Lan Bale, who won four ATP doubles titles during his career, vividly remembers receiving the telephone call, even though it was roughly 17 years ago.
Craig McLachlan was looking for a coach for his two sons, Ben and Riki, in Queenstown, New Zealand, and heard that Bale was about to relocate to the tourist spot.
“I thought, What is this about?” said Bale, a South African who was working as an assistant tennis coach at the University of California, Berkeley, at the time. “But I said: ‘Yeah, of course. How old are they?’ ”
“They were 9 and 10,” he added with a laugh, expecting them to be older.