Leaving, But Still Learning

After spending a lifetime in the sport, Mike Mullan hasn’t stopped expanding his horizons

- Stephen Tignor

"Hey, I’ve got a Western forehand now,” Mike Mullan tells me, excitedly. “I can finally stay at the baseline.”

Mullan sounds pleased, and a little surprised, by his own words. The 68-year-old Pennsylvania native learned the sport in the heyday of the Continental grip, and he spent much of his 40-year career as the men’s tennis coach at Swarthmore College coaxing and cajoling his players to leave the backcourt behind and charge the net.

I know he coaxed—pleaded with, really—me to “move up, move up, move up!” when I played for his team in the early 1990s. And I knew, whenever I shanked a volley and turned around to see Mullan hanging his head in despair behind the back fence, how much he regretted it. “Mike,” as we called him— “Coach” was too formal for this happily informal man, and too limiting for what he meant to us—never mastered the art of hiding his emotions when he was watching his team.