CVITT: Clay, the great leveler

The edifice that is Lynchburg tennis stands upon feet of clay. Or, if you will, feats of clay.

That’s the surface upon which players in the 49th annual Central Virginia Invitational Tennis Tournament will compete this week, and it’s the surface on which Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson learned their groundstrokes under the stern vigilance of Dr. Walter Johnson.

That’s all coming together this spring and summer. The CVITT will be held at Oakwood Country Club as usual, Johnson will be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame later in the summer, and there is still a movement afoot to restore Johnson’s house at 14th and Pierce.

I always liked the fact that the CVITT has never charged admission, even though it has often attracted competitors with national reputations — Fred McNair, Harold Solomon, Zan Guerry, Tim Wilkison. Allen Morris, who dominated the tournament for several years in its early days, was a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team.

Bill Fix remembers all of them. A former tournament director now living and selling real estate in the Charleston, S.C., area, he has stayed in touch with the CVITT and is helping to lay the groundwork for next year’s 50th anniversary.

“Somebody from ‘Tennis’ magazine called me,” Fix said, “and said we might be the longest-running off-circuit tournament in the country. It’s either us or a tournament in Chattanooga.”

“Sports Illustrated” might do a story next June, he said, and he’s trying to recruit as many former champions as possible.

“Most of the older guys play golf now instead of tennis,” Fix said with a chuckle, “and they’re all asking if we’re going to have a golf tournament, too.”

Not likely; Oakwood closed its golf course last year.

The CVITT has always been popular with some of the Mid-Atlantic’s best players over 35 and 45. Part of it is the part the tournament plays in the community and the community in the tournament (which Susan Pugh is writing about elsewhere on this page), but there is also the surface.

“Clay is a great leveler,” Fix said.

Sometimes, literally. It’s not unusual to see a CVITT player with a greenish stain on the seat of his or her tennis shorts. Part of the trick of operating on clay is to slide your feet when you hit the ball, a little like the slide executed by bowlers, and sometimes that slide turns into a tumble.

Clay also deadens the ball, leading to long volleys.

“This has turned into pretty much a college tournament now,” Fix said. “We get a lot of ACC players — they tend to run in packs, and they love to play each other. The thing is, some of them have never played on a clay court in their life.”

Fix has been associated with Oakwood tennis since he was a ball boy as a kid.

“We started this (the CVITT) because there was nothing going on, tennis-wise, in Lynchburg,” he said.

Except at 14th and Pierce, where a rail-thin Richmond native was holding court in the summer time.

“Walter (Johnson) would always invite some of the better players in the city to come over and play Arthur,” Fix recalled. “You only went if you were invited.”

But when the CVITT began, Fix said, Johnson played it safe.

“He knew there would be problems back then, because Oakwood was segregated,” Fix said. “I’d ask him if he wanted to enter one of his students, and he’d always say, ‘I really don’t have anybody who could do well this year.’”

Too bad. Arthur Ashe competing in the CVITT would have been a nice memory to add to Bill Fix’s collection.

Contact Laurant, who writes for The News & Advance in Lynchburg, at dlaurant@newsadvance.com