How I Won Wimbleton and Changed My Life
The Shape of Probable Futures Still to Come
I remember that pivotal day so well.
It was hot, and there wasn’t a breath of air. Not even a tiny breeze; just a stillness as I prepared for every point, considering how I would hit the ball and how I must be ready for the sudden return, probably at my feet as I ran towards the net each time. I had, and as some would say, quite miraculously, defeated so many great players before reaching the final. I had had so many titanic matches of stress and strained sinews, breath-taking exertions, lung-busting stretches and more dives towards the ground than I could remember.
But here I was in the Championship Match – the Final of Wimbledon – and facing perhaps THE greatest player ever to play the game up until that memorable moment in my life.
It was a blisteringly hot day in July 1958, and there was my opponent’s name chalked on the Players’ Board in front of me as I turned away from bowing to The Royal Box and stared down the baking court at my opponent, dressed, as I was, all in white. Ashley Cooper, one of a long line of illustrious Australian tennis players, was, for every pundit and newspaper columnist in England, the undoubted favourite to win this match. I knew what they were all saying. I knew what they anticipated, and I could picture the bottles of beer being prepared in the Australian dressing room immediately after the match.
I was given no chance, beyond the highly improbable luck of a rookie adventurer hoping to upset odds of a million-to-one against. But this was MY dream and this was MY moment and I knew that I could not be denied as I bounced the ball my ritual three times, before reaching up into the air and blasting down the fastest service I could imagine.
Across the ground I sprinted and leapt, lunged and leaned and powered both backhand and forehand, following them up with volley-after-volley into the specific, chalked areas of my father’s garage door!
I was 10 years old and playing the match of my life!
“David,” shouted my mother, as I wiped the sweat from my eyes and prepared for another sensational rally once the crescendo of applause from the enthralled spectators had subsided.
“David, your tea is ready, and will you please stop thumping that ball on the garage door?”
I hardly heard – I was about to serve for the match. I was about to win Wimbledon and a thousand cups of tea dared not intervene in this colossal moment in history; MY history. Three minutes later and I was raising my hands high in the air and running to the garage door to shake hands with Ashley Cooper as he smiled and said, “Well done mate – nice match. Wanna beer?”
Well, that ‘history’ was real. I made it happen and I DID win Wimbledon, the Wimbledon of my dreams and of my fantastic (literally) imagined experience of life at the age of ten! Of course, some of you will be smiling at me, some of you will be shaking your heads, and some may even be thinking – what a silly little boy! But, you know, I can’t apologise for the dreamtime experiences I had that manifested so much into my life – even though, at that time – I had ZERO idea how life – or dreams – could work!
And yet you know – they DO!
WE create our lives through our dreams and imagination – the greatest ‘nation’ in the cosmos – the ‘Imagi-nation’!
It is our intent that drives our expression, and both of those come from Heaven, The Living Presence of The Eternal Loving Essence.
It is indeed, truly, who we are!
And back then, as a child full of dreams and hopes and wonderings, I knew – somehow – that what I imagined would come true – even though quite HOW it would come true, or in what form, I had no idea! I did go to Wimbledon and I did play there a couple of times but I never played, or even met, Ashley Cooper (yet I always thought his name was pretty cool! In fact, a couple of times I wondered about maybe changing my name TO ‘Ashley Cooper’, but I realised that then I wouldn’t be able to go to Australia!).
I did ‘meet’ some of his peers, though – all immensely famous players in their own right – and they chatted with me, once!
It was in 1967, when I was 19 and playing British tournaments, and I had visited the Queens Club in London to play a ‘postal’ match against a good, older English guy from the city. I lost but went into the changing rooms just really to take a look around at another prestigious English tennis club, and as I walked into the wood-panelled room with my tiny little bag, four players looked up at me and one of them nodded and said, ‘g’day mate!” It was John Newcombe, eventually a three-time Wimbledon winner, and he was with Ken Fletcher, many-time international doubles winner and Ken Rosewall, another iconic serial winner and Roy Emerson, who had won Wimbledon in ‘64 and ‘65. I was captivated just being there – listening to them – and yet of all the things I most remember, it was Ken Fletcher telling them what he ate and drank before matches and some of his astonishing stories about matches he had played.
