Tennis star of the 1950s, Pancho Segura, died last week at the age of 96 years of the consequences of Parkinson’s disease. The Ecuadorian, who became an American citizen in 1991, has been a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame since 1984, and has helped Jimmy Connors become a coach for eight Grand Slam titles.
“It doesn’t take more than one club to play this game,”said Segura ESPN 2009,”It doesn’t matter how much you have, who your father is, or whether you went to Harvard or Yale University. Segura, who grew up in Guayaquil in Ecuador even in the poorest conditions, wanted to clean up the cliché that tennis was just a sport for the well-to-do.
“I taught myself how to play tennis,”Segura once told me about his work at a tennis club in Guayaquil,”and I trained every day, asking people to play a few balls with me over and over again,” Although he was only 1.68 metres tall, he was particularly successful with his merciless, two-handed forehand against bigger, stronger opponents.
You have to recognize many things like the grip or movements of your opponents,”Segura said,” and then you’ll find out which strokes he can and can’t do.”
In 1962 he started working as a coach at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club in San Diego. Six years later Gloria Connor brought her son Jimmy to Segura. The latter helped Connors to hit balls on the way up in order to better counteract the speed of the opponent’s strokes. Segura died on Saturday in Carlsbad/California.