Tennis has a timeless quality. Many Irish youngsters have filled the long days of their summer holidays competing in tournaments in Carrickmines, Leinster and Fitzwilliam.
Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, or Fitz, has been holding tournaments for 100 years this month. The Junior Irish Open, aka the Junior Fitz, which has never left the club, has been a rite-of-passage competition for Ireland’s top young tennis players since 1914.
The names of the competitors and winners stretch into the past like footprints into history – JD Hackett, Cecil Pedlow, Geraldine Barniville, Tony O’Reilly, John Horne, and the Nilands, Gina and Conor – many of whom played in a time of strict amateurism.
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In the early days the country’s best junior tennis player could also become an international rugby player and, between sets, play cricket for Ireland.
Among the gentlemen and ladies of leisure was Pedlow, the under-18 Fitzwilliam champion in 1952. He was capped 30 times for Ireland in rugby and played with the Lions on the 1955 tour to South Africa.
Other winners of the junior competition went to take high-profile jobs in public service. The 1979 headline in this newspaper accompanying Vera McWeeney’s report for that year’s girl’s championships reads: “Miss Ruane makes it a first for Connacht”.
Catríona Ruane, who also won the 1979 junior doubles and mixed doubles, went on to become an MLA and minister for education in the first Northern Ireland Executive.
Conor Niland, who won it in 1999 and went on to play in the Davis Cup for Ireland and make it into the main draw for senior Wimbledon and the US Open, remembers Junior Fitz clearly.
“Stephen Nugent,” Niland says. “Yeah, in 1998 Stephen beat me in the final. I was set point and up 5-2 in the first. I can remember it. I won it the next year, though. There’s a really special feel about the tournament. If you win it, it doesn’t matter what you did that year, because everyone sees you as the best player in your age group.It’s also about Fitzwilliam, the club, the history of it, the all-whites rule . . . It’s almost like a mini Wimbledon. I’m coaching now, and kids are playing in it, and I’m around and it feels no less important now than then.”
Three in a row
Four women have won the under-18 event three times in a row; no male player ever did. Eleanor O’Neill McFadden was champion in 1956, 1957 and 1958. Heather Flinn, nee Cole, is the oldest surviving champion, from 1947, 1948 and 1949.
Mary O’Sullivan, nee Bryan, was the 1954 junior champion and was selected twice to play at the Wimbledon junior tournament. She was also one of the top-five badminton players in the world.
“It couldn’t have been more different in those days. You had one racket and went and played. You didn’t have a tennis bag. I kept my racket in a wooden press that I screwed down,” she says. “Tennis balls were white and usually dirty. If you were top of the pile you might get one tennis racket from Dunlop, which you had to give back at the end of the year.”
The former Ireland rugby coach Declan Kidney had a crack at Junior Fitz. So did the Ireland outhalf Johnny Sexton, as did the concert pianist Hugh Tinney.
Once situated on Lad Lane, at the top of Lower Baggot Street, the original Fitz was an old wooden clubhouse with grass courts. It then moved to Appian Way.
“Everything seemed a bit magical when one was growing up,” says Tinney. “There was a sense of history in Lad Lane, also quite forbidding. Only members could go under the pavilion, and it had the sense you were under scrutiny.”
“Huge crowds, lots of rain,” says Mary O’Sullivan of her Junior Fitz years. “If you won you got seven and six that you had to spend in a sports shop.” A Junior Lawn Tennis Championships of Ireland centenary dinner takes place at the Hilton Doubletree hotel, Dublin, next Saturday. juniorfitz100.com