Just recalling it now is like still being there – the ‘distance’ between now and 58 years ago, shrinking as if it were a mere moment in time.
“Yeh,” replied Fletcher, when asked what he ate before winning the men’s doubles title at Wimbledon. “I had been out all night and got plastered. Couldn’t see straight but managed to down a pint of beer and a slice of cake before stepping on the court!”
The others laughed uproariously.
“And you still won, you old bastard,” said Newcombe.
“I did actually,” replied Fletcher. “Couldn’t see the ball for the first two sets, but my partner was ok and once the alcohol wore off, I was fine!”
Well, tennis in those days was a much more ‘relaxed’ affair and simply NOT as it is today, where money matters, TV talks and sponsors speak and (honestly) where many players play for something more than the love of just hitting a ball. But I’m not criticising. That’s the way human endeavour can work sometimes, especially in a world where dreams can so often be directed by the ‘facts’ of a fiscally-contracted life. But about now, some of you might be thinking that I wrote this post under false pretences, getting you to mistakenly think that I had won Wimbledon when I was simply dreaming about it – and that wouldn’t be fair – or would it? It’s as if I got you attracted by the title of this piece just to get more people to read what I write.
But that truly isn’t the case.
I wrote this to show something: that we (you and I and all Angelic Humans and their ‘indigo’ comrades) are CREATORS.
Every moment of our life is a creation, and we also co-create with all of our other ‘selves’ whom we usually cannot see, hear or feel – and yet they are right here, with us – and involved in all we do – and all we imagine. YOU reveal the power of the present moment – in YOUR life – and all you imagine and intend DOES and CAN manifest out into your physical world. It’s just that – in these ‘lower-domain’ realms – that outpicture of dream and intent can regularly manifest as not quite the reality you initially wanted.
And that’s what happened to me!
When I ‘won’ Wimbledon, my destiny was to BE that expression of self that I imagined. I was certain that – somehow – it WOULD occur. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know how, but somehow I KNEW that my life would be changed by that marvellous moment of defeating the garage door in my mind game of tennis.
And you know – that IS what happened – about 20 years later!
I tried hard to be the best I could be in tennis and reached a fine, competent level of competitive play, and in doing so, enhanced my fitness, my work ethic, my ability to communicate with others (where before I was very introverted) and my awareness of what it takes to succeed! (At least in THIS world!). In trying to be the best player I could be, I developed other areas of my young life, and it also gave me a sense of purpose and a focus which I may NOT have had without tennis.
So, how did a ‘probable future’ become a reality-field of fact for me in tennis?
Well, in 1978, I was ‘head-hunted’ by a very prestigious tennis club to be their teaching pro. I had never really thought about teaching others to be something that I had seemingly failed at (basically) but when I started, I realised that all MY dreams and hopes and strivings had become a data-base of detail which all my students could tap into and learn from and through them, I developed skills and attributes to HELP many others advance and be the best they could be. Because of all THAT, I ended up becoming deeply involved in the national dynamic of improving the dreams of others in tennis – and I began to realise that me hitting against that garage-door decades before, and winning Wimbledon in my dreams, HAD manifested itself OUT of nothing – and into the world of – fact! I realised that, without quite knowing how, my intensity of intent and my loving expression for tennis, had truly created a life which fulfilled my dream, not perfectly in the way I had imagined – but as surely as I had picked up a racquet and chalked a line across my father’s garage-door in July of 1958.
Dreams do come true, and imagination does deliver, and it’s all because we are creators of the worlds we live in. And in striving with love and joy in each moment, and with the exhilarating determination to simply BE all we can imagine in truth and vibrant belief in all we do, there is nothing we cannot achieve, and no dream that cannot exist.
Each moment is a future, created in the instant of its imagined fact, and though it may not always arrive in the precise detail we first considered, nevertheless, our path into our future is secure, when we know in our hearts that we – are – the creators of our own reality.
