The Longhorn Fans Reflection Point
Melvin Pat Patterson November 2023 about Coach Snyder
In 1952, he hitched hike from Windfield, Kansas, to Austin. Had a tryout and got some kind of scholarship. Hitchhiked back to Kansas. Got his clothes and hitchhiked back to Austin Great student. My favorite memory is when long-time coach retired. It was summertime. I was the swim coach. Wife’s name is Nancy He was coaching in Arizona. I called to tell him about the opening at Texas. A woman answered the phone. I said “NANCY”. She said yes. Let me talk to David. She told me that he was at the store. So I said “tell him the Tennis coaching job came open today “. She said Ok and hung up. He called me the next day “Pat you really screwed up this time “. I am coaching Tennis in Aspen, Colorado this summer. I rented my house to the new AD and his wife Nancy
Jo Ann Kurz 5/03/2022 - 1973-1976
Jo Ann Kurz is lower row first on the left to right sequence.
Jo Ann Kurz says about her tennis coach “Betty Sue was an excellent coach. She helped me learn doubles and that helped my singles game. She was very patient as I developed more in my junior and senior years….”
“Significantly, I saw the change in women's tennis with Title IX. I got a tuition waiver my first two years, then more assistance my 3rd and 4th perhaps a partial scholarship.”
We went from riding in Betty Sue's Volkswagen bus to Arizona to flying to the Braniff Mixed Championships in Michigan, all because of more funding. We taught lessons for the Austin Tennis Foundation to bring money in for our team before we had enough funding to fly to team events.
Thank you for hearing pieces of my past at UT. It was a lot of work for us and it is nice to know that the women following us have had a smoother path.”
A TRIBUTE TO LONGHORN TENNIS STAR LOUIS WRIGHT FERGUSON BY HIS DAUGHTER PAMELA FERGUSON.
Click on link below for Louis story.
Dad’s letters to his mother the previous year described returning from successful tournaments in Oklahoma, Waco, and Fort Worth, where they played against “Oklahoma University, Baylor, and TCU, and all in all it was a very good trip. I haven’t lost a match yet and I’m going to try to go through the season without losing one. ... I have been trying to fight a lot harder this season after a slump last year.”
Ferguson is sitting on the left shoulder of Coach Penick
Dad attended UT after oil was discovered on campus-owned land, which helped to swell campus coffers and fostered a solid reputation in mining engineering. “We used to step off campus into desert,” he’d say. Dad would recall streetcars rattling down Congress Avenue, and he regaled me with tales of how he and fellow chemistry students made bathtub gin during Prohibition. As their geology fieldwork spanned the Hill Country, he told me of a time they ended up at some rancher’s illegal still to see turkeys staggering around drunk on discarded corn mash.
Even though he admitted tennis sometimes shifted his attention away from his studies, he graduated and took his Hill Country rock knowledge to Africa, where he excelled in the exploration of strategic minerals, his focus when he joined the State Department in 1949 as a mineral attache under the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration.
My father, Louis Wright Ferguson, died in 1993. In some of my final moments with him, long after his days in Austin, Dad spent a lot of time in a recliner. He would often laugh, tilt back to lift his feet onto the footrest and clink ice in his bourbon. In soft moments, I would stand behind the chair and apply acupressure to his shoulders and neck to relieve pain and tension. A silent touch was one of the most bonding memories at the end. Or I would sit on a stool to work on his hands, especially his left hand with its missing ring finger and pinky, gone because of a shooting accident when he was a boy in El Paso. The accident had propelled him to become a star tennis player (and golfer, too), and to teach his four kids obsessively about gun safety.
After his death I picked though tax documents, personal papers and paperbacks, until I salvaged more important items. His old passport. My mother’s engagement photos. And some Hollywood-like glamour shots of Dad taken during his days at the University of Texas. These days, every time I wander by a University of Texas building that was around in the 1920s, I pause and think, “Dad used to walk by these same buildings. I feel closer to him in Austin than anywhere.
Pam Anderson