In November 1996, I published the book TOP TENNIS (Tennis for Youths, Executives, and Professionals). This title is a homage to the "Executives" since they will be great users of this work for trying to compensate their lack of time to practice tennis on the court. The main title, TOP TENNIS, portrays my will to contribute for the Brazilian tennis to reach the top of the international scenery. Mentioning "Youths" suggests my effort to make this sport popular in the country. I consider a youth everyone who knows how to live each moment of his/her life with appropriate intensity and joviality, being either eight or eighty-eight years old.

I am proud to remember that my friend Carlos Braunn, from Rio de Janeiro, played tennis until the day he passed away, at 97 years old. We used to say that Carlos Braunn had not died; only that the "engine" stopped in a beautiful morning when he was getting ready to host a doubles, while sweeping the court lines in his residence.

During a Jô Soares' TV show, Doctor Zerbini had mentioned that a doctor advised him to start playing tennis at age 40, in order to avoid that an arthritis would later put him on a wheel chair. In the interview they show a video clip with Dr. Zerbini playing tennis, a habit he repeats every day at 6 o'clock in the morning, before going to his surgery room.

For people like us, who have been playing tennis for a long time, there is nothing more gratifying than watching two ladies older than 65 playing tennis, which reminds us that most people at this age waste great part of their time in front of a television, waiting for their final days.

Many people ask me at what age one should start playing tennis and I answer: "At the age you are today." In other words, tennis is an accessible sport for people at three, twenty-three, or eighty years old, and it can become an instrument of physical, mental, and social satisfaction.

I arrived at the Capital in 1970, with a job transfer of the Public Sector from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. As I was in the group of best players in the country at that time, I had the opportunity to meet so many people, due to the big flow of executives that here arrived. They used to come to me to be introduced into tennis.

There are countless reasons for this expressive tennis demand by executives, businessmen, and the group of the third age. The number of people - originally practitioners of collective sports - interested in tennis is enormous, due to the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult to conciliate professional schedules to the collective sport practices. In addition, in individual sports the risk of a body collision, which would make the executive interrupt the exercise of his/her profession, does not exist.

People with no physical conditioning are influenced by their friends who play tennis to begin practicing it, with the allegation that they will be ready to start. There will be a need for a long and patient practice together with the absorption of countless information, and during this period they will slowly acquire their necessary physical conditioning to improve in the sport.

Many people don't feel comfortable working out in a gym, for they find themselves over the average of the members' age. So tennis classes become a good substitute, since it is a friendly environment and also a great physical exercise.

Older people realize that tennis opens a huge opportunity for the development of their social life and for making business negotiations easier. The former president of Banco do Brasil, Alcir Calliari, revealed to me in a certain occasion that the best deals he had gotten abroad for the Bank were all closed on a tennis court. Of course there is a big difference between closing a business agreement in an office and on a tennis court. In the former, you, the applicant, stands on one side of the table and the Chairman of the institution, who has never seen you before, on the other side. In the latter case, you invite that gentleman for a friendly tennis match and use the occasion to give him your message. The experience says that the dialog tone softens such that your "friend" asks you at the end of the match: "Now, what can I do for you?". In this situation, he reads your proposal and points to some corrections towards his interests, and this would never be done during a simply commercial meeting.

In the tennis environment, you naturally build a big circle of good friends. While the doors of the Rio de Janeiro Country Club were opened to me because of tennis, many famous people were barred the entrance to that sophisticated club.

I come to this auditorium with great satisfaction. At the same time you gentlemen give me the chance to teach you something about tennis, I also recognize that you are my target audience, because the message I bring today will show that sports, precisely tennis, are for the Third Age one of main reasons to motivate success in your professional career. The lack of sport activities will not lead the individual in the Third Age to professional failure, but it will certainly cause stagnation or a worse performance during his/her professional activity.

A very interesting fact to register in this occasion is that I have a practically ex-asthmatic student. His name is Roberto Godinho. When I started teaching him, he had a totally wrong technique, and little by little we fixed it. Today he plays tennis decently. After his strokes became almost perfect, I started to test his physical conditioning and I realized that he would achieve a point where I needed to slow down the rhythm so he could recover his respiratory deficiency. Little by little I pushed Roberto harder and harder, and today Roberto says he doesn't have respiratory problems when I push him to his limits.

I also want to register at this time the statement of another student, the lawyer Luís Carlos Bettiol, who used to suffer from systematic insomnias. He used to wake up at three, four o'clock in the morning, after having slept for just two hours. It wore him down to the point of jeopardizing his performance at work. Today Bettiol considers that, as a result of a better physical condition through a more adequate and orderly life with a systematic tennis practice, his professional performance and speed of thinking have improved about thirty percent.

In addition, the court judge Pedro Aurélio Rosa de Farias once told me that, before tennis, he was hyper-tense and his high pressure used to make him explode from nervousness, jeopardizing his speed of making decisions. Nowadays his arterial pressure is conditioned by the physical exercise from tennis, a sport that allows you to have a good time during some hours in a week without noticing the huge exercise you have done. Today he realizes his decision making at work is quick, as tennis conditioned him to the fast decision dynamics of the game.

