him. So I think a bit, unfortunately, Bernard probably didn't spend enough time developing the front court part of his game.

But look, he’s quite a finalist of Wimbledon, and he's had a pretty good career. Sadly, he dropped out of it for a while, and he's trying to make a comeback now, and I think it's all a little bit late. But Sam Stosur has done exceptionally well to win the US Open, as she did against Serena Williams. And the way she won was very impressive. Former world number one doubles player as well. So I think she maxed out her ability, and she's very much revered in Australia not just for what she does on court, but off court as well. She's a delightful human being. She's a phenomenal athlete.

I remember seeing her at age 19 saying, “This girl could really be the one.” And she could do it all, pretty much. But did she have a good work ethic when she was a junior growing up? Well, it's funny because she was doing so well as a 15, 16-year-old. I think she figured there was going to be a walk in the park, and her work ethic dropped off 17, 18 years of age. She sort of flatlined, and people got ahead of her, and I think she was doing well in doubles.

Then an interesting thing happened. She picked up what was called Lyme's disease, and she was out of the game for about ten months. And I think that's when she thought, well, if I ever get a chance to get back, I'm going to work harder and do better. And she did. And so she came back fitter, faster, stronger. And that's when her singles career took off.

What age was she? She was in the mid-twenties—25, 26—when her singles game really took off. She'd been doing quite well, certainly very well in doubles. But after she was out of the sport for 10–11 months, I think that was a catalyst for her to realize, I've got a window of opportunity here for another few years. I need to maximize it. And she worked, doubled her efforts, and spent a lot of time in the gym getting stronger, faster, leaner. So the back end, the back five years or four or five years of her career were her best by a long way.

Wow, that's an incredible story. So you posted a little quote from Leonard Bergelin on Full Court Tennis, and I just love that little story and quote. I think I'll kind of paraphrase it in a sense. Tell me if I'm right. Somebody asked you. Well, when they came up, I'll let you say it. You go ahead and tell the story, since you know what you're telling.

But also for the kids that basically don’t have a good coach and they’re just hanging out at the park. I grew up at the park, and I didn’t have access. There was barely even TV in the days of tennis. So to be able to compare your stroke to a top pro or something, I think that—like you’re mentioning between Rafter and Hewitt—well, different styles of play, completely different styles of play. But when they’re volleying or they’re hitting a groundstroke, there still are certain essential ingredients: the contact points through the shot, their footwork, this or that. A lot of them are basically the same ingredients. And so, yeah, they can have different styles of play but different ingredients.

So I’m trying to get people to understand that and to pay attention to it and to be able to look at it, compare it, and then learn from that, basically. Because I find, as a coach, it helps me to be able to break it down, put it in the app, put it in slow-mo, look at the technique, and then be able to show the kid on the court immediately what he’s doing and compare it to another pro so that visually they get a better idea in their head of what to do. And so I think that they learn quicker that way.

It’s amazing—some kids, when they have bad habits, you tell them what they’re doing, something like maybe they’re taking the shortest backswing in the world. A lot of the kids today, I see, are doing so much windshield wiping, but they don’t take their racket back at all because they’re doing so much windshield wiping. And so they think they’re doing it, but they’re not. And I’m sure you and I probably have had the same type of issues growing up. We think we’re doing something, but we’re not doing it.

And so, to get them to understand how to improve their technique, I think it’s silly today, in this day and age with technology, that everybody doesn’t have good technique. There’s no reason for people not to have good technique today. So I’m hopeful with Full Court Tennis, and I appreciate you being on there and using the technology and helping everybody as well. And there’s no reason—you have an amazing career and knowledge of the sport, and so people should be hiring you in the app to get a lesson. So it’s much appreciated you being on. It was fun talking to you, Jeff, and look forward to seeing you on Full Court Tennis.