I had turned up early in the morning at the Siam Inter-Continental partly because I wanted to be mentally prepared before starting the Volvo Tennis Clinic and partly because the gardens at the back of the hotel were a peaceful oasis in the heart of Bangkok. This morning seemed like all the others, but I wasn’t to know that it had the potential to be a life changer.
On this particular morning I was approached by an elderly foreign man who I had noticed watching the clinics with great interest each morning. He was a guest in the hotel and we quickly struck up a conversation. He explained that he was in Thailand as a guest of the King of Thailand and was gathering information in preparation to write a book on the Kings many projects throughout Thailand. He explained that he would usually stay in the palace grounds whenever he visited Thailand as a guest of the King and Queen but on this occasion was staying at the hotel.
The man’s name was William Stevenson and he had already written several very successful books, the most well known of them being “A Man Called Intrepid” which was published in 1976 and was later made into a movie of the same name. I also met his wife Monika Jensen-Stevenson a former producer of the CBS current affairs television program “60 Minutes”.
Each morning we would talk, either before the clinic started or after I had finished and each evening he would have dinner with the King and Queen of Thailand. One morning he said that he had mentioned my tennis clinics to the King the previous evening and that the King was very interested in our project that took tennis to hundreds of Thai children each year. Then, almost as an afterthought he asked me if I would be interested in hitting some balls with the King! If you have ever visited Thailand you would know that the King of Thailand is treated with enormous respect and has an almost god-like stature throughout the country. I think my reply was something like “you tell the King that if he wants to hit some balls I’ll be there”. That day I floated home in a daze, William Stevenson was going to ask the King if he wanted to hit balls with me in the Palace!
The next morning William Stevenson was down at the courts early. As we talked I waited for a hint as to whether the topic of me hitting with the King had been mentioned at dinner the previous evening. It had, and the King wanted to thank me for the offer but had to follow Palace protocol which made it virtually impossible for him to have direct contact with someone from outside the Palace.
Although I never got the opportunity to meet the King on a tennis court, William Stevenson had made sure that he was aware of whom I was and the work I was doing. I was very grateful to have met William and to be the topic of conversation at the Kings dinning table for a short time.
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