TENNIS WITH GOD: My Quest For The Perfect Game And Peace With My Father

By Brian Cox

“…Cox delivers an intriguing life story that depicts Eastern spiritual practice as a tonic to Western culture… He also arrestingly describes his own spiritual experiences on the path to enlightenment…” — Kirkus Reviews 

“Through it all, tennis plays an important role physically and spiritually, and lovers of that sport will grasp both the reality and the metaphor through the author’s accounts…he also provides welcome splashes of humor…” — Self-Publishing Review 

Enjoy a courtside seat as Brian Cox swings his tennis racket from hazardous war zones to the ashram of a Himalayan guru, and eventually to Mount Shasta, an area known for its occult legends. In Tennis with God, Brian, a globetrotting Foreign Service brat, travels with his family through hardship posts in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East. 
     Along the way, high-level tennis and table tennis are his faithful companions, as Brian perfects his game and aims to earn the respect and acceptance of his overbearing father. During his journey, Brian becomes fascinated by spiritual knowledge and the paranormal. His search for self-realization eventually leads him to a mystical healer who demonstrates miracles and has no patience for rules. Under this teacher’s unique tutelage, Cox begins to transform himself as he seeks to find a way to heal his relationship with his father, and with himself as well. 
     Tennis with God combines the spirit of the travel writings of Paul Theroux with the personal metaphysical investigations of Dan Millman. With Cox as your guide, you’ll relish your time through a remarkable, true story where tennis and spirituality ultimately weave themselves into a cosmic Grand Slam.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781452562544

Brian Cox

Brian Cox, Ph.D., is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Dr. Cox is also a Royal Society research fellow and a researcher on the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He is perhaps best known as a science broadcaster and host of the BBC’s hugely popular Wonders series. He is the coauthor of three companion books to these series, which have become #1 Sunday Times bestsellers, as well as two narrative works of popular science, The Quantum Universe and Why Does E = mc2? In the 1990s he played keyboards for the UK pop band D:Ream.

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Copyright © 2017 Brian Cox.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The author of this book is not a licensed medical physician. He does not dispense medical

advice, nor does he prescribe the use of any technique, principle or product herein as a

substitute for proper and necessary medical care. No one should attempt any of the practices

or methods described in this book without expert medical guidance and supervision.

The names of many people, places, and things in this book were changed to

protect their privacy but all of the events are true, according to the author’s

best recollection. Special thanks to my mother Norma, my brother Danny,

my sister Jean, my nephew Dana, and Dennis and Jessica Adams, who

provided notarized documentation for their real names to be used.

Balboa Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any

technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the

advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer

information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-

being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your

constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6253-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6255-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6254-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017907305

Balboa Press rev. date: 06/15/2023

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1:     Tennis in My DNA

Chapter 2:     Learning the Game in Laos

Chapter 3:     A Caddyshack Championship

Chapter 4:     Showdown in Bogota

Chapter 5:     An Unusual Awakening

Chapter 6:     Tennis in the Land of Sheba

Chapter 7:     The Death of Tennis in North Yemen

Chapter 8:     Melting Clouds and Choosing a Path

Chapter 9:     Becoming a Holistic Yogi

Chapter 10:   A Jungian Astrologer and an Osteopath

Chapter 11:   Message from the Other Side

Chapter 12:   Metaphysics with a Master Healer

Chapter 13:   Tennis with God

Chapter 14:   No Malice Intended

Chapter 15:   Special Times in Mount Shasta

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My heartfelt thanks go out to my family, Setsuko, and the following people and everyone else who helped me and this project with their generous support, ideas, time, energy, and blessings: Bronco; J. Bergley; Allan and Lois Crawford; Dana Flint; Darrell A. Fleury; Patricia Linnea Fleury; Corrine Goellnitz; Dana Hogenson; Cheryl Kumma; Liz Learmont; my Mount Shasta driving buddies, Margie Schwarz and Bonnie; and my dear friends in South America, Mirtha and Guillermo. Also, thanks to all those who stepped onto the tennis courts or up to the Ping-Pong table with me and gave their best!

And of course, a huge shout out to the professional, helpful and patient editors whose assistance I desperately needed to bring the story together: Angela Bellacosa, Rob Bignell, Jasmyne Boswell, Alex Catchings, Consuelo Collier, Katie Dilts, Diana Finch, Martin Grossman, Kristen House, Ella Miltner, Pat Neal (the best river guide on the Olympic Peninsula), and Natalia Tune.

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CHAPTER 1

Tennis in My DNA

After nearly 40 years of playing tennis and hundreds of matches, I may not have any major titles to tell you about, but I did have a gratifying and amazing time being the hitting partner of ambassadors, a reclusive guru from the Himalayas, and a quarterfinalist from the French Open. And, even God. An unbelievable claim? You’ll have to decide for yourself.

