ATHLETICS
A Tennis Player for All Seasons
Checking off Antarctica — the last of the seven continents he had yet to visit.
MAC doubles dynamo John Popplewell is still going strong By Jake Ten Pas
A
is in the eye of the “be older.” A spring chicken by almost any definition, MAC Tennis titan John Popplewell is, at the age of 78, just hitting his stride. Over the summer, he received the dual honors of making the club’s Gallery of Champions and being selected by the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to represent the U.S. at the International Tennis Federation Super-Senior World Team Championship in Mallorca, Spain. Asked which honor means the most to him, Popplewell appears to hold a rally with himself in his own mind. “Long-range, the Gallery of Champions has been a goal of mine since I walked through the front door in 2005, and I’m pretty ecstatic. I’ve seen the people chosen for it, and thought it was a pretty tough deal to get in.” On the other side of the court, “It’s an incredible honor to be picked as one of four people in the whole country for my age
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group. I figured I’d make the team when I was in my 80s, but wasn’t so sure I’d make it this year. I want the biggest and best, and I want to win at the highest level. That would probably be it!” On whichever side of the net the ball falls, Popplewell puts both achievements into his sporting-life top three, along with being inducted into the Southern Oregon University Sports Hall of Fame in September 2017. While he’s always been goal-oriented, competitive and ambitious, even Popplewell, Pops, or just Pop — depending on who’s talking — might not have been able to predict just how far the game would take him when he first started playing on Coos Bay courts as a seventh grader. Back then, the age of 40 seemed ancient, and being the talk of the local barbershop a noble and lofty pursuit.
The Serve It was in college that Popplewell first realized tennis could be a sport for a lifetime. He remembers buying magazines such as World Tennis and following all the scores of guys playing around age 35 or even, gasp, in their 40s. “At the time, when I was 18, I thought 40 was really old. Now, I figure maybe it’s not so old,” he says, laughing. In the 1950s and early ’60s, he recalls, Marshfield High School’s teams were very competitive, and often victorious, against the best sports teams in the state. It was a small logging town, and Popplewell remembers walking to the barbershop and listening to men getting their hair cut and talking enthusiastically about sports, particularly football. That made a big impression, and living across the streets from tennis courts and a baseball field, with a swimming pool just up the street, didn’t exactly
