scheduled to play an exhibition game<\/a> at a tennis facility, it\u2019s as good a time as any to look back on the tennis history of the team\u2019s home court, UD Arena.<\/p>\nDayton will play Xavier at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 7, at the Lindner Family Tennis Center. It\u2019s the second game of the CareSource Invitational. Ohio State plays Cincinnati at 3 p.m.<\/p>\n
The teams will not play on a tennis court, of course. A basketball court will be laid over the site of the main tennis court.<\/p>\n
On May 1, 1970, however, professional tennis players did play on the same surface where the basketball team played in an arena that opened the previous December. UD Arena then \u2014 and for many years \u2014 featured a court made of Tartan, a rubbery flooring material created by 3M.<\/p>\n
The University of Dayton Tennis Champions Classic featured one match between Roy Emerson, who won 12 Grand Slam titles in the 1960s, and Fred Stolle, the 1966 U.S. Open champion, and another match between Pancho Gonzalez, the 1948 and 1949 U.S. Open champion, and Ken Rosewall, an eight-time Grand Slam champion.<\/p>\n
All four are members of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
Gary Nuhn\u2019s Dayton Daily News story read in part:<\/p>\n
They sat not six feet apart, each with a beer in his hand, but you could tell the winner and you could tell the loser.<\/p>\n
Fred Stolle, the wavy-haired winner, gabbed away in his Australian accent, sipping his beer in between sentences.<\/p>\n
Roy Emerson, the straight-haired loser, just sat staring at the floor, popping the sides of his beer can in and out.<\/p>\n
The cracking of Emerson\u2019s beer can didn\u2019t bother Stolle as he discussed his 7-5, 7-5, 6-4 tennis victory at UD arena Friday night. It didn\u2019t bother him because he\u2019d just made $10,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll just send it on back and put it into some land in Australia,\u201d said Stolle. \u201cIt oughta make my bank manager feel a bit happier.\u201d<\/p>\n
The match took place in front of 3,248 spectators. Nuhn described Stolle as a \u201cone-armed bandit,\u201d whose \u201cstrong right arm continually smashed hard shots off the arena\u2019s faster-than-the-speed-of-light Tartan surface and past Emerson.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOn something like that Tartan,\u201d said Emerson, shrugging his shoulders, \u201cit gives such an advantage to the server. It\u2019s impossible to run a shot down. And, unless I have a good day, my serve is up and down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the other match, Nuhn wrote:<\/p>\n
It was the old Pancho Gonzalez charm we’ve always heard so much about.<\/p>\n
Before he made the sure-to-come uncomplimentary remarks about the playing floor at UD Arena, he came out with something designed to make you forget what was to follow.<\/p>\n
“This is the most perfect building I’ve seen in America for tennis,” said Gonzales. “The seats are close, the lighting is magnificent.”<\/p>\n
Then Pancho, who’d just beaten Ken Rosewall 6-1, 6-4 in a preliminary match, gave his version of the floor.<\/p>\n
“If we looked casual out there, we weren’t,” he said. “It’s just that if a ball is going in the opposite direction from you, you might as well let it go. Why chase it? You can’t get to it. It’s slam-bam, take a chance.”<\/p>\n
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A Dayton Daily News ad for a tennis event at UD Arena in 1970.<\/p>\n
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An ad in the Dayton Daily News for the 1983 Borden Invitational.<\/p>\n
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An ad in the Dayton Daily News for the 1984 Borden Invitational.<\/p>\n
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An ad in the Dayton Daily News for the 1985 Borden Invitational.<\/p>\n
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An ad in the Dayton Daily News for the 1986 Borden Invitational.<\/p>\n
Thirteen years after tennis debuted at UD Arena, it returned with the Borden Tennis Invitational. On Jan. 11, 1983, 11-time Grand Slam champion Bjorn Borg beat 1977 Australian Open champion Vitas Gerulaitis, 7-6, 6-3.<\/p>\n
In the other match, Beth Herr, of Centerville, played three-time Grand Slam singles champion Virginia Wade. Herr won two state championships in high school at Centerville and also won an NCAA singles championship as a freshman in 1983 at the University of Southern California. She turned pro after her freshman season and played on the tour for 11 years.<\/p>\n
Nuhn wrote about the matches in the Dayton Daily News the next day:<\/p>\n
Exhibition tennis: In Dayton one day, out the next. We say hello and they say goodbye.<\/p>\n
The first thing you should know about the Borden Tennis Invitational is that it had more “official” sponsors than it did players.<\/p>\n
There was an official airline, an official printer, an official host, an official beer and \u2014 yes \u2014 an official wine.<\/p>\n
Each received exposure on the public address system, some more than once, after which the 10,234 were invited to applaud.<\/p>\n
Let’s hear it for Ponderosa. And how about Michelob Light, eh?<\/p>\n
Through oversight, there was no official cottage cheese, official hardware store, official gutter and downspout company, official vacuum cleaner repair store or official phonograph needle.<\/p>\n
But it was for a good cause \u2014 AIM for the Handicapped. And you just know all those “official” thisses and “official” thats paid for the honor, don’t you?<\/p>\n
The Borden Invitational would last four years. Tennis legends such as Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova also participated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Roy Emerson, bottom, plays Fred Stolle in a matchup of Australian tennis greats at the University of Dayton…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-874551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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