Hello, I am Roach the Coach and I am your guide through the Coaching Chronicles. There are 4,500 species of us cockroaches so we are well placed, across the globe, and across time, to tell you about coaching…
It took 77 years, but in 2013, Great Britain finally got a men’s singles Wimbledon champion when Andy Murray beat Novak Djokovic on 7 July. The scenes in his home town of Dunblane, Scotland, it is said, resembled the victory scenes from the film Braveheart.
Tennis has a long coaching history and is the only modern sport to have a mention in the Bible, “where it is said that Joseph served in the court of Pharaoh”.
What is not so well-known is how strong the link is between advertising and tennis – and therefore the money that can be made from it. Because of this, coaching in the sport has become vital. Indeed good coaching could even turn tennis players into billionaires.
Take the first great tennis Brit, Fred Perry. Really, his entire career in the sport was just a minor part in the greater marketing game at play.
Perry was born in Stockport, Cheshire in 1909. His father, Samuel Perry, was a cotton spinner and became active in the Co-operative Party, which took the family to London.
After seeing the fancy cars that some tennis players had, Fred decided he wanted a bit of that and took up tennis. Fred’s coaches could see the potential branding and product placement potential of this young man, and began coaching him intensively to build Perry brand awareness.
Perry was quite good at tennis and table tennis and won all four Grand Slam titles (Wimbledon, along with the Australian, US and French Opens) by the age of 26. He also became world table tennis champion in 1929, which opened up his popularity in many more countries.
Service with a smile
In the late 1940s, Perry was approached by Australian footballer Tibby Wegner, who had invented an anti-sweating bracelet. Tibby could see that there was a big market for men so asked Perry if he would put his name behind it, thus creating the first sweatband.
Perry’s mentor at the time, Pop Summers, had started work on his own clothing line.
As an entrepreneurial man, he had also started work with some breweries to see if they could break into the teen market for alcohol and create an intoxicating drink that bore his name – and so Alco Pops were invented.
Pops encouraged Perry to follow his lead and find some marketing routes to exploit his name and popularity. Fred toyed with some potential tag lines – ‘Deuce’, the juice of choice; ‘Doubles’, a whisky worth drinking twice, but none of these appealed to his taste.
Perry remembered his father always enjoying a cider, but that he was not that keen on drinks tasting of apple.
One summer day, Fred went home to his Normandy house and found that the pears from his orchard had rotted. Having picked them up to put in the compost, he licked his fingers and found the taste to be quite intoxicating.
Fred called Pops immediately and they found a brewery willing to make pear cider. The idea caught on and the drink was soon nicknamed Perry.
Perry’s clothing line grew massively from the sweatband he created with Tibby, and it continues to be a multimillion-pound business today.
It also has a tennis-related slogan for end-of-season sell-offs – 1st come, 1st served!
New balls, please!
By this time, Perry’s love life was under the spotlight too. It was interesting albeit turbulent. He was rumoured to have dated many famous women, including Marlene Dietrich to name but one.
Sadly, he had three failed marriages behind him, though none of these women ever learned that marrying a tennis player is an unwise move as love means nothing to them.
And so it continues. Andy Murray could learn a lot about PR from Fred Perry. The potential for marketing and branding are almost endless.
And what part will coaching play? If you think that the motivation behind tennis coaching was to become the first Brit in 100 years to win an Olympic Gold medal at tennis, or even to be the first Brit in 77 years to win Wimbledon, you would only be partly correct.
Because if someone were to work out the ROI of coaching tennis stars like Andy Murray, the bottom line would be too fantastical to be believed.
Sam Humphrey, partner, Moller PSF Group, Cambridge
Coaching at Work, Volume 8, Issue 5