Tennis for making new friends

Tennis has always been part of my life from playing at school, where we were lucky enough to have tennis courts, to playing for pleasure and when coming to France tennis was an opportunity to integrate, make new friends and help create a tennis club that is still going strong

Being part of a tennis club also meant that I also had the marvellous opportunity to go to Paris to see the French Open at the Roland Garros stadium. I imagine that many people, including my grandson who during a question in the game we were playing together - Les Incollables (I suppose we would say The Unbeatable in English) - asked who was Roland Garros, he said a tennisman, think indeed that Roland Garros was a tennis star, a champion of the past or at least someone involved in tennis.

The life of Roland Garros was more daring, courageous and inventive – he was an aviator, the first to cross the Mediterranean by plane and he could be named as the world's first fighter pilot. His passion was flying and he was one of the many victims of the First World War. He took part in many missions and bombings but was frustrated by the technology of his aircraft. One pilot steered the plane and a second at the back fired the gun at enemy planes, where the chance of hitting one was minimal. Garros helped devise a new system where the gun could be fired trough the propeller blades without hitting them.

Garros tried out the new system and had many hits at the German air force, thus becoming the world's first fighter pilot. Unfortunately he had to crash land is plane, he tried to destroy it so that the Germans would not be able to replicate the technology, he did not succeed and before long the skies belonged to the Germans, thanks to Dutch engineer Fokker who copied and improved Garros' system.

Garros was imprisoned in a German Prisoner of War camp, but he was always plotting his escape, there is a link with tennis, as he managed to send out coded messages and he received two tennis rackets with a map of Germany hidden in the hollow handles. He escaped from the camp with another pilot who spoke German and indeed his journey back to France via, the Netherlands and England is like an adventure movie. Clemenceau welcomed him back as a hero and offered him a technician's job.

Garros was however very keen to get back into the skies and on the day before his 30th birthday, 5th October 1918, he took part in his last fateful mission over the Ardennes, he was shot down, paradoxically, by a Fokker plane.

Roland Garros' legend lives on as a decade after his death France held the final of the Davis Cup in a new stadium in Paris. It was built by Emile Lesuir who insisted it be named after Garros who was his friend and comrade during the war. People (like me and my grandson) are always interested in finding out who he was and why the stadium is named after him. He was indeed a French war hero and certainly won't be forgotten as long as tennis continues to be played in the Roland Garros stadium.