John Voikos signed his first autograph one Thursday night two years ago, and I was the lucky recipient.
Longtime tennis coach/instructor at Scituate Racquet & Fitness, he was standing in a crowded room, elbow to elbow among more than 400 admirers who showed up for a fundraiser at the River Club in Scituate.
Make that crowded rooms. The bar – a cash bar – was jammed. The main hall, where such folk music stalwarts as Tom Rush and Ellis Paul have played to packed houses, never packed ’em in like John Voikos did.
Every space in the parking lot was filled, guests forced to find spots along Border Street.
People danced to the music of the Mark Greel Band. Hors d’oeuvres and desserts were delectable. Donations doubled and then some, as auction items were gobbled up.
Folks paid $50 each to attend the fundraiser, the money going toward John’s cancer treatment. He battled stage 4 lung cancer, gave it the fight of his life for two years. He fought cancer valiantly, but the cruel disease finally won out. John Voikos died Jan. 22, at home in Kingston in the company of his family.
His passing transported me back to that night of the fundraiser. One last-minute item for auction was a greenish-yellow Wilson tennis ball signed by the man himself. “Best Wishes, John Voikos,” read the inscription, penned in a black sharpie as distinctively as John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence. The ball was part of a Scituate Racquet membership that was auctioned successfully.
An autograph collector since my teens, I’ve garnered the likes of Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan, Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky.
So, when I saw John Voikos at the River Club in a woolen winter hat, his only outward concession to radiation and chemotherapy, I had to get his autograph. I had brought a tennis ball for the occasion. When I approached him, my request caught him by surprise.
“I’ve never signed autographs before,” he said. “This is my first one.” He wrote “To Rich, John Voikos.” I tucked it away in a pocket of my jacket, and now it’s displayed in a place of honor on a bookshelf in my home.
Other guests saw the signing and delightedly snapped photos with their iPhones. One tennis club member had him autograph her T-shirt.
Then it hit me: Get another ball, have John sign it, and add it to the auction. Tennis clubber Chuck Cullen came to the rescue, retrieving some Wilsons from his car.
I went back to John and that’s when he affixed “Best Wishes” to his name on the ball for auction.
“Look at you, signing autographs,” quipped his sister, Karen. She once played a lot of tennis. His other sister, Andrea, also in attendance, played a ton of tennis, was nationally ranked, and is a United States Tennis Association Hall of Famer.
You can see why tennis was John’s passion for most of his 63 years. It was a family thing, but more. He was a highly ranked player in the USTA junior program. Later, he was a fixture in local and regional tennis tournaments. He was a good one. For 17 years he was a senior teaching pro at Scituate Racquet. He was a great one. He still came to lead, or try to lead, morning clinics there while combating his illness.
“He came in well beyond the point where he should be teaching,” Scituate Racquet co-owner Barbara Horne said. “If he wanted to be here, we had him come and everybody was happy just having him out there, sitting on a bench.”
John was wearing down, thinning, eventually unable to swing a racquet or speak beyond a whisper. Those who knew him at the club, those lucky enough to have signed up for his lessons – whether young or old – understood they had learned from someone special.
The little kids he coached all made him cards when he was sick
“Everyone loved him, no matter how old they were,” said sister Karen. She's right. John was a lefty, soft-spoken, with a dry sense of humor, but he wielded a mean racquet. He had all the shots – all of them: Serves not easily returned, solid passing shots, soft drops, slashes to the corners, lobs. He was a pro’s pro.
“We're going to miss him terribly,” Horne said.
Regulation tennis was not John's only love. Late in life he became enamored of paddle tennis, was instrumental in getting the first South Shore team into the Greater Boston Paddle League, and was part of a state championship team in 2016.
I met John 12 years ago, when I joined the racquet club. I often thought he had one of the best jobs in the world. He was paid to be on a tennis court to hit those little greenish-yellow fuzzballs, the kind on which he signed his name and “Best wishes.”
Every once in a while I like to look at the autographs I’ve collected. Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio . . . Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin . . . Walter Cronkite and Ken Burns . . .
My favorite to look at these days is on a tennis ball that reads “To Rich, John Voikos.”
It’s a rare piece, just like the man who autographed it.
A celebration of life for John Voikos will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Scituate Racquet & Fitness, 1004 Chief Justice Cushing Highway, Scituate. Memorial donations may be made to tenacity.org, 38 Everett St., Boston 02134.