Well, let me tell ya ’bout this fella, Roscoe Tanner. He was a tennis player, you know, one of them fellas whacking a ball back and forth over a net. Roscoe Tanner, that’s his name, plain and simple.
Now, this Roscoe, he was born back in 1951, October 15th to be exact. He played tennis for a good long while, started in ’72 and didn’t quit ’til ’85. That’s a lot of whacking, I tell ya. He got to be real good at it too, got to be number 4 in the whole wide world in 1979. Imagine that! Number 4! Musta been somethin’ special.
- Started playin’ in 1972.
- Got to be number 4 in the world by 1979.
- Played ’til 1985.
Folks say he had a serve like a cannon. A lefty, he was, and that ball just zoomed! They say it went 153 miles an hour! Can you picture that? Faster than a car on the highway, I reckon. Nobody could hit it harder for a long, long time. Folks was talkin’ ’bout it from 1978 all the way to 2004 when some other fella hit it a smidge harder.
He played in all sorts of big tournaments, you know, the kind they show on TV. Went all the way to the finals at Wimbledon once, that’s a big deal, even I know that. Lost to some fella named Bjorn Borg, but still, gettin’ there is somethin’. And he won the Australian Open in 1977, that’s a real big one too. He won in Japan and New Zealand too, seems like he got around quite a bit. He played in places like Stanford, you know, the college place.
Roscoe was good enough to get into somethin’ called the Masters, that’s like the best of the best, I guess. He got in there four times – ’76, ’78, ’80, and ’82. Musta been playin’ against some real tough fellas. This whole tennis thing, it sounds like hard work. All that runnin’ and whacking. But Roscoe, he did it for a long time.
He was famous for that serve of his, that fast lefty serve. That was his thing, you know? Like how some folks are known for their cookin’ or their singin’, Roscoe was known for that serve. Fastest serve for a long, long time. That’s somethin’ to be proud of, I reckon.
Even though he stopped playin’ in ’85, folks still remember him. They remember that serve and all the matches he won. He left his mark, they say. Like a farmer leavin’ his mark on the land, Roscoe left his mark on tennis. He played hard, he hit hard, and he made a name for himself. Roscoe Tanner, the tennis player with the cannon serve. That’s how I see it, anyway.
So that’s the story of Roscoe Tanner, as best as I can tell it. A fella who played tennis, hit the ball real hard, and folks still remember him for it. A good story, I think, about hard work and stickin’ to it.
Tags: [Roscoe Tanner, Tennis, Tennis Player, Wimbledon, Australian Open, Serve, Sports, Athlete]
