Mats Wilander, the former No. 1 tennis player in the world, won seven Grand Slam titles in a Hall of Fame career. If you would like to take a tennis lesson from him, please call 787-GET-GAME and he'll drive to your local club in his Winnebago.
"At first I thought it was a joke," said Andrew White, a bond trader at III Offshore Advisors who plays at Bear Lakes Country Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., where Wilander has visited the last two years. "Then he showed up."
Tennis junkies have long flown to fantasy camps for a hit-and-giggle with all-time greats. But a traveling fantasy camp?
"It's—it's just weird," said George Bezecny, the head tennis pro on Fisher Island in Miami, where Wilander put on two clinics last month. "He doesn't have to do this. It's amazing that he does."
It's not unusual for former No. 1 tennis players to find other work after they retire. John McEnroe has developed a lucrative career as a commentator and he recently opened a tennis academy. Ivan Lendl has started playing exhibitions again. Jimmy Connors had a stint as Andy Roddick's coach and is now a Tennis Channel commentator.
For many, working isn't a choice. Tennis careers are so short (many players are done by 30) that even top players have had trouble building the kinds of fortunes they can sit on. Bjorn Borg narrowly avoided bankruptcy and several years ago considered selling his Wimbledon trophies.
Wilander, 46, is on sound financial footing. He won nearly $8 million in his career, and earned more in endorsements and exhibitions. He owns an 81-acre estate in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he lives with his wife of 24 years, Sonya, and their four children. He's a commentator for Eurosport and a regular on the seniors circuit. He has coached players and served as Sweden's Davis Cup captain.
Still, he says, he'd always wanted to spend less time on planes and in hotels and more time building a business of his own. So at a fantasy camp in Vermont a few years ago, he had an idea. A few players from Las Vegas had complained that they found the cost of the camp—and the hassles of travel—too burdensome. "So I thought, 'Why don't I come to you?'" Wilander said. "I love camping out, I love teaching tennis."
Wilander on Wheels, LLC, otherwise known as WOW, is a two-man operation. Despite the 787 area code, it is not based in Puerto Rico. "GET-GAME was the best number available," said Cameron Lickle, Wilander's business partner and fellow instructor. "We didn't know it was in Puerto Rico until later."
Wilander does most of the driving. Lickle, a 30-year-old former top player at the Naval Academy who studied nuclear engineering, drums up business. They met in Sun Valley when investment strategist Kiril Sokoloff hired Lickle as a ringer to beat up on a few local bullies in doubles.
For an hour-and-a-half clinic with eight players, Wilander and Lickle charge as little as $200 per person. Private lessons and home visits cost more. A full day at a club includes two clinics and an exhibition; customers are mostly recreational players, from 30-somethings taking a day out of the office to retirees.
They'll happily stay for lunch or dinner, too. They also might ask for permission to sleep in the parking lot. "Sometimes it's too late to find a trailer park or a camp site," Wilander said.
Wilander has a queen-size bed in the rear of the Winnebago. Lickle bunks over the driver's seat and can't sleep without a Vornado, whirring at full blast, next to his head. "The pipes on ships are so loud, I needed something to drown it out," he said.
Wilander bought the Winnebago in 2000, when he and his wife moved their family from Greenwich, Conn., to Sun Valley, where the air is cool and dry, ideal conditions for their son, Erik, who has epidermolysis bullosa, a rare skin disease.
The Winnebago is 29-feet long and has 48,000 miles on it. It drives beautifully but is beginning to show some wear. The windshield wipers don't wipe so much as splatter, and the skylights sometimes leak.
One evening before bedtime last month, Wilander climbed onto the roof to stuff them with towels. The side door recently broke and now can't be opened from the inside unless pried with a screwdriver.
"We're going to ride it into the ground," Wilander said.
Last May, Wilander and Lickle drove from Los Angeles (Lickle lives in Santa Monica) to Washington, D.C. For their recent trip through Florida, they had the Winnebago shipped from Sun Valley via truck. Their plan is to travel at least 12 weeks a year; they'd like to teach in all 50 states.
Wilander's tennis philosophy is simple: run more, worry less about technique.
"Tennis is a running game, not a hitting game—it's not golf," he said. "In Sun Valley, people play tennis and then go for a hike. You should be too tired to go for a hike!"
Wilander calls his favorite drill "the heart attack." Players must hit a ball, shuffle to the far corner, circle back to where they began, and then hit another shot. It's a fast-spinning tennis carousel with two to three people per side. "That's it, Barbara!" he shouted at Barbara Rubenstein as she retrieved a wide ball on Fisher Island's perfectly manicured clay courts on a Wednesday afternoon last month. "Move, move, move—all the time, move!"
Wilander's approach is punishing. "I hadn't been worked like that since high school soccer practice," White, the bond trader, said of his first encounter with Wilander last year. "We nearly died."
"What time is the Advil break?" James Desnick, a 59-year-old ophthalmologist who now invests in health ventures, shouted in the middle of his Fisher Island clinic. "I'm exhausted," he said later. "My back hurts, my arm hurts." But he looked happy.
In his heyday, Wilander seemed to glide along the court without expending any energy. His secret: He doesn't sweat. Lickle drenches two or three shirts during back-to-back clinics; in Florida, one young girl asked him if he had jumped into a swimming pool.
Wilander can teach for nearly four hours, in bright sun and 80-degree heat, in one cotton shirt and finish with just a trace of sweat under his arms. He drinks very little water and eats small meals. "My genetic makeup is a little bit crazy," he said.
At dinner, the men tend to huddle around Wilander and ask him questions about other all-time greats, the toughest serve he ever faced (Steve Denton, a Texan nicknamed "The Bull"), and why Americans aren't as good at tennis these days (it's complicated, but footwork is a big reason).
The women cozy up to Lickle, who looks more like a San Diego surfer dude than a former Navy lieutenant. "He's so cute!" Jody Bandremer said after her Thursday morning clinic at Bear Lakes last month. She took a photo with Lickle to text to a friend.
After several plates of sushi had been depleted at a restaurant by the beach on Fisher Island, Barbara Goldin, chairwoman of the island's tennis committee, asked the inevitable question: "Mats, where are you staying tonight?"
"We're sleeping in the Winnebago," Wilander replied. Goldin paused. Then smiled. "And you enjoy that?" she asked. "Very much," Wilander said.
Wilander plans to buy a bigger Winnebago one day, with fancier features and a towering driver's seat like a bus.
"The sides pop out, you push a button and it gets wider," he said. "The chairs swivel, the kitchen sofa comes out—it's unbelievable. I want to get one of those when we grow old, take my wife around and visit the kids. They're not going to visit us, I know that."
