Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Gutsy Abe was an ace both on and off the court
THE recent Masters golf tournament, poignantly reminding us of the loss of golfing great, Arnold Palmer, was also the first anniversary of the death of South Africa’s charismatic tennis No 1, Abe Segal.
He was supposed to live on, to return to Paris next year to celebrate reaching the French Open final twice, with two different partners.
The first, in 1958, was an Australian “outbacker” Abe discovered, during a PR stint in Armadillo, while winning the Anzac Trophy, on his first SA tour Down Under. I can hear Abe describing it: “That ‘Dillo’ place was something out of a Western movie – not the end of the world, but you could sure see it from there. It was so hot you could fry eggs on the tramlines.
“And while I was trying to escape, to save up for the real deals – Hoad and Rosewall in Sydney – on walks this ‘giraffe school teacher’ out of nowhere, who jerks me around a potholed court, for two hours, and worse, takes a set off me...
“I thought I was seeing a mirage. So I asked this ‘giraffe’ what he was doing for the rest of the summer. I suggested he give teaching a miss, because he didn’t talk much anyway and said he should get his ass over to Italy, to join me on the Italian Circuit.”
Bob Howe forthwith escaped “school” in the Outback and he and Abe made it through Europe all the way to Roland Garros, where in the final countdown that summer, only two professionals, Ashley Cooper and Neale Fraser, stood in their way. “Coope and Fraze, who would have bloody believed it, the Australian Dream Team and it went down to the wire – they beat us 7-5 in the fifth. I felt like 10 men and only nine were dead...” as Abe put it.
I shall always wonder what Abe would have said to me on that ghastly night he died. “The last man standing has bitten the dust, but here’s looking at you kid!” Maybe...
Yet ironically, I received my first sign from Abe, beyond the grave, on January 31 this year. Australia featured, when Federer won the Australian Open against every so-called international expert opinion, with the exception of one: Abe Segal’s.
Abe, in his columns gave uncensored opinions on top players and their chances of winning majors, which he attended both as a member of the Last Eight club and the press. He was a brilliant observer of the game, mainly because he was completely selftaught and had spent hours as a socially excluded youngster, sitting on the roof of Ellis Park, looking to emulate the serves of visiting internationals like Briton Tony Mottram – until Abe’s own lethal, rocketing, left-handed serve became his best weapon.
Fred Stolle recently admitted he wouldn’t have won the 1965 French Open were it not for Abe pointing out to him, at the start, that he needed to add a drive forehand to his apparently lacking arsenal on clay.
Ironically Stolle beat Abe with precisely this shot in the first round and Abe went on to identify opponent weaknesses, in every subsequent round.
Segal simply put was a walking encyclopaedia on tennis. Yet I used to sit listening to pompous armchair “experts”, arguing with him ad nauseum – mainly for the sake of it:
Abe was always proven right and they invariably had to eat their hats and their desserts. Yes – Wayne Ferreira had beaten Sampras in at least six head to heads; yes, Paul Annacone did need to be sacked, before Federer’s game would return; yes, Edberg would make all the difference to Federer, in reigniting his volley and attacking game ... Abe Segal recognised it all, long before reality set in.
Moreover Abe was anything but politically correct – chastising Nadal for pulling “Medical Time Out Tricks” in finals, when the Spaniard was a set down to break his opponent’s concentration – specifically Wawrinka in the 2014 Aussie final.
Abe received more con- gratulatory mails from ex- players, for that column, than arguably any other. Even the real experts – Lloyd, McEnroe and Rod Laver, on a recent boat trip, denied any remote possibility of Abe’s belief, that Federer (the best player Segal saw since Hoad) had had one more major in him, while Djokovic wore himself thin on the baseline... (Laver also divulged he would never have won a major had he not emulated Hoad’s slice backhand volley, redesigning his racket to match Hoad’s.)
The more rampant the “naysayers”, the more Abe stood his ground. Like in 2013 at the French Open. “The fact Federer was annihilated by the French No 1, (Jo-Wilfried) Tsonga, without resorting to the MTO tactic doesn’t mean Federer has lost his grip on the game. It simply means it’s the first sign of old age creeping up – and the Swiss maestro is losing patience with his most powerful weapon, his backhand – but he can still beat anyone out there.”
In November 2015, Segal again wrote: “I was the lone wolf going into this O2 event, howling against the odds, the Swiss magician would pull the red carpet out from under the supposedly indomitable Djokovic, and this Federer did in straight sets. I’m buried in a whole pile of satisfaction, knowing, the Swiss no 1 is the only player capable of adapting his game around the volley to keep on winning...”
And keep on winning Federer has.
Thus we should proudly remember, this unique gutsy genius – and be humbled by the superior tennis acumen of an old soldier, who not only valiantly distinguished his country, but recognised a good thing on a tennis court, when he saw it ...