Competing at Wimbledon or at any professional level was never in the realm of possibility for me. I was just a short, skinny kid with a hand-me-down racket. But that didn’t stop me from dreaming of how far I could go in the sport and the tremendous amount of fun and glory I would have along that journey.

For most of my life, while playing tennis and table tennis with abundant passion and determination, I was equally driven to explore and understand the mysteries of reality and spirituality. I sought after and studied with several profound teachers from whom I could learn the most advanced knowledge. I wanted to experience and confirm for myself the ancient wisdom and self-realization that people like the yogic sage Patanjali, the Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky, and the spiritual giant Yogananda, and his lineage, were intimately involved with. That type of wisdom resonated with me strongly and I was drawn to it quite naturally.

I began my search for spiritual knowledge in my early teens, but tennis was in my DNA from the very beginning. It is said that we are all made from the dust of the earth. Mine happened to be clay court tennis dust. For you see, two years before I was born in Kenya, my father had been teaching tennis to my older brother on the red-clay courts in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Each weekend they played on the courts that the Italian colonists had left behind, Dad breathed in the microscopic dust particles from the red clay courts that would eventually become part of me.

My early life as a Foreign Service brat may have looked rather charmed from the outside, as my family traveled and lived in exotic locations in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East. My family had first moved to Africa when my father accepted a position with the education programs that the U.S. State Department was operating in countries desperate for American assistance and cooperation.

Yes, I was very privileged in many respects. But as a negative counterweight to the adventure this lifestyle provided, I had to find a way to cope with and survive being raised by a strong-willed father who dominated and controlled my family and me with corrosive and painful abuse.

My father’s name was Dan. If I had to pick an actor to portray him, based on similar resemblance and emotional intensity, it would be Daniel Day Lewis in the movie There Will Be Blood. Dad was born near Carbondale in Southern Illinois and grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The town was far enough south that most people spoke with a hint of a Southern accent. His father was a coal miner—there were some deep shaft mines on the outskirts of their town, and not much else but lean times and a sweaty boxing gym where my father spent most of his free time.

Boxing was my father’s chosen sport. Standing a mere 5'8" and at a trim fighting weight of 132 pounds, he skipped rope daily, ran country roads to develop endurance, and sparred in the ring for hours. When he was in his prime, he hit the speed and heavy bags with blistering combinations and knockout power. He became a four-time Golden Gloves champion and retired with a record of 30 wins and one loss.

While in college after a stint in the U.S. Navy in World War II he married my mother, Norma, from nearby Shawneetown. In graduate school Dad spent time learning tennis by hitting with members of the college team. For him, tennis was a natural crossover from boxing because it required fast footwork and good hand-eye coordination.

Mom got pregnant soon after they married and dropped out of school at Dad’s insistence. In no time she was taking care of Danny and Jean, my older brother and sister, and working two jobs to help dad finish his PhD in education.

After their tour in Ethiopia, Dad continued playing tennis with my brother Danny at their next post in the quaint seaside city of Mogadishu, Somalia. When a former U.S. Davis Cup member was visiting the country, Danny took some lessons with him and improved his game even further. But in their newly formed tennis rivalry, Danny was only twelve years old and Dad had the upper hand. All was well in that regard, but the relationship between my mother and father was showing signs of strain. Mom had begun to suffer painful migraine headaches as a result of my father’s growing pattern of verbal abuse and cold emotional treatment.

That’s when I joined the family. Mom flew to Nairobi, Kenya in 1960 to give birth to me, as there was no decent hospital in Somalia. During this period, Dad instructed her not to show so much love and affection to us children, which ran contrary to her natural inclinations. She sought professional help but the psychiatrist she met with was only interested in introducing her to his friends for extra-marital affairs and so she passed on his advice and continued with the migraine headaches.

After our tour of Somalia was over, our next assignment was to Gbarnga, Liberia. We lived there for one year but Mom felt that living in a single-wide trailer with no curtains next to a swamp infested with seven-step snakes and a local population suffering from leprosy was simply not an acceptable place to raise three children. We lasted only one year there before we received special permission to leave the country earlier than planned.

In 1963 my father accepted an assignment in Saigon, Vietnam and we moved there with him. He was involved with the hamlet counterinsurgency programs that brought American education methods and supplies to children in the villages. I remember Dad walking with us on the weekends to the Cercle Sportif, a fashionable tennis and social club near our house. I watched his matches, looking forward to the day when I would be old enough to join the fun on the courts. No matter how hot and humid the weather was, Dad always wore long white pants so that his skinnier left leg would not be noticed. He didn’t know why it was noticeably thinner than the right one, but he never wanted anyone to see a single part of him as weak.

