Double Their Pleasure : Father’s Day Tournament Allows Two Generations to Share Love of Tennis

Can you imagine a father in his 70s and a son in his 40s playing baseball or football on the same team to enjoy a Father’s Day weekend? It’s probably not likely in either of those sports.

But it’s been happening in tennis this weekend at the Newport Beach Tennis Club. The event is a father-son senior open doubles tournament, sanctioned by the Southern California Tennis Assn. The father must be a least 60 during 1994 for the team to qualify.

“That’s part of what makes tennis the game that it is,” said Dick Miller, 40, who entered the tournament with his father Bob Miller, who is 72. In fact, Bob Miller is the one who suggested the event a year ago to Irv Goldberg, general manager at the club.

The Millers, who both live in Laguna Beach, have turned father-son tennis into an experience that could go under a microscope for a lesson in successful parenting.

“I feel my father gave me a great gift when I was growing up with tennis, and now this is a gift I can give back, by being able to do this with him,” Miller said. “Tennis is one of a few sports that a parent and a child can do together until they die. My dad is in his 70s, but we’re still playing tournaments together. And, for me, that’s a real emotional high.”

They played in their first father-son event 31 years ago in a tournament at La Jolla that has doubles competition in various family combinations. They’ve played in at least one father-son tournament each year since. This will mark their 31st consecutive year at La Jolla.

“It’s been a unique sort of experience, one that we’ve both really enjoyed,” Bob Miller said.

“They’ve been able to put aside all the generational differences and build a real close association,” said Georjean Miller, Bob’s wife and Dick’s stepmother.

And at a time when some top young players are coming unwound emotionally and are burning out in a blaze of parental pressures, Dick Miller looks back and thinks that he had the perfect tennis father when he was growing up.

“I attribute my love for the game all these years to the way he approached it back then,” Dick Miller said. “He always treated me the same whether I won or lost. And at some point in every tournament you do lose unless you win the championship. He would ask me two questions after I finished a match. He would say: ‘Did you play hard?’ If I’d say yes, then he’d ask: ‘Did you conduct yourself like a gentleman?’ If I said yes to that, he would say, ‘OK, let’s go get a piece of pie.’ That conversation, or one like it, must have been repeated hundreds of times when I was playing in junior tournaments.

“I remember one tournament. We were against a top player from a local university and his father. His father chewed on him for two straight sets. The son was 20 at the time, and I remember after the match was over, the son was on the sidelines crying . . . Everyone gets upset when they lose, but you have to forget it and look ahead. My father taught me that from the beginning.”

That’s part of the reason he enjoys playing doubles with his father now.

“When I was a kid, he made me feel like a star every time I played the game,” Dick Miller said.

Tennis has been a big part of both their lives.

Bob Miller played in high school at Glendale Hoover and collegiately at Occidental. He continued to play for recreation during his career as a teacher, the last 22 years at Corona del Mar High School, and does so now in retirement.

Dick Miller was the No. 1 singles player for four years at Corona del Mar, then played in college for nationally prominent teams at Pepperdine. He gave the satellite pro tour in Europe a brief try, but he found it lonely and “hated it.” He came to the realization, too, that he never was going to be one of the top 50 players in the world, where he felt he had to rank to make a pro career worthwhile.

He went back to Malibu and taught tennis in the Malibu Colony, giving lessons to, among others, actor Robert Wagner and actress Lynda Carter and the families of singers Neil Diamond and Julie Andrews.

“I was teaching 60 hours a week during the summer months, and I found there was a limit to how much time you could spend standing on your feet, even if you were doing something you enjoyed doing,” he said.

At that point, he went into the commercial real estate business with a national company. Then, seven years ago, he opened his own business, based in Laguna Hills. Today, his company provides leasing and management services for more than 2 million square feet of commercial property.

Dick Miller occasionally plays in some open tournaments in the region, but devotes most of his time to his family and his business. He and his wife, Gretchen, have two young daughters. She also has a strong tennis background as a two-time All-American at USC.

Together they’ve started a low-key tennis development program in the Emerald Bay community where they live.

“We donate our time to the program,” he said. “It’s something we really wanted to do. We’ve got 17 kids in the program between the ages of 3 and 6, and the thing we’re trying to do more than anything else is to get them to have fun with tennis. We go out there with hula hoops and jump ropes as well as tennis rackets.”

Dick Miller says he feels so good about his own tennis development that he’s trying much the same kind of it’s-supposed-to-be-fun approach with his daughter.

“I have to be a great salesman with my kids, and I know how to sell the sport,” he said. “ But I do some silly, stupid things I could never do in the business world. My daughter and I play dress-up tennis, where she picks out a costume to wear. And I go out there in an Aladdin hat if that’s what it takes.

“Some people are turning teaching tennis to youngsters into a big business. At least as far as I’m concerned, I just want to turn it back into a game.”

Notes

Advancing to the finals of the father-son senior open doubles tournament were Spencer Letts and his son, John Letts, and Eldon Rowe and son Brad Rowe. To reach today’s final at 12:30 p.m., the Letts defeated H.M. Wammack and his son J.P. Wammack, 5-7, 6-0, 7-5, in the semifinals. The Rowes beat Gene Land and son Jeff Land, 7-5, 7-6 (7-4) in the other semifinal match.