UCLA Tennis Making Racket Under Bassett : Bruins Are Without a Standout, but Coach Has Team Ranked No. 1

Glenn Bassett’s life has been tennis and UCLA, or maybe it’s the other way around.

The school, the sport and the man, UCLA men’s tennis coach for 25 years, have been virtually inseparable for more than four decades.

As a Bruin player from 1948 through 1950, he was ranked fifth in the nation in singles, and in the quarterfinals of the 1950 NCAA championships, he upset top-ranked Dick Savitt, later a Wimbledon singles champion. Bassett later played in three Wimbledon tournaments, defeating several of the world’s better-known players.

Bassett did spend some time away from UCLA as a high school coach, but he wasn’t far away.

For six years he coached at Santa Monica High, close enough that he could also assist with Bruin teams. His Santa Monica High teams won five consecutive CIF-Southern Section championships from 1962 through 1966.

In 1967, he came to UCLA, where he has won more matches than any active NCAA Division I coach with a 543-81-2 career record and also has the nation’s best winning percentage, .869. His Bruin teams have won seven NCAA championships and 13 conference titles.

UCLA players who won NCAA singles championships under Bassett are Jeff Borowiak (1970), Billy Martin (1975) and Jimmy Connors (1971), who went on to win five Wimbledon championships.

This season’s top-ranked team doesn’t have a player ranked among the nation’s top 10 in Division I singles, yet the Bruins are 23-1 and had won 21 consecutive matches before losing to USC, 5-2, last week. The victory by the Trojans snapped UCLA’s winning streak of 53 matches in a row at the Los Angeles Tennis Center on campus.

There is no secret to Bassett’s success: He loves the game and he hates to lose.

There is also no secret why his players are almost always prepared: They work, work, work on their games.

Martin, who played on the professional tour for several years and is now in his eighth year as a UCLA assistant coach, said that the most outstanding thing about Bassett “is his work ethic. He really believes in working hard, no short cuts, and being there when his team is working.

“I think he has missed two days of practice in eight years, and once I had to beg him to go home because he was so sick.”

Usually, other coaches get sick when they see Bassett and his team walk on the court.

“Glenn is a tough competitor,” said Allen Fox, in his 13th year as men’s tennis coach at Pepperdine.

“Any time we beat one of his teams, it makes me happy because I know we have beaten a real good team,” said Fox, whose 302-88 record and .774 winning percentage place him among the nation’s top five Division I coaches.

Bassett’s teams are “well trained, well controlled and fight to the end,” he said.

“He practices very hard (with his teams) and thinks of every detail. He has done real well, (with) material that is real good sometimes and, maybe not so good at other times. He gets the best out of them.”

Martin said that Bassett’s practices are devoted mostly to hitting balls, bucket after bucket. “It’s pretty structured and you don’t deviate from it. Believe it or not, they’re the same drills we had when I was (playing at UCLA in 1974-75), hitting forehand to forehand, backhand to backhand,” and others.

“He likes to have you hitting lots of balls. And when you do get into matches, you don’t have to think about it. You just reel off the shot.

“Some guys respond better than others (to the practices), but he pushes you to attain heights that you wouldn’t have reached on your own. He is somewhat demanding, but it’s easier to do it for somebody when you realize he is putting in 100% too.”

Bassett was interviewed the day after Bruins lost to USC and was not too happy with the way his team had played against the Trojans, nor with the ending of that 53-match streak.

He said that his team may have lost to USC because the Bruins were feeling cocky about their winning streak and had beaten the Trojans in the National Indoor Intercollegiate tournament in February.

Or injuries and illnesses that had been hampering UCLA since that tournament may have contributed to the loss, he added.

“We didn’t play as well as I would have wanted,” he said. “We didn’t capitalize on leads. We didn’t have the killer instinct. It may have been self-satisfaction, or SC took it away from us--probably a combination of both.”

UCLA was up to Bassett’s standards in its next two matches, beating No. 3 Stanford and California, both by 5-2 scores.

Bassett said he realizes his team can’t always win. “I know everything is not going to be great. I expect problems.”

One problem that he runs into now and then is handling temperamental players.

Martin said that many players come to UCLA as a way of preparing themselves for the pro tour. Such players, he said, “might have good intentions but get distracted easily. They won’t push themselves as hard if he’s not there to make them work hard.”

Connors, in his early years on the pro tour, and John McEnroe afterward made outbursts of temperament on the court a staple of international television. But both seemed to calm down as they grew older, and Bassett defends tennis players from charges of being prima donnas.

“Most guys are super, and I think they are great players who do a great job,” Bassett said. “I think (displays of anger are) overplayed.”

He said that tennis players may sometimes behave badly, but so do football players when they throw a punch behind an official’s back, So do basketball players, he added, when they throw an elbow at another player and hope the referee is looking the other way.

A tennis player, he said, “is out there all by himself. He can’t hide and he’s under a lot of pressure. He is one guy exposed under a magnifying glass. You don’t see tennis players throwing punches.”

He said that Connors had immense powers of concentration as a player.

“He had a one-track mind. He super-believed in himself. He was an achiever. Other people are not that focused, not that strong mentally.

“You have got to be a great athlete to be a great tennis player. But you have got to have mental toughness too; it’s probably 50-50. You have got to have both going for you.”

He said that Martin, who was named the pro tour’s top rookie in his first year and reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1977, was an “overachiever who got 40 miles to the gallon. Talk about mental toughness, that was him all over. He wouldn’t be denied.”

Bassett, 63, is getting tired of being denied an eighth NCAA team championship. UCLA hasn’t won one since 1984, long enough to make Bassett impatient for another.

This season’s team is capable of going all the way, he said. “I think it’s just a solid team with good depth. We practice real well, but we’re hurting because we don’t have (the nation’s) top players. If our top players get better, though, we can be outstanding.”

Even if his players were all in the nation’s top 10, Bassett feels he would still have to work with them.

“Even the best players need to work on things, whether they’re beginners or advanced. Everyone has problems.”

And Bassett likes trying to solve problems and hopes to continue to do so at UCLA for a few more years.

“You never know whether your team lost a match because it was too confident, or mad or lost heart. You never know. It’s still exciting.”

And Bassett is still on the go.

He said that he has stayed at UCLA for so many years because he has “real good feelings about UCLA.”

He has been privileged, he added, to follow the late William Ackerman and the late J. D. Morgan, who were both UCLA men’s tennis coaches with strong programs and also served as athletic directors.

Ackerman and Morgan “were real great men as coaches and athletic directors, and I was very fortunate to be involved with them, “ he said. “For that reason, UCLA has been a special school for me.”

Buildings on campus have been named for Ackerman and Morgan for their service to UCLA, but that kind of memorial would never do for Bassett, who never seems to stop pacing up and down the courts when his team is playing.

But a research project on perpetual motion might be fitting.