Ashley Cooper remains one of the great aces for Queensland tennis
Wimbledon champion Ashley Cooper, Melbourne-born but a Queenslander for half a century, was a driving force behind the development of the State Tennis Centre where the final of the Brisbane International women’s event will be played today.
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LAST week I was at the ATP Cup tennis tournament at Tennyson checking out a display that pays tribute to the great tennis players from this state when I bumped into “Gentleman’’ John Millman, one of our current champions.
Millman is a throwback to those unassuming but iconic giant-killing greats Queensland produced in the 1950s during a marvellous era of Australian sport.
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I walked to Tennyson’s State Tennis Centre, from the Yeerongpilly train station along the 430m Ashley Cooper Riverwalk.
The walk is part of Brisbane’s tennis trail and Brisbane businessman Peter Rasey has worked hard advocating various permanent honours to our greatest players, with parks, rebound walls, footbridges and tennis courts named in honour of many who have contributed to our wonderful tennis history.
Ashley Cooper, Melbourne-born but a Queenslander for half a century, was a driving force behind the development of the State Tennis Centre where the final of the Brisbane International women’s event will be played today.
At 83, he’s been in the wars lately after coming off a pushbike to avoid a runaway child, but he was a Wimbledon champion aged just 21 and won three of the four Grand Slam singles events – the Australian, Wimbledon and US titles in the one year.
His career ended prematurely with an elbow injury at just 26.
Cooper first came to Brisbane in 1952 aged 16 to compete in the Queensland championships at the old Milton courts.
He left Melbourne in the morning in a DC-3 aircraft and arrived in the River City, with all its tin rooves and outside tennis courts, at dusk after six or seven stops to refuel.
``I was very ambitious in tennis,’’ he recalled, ``but when I went out to Milton I saw, hitting up on one of the outside courts, two lean, suntanned Queenslanders – that was Mal Anderson and Roy Emerson.
``I thought these two could be a thorn in my ambitions and so it proved to be.’’
The 1950s started a golden era for Queensland tennis. Mal Anderson, who learned to play on a dirt court on his father’s cattle property at Theodore, won the US singles title in 1957 as an unseeded player.
His brother-in-law Roy Emerson, who started playing tennis at the two-room Nukku school near Blackbutt, went on to win six Australian singles titles, two French, two Wimbledon and two US crowns.
Rod Laver, who as a boy made his own tennis court from Fitzroy River silt at Rockhampton, became the only man in history win all four Grand Slam Events in the same year – not once but twice.
Cooper beat Neale Fraser for the 1957 Australian title and the next year won the Australian, Wimbledon and US titles as well as making the semi-finals at the French Championship.
He married Miss Australia, Helen Wood, in 1959 at St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Spring Hill in what was termed Australia’s wedding of the year.
A couple of years ago I had the privilege of attending the unveiling of a statue of Roy Emerson at Blackbutt, where Cooper entertained the crowd with stories of a long-gone time in Australian sport.
He recalled travelling to England with the national team for the first time in 1954 and how their fearsome coach Harry Hopman would hide in bushes to make sure no players took short cuts on their morning runs through London’s Hyde Park.
The city slicker roomed with tough bush boy Emerson for a month leading up to Wimbledon.
``Roy had a very special wake-up call,’’ Cooper said.
``First thing in the morning you’d find yourself on the floor in a headlock .
``That woke you up pretty sharply.’’
Grantlee Kieza’s best-selling biography of poet Banjo Paterson is now in paperback through HarperCollins/ABC Books
grantlee.kieza@news.com.au
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