If there is tennis played in heaven (and who can be bothered to go there if there isn't?) that place has just received an exceptional player in Canberra's Reg ''Blackie'' Bennett.
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Our young city doesn't have nearly enough folkloric sagas but Bennett is the subject of a very good one. Legend has it that in 1926, radiant with talent, he got to the final of the boys singles in the city's very first junior championship. His well-meaning father bought him a new pair of tennis shoes to wear in the final but of course (and as Graeme Langlands famously found out when he wore new white boots in the rugby league grand final debacle of 1975) new footwear chafes and hurts. The brave boy struggled for a while but then in the words of one chronicler ''He tore off the sandshoes and, playing barefoot, proceeded to win easily, against a much older boy''.
''Blackie'' Bennett (he got his nickname from his jet-black hair) was 96 when he died a few days ago. He had once been a colossus of ACT tennis.
He was so dominant that when Davis Cup star Harry Hopman came to Canberra in 1934 to play an exhibition match at the Manuka courts it was Bennett who was the obvious choice to play him. He won the ACT men's resident singles championship six times between 1936 and 1948 and the ACT men's resident doubles title 10 times between 1936 and 1961. He won the ACT open singles twice, in 1937 and 1947, and the open doubles title three times - 1937, 1938 and 1939. He and his brother Jim are remembered as an almost unbeatable men's doubles pair but we can bet they didn't go in for the flying chest-banging the obnoxious Bryan twins do whenever they win anything.
Everyone who knew him remembers him with great respect and fondness. One of his mixed doubles partners Pat Macnicol somehow found herself continuing to call him ''Mr Bennett''.
''He was such a true gentleman,'' she recalls. ''He would play a brilliant passing shot at the net and he was so likeable that our opponents simply couldn't get annoyed at him.''
He was especially athletic and bounding around the court (he also represented the ACT at two football codes) and he was brainy too. Cres Roberts remembers ''That drop-shot of 'Blackie' Bennett's was a coot of a thing to handle. He could drop it exactly where he wanted to''.
Reg Bennett's family (he was one of six boys) came to Canberra (to Molonglo) from bucolic, hillbilly Yowrie (on the far south coast) in 1923 and in a T-model Ford. They somehow chugged up over Brown Mountain and got to Cooma. There, someone who has studied the family told Gang-gang yesterday, ''The children saw their first ever railway engine. They were all terrified. They'd never seen such a monster''.
Beetling on to Canberra in their T-model Ford and arriving at Molonglo they moved into the first house they'd known that had that new-fangled electric light. ''The boys switched the lights on and off for two days'' until the wonder of electricity seemed a little less wondrous.
''Blackie'' Bennett's funeral had only a small congregation because in his twilight times he insisted that there be ''no fuss'' about the event. Nevertheless, thinking he deserved at least a little fuss, at the funeral his niece Colleen Handley placed a tennis racquet on her uncle's coffin.
