Growing up two blocks north of Battlefield Park had its advantages.
Battlefield boasted one of the largest swimming pools in the state. (Unfortunately, the Jackson City Council shut down the pool the year I learned to swim because they didn’t want us swimming with the Black kids from Washington Addition, just across Terry Road from our neighborhood.) From that point on, if we wanted to go swimming, we had to go to the Flamingo Hotel on Highway 80 across from the old Coke plant and plop down 50 cents.
One unique feature of the park that we were forbidden to use was a tennis center that contained a dozen rubico courts. The tennis center was staffed by John and Dorothy Vest, who came to Jackson to manage the center, and brought and introduced the game of tennis to Jackson. As a child I was intrigued with what I perceived to be the famous, wealthy patrons parking on Porter Street in their Cadillacs and Lincolns, dressed in all white tennis attire and matching hats, populating the rubber-smelling rubico courts.
The mysterious sounds of…” pop…pop…pop” rang in my ears as I listened to the lengthy volleys of these invaders to our park, who would never dare come over to the shuffleboard court, where we engaged in a much more mundane game.
This was well before the days that River Hills Tennis Club had been built in northeast Jackson, so anyone in the area had to come to Battlefield to satisfy their passion for this curious game, unless by chance they were a member of a country club, in what seemed to us a faraway place.
Later, as the popularity of tennis grew, five more courts were constructed with a concrete surface, rather than the exotic rubico. And, with each of these courts came a string of lights about each one, which allowed night play.
My buddies and I would sneak around the courts after Mr. Vest left for the day and find tennis balls that had been hit over the court fences. We’d take the balls we found home and use them for baseballs in our backyard games. (It is amazing how much further one can hit a tennis ball than a regulation baseball.)
We were also mesmerized by Mr. Vest’s daughter, Becky. She played for the Provine High School tennis team and was the most gorgeous girl we had ever seen. Attired in a tight-fitting white polo shirt and phenomenally short red tennis shorts, we, in our prepubescent curiosity, breathlessly watched from what we hoped was a safe distance as she volleyed with her high school teammate.
Our interest in the game of tennis had been piqued.
After months of stalking the tennis center for used balls, we observed very late in the afternoon some of the concrete courts would be vacant until the arrival of people playing at night. Knowing that using the lights required inserting four quarters for 30 minutes, we reasoned we had an opening for “free” play if we timed things just right.
The problem was we had no rackets.
And we didn’t know how to keep score.
Problems solved…
First, my mother had worked for a brief period selling World Book Encyclopedias, just so she could get a set for my brother and me at no cost. In pre-Internet days this was the go-to for information on just about anything. We were relatively bright kids and we studied together on the basics of tennis, what “game-set-match” meant, and what a forecourt and a backcourt were, and what the implications of a “single fault” and “double fault” meant.
Now that we had the basics in mind, we just needed some rackets.
My childhood friend Paul Smith always had a gift for coming up with answers to complex situations. An hour later he rode up to my house on his bike, balancing four canoe oars on the handlebars.
We couldn’t wait to get back to the concrete courts at Battlefield.
As the sun set in the west, we assumed Mr. Vest had gone home and the coast was clear to test our knowledge and canoe oar “rackets.”
We started hitting as best we could with our used tennis balls and canoe paddles when suddenly…we heard the creak of the chain length gate open and striding across the adjacent courts comes John Vest!
Busted….
To our amazement, Mr. Vest didn’t scream at us or threaten to call the police for trespassing.
“Boys,” he said with a chuckle in his voice.
“If you are going to play tennis, you got to have the proper equipment.”
“Wait here.”
He returned a few minutes later with four Wilson rackets…the kind with the “W” highlighted in red on the face of the racket head. We couldn’t believe our good fortune.
His only request was that we put quarters in the timer if we played at night…and not to tell anyone where we got the rackets.
John and Dorothy Vest were legends in Mississippi sports history. Both have been inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Saturday evening, August 3rd, their daughter Becky… (she with the tight shirt and shorts) …will join her parents as an inductee in the Sports Hall of Fame.
(Tickets are still available for the event which will be held at the Clyde Muse Center in Pearl.)
The old tennis center in Battlefield Park is in a dilapidated condition. The surrounding neighborhood is one of the most economically disadvantaged and crime infested areas in Jackson. Attempts have been made to introduce the “rich man’s game” to underprivileged kids in the area.
All I know is that 60+ years ago, Paul Smith, Louis Sturdivant, Rickey Murray, and I were the recipients of the generosity and encouragement from a man who just wanted to help some crazy kids grow to love a game that was his passion and his life.
Kendall Smith is a Northsider.
