The Tennis Week Interview: Chip Hooper By Richard Pagliaro
Tuesday, November 03, 2009

He stands 6-foot-6 and seemed to be swinging from a tree top when he launched his chiseled frame into a serve so massive he could make a tennis ball sound like a wrecking ball when it battered against the back wall and reverberated around the court.

You may have never seen Chip Hooper play during the days he reached a career-high rank of No. 17 in 1982, but many who did won't forget the sound of that serve.

At the '82 US Open, Hooper and outgunned fellow seismic server Roscoe Tanner 6-7, 7-6, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 in a memorable shootout. He's known for a serve that threatened to deconstruct the very shape of the ball, and these days Hooper, who left tennis for a time to earn his college degree and become a school teacher, devotes his time and energy to a tennis teaching program called Black Belt Tennis aimed at using martial arts training to creating controlled explosiveness into every stroke through speed, power and flexibility.

The 51-year-old Hooper, in fact, forgoes the term "strokes" and prefers to view tennis as "a game of multi-dimensional striking" in which the player uses the tennis racquet like a martial artist wielding a sword in applying his or her entire core into explosive strikes at the ball. Hooper has applied his background in karate and jung fu into choreographing moves meant to maximize players' explosiveness.

"You have to learn the movement," Hooper told Tennis Week today. "Another thing I might say to explain it is if you turn on a video and watch Rod Laver playing Ken Rosewall back in the late '60s or watch Pancho (Gonzalez) playing Charlie (Pasarell) and watch the pace and how they play and it's a little bit like the polka. Whereas nowadays, it's a little bit more like African dance. It is a new choreography they way they move around the court and of how they get to the place where they want to hit from."

His journey to his present coaching place is a fascinating one.

A gifted all-around athlete, Hooper was born in Washington, DC, but grew up in Northern California where eventually became the top-ranked Northern California junior and forged friendships with the Gilbert brothers, Brad and Barry, as well as Larry Stefanki. He traveled with Dr. Robert "Whirlwind" Johnson, founder and director of the American Tennis Association (ATA) Junior Development Program, who worked for decades assisting young African-American players, including Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, in gaining admittance into previously segregated tournaments. Hooper played national junior events that featured the young John McEnroe and Mel Purcell and eventually landed at the University of Arkansas where he earned all American honors. He turned pro in 1982, quickly cracked the top 20 and was named 1982 ATP Newcomber of the Year.

Though he was an imposing attacking presence, Hooper says now never fully realized his true potential. A series of knee injuries stalled his career and prompted an early retirement from the pro circuit.

In the final year of his playing career, Hooper hooked up with a family friend, Jimmy "The Blade" Brown, a black belt who trained with the late Bruce Lee. Standing in a friend's living room, Brown asked Hooper to demonstrate a forehand then proceeded to show him his own version of a modern, martial-arts influenced stroke that saw the martial arts master launch himself into the air in an explosive version of a forehand that immediately hooked Hooper on the concept of applying martial arts moves to tennis strokes.

"I did some classic forehand thing: turn, stepping and hitting, mimicking the motion of a traditional forehand. Jimmy said 'That's pretty good, but wouldn't you rather be able to do this?' And he squatted down and from an open stance, jumped up and spun around using his entire core," Hooper recalls. "Basically, it was a Fernando Gonzalez approach to the forehand, but with a little bit more verticality imposed there."

He has spent several years refining his program. Hooper has worked with NFL players, top juniors and briefly worked with former World No. 1 Jelena Jankovic and Wimbledon doubles champion Nenad Zimonjic.

Currently living in South Florida, Hooper can still crank his crushing serve at well over 110 mph — "You can say I have lifetime pass in the server's club," he reports with a chuckle. "Whenever I want to crank it, I can crank it." — and will be conducting a serving clinic at Miami's famed Flamingo Park, former home of the Orange Bowl, on December 5th.

Tennis Week caught up with Hooper today and in this interview he discusses his training program and website, Black Belt Tennis, his views on modern tennis teaching and the challenges of African Americans face in tennis today.

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