Tennis Loses Two Capable Chairmen

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30841, 28 August 1965, Page 11

Tennis Loses Two Capable Chairmen

r pHE two most important x committees of the Canterbury Lawn Tennis Association both lost their chairman at the annual meeting. There was a severe blow to the management committee when Mr M. C. Healey, a member for 13 years and chairman for the last two, retired. Then Mr

R. P. Murphy retired from the competitions committee after he had been chairman for seven years and a member for seven years before that They have been exceeding energetic and forceful administrators. Mr Healey is a national figure in tennis as well as a Canterbury one. An Auckland and Waikato representative in the late 1940’5, he came to Christchurch in 1953 to have a considerable influence on the game.

As a leading member of the Cashmere and Canterbury teams he has been a competent player and a stylish stroke-maker. As an administrator, he has been an outspoken man of ideas, young enough to be accepted by players- as one of themselves, mature enough to be able to carry the responsibility of directing their welfare and to be acceptable to those older in years.

A national selector for seven years, he has never been insular in outlook. He has kept himself au fait with the doings of Canterbury players, New Zealand players and with the world scene in tennis. This has led to the use of his abilities in the support of Davis

Cup and other tours, the obtaining of overseas players for New Zealand tournaments and of visiting players for Canterbury tournaments. For these ends he has spent many hours of his time. His ideas have had their opponents and he himself has at times shown his impatience with those whose conservatism has appeared to stifle progress. But under his reign there has always been something happening in tennis. Mr Murphy’s job has been a local one but a valuable one and he has performed it over a long period. His tennis career began with the Cathedral club in Christchurch, was continued in Waimate, then Melbourne, the Cathedral club again when he returned to Christchurch in 1950, and of recent years. North Linwood.

He became a member of the association’s competitions committee in 1951 and was elected chairman in 1957. Since then he has devoted his time to running the Christchurch inter-club competitions in the most efficient and most interesting way possible. Like Mr Healy, he has often been a controversial

figure because he has always been doing something different. Essentially an empiricist, he has changed the nature of competitions several times in his efforts to find the most suitable system and one that players favoured most. The interest has been such that other associations have written asking for his views so they could base their own arrangements on them. At the same time Mr Murphy has been a stickler for adherence to competition rules, especially those on punctuality, and some players had to sharpen their approach to the game if their team was not to suffer. Perhaps a common feature that has made these two administrators so successful is that through their years of office they have both played the game regularly as well as organised it.