U.S. Super-Senior players clean up in international tennis tournaments

Last October, nine United States Tennis Association teams -- four in women's age divisions from 60 to 75 and five in men's age divisions from 60 to 80 -- headed for the red clay courts of Antalya, Turkey, for the International Tennis Federation World Super-Senior Team Championships. Competing in the event were 114 teams representing 24 countries.

In recent years, the United States has dominated this event, and despite a few upsets in the older division, 2006 was no exception. The U.S. teams made the finals in six of the nine cups and won four of them. The women won both the Kitty Godfree Cup (65s) and the Althea Gibson Cup (70s). The men's team won its third consecutive Von Cramm Cup (60s), and the Americans also won the Jack Crawford Cup (70s) for the fourth year in a row.

Despite the fact that no other country won more than one cup, those upsets in the older brackets loomed large for the U.S. teams. For the first time since the inception of the women's 75s Queens Cup in 2001, the U.S. team didn't place for a medal (the squad finished fourth). And for only the second time in 11 years, the men's 80s Gardner Mulloy Cup team didn't get the gold (they lost to Austria in the final). "Someone new always comes in to the age group, and all of the sudden things change," explained two-time Gardner Mulloy Cup team member Tony Franco, who had a chance to avenge that loss the following week during individual tournament play.

Franco beat France's Jean Delhomme to take the 80s men's singles world championship. Playing with his teammate Graydon Nichols of California, Franco also defeated Australia to win the doubles. Evidently, Franco and Nichols are as comfortable trading off wins as they are sharing doubles strategies. Shortly before the international event, Nichols defeated Franco in the grass court nationals; the following weekend, Franco defeated Nichols in the clay court national championship, and then, playing with him, won the doubles again. "We know each other's strong suits, and I think we try to take advantage of that both when we're playing together or against each other -- it definitely works both ways," Franco says. "I think that must happen in other sports also -- where you've been playing against each other for 30 to 40 years, and it becomes a nice relationship."

Franco started playing tennis at 14 but didn't start competing until he was 45, and it wasn't until age 75 that he was picked for international cup teams. Like Franco, Elaine Mason, the world's No. 1-ranked player in women's 80s, was a relatively "late bloomer" in senior tennis. At the age of 64, she met Dodo Cheney at a Southern California event, where the tennis legend encouraged her to compete nationally. "I thought those events were for the Everts and the Navratilovas and all that," she says. Mason went on to win grand slams on all four surfaces in singles and doubles in both the 70s and 75s age groups. "When I started, I didn't think I could get so much better and stronger at age 65 --- but as I worked on it, I just got better, and it got me really motivated," she says. "I surprised myself -- I still do. I even managed to defeat a couple of women who hadplayed at Wimbledon in their 20s -- that was my goal, to get past them."

Last year at the ITF tournament, Mason played on the 75s team, and chalks up their loss to "better competition than usual." "We had seven countries represented, and a lot of new faces, and we had very good comp from New Zealand and Great Britain and from the Netherlands," she explained. But Mason hardly harbors few regrets over that loss, or over her loss the following week in the second-round individual singles to German Jutta Apel -- she's just happy to see that "the ladies" are playing better and longer. "I don't think people realize how strong and how nice strokes you'll see these players use," she says. "You don't run as fast, of course, when you get to the 80s and 90s. But if you get a ball anywhere near some of these people, they'll hit a really nice drive -- not bloopers. If people came out and watched a little bit, I think they'd get as interested as we are."

Louise Russ, by contrast, is a poster child for the USTA slogan, "Tennis is the Sport of a Lifetime." She won her first tournament at 9 and was nationally ranked as a teen-ager. Still, she says, she never imagined she'd one day get "all the way to the top." She accomplished that feat in 2004 with her "Gold Slam," winning all national singles and doubles tournaments played on all four surfaces. In 2005, Russ won two of four surfaces (clay and indoor) and remained the world's top-ranked player in 75s. But in another U.S. upset at the 2006 World Championship, Britain's Ruth Illingworth beat her in a semifinal tiebreaker.