Mover and Shaker : Passion for Tennis Spurs Darrah to Bring Major Senior Tournament to His Westlake Club

The USTA National Hardcourt Championships for the 50- and 55-year-old division at the Westlake Tennis and Swim Club began this week with Jack Darrah doing what he likes to do best: playing tennis.

If Darrah, 57, had his way, he would have played tennis for a living. Instead, Darrah, who owns the Westlake club, brought in the senior tournament, which he directs.

And he finds the senior tournaments highly competitive.

“Everyone plays to win . . . and it still is a lot of fun. We probably have more fun than the open (division) players today. Ours is kind of a social event too,” he said.

Darrah took over the running of the tournament from a Las Vegas club three years ago because the club “seemed to run it as an afterthought.” The USTA decided to let Darrah have the tournament because he had been trying to land such an event for several years; he has grown up in tennis with many of the players who enter.

“Half the players have played all their lives. The other half have picked it up. They were usually athletically inclined in other sports and have picked it up,” Darrah said. “So after they’re about 30, they tend to gravitate toward tennis.”

Darrah expects the Westlake tournament to be very competitive because the tournament always has drawn the better players in the age group.

“I know from what I hear that ours is a favorite among the players,” he said. “Ours is kind of in the old tradition of the tournaments. When you’d go to a match, there wasn’t a lot of money, but you’d have a great time.”

“We have more to offer than tennis here, so we try to make trips and other things available to the players and their families.”

Darrah, with a wife and two children, is a family man himself now. It wasn’t always that way. He wanted to become a professional tennis player, but when he was the age at which today’s players are turning pro, professional tennis was a far cry from what it is now.

“Professional tennis in the early years was a troupe of players that toured around playing,” Darrah said.

In fact, the riches that today’s players compete for were nonexistent. The days of tennis camps and tennis schools were years away. So too were college scholarships in the sport.

“I had to work my way through college,” said Darrah, who attended Cal for three years before graduating from San Jose State.

Although he was supporting himself, Darrah did manage to play his first and last year in college, winning a conference championship when he was a senior.

After college, Darrah took a job as a math teacher and golf coach at Orinda High in Northern California. “What did I know about golf? We ended up winning the conference championship, but not on my ability to coach golf. It was on my ability to make them practice,” he said.

Then, in 1958, Darrah got the job he wanted: coaching tennis. “Once I became tennis coach I was in an element where I could teach the kids what to do and how to train,” he said.

While Darrah was coaching he was playing too, but not as much as he would have liked. After a few tries, he realized that he couldn’t coach and also play in tournaments, at least not effectively.

Darrah made up for it in the summer, playing in Northern California tournaments during the summer. After doing well there in 1963, he advanced to some major East Coast events.

“Then I was so stoked on playing tennis that . . . I quit school, as a matter of fact. They wouldn’t give me a leave,” he recalled.

To anyone else, quitting a well-paying job to play tennis probably seemed like a foolish decision.

“The major tournaments of the day were all amateur. All you were allowed to get was expenses, supposedly,” Darrah said. “However, they’d pay people under the table. You would arrange ahead of time what you would get at the tournament, and it didn’t make any difference if you won or lost.”

Darrah was glad just to be playing tennis and having so much fun doing it.

“I remember going to my first tournament back East. I was a bachelor at the time, it was just fantastic. We just went from highlight to highlight,” Darrah said.

After the summer, Darrah traveled to Europe to play the international circuit.

“I wouldn’t have missed playing in Europe,” he said. “I played all over--England, Spain, France, Switzerland, West Germany, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Denmark. Actually, it wasn’t much different from playing over here, but you’re in a foreign country. I was meeting people and actually becoming a part of their lives for a week.”

Unfortunately for Darrah, the fun was soon over. The matches there ended in October, and when he returned from Europe he had no job waiting. Not long afterward, however, he wound up as coach of the Junior Davis Cup team.

“I looked at the job as a way of getting back East to play the circuit, because I was really broke,” Darrah said. He had a job teaching math and coaching tennis waiting for him in September, but he needed money to live on that summer. Coaching the Junior Davis Cup team turned out to be a particularly enjoyable experience.

“I got real involved with the Junior Davis Cup team, and I coached it for three summers, 1966-1968,” Darrah said. He took 1969 off to get married, and returned for two more seasons.

The Junior Davis Cup team comprises players selected from the top 20 18-and-unders and the top 10 16-and-unders. The players chosen are regarded as future Davis Cup team possibilities. During the years he was with the program, the team included some of the best players the United States has produced, including Jimmy Connors, Dick Stockton, Harold Solomon, Roscoe Tanner and Jeff Austin.

Darrah quit coaching in the Davis Cup program in 1971 because he had another, more important commitment. That year his wife, Joan, gave birth to a daughter, Laura. Having Joan along with him was not a problem, but the addition of Laura made things hectic.

“We were somewhere in the South, I had taken Laura because Joan was not feeling great,” he recalled. “I took Laura to the practice and left her with the ball boys while we practiced,” Darrah said. “We were having a good practice when all of a sudden this face shows up at the fence. It was Joan. She wanted to know where Laura was. I panicked. I found her under the only shaded area at the club being fanned by the ball boys with their racquets. I knew right there that I couldn’t coach the team and take care of the family.”

Since then, Darrah’s family has been a top priority. He has been owner of the Westlake club for the past 10 years after spending two years as manager of the California Tennis Club in San Francisco.

Now that his daughter is a freshman at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a son, Jason, is a freshman at Agoura High, Darrah is playing more tennis. He says he enjoys the game as much now as he ever did.