Annual Report 2020/21
Steve Ronaldson A Personal Recollection, By Maggie Henderson-Tew
I
n 1984, my company seconded me from Head Office in London to their offices on the South Coast of England and was I obliged to switch from my passion of river rowing to coastal rowing, which was absolutely ghastly in every way. After half a season of misery, I determined to try a new sport and one in which I would never be cold and wet again (I hoped, but that was before I had any idea just how perishingly cold Oxford, Hardwick and other courts could be in winter) and was alerted by a colleague that there was a real tennis court at Canford School. I decided to contact the professional to set up an initial lesson. Steve Ronaldson proved to be large, exuberant and extrovert. As a fellow left-hander, I thought that he might be the ideal teacher for me. Alas, I remain an average player 38 years later, which I blame entirely on him and am delighted to remind him of the fact with tedious frequency. If only I could have been started off by someone else, think what heights I might have scaled! To be fair, I am sure he did his best and the inadequacy may, just may, be on my side, but a lingering doubt remains. Nevertheless, the experience of being introduced to the game by Steve was a memorable one. I had been warned that he was a practical joker with an apparently bottomless well of risqué, sexist, misogynistic, vulgar and non-pc jokes, and this reputation prepared me for the fact that we might well not hit it off. My fears were not lessened after my first lesson, though for different reasons. I can remember standing helplessly on the court unable to return any ball hit towards me, nor even being able to hit the damned thing out of my hand. Curiously, Steve remained so encouraging and enthusiastic that, despite my humiliation, I was determined to go back and do better next time. Little
did I know that a lifetime of frustration, alleviated by the occasional burst of mediocrity, lay ahead of me. It became clear that the eccentricity of the game induces a kind of madness in some players and that Steve was particularly badly affected. One never quite knew what he might do next and the Tennis court seemed to be a kind of theatre for him. The fact that ‘Chase 8’ (see photo left) existed at Canford and nowhere else, and was entirely of Steve’s invention, might have given me a clue, but I knew no better at the time. Steve demonstrated that it was possible to play a good standard tennis on a unicycle (but that trying to execute the legendary Penthouse Run on such a machine was likely to result in a near-death experience). The creation of Red Nose Day in 1988 only seemed to make him worse. He rode his
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