Interview with Roy Martino By Eric Halpern
1. What do you miss most about College Tennis?
a. Probably the interactions with my teammates and doubles partners. But the true answer to your question has to do with when I played varsity soccer at Emory. Some of the guys that I am closest with now on an ongoing basis. I miss the guys that I used to play tennis with and my doubles partners, but my life-long friends and the guys who I see all the time are actually the guys that I played soccer with.
2. Who did you play doubles with?
a. I played with four different people. Freshman year, I played three doubles with a guy named Will Weeks. My sophomore through senior years, I played one doubles. Sophomore year I played with a guy named Bob Crowll. Junior year I played with Dave Brayon. And my senior year I played with Graham Lawrence.
3. Was the scoring format the same as it is now for matches?
a. Doubles was a lot different back then, we didn’t play pro-sets, we played two out of three sets with no tiebreaker for the third set, so it was a full third when we split. And we also played all nine matches and finished all nine of our matches out even when the matches were already decided. By the time doubles matches started after singles, we never stopped until everything was done. We played singles before doubles, and singles was two out of three sets as well. So you could imagine how long those matches could take back then. We could be out there for a couple of hours for singles and a couple more hours again for doubles.
4. What was Emory like when you attended it? How has it changed?
a. Well, it was a different era back then, and only five college sports existed at Emory. There were only men’s sports. They were soccer, cross-country, swimming, track, and tennis.So athletic-wise, things have changed a lot since then with the addition of some new sports over the years. There were no true divisions of the NCAA back then, there was no separation between Divisions One, Two, or Three. So what that meant was that in tennis and in soccer, we would play teams that would nowadays be considered Division One powers in both tennis and soccer. We ended up playing a lot of big time Division One tennis programs who would be cruising on their way through Atlanta down to Florida for spring break. There were a lot of times that we would be playing guys that were at the very top level at the college level.
5. How was your experience as a freshman on the tennis team?
a. It was great, and I was a doubles specialist—I didn’t play singles in my freshman year. What I found which was pretty different to me, growing up in the Chicago area, was that we were able to play outdoors for somewhere around ten months out of the entire year. And I think that helped me a lot especially in my sophomore year as I started to improve my singles game.
6. What advice would you give to current players based on the experiences you had with college tennis?
a. Never get frustrated. Even if you think you’re in a slump or not playing great, you always need to remember that things can change, and they can change pretty quickly. I mean for me, I went from not even playing singles at all in my freshman year to playing 5 singles as a sophomore, and then number two and number one as a junior and then a freshman.
7. What were your athletic accomplishments throughout your career at Emory?
a. Well, for soccer I went from never playing at all, to playing a little and then joining the varsity team and becoming a starter in my junior and senior years and then co-captain in my senior year. As far as intramurals went, I organized a basketball team in my junior year that won the basketball championship for the first time as a non-fraternity team ever. And because this was the pre-ranking era, we never got to be ranked amongst the other teams in both tennis and soccer. I was the Bridges Trophy Winner my senior year for the best all-around athlete, I was the most valuable player on the tennis team as well as team captain inmy junior and senior years,I was the first person at Emory to win an NCAA post-graduate scholarship, and I made the Emory Sports Hall of Fame.
8. What do you do now?
a. I play tennis three times a week, and I mostly play singles. Unlike most of the people in my age group, I’m 61, who are just strictly tennis players, I play singles three times a week. I walk and carry my clubs playing golf two or three times a week, and I travel. Right now I’m retired, but after I left Emory in ’72, I went to medical school at Emory and graduated in ’76, I did residency training in internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati, I did fellowship training in Hematology and was Chief Medical Resident at the University of Cincinnati. I then went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for two years to do fellowship training and Medical oncology. In ’84 I moved to Mobile, Alabama to become a faculty advisor at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine.
9. What made your experience at Emory so special?
a. Well, Don Schroer was a great coach. He had only coached for one year when I came on my freshman year. It was a great experience playing for Don, he kind of was the architect for Emory tennis, so as to put it. Don remains the first person I look to to find when I come back to the Emory campus. He is a friend, a mentor, and his influence on all of the individuals on our team was extraordinary.
No comments:
Post a Comment