From our Arthur Ashe commemorative issue: These Richmonders share Ashe’s commitment to strengthen the African-American community.
If it weren’t for tennis, George Banks’ life would have been different. He’s sure of that.
He wouldn’t have attended Virginia Union University on a scholarship, wouldn’t have gotten a job teaching tennis at a local YMCA and wouldn’t have traveled to a 1975 youth tournament in Boston, where, as a ninth-grader, he shook hands with Arthur Ashe.
“I could have been considered an angry kid,” Banks says. “I got into a lot of fights. I didn’t have the best grades. I got an ‘F’ in conduct in elementary school.”
On a brisk afternoon in late October, he’s on the courts at Armstrong High School. It’s not tennis season, but he’s preparing players. Among them are three girls who attend Community High School, which doesn’t have a team; they hope to play for Armstrong in the spring. Also on the courts is Armstrong ninth-grader Dreyson Cooper, who is practicing his forehand.
“You’re trying to swing too hard,” Banks tells him, quickly followed by: “That’s good. Nice and easy.”
By attending practice now, players will be able to join the team already knowing how to hit a forehand and backhand, serve the ball and keep score, he says. This way, “kids don’t come in the spring and get overwhelmed.”
Banks is cheerful and energetic, especially for someone who only slept three hours between his overnight shift as a master patrol officer with the Richmond Police Department and caring for his 91-year-old mother at home. Tonight, he’ll moonlight in an off-duty police job from midnight until 4 a.m.
“I push it to the edge,” he acknowledges.
In the spring, he’ll coach the boys’ tennis team at Armstrong. Today, he’s here as head of the nonprofit Metro Richmond Tennis Club, which he founded in 2010. Through the club, with support from the Richmond Tennis Association and other donors, he works with children ages 4 to 18 at Armstrong after school and on Saturdays. There are about 30 now, down from 70 in the summertime. During the winter, the club holds practice clinics indoors at Westwood Country Club. The idea for the tennis club stemmed from his work with youth through the Richmond Police Athletic League.
“After that, I saw a need for a year-round tennis program dedicated to inner-city youth,” he says.
One of those who benefited from his efforts is Demetrius Pegram, who met Banks while attending Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and living in Mosby Court. Now a senior at Norfolk State University, Pegram graduates in December with a degree in mass communications. He’s the first person in his family to attend college. He received a scholarship from the Metro Richmond Tennis Club, which covered some of his first-semester expenses.
Playing tennis, he says, gave him something to focus on and kept him away from negative influences. It also brought him under the tutelage of Banks, who became a father figure and encouraged him to imagine a future outside his immediate surroundings.
“He taught me to not be selfish, to think about others,” Pegram says. “He’s a real miracle in my life.”
Former Richmond Tennis Association President Fred Bruner says he learned about Banks’ work with youth at Battery Park in about 2007, when Bruner was looking for ways to promote tennis playing in city neighborhoods.
“He was like a pied piper,” Bruner says of Banks. “He was out there every weekend.” Banks would encourage children as young as 6 years old and help older youth develop the skills they’d need to play on high school teams.
“These kids were not necessarily right there in the neighborhood. He would go and pick them up and bring – at least some of those kids — he would bring them so they could work out together at Battery Park, so they would have a community of better tennis players who were learning to play together,” Bruner says. “In addition to that, if there was a kid that George was working with and suddenly the kid would begin to not come, George would go to his [home], knock on the door and say, ‘You need to come with me.’ He would save kids’ lives by encouraging them to come back onto the tennis courts. To me, that’s what makes him heroic.”
A tennis evangelist of sorts, Banks constantly recruits players, whether on the job as a police officer, working out at the Downtown YMCA or attending church. He knows from his own experience how playing tennis can change the direction of someone’s life. He also knows about the sport’s power to bridge racial divides.
Banks identified with Ashe, the first African-American man to be the country’s top-ranked tennis player, when he was the only black player on the tennis team at Benedictine High School. Initially placed on the junior varsity team, which played at Humphrey Calder Park, Banks won all his early matches, earning him the chance to move up to varsity and play at Byrd Park — where Ashe was barred from playing more than a decade earlier.
“I made it all the way to No. 4 my freshman year,” Banks says. “To me, that was a big accomplishment.”
He would like to see Richmond do more to live up to Ashe’s legacy. He envisions a tennis learning center, where students can go after school and on weekends to learn the game, get help with homework and participate in events.
“Kids who play tennis are a different breed of kids,” he says. “They learn discipline. They learn self-control. They learn qualities that make them good students.”
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