Hall of Fame new home for Burdick

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Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen Dalton’s Fred Burdick has been teaching tennis for four decades and was recently honored by being inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Southern Division of the U.S. Professional Tennis Association.

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June 17, 2012

Hall of Fame new home for Burdick

By Chris Whitfield chriswhitfield@daltoncitizen.com The Dalton Daily Citizen Sun Jun 17, 2012, 07:31 AM EDT

In the vocabulary of pop culture, Fred Burdick is to tennis as Yoda is to the Jedi Order of the Star Wars saga.

Both are masters, but Burdick has a place in the U.S. Professional Tennis Association’s Southern Division Hall of Fame.

A tennis teaching pro since 1972, when he began teaching continuing education classes at Dalton Junior College, Burdick has earned the USPTA’s highest teaching certificate as a Master Professional, and his resumé includes honors and accomplishments that are difficult to enumerate and quantify.

Perhaps most importantly to him, it has brought him a lifetime in the game, which Burdick has relished.

“To me, being a tennis pro was always like having a party and inviting friends over,” Burdick said. “It’s a great job. The only problem is when most people are off, that is when you are working the most.”

But when it’s raining, it’s a vacation day, so there are tradeoffs. And earlier this week, as Burdick sat on the back porch of his home in Beaverdale — with Ray Charles’ mellow tones drifting through the air and his wife of 44 years, Beth, preparing dinner — the man whose life has been tennis for the past four decades admitted the good has surely outweighed the bad.

“I enjoy it so much,” said Burdick, who considers himself semi-retired. “I’ll teach as long as people will take a lesson, but it is my schedule now. When I was working for a club, you are at everyone else’s beck and call.”

Burdick started playing tennis as a teenager in Dalton and joined the Marine Corps after graduating from high school, serving from 1966 to 1968. He returned to the area and used the G.I. Bill to enter college and received his business degree from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga in 1972.

Like most young professionals at the time, Burdick found work in the carpet industry, but that career just wouldn’t take.

“I was miserable,” Burdick said. “I decided I was going to do something that I loved to do.”

He began teaching tennis at Dalton Junior College, and in 1978 he opened The Starting Blocks retail store in Bry-Man’s Plaza, specializing in tennis and running apparel and accessories.

By 1985, the retail business was struggling, but Burdick’s tennis teaching career was thriving. As he devoted more and more time to teaching, it took over his professional life as well.

He was hired by the Cobb County Parks and Recreation Department as a tennis pro and gave private lessons at Cartersville Country Club. Soon, Sunset Hills Country Club in Carrollton came calling.

“I wasn’t really interested, but all of a sudden Cartersville Country Club came to an end,” he said.

His wife was the secretary to the president at Dalton State College, and the couple ended up in split houses, seeing each other on weekends.

“I bought a duplex, and it was good and bad,” he said. “Beth would come down on the weekends, and tell me what a mess I made. I always told her she should have seen it before she got there.”

For 15 years he worked at Sunset Hills and began to get more heavily involved with the USPTA. For 20 years he was executive director of the Southern Division and taught 25 award-winning teams in the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association and U.S. Tennis Association.

He won countless awards, including numerous Professional of the Year honors, Tennis Director of the Year, four Southern Division Pride of the South Awards, 23 USPTA Presidential Service Awards and the U.S. Tennis Association President’s Recognition Award. He has also been published in Tennis Magazine, Net News and Addvantage Magazine.

In recognition of his distinguished career, he was inducted into the Southern Division Hall of Fame during June 12 ceremonies at The River Club in Atlanta.

“I was shocked to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but I have been doing this so long that they couldn’t deny me any longer,” he said with a laugh. “The first criteria is to be old, and I have passed a whole lot of people on that journey.

“Seriously, though, the Hall of Fame never enters your mind. I feel humbled to reach something of that level. You don’t start out to reach the Hall of Fame. You just want to do your job the best that you can.”

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