YOU could make a Hollywood movie out of the rise to national prominence of little old Holcombe Brook Tennis Club.
Some dedicated work behind the scenes and an amazing stroke of good fortuned culminated in the club raising a few eyebrows at LTA in the early 90s and providing the platform for what is one of the most successful tennis clubs in the region today.
The key to it all was when the now chairman Tony Lawson stumbled across an amazing scheme to recruit two Russian professional tennis players to the Holcombe team after they had miraculously qualified for a new national league via the Puma Cup in 1983.
Sevetlana Parkhomenko and Natalia Egorova had beaten a doubles pair including Martina Navratilova and were being touted by an agent to play for £1,000 a match.
Lawson had already been told by Paul Hutchins, then head of British men’s tennis, that it was normal practice for qualifiers to the national league to recruit from the professional circuit for the new league.
“Paul came here after we qualified, sat in our clubhouse, and told us how some other team had recruited Jimmy Connors to play for them,” said Lawson.
“I told him we had no chance of paying people to play and that we planned to compete with our club players.”
But that was when fate intervened to present Holcombe with an opportunity to get into the national spotlight.
When Lawson was told by a friend at East Lancashire-based bedding company Hamilton McBride that they had landed a Russian export order, he saw an opportunity.
“I said ‘I don’t suppose you would fancy sponsoring two Russian girls to play for us’, and he said he would.
“It was a pure stroke of luck. The Russians were great girls. We had great fun out of it.”
Lawson started networking and got some other girls together. It cost £2,500 but they got through to win the national final at Welling Garden City with Parkhomenko and Egorova in the team.
“Getting those Russian girls playing for us back then definitely worked as a catalyst for the club.
“I’ve got on an article written then by Hutchins for the LTA magazine with the headline Holcombe Brook, who are they? We were a fairytale team playing against the David Lloyd clubs and a lot of big clubs in the country, but with our own club players.
With their homegrown talent they went on to win further national women’s titles in 2001 and 2008 at Bournemouth.
And at local level the quality of talent produced — thanks largely to Lawson’s tennis coach wife Sue — has shone through in the Bolton Sports Federation tennis league. Since joining the BSF in 1984, Holcombe have won’t he men’s title 21 times.
Sue Lawson joined the club in 1987 and Holcombe have won the mixed division every year bar one since.
Inevitably their success had induced a mini explosion of tennis in the Holcombe Brook area, and maybe those looking to resolve the ongoing deficiencies in British tennis could do worse than visit this vibrant club, run by a team of dedicated volunteers led by Lawson.
Almost inevitably, however, they are currently victims of their own success with their 13 all-weather courts hard-pressed to cope with the demand for national league, local league, junior, social, and even veterans’ tennis, as well as coaching.
Lawson and other committee members are currently negotiating behind the scenes to move the club to another site in the Holcombe Brook area, but no deal has been done yet.