By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
Scott Mitchell called his tennis friend Bob Pendleton one day and asked that he go with him to a tattoo parlor in Kannapolis.
It was a dive, Pendleton recalls, but Mitchell, who most people call “Scotty,” returned from their trip with the semblance of a tennis player tattooed to his right shoulder.
Mitchell later told his Catawba College tennis teams ó he was still coaching back then as a 75-year-old ó that they could get tattoos when they reached his age.
Scotty had made his point, as painful as it probably was.
Pendleton told the story Saturday when he and about 20 other tennis friends of Mitchell’s gathered for a small birthday party in the basement of Salisbury Square Antiques & Collectibles.
“We thought you were old back then,” Pendleton told Mitchell.
Scotty, whom the Post long ago dubbed “Father Tennis,” turned 89 Monday.
If it hadn’t rained, he planned to play doubles that morning. Mitchell acknowledges that he has “quit” tennis four times now but always ends up back on the court.
If you’ve ever seen or played tennis with Scotty, you’re familiar with his dinks and alley shots, the low-toss serve that he seems to hit from behind his head and a monstrous forehand that’s surprising in its velocity.
Mitchell has been a fixture on Salisbury tennis courts for almost 35 years. He’s like tennis furniture. He still strings rackets and keeps up with the professional game over television. Most recently, he has been absorbed in reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography.
The man has a deep love for tennis, to the point that he’s the best ambassador for the sport that I’ve ever seen. He has done it quietly through a solid game of tennis, dry sense of humor, sharp wit and just being a good guy.It has been difficult to keep Mitchell off the courts. He apparently finished out a match once with a torn biceps muscle. One morning, a dentist pulled a tough wisdom tooth out of his mouth, and a swollen Mitchell was playing tennis that afternoon. He rebounded from a serious heart attack about 10 years ago.
Pendleton said he and Scotty once scraped snow off a tennis court so they could play.
Trudy Gale, Bob’s wife, remembers when she first began visiting the City Park courts in the 1980s to watch some of the matches. On one of those trips, she overhead a young tennis player talking to his buddy.
“See that old man down there?” the kid asked. “He’s 90 years old, and he can beat anybody out here.”
The boy was referring to Scotty.
As a General Electric financial officer, Mitchell moved here from Cincinnati when he was 55, retired from GE in 1983, became Catawba College tennis coach in 1987 at age 66 and, throughout the years, has made scores of tennis friends in Salisbury and across North Carolina.
He’s a Dartmouth graduate and World War II veteran who had six children with his wife, Mary Marks Mitchell, who died in 1998.
Back in the early and mid 1980s, I often played doubles matches with Scotty, Pendleton, Dr. Ted Weant, Mike Meyerhoeffer, Dr. David Smith, Tony Lake, Rick Beattie and others who could put up with my weak game. City Park courts were a second home then for a lot of those guys.
Roger Richburg, young enough to be Scotty’s son, says he was playing doubles with Mitchell and his older colleagues one summer day at Catawba College when the temperature on the courts must have been close to 110 degrees.
“Nobody was going to say it was too hot,” Richburg says.
After getting in his car to drive home after the match, Richburg made it only as far as the school gymnasium before realizing he had better find a telephone to call someone to pick him up. The next thing he knew, Richburg had passed out and a woman was shaking him, trying to bring him back to consciousness.
He quickly recuperated from his heat exhaustion and made it home, where his wife told him, “You’ve got to quit playing with those older guys.”
Jeff Saleeby, one of his playing partners today, says Mitchell let him in once on a tennis secret he’ll never forget: “The best test of skills is singles, and it should be avoided at all costs.”
Mitchell recalls that he used to hit a lot of tennis balls and offer some tips to Salisbury High tennis player Aaron Post.
When he saw the boy several years later, Aaron told him that one pearl of wisdom from Mitchell had really stayed with him:
“If you eat the crust of your bread, it’ll make your hair curly.”
I remember stopping in to see Scotty back when he was Catawba College tennis coach in 1990. In his small office at the courts, he had taped a map of the world behind the door.
One of his top women’s players, Michele Hancock, had asked him earlier how long it would take to drive from Catawba to Arizona. A friend had told her two hours. Scotty began giving periodic geography lessons to his player from that day on.
Mitchell received a lot of razzing from his tennis friends about being around young and attractive women players at Catawba. He played along, telling people he recruited players strictly on looks.
“The fifth question I’d ask was, ‘Do you play tennis?’ ” he laughed.
When he’s not playing tennis, Scotty often has his nose in a book or newspaper. He stops every afternoon for coffee at Salisbury Square. He does daily crossword puzzles in ink.
Back when I first knew him, Scotty often drove to the courts in a motorized scooter. He was way ahead of his time, in terms of saving his gas money. That’s not all.
“Scotty was the first person I know who had Internet,” Pendleton says.
As all of Mitchell’s tennis friends talked and shared in his birthday cake Saturday, they said they probably should make it an annual gathering.
Mitchell agreed. In his 90s, maybe he’ll finally qualify as “Grandfather Tennis.”