DF wrote:

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Bethanie Mattek-Sands & Marcelo Rios

Bethanie Mattek-Sands (35) is an American professional tennis player. She is an Olympic Gold medalist and has won nine Grand Slam titles, five of which was in Women's Doubles and four in Mixed Doubles. She has had success with our own Jamie Murray. She seems to get a lot of wild cards and is famous for her fashion sense!

Marcelo Rios (44) is a former no 1 professional tennis player from Chile. He retired prematurely in July 2004 after being overtaken by a back injury. He played his last ATP
Tour level tournament while only 27.

I'm sure that Indiana knows this already but to help JonH out- Rios means river

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 Heh!! Youre giving me  bad press here 

Bob in Spain wrote:

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JonH comes home wrote:

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DF wrote:

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Bethanie Mattek-Sands & Marcelo Rios

Bethanie Mattek-Sands (35) is an American professional tennis player. She is an Olympic Gold medalist and has won nine Grand Slam titles, five of which was in Women's Doubles and four in Mixed Doubles. She has had success with our own Jamie Murray. She seems to get a lot of wild cards and is famous for her fashion sense!

Marcelo Rios (44) is a former no 1 professional tennis player from Chile. He retired prematurely in July 2004 after being overtaken by a back injury. He played his last ATP
Tour level tournament while only 27.

I'm sure that Indiana knows this already but to help JonH out- Rios means river

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 Heh!! Youre giving me  bad press here 

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Hey JonH.  We Leeds fans need to stick together, right. So if you want a "come-back" for DF, you might like to politely point out that Rios mean Rivers (plural) and not River.

I'll leave that decision up to you though LOL.

But be careful getting involved in such discussions, or SC might jump in and start mentioning the accent on the "í" in Ríos.

Can of worms - and all that.

I am sure that people can tell that I am bored this morning. 

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Hey Bob, thanks for that, on a personal front I think retorts are demeaning and defensive and I would never stoop to that level, so I will leave it at that, just to say that I do have REALLY good solicitors, should they ever be needed, which hopefully they wont be!

I will leave it there, but just to advise DF, my team and I are watching you and your words, VERY CAREFULLY

DF wrote:

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JonH comes home wrote:

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Bob in Spain wrote:

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JonH comes home wrote:

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DF wrote:

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Bethanie Mattek-Sands & Marcelo Rios

Bethanie Mattek-Sands (35) is an American professional tennis player. She is an Olympic Gold medalist and has won nine Grand Slam titles, five of which was in Women's Doubles and four in Mixed Doubles. She has had success with our own Jamie Murray. She seems to get a lot of wild cards and is famous for her fashion sense!

Marcelo Rios (44) is a former no 1 professional tennis player from Chile. He retired prematurely in July 2004 after being overtaken by a back injury. He played his last ATP
Tour level tournament while only 27.

I'm sure that Indiana knows this already but to help JonH out- Rios means river

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 Heh!! Youre giving me  bad press here 

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Hey JonH.  We Leeds fans need to stick together, right. So if you want a "come-back" for DF, you might like to politely point out that Rios mean Rivers (plural) and not River.

I'll leave that decision up to you though LOL.

But be careful getting involved in such discussions, or SC might jump in and start mentioning the accent on the "í" in Ríos.

Can of worms - and all that.

I am sure that people can tell that I am bored this morning. 

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Hey Bob, thanks for that, on a personal front I think retorts are demeaning and defensive and I would never stoop to that level, so I will leave it at that, just to say that I do have REALLY good solicitors, should they ever be needed, which hopefully they wont be!

I will leave it there, but just to advise DF, my team and I are watching you and your words, VERY CAREFULLY

 

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 Right. So what sort of stance should I take with people ganging ()up on me ?  What would be the appropriate response to such threats and confrontational

tactics when I was only doing a good deed merely being helpful and helping a vulnerable member of the forum.

In the above I could point out that an 's' was tagged on to 'sand' as well as to 'rio' and in that case did not make the word plural and was not intended to do so. However

that would be petty.

So ....no comment 

 

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JonH comes home wrote:

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 Apart from the ideas being fab, how do you find the names, DF. eg. presumably you didnt know Moos Sporken instantly, did you google tennis players called Moose or some such to get the link? Whats your data source! Or just fabulous global recall!?

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 something like that . Started with a list of men from ATP and women from WTA and thought of possibles, then played around with ideas. However only

a few left you'll be glad to know and i'll be putting my feet up soon.

DF wrote:

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Two today:

Jay Clarke & Geoff Masters

Jay Clarke-one of our own with potential?
Geoff Masters(69) is a former tennis player from Australia. He was part of doubles winning pairs in the US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon tournaments
in the 1970's.

Jay Clarke and Hugo Boss

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 Hohoho!

I remember Geoff Masters pretty well, he played most of his doubles with Ross Case and , as you say, won Wimbledon in 1977. His singles was ok, in a time when a lot of top doubles players also played singles, he got to the last 8 in the AO one year and took John Newcombe to 10-8 in the  5th, Newc went on to win the event that year (74 I think?). 

But what I really remember him for was a surprise, left field appearance in the WCT Finals in Dallas in 1979. People who dont recall the WCT may not realise how big this event was. When tennis went open, the WCT and another rival American signed a lot of players to commit to their tours and set up series of events. WCT was the  big one, the other had Jimmy Connors and  others in it. The ITF then set up the Grand Prix Circuit (which is now the ATP Tour - the ATP didnt run the Tour until much later after the famous car park meeting at Flushing Meadow) and the Grand Prix Circuit and WCT ran two major tours. Players could play both after some exclusivity and other things like World Team Tennis existed as separate commercial ventures (it was the World Team Tennis clashes with Davis Cup that led to the 1973 Wimbledon Boycott when Niki Pilic was banned for not playing DC). 

Anyway, WCT (World Championship Tennis) held their year end Tour Finals (the major ones, they also sometimes tried events like Seasonal tour finals in Autumn, Winter and Tournaments of Champions etc) in Dallas every May. It was a big affair, the top 8 players, straight knockout, best of 5 of course, and the winner in the period from 1972 to around the early 80's was a big deal, some said the 5th major. I recall WCT being  bigger than the main Grand Prix finals which at that time where played in various locations before settling in  Madison Square Garden in New York in the late 70s, and where played in January for a time. 

WCT in May in Dallas was always shown on the BBC at the time, whereas Grand Prix Finals werent. All the stars played. In 1979 the field was as below:

You will see Geoff Masters there - he wasnt due to play, the Circuit that year, if I recall, which covered most of the events from Jan to May (main stops where US Pro Indoor (Philly), US National Indoor (Memphis), Rotterdam (still on the tour), Milan (big deal then), Monte Carlo (the Masters 1000 event as is now), Houston and others we still see around the Tour. Masters only played one event and was way off the field. But he was in Dallas to play a coupe of exhos and as a hitting partner and someone pulled out from the main field and they needed to make up the numbers and so Geoff got called up. he was drawn to play Borg in round 1 and got smashed and that was the end of his reaching big tour final events!