Biography|Eno Polo — The Tennis Scholarship That Landed Him at Trinity University

People who meet Eno Polo as chief executive of the ATP tend to start the story in a London boardroom.

The turn that made the later titles possible happened on a hill above San Antonio.

Polo was born on 30 May 1967 and grew up in Kenya, the child of French and Italian parents, holding Kenyan and Italian papers and describing himself as Kenyan first.

Tennis got him out of Nairobi.

Kenyan newspapers that covered his later ATP board election record that he went through Strathmore College in Nairobi and then to Trinity University in Texas on a tennis scholarship.

He has told the same sequence himself: a flight from Nairobi, a shock at the size of the cars in a San Antonio cab, and a small university whose courts were the reason he had a ticket.

Trinity sits at One Trinity Place, a 125-acre campus of red brick and O'Neil Ford buildings overlooking downtown from a former quarry.

The men's tennis stadium on that campus still carries the name of Al G. Hill, a reminder that the school took the sport seriously long before Polo arrived.

He did not become a star. His ATP player file lists a career-high singles ranking of 574, reached on 10 September 1990, and combined prize money of 1,605 dollars.

What the Texas years did was put a Kenyan junior onto the professional circuit and into Davis Cup colours for Kenya from 1986.

The exact matriculation year is not on the public record. The sequence is: Strathmore, then Trinity, then four years on the ATP circuit, then a long second career that began at Nike.

Stand on the Trinity campus and the later titles look less like a sudden promotion and more like the first time the sport paid his fare.

Photo: Sbd01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Murchison Tower). Campus: Renelibrary, CC BY-SA 4.0.