People over 40 years old who have never practiced sports think it is too late to start in any sport. In tennis that is possible, because the learning period is long - more than one year -, so the student has enough time to gradually recover his/her physical condition. In one-hour class the teacher controls the student's physical effort, between tougher and easier exercises and theoretical information. The teacher must also guide the student to find a nutritionist, in order to reduce the level of weariness through a balanced diet of proteins and carbohydrates. It is still advisable that the individual doesn't rush to learn the sport, so he/she will avoid making too much effort in little time. Some times I guided students to play just once more in a week besides their regular classes, and they would come back complaining about pains or muscle strains, confessing that they got excited and played the whole week. We must remember that the muscles have to be slowly conditioned in order to achieve a level of great endurance. For not obeying this rule, many people who are not regular athletes end up dying during a "quick match" on the weekend. Your muscular system, never activated, happens to be in a perfect balanced condition to support the struggles of a competition; however, the body muscles and the heart will not know how to indicate your limit of capacity, immediately prior to the occurrence of a muscle strain or a heart attack.

I have been reading about accumulation of lactate in certain muscles caused by physical exercise. Due to the lack of stretching after exercising, lactate is transformed into lactic acid that can possibly cause strains. Stretching after practicing the sport is even more important than the stretching before, but there are only few people who regularly obey this rule.

I am 56 years old and have played tennis for 43 years now. I wrote a book with about 180 pages; I didn't cover tennis history, because the book was already very large with only the technical, tactical, and psychological information. To visit my book's homepage, just go to http://www.toptennis.com.br/. I am already gathering new material to write another tennis book, because I publish every week a section on my homepage called "Tennis Tips". I am sure I will always have new material to write about this sport even if I live over a century. When I am teaching, even for a beginner, I frequently discover material for one more "Tennis Tip", originating from the need to adapt the technique to each student's physique.

Tennis is a very difficult sport, and because of that, it usually attracts people due to its information versatility.

Tennis teaches us to win in life. You never know when you are good enough, but you don't give up that goal and one day you realize that you have reached it. From this point on, you start believing in yourself and trust you can achieve anything you wish by never quitting. There is a saying: "When you give up a goal, it is because indeed you didn't intend to reach it!" My experience has demonstrated that, when I want something, my attention is directed to that goal all times, and in each moment opportunities are opened to talk about the subject, I learn more and I get closer and closer to my final goal. I recommend tennis to the seniors not only to learn the sport, but also to teach "this way to success" to his/her sons, daughters, and dear relatives.

Learn by reading and asking the reason why to execute the strokes and more in tennis. Who understands the reasons only needs to be taught once, and that doesn't happen with those who are forced to memorize. Knowing the reasons will make easy to teach the others in the future.

The problem with idleness in individuals of the Third Age can be eliminated by learning tennis at an intermediate term. The first five years must be dedicated to learning the technique and studying the theory. After that, it is possible to learn how to teach, starting with one or two students. In a while you will have plenty of students, filling up your free time and making some extra cash. Nowadays, studying tennis is the most important goal, because we don't have good instructors. Paraná and Santa Catarina are experimenting with teachers who never became top tennis players, and their work is having great success. It is vastly important that tennis teachers detain a reasonable intellectual level, so that they can discover ways to adapt the technique to the physical characteristics of each person.

I cite as another example the wife of the tennis player Parker, who never stepped on a tennis court, but as a sport observant and student, she helped him reach the world's number one spot. Today we have ball machines that can help training good players. In addition, with two students, all we need is showing them the drills to obtain good results in their technical work.

After starting to search about this subject, I realized that such material is so rich in information. For that I want to create a page on my website with the title "Tennis in the Third Age". The behavior of people in the First Age, which goes up to 35 years old, is already standardized properly into the social concepts. Similarly, the activities of individuals in the Second Age, from 35 to 45 years old, are already configured in the context of their life. However, the phase that begins in the Third Age lacks much information, for being the stage where the individual gives higher priority to a balanced time sharing among work, rest, recreation, and physical activities. What we have on the behavior in the Third Age is only a few statements of closer friends, and not the development of a thesis about a behavioral model for the man of this age. The profile of the First Age is an agitated life around the physical strength. The profile of Second Age is the forgetfulness of the need to keep the physical strength, starting to spend that vigor built during the First Age with inactiveness. And the Third Age profile is a chart of illness, caused by this long period when the individual chose that sedentary life. We must be aware of this behavioral portrait, at least so that we can alert our sons in order to avoid our same mistakes during their own lives.

At the attempt to perfect in tennis, I have been learning a lot about sports medicine, nutrition, physical conditioning, and stretching, so I would really appreciate if we could end this lecture with an open discussion around these questions with this illustrious audience .

Thank you very much.