Oscar Wegner
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Oscar Wegner (born 1939 in Argentina), of www.tennisteacher.com, is a tennis coach.
He is credited as the first coach to draw a distinction between the way the best players played and the way the game was taught by the governing teaching organizations in the USA.
His extended stays in Spain in 1973, Germany in 1982 before moving to Latin America for eight years (where he developed the young Gustavo Kuerten), and his later work as the Spanish speaking counterpart to NBC's Bud Collins as tennis commentator on tennis tournaments and Grand Slams during the 1990s helped spread his Modern Tennis Methodology techniques. The last few years have seen the USPTA and PTR, the two largest teaching organizations in the USA, announce a phase-out of conventional tennis teaching and they are beginning to introduce many of the very techniques they criticized for decades.
Oscar teaches a "play by feel" method using simplistic techniques based on natural movements using martial arts concepts of hitting “across the ball”. After introducing his new Modern Tennis Methodology to the USPTA beginning in 1971 with no success, Oscar was invited to test his theories in Spain in 1973. His success with top juniors forced the National Tennis School of Spain to adopt his methods, resulting in Spain becoming a virtual tennis factory of top rated players to this day. Germany then invited Oscar to spend a year working with top coaches and then eight years in Brazil resulted in tennis booms that replicated the success of Spain in tennis becoming one of the most popular sports. As more pro players began to appear using his techniques, Wegner began to believe that tennis teaching at the grass roots level must be reformed using his methods and so he set out to change tennis teaching almost singlehandedly around the world. He believed that "conventional tennis teaching" and its form based methods emphasizing footwork destroyed natural athleticism except for all but the most gifted of athletes.
Once he saw his techniques in much of Europe and South America, in 1990, he moved to the U.S. permanently to start reforming USA conventional tennis teaching. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Bud Collins took his first trip to Russia to see the state of tennis. Bud witnessed the top Russian coaches were using Oscar's methods with great success and wanted more copies of his 1989 book which had been reviewed poorly in Tennis Magazine. Bud remembered noticing Oscar's new methods as far back as 1973 when Oscar was coaching a new group of junior Davis Cup players for Spain who hit the ball harder with topspin with a new "across the body" style. Bud now challenged Oscar to prove his "Play Tennis in Two Hours" claim by bringing Oscar a group of total adult "beginners" to teach. Observing how in a a couple hours these players were hitting the ball incredibly well using these new techniques caused Bud to rethink his previous theories of how tennis was really best played and taught. It was as if Oscar was teaching the exact opposite of conventional tennis theory and yet Bud Collins, the game's historian, became one of Oscar's biggest believers in Modern Tennis Methodology. In 1992, tennis historian/commentator Bud Collins forwarded the republication of Oscar’s first book and they called it "You Can Play Tennis in Two Hours" and put his picture on the cover with Oscar.
Oscar's popularity overseas resulted in his being hired to do a series of tennis tips in English and in Spanish while he became the Spanish tennis commentator for professional tennis. Overseas, during the 1990s, Oscar's TV tennis tips would be seen in over 150 countries on ESPN International to the tune of three billion impressions but to this day have never been shown on US television. His growing number of advocates might argue that would help account for the dearth of top USA players in the rankings today. These tips are available only through his website today.