By now, Dad had formed an adequate tennis game overall. His groundstrokes were consistent and his court sense and footwork were improving, but his Achilles heel was his serve. He tossed the ball straight above his head, higher than Maria Sharapova does, and gaped at it with his mouth open as if he was going to swallow it on the way down. Then he sprung upward at it and grunted loudly as he hit the ball as flat and hard as he could. There was very little chance that one of his serves would go in, but whenever one did, it was usually unreturnable. After a few errant first serves stung his doubles partners in the back, they often stood closer to the sideline to avoid getting blasted.

Dad’s doubles partners suffered equally on his second serves. He patty-caked the ball over the net without a hint of pace or a slice. The slow, soft bounce set the ball up just right for the player hitting the return. In the interest of self-preservation, his partners at the net often curled up into a defensive pose after his second serves and hoped for the best. There was an unspoken rule in those days that you never retreated from the net unless they lobbed over you, and even then it was shunned.

Saigon spun more out of control each month and nothing signified that more than the time a Buddhist monk set himself on fire to protest how the South Vietnamese government was oppressing the Buddhists. The smell of burning flesh and gasoline drifted throughout the city and into our home as we always had our windows open to catch a breeze. Things escalated further when one morning two Vietnamese pilots diverted from their airborne mission and attacked the presidential palace in retaliation for the government’s crackdown on the Buddhists. The palace was two blocks away from our house. After hearing the commotion, Mom rushed me into a downstairs room for safety. The planes strafed the palace and dropped napalm and a 500-pound bomb, but the president escaped unharmed.

Not long after the unsuccessful coup, White House Cable 243 was sent by President John Kennedy to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. This sealed South Vietnamese President Diem’s fate and a second coup d’etat took place with tacit approval from the United States. During the ruckus, Danny and a friend left the movie theater downtown to try and make it home. They crawled under tanks that blocked the streets and avoided running gun battles along the way. With faces covered in soot from the dark smoke drifting through the streets, they made it home breathless but safe. Our front yard was littered with empty shell casings. Not long after that the movie theater was bombed by anti-government forces, and a bomb exploded at the American School. Soon after that, armed U.S. military personnel guarded the hallways and pep rallies with M-16 rifles at the ready. Then one of our friends died from injuries from a bomb explosion at one of the floating restaurants on the Saigon River.

My brother was now a teenager with promising athletic talent and had finally beat Dad in two sets of tennis. This hurt my father’s ego so much that he never again played tennis with Danny. Dad’s discipline was strict to begin with, but over time he became increasingly harsh on Danny. The rhinoceros-hide whip from Africa was Dad’s primary instrument for inflicting pain. Mom eventually talked Dad into sending Danny away to a boarding school in Virginia. She felt it was the only way to save him from a possible blowout fight with Dad. The following month we took my brother to Tan Son Nhut airport and he was gone.

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Norma’s Special Passport, 1958

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Visa for Ethiopia

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Danny with a Greek guard

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Ethiopian woman carrying water in a gourd

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My mother with Ethiopian government staff

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Danny and his pet cheetah, Ishie

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Jean showing her doll to Ethiopian women

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My father on safari with hunting guides

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My father with his 300 H&H magnum and a dead lion

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My family with hunting trophies in Ethiopia. Wrapped around

Jean and Danny’s shoulders is a 16 foot python skin

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My father next to an ant hill in Ethiopia (Credit – Norma Johnson)

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Jean and Danny at the Great Pyramids and Sphynx, 1958

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Visa for Somalia

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Street scene in Mogadishu, Somalia

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My first photo was my passport photo, 1960

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With my brother, sister and nanny Ahma in Somalia

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Christmas 1961 in Mogadishu with family guests

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With my mother on the beach in Mogadishu

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Hanging out with the U.S. ambassador to Liberia’s monkey.

I was the only person he would ever play with.

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With my grandfather Roy Drake and his pit

bull Butch in Shawneetown, Illinois

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Visa for Vietnam

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Entering the U.S. Commissary in Saigon with my mother, 1963

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Walking the plank behind Jean onto a Saigon riverboat

with Dad watching, 1964 (Credit – Dan Cox Jr.)

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Standing beside a street vendor in Saigon

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My membership ID card for the Cercle Sportif club, Saigon

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My membership ID card for the Cercle Sportif club, Saigon

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On my father’s lap at the Cercle Sportif after he

played a match (Credit – Norma Johnson)

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At the Cercle Sportif with my mother

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