Bruce Mannes

      By Doug Smith

Bruce Mannes grew up in Aberdeen as a stellar athlete in both team and individual sports.

 He first showed his prowess as a 5th-grader in Gray-Y football and basketball at Howard Hedger Elementary School. It was there that he cut his teeth in those two team sports. Though a bit undersized in contrast with many of his teammates, he took a back seat to none of them in both ability and competitive attitude. Blessed with natural footspeed and eye-hand coordination plus an innate competitive spirit, young Bruce proved to be a speedy and elusive running back in football and a natural leader and clever distributer as a point guard in basketball.

 Like his 5th-grade teammates and his 6th-grade “elders” (and virtually every young boy in Aberdeen at that time), Bruce also played Little League Baseball in the summer. In his first such season he made the All-Star team, but the next summer a new coach benched him. That didn’t sit well with Bruce, so he turned his focus to tennis and joined up with the other lads who had already started making their mark when 7 of them advanced to the quarter-finals of the Boys 12’s competition at the South Dakota Closed. It didn’t take long for him to catch up and pass some of his local tennis compatriots.

 Two years later, Bruce had advanced to a point where he had an edge on all of his fellow Aberdeen challengers in his own age group, which he proved by winning both the Boys 14’s singles and, paired with Don “Woody” Boyd, also the doubles at the South Dakota Closed in Brookings. After that, he and several of his Aberdeen tennis buddies set their sights on the Holy Grail of the 3-state area then-called the Northwestern Lawn Tennis Association. That prize was the Sectional Championship, which was open to all 14-&-under boys from the NWLTA, which also included North Dakota and Minnesota.

 So it was that a veritable troupe of Aberdeen’s best 14ers descended upon Woodhill Country Club in Wayzata, Minnesota to challenge the best from the 3-state area…and Bruce proceeded to whip all comers to win the most prestigious tournament of the year. Thus, he had “arrived.” He finished the year ranked #3 in the NWLTA 14’s singles and, paired with Rochester’s Mark Brandenburg, #1 in doubles.

 Over the four years which followed, Bruce remained a top-flight contender vs all within the NWLTA as he “aged up” next into the Boys 16’s and finally the Boys 18’s. Summer after summer the name Mannes drew trepidation to the minds of opponents as he continued to carve out annual Sectional rankings consistently in the Top 5 in both singles and doubles.

 With no indoor tennis facility yet in Aberdeen, Bruce shifted his winter focus to basketball where he was a starting point guard for the Golden Eagles and sometimes even entertained the home crowd by juggling 3 basketballs during halftime. During the Spring of those years Bruce played at the #1 or #2 positions on the Aberdeen Central High School teams which won 3 straight State Team Championships in 1972-74.

 Upon graduation from Aberdeen Central, Bruce spent the next two summers teaching tennis in the Hub City. For college, he opted to stay “in state” and enrolled at Augustana where he continued to ply his tennis wares for 4 years as a vital member of the Vikings tennis squad. In that capacity he won the Conference Championship in Flight 2 Singles and was the Conference Flight 1 Doubles Champion with Brian Weinreis.

 Bruce’s last hurrah in South Dakota tennis was in 1976 when he paired with Sioux Falls’ Ron Selkirk to win the Men’s Doubles Championship in the South Dakota Open.

 Upon graduating from Augie, Bruce’s next venture was training at the Cessna Aviation School where he had dreams of becoming a commercial aviation pilot. But his two years with Cessna convinced him that the cyclical nature of aviation offered too uncertain of a future, so instead he applied to the medical school at Vermillion.

 Four years later, with a USD degree in hand, Bruce proceeded to the University of Utah to do his residency in anesthesiology. Upon completing that, he took his first medical position in Yankton where he was the attending anesthesiologist from 1989-2000. Bruce then made his final move to Phoenix where he continues his anesthesiology practice.

 Bruce didn’t play much tennis right after college, but he returned to it in 1988 during his residency. Upon relocating to Arizona, he continued playing until age-related injuries posed too much of an obstacle. Since then, however, his wife, Amy, already an exceptional pickleball player, prevailed upon him to join the millions who now enjoy that off-shoot of tennis.

 Bruce says the pickleball paddles reminded him of the wooden paddles with which he and his fellow Aberdeen lads got their start on their local YMCA racquetball courts before the winter snows had melted. As the athlete that he has always been, he too is now an accomplished pickleball player, and he and Amy are a high formidable duo in their partnership on the court.