In 1988 China was a very different place to what you encounter today. Many mainland Chinese had never seen a foreign person before and merely walking the street created a minor public disturbance. I was invited to coach the Chinese National Junior Team in 1988 and the program required me to train a selected group of 4 boys and 4 girls within China, and later take them to ITF tournaments in Jakarta, Hong Kong and finish back in China.
I trained the players for 4 weeks just a few miles inside the border from Macao. Two wealthy Hong Kong businessmen had built a golf course on the outskirts of Zhongshan and we trained on the tennis courts at the Zhongshan Hotsprings Resort.
The players also traveled to Wuhan and represented their provinces over one week of competition. I traveled with them and watched them compete against many of the best players in China. I had to stay in a separate hotel and walked to the courts each day. Those short walks to the courts would attract a group of followers, sometimes as many as 10 people. On one occasion I had to enter an electrical shop to escape the followers. It was a little intimidating when the followers came into the shop also!
For someone like me who likes their privacy China back then was tough. The team and I had traveled to Guangzhou and arrived after midnight. We stayed in what seemed like an old university, very much like Harry Potters’ Hogwarts School. In the morning we came down to the main dinning hall for breakfast and there must have been 300 athletes from a variety of sports all seated at long tables. As soon as I came into the hall everyone stopped eating. Every head turned to look at the strange foreigner. When I sat down people on the far side of the hall began to stand in order to get a better view. I had only just begun to master eating with chopsticks and I was really put to the test that morning under the watchful eye of those Chinese athletes.
I was sitting outside a train station during a break on a trip back from Wuhan when I felt someone watching me. I looked up from my book at a mother and her small son watching me intently. The small boy was holding a can of Coke. Suddenly, and without warning the child threw the can at me, hitting me on the shoulder. I looked at the mother, waiting for her reaction. None came; I was the monkey at the zoo!
When we toured to Jakarta and Hong Kong we created quite a stir within the local Chinese communities in each city. Many of the elderly Chinese businessmen who had fled China when they were young would invite us to dinner in the evenings where we had to endure 10 course meals. Eventually I had to decline these invitations as the players where beginning to gain weight from those dinners and the “all you can eat” buffets at our hotel we were staying.
During our ITF tour a Chinese government official was sent with us to make sure the players didn’t defect. He would hand out the passports to players before going through immigration, and collected them again on the other side. One day during our stay in Jakarta he disappeared for 8 hours, nobody knew where he had gone or when he would be back. Late in the evening he returned to the hotel, obviously distressed and looking as if he had been walking the whole day. I’m sure he had attempted to defect himself but after hours of walking had realized it wasn’t going to be that easy.
I really enjoyed my experience with the Chinese team and can look back with pride that I was one of the first overseas coaches of any sport to have the opportunity to work there. Within the next 20 years China will be a real force on the professional tennis scene and I will have been part of the early development.
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