Kenny Fletcher started out life in the 1940s as the only child of Norm and Ethel, who lived in a small rented white Queenslander on the tram line at Annerley Junction, Brisbane.

Just by chance there was an ant bed tennis court in the backyard. And just by chance when Ken was five the family was showing him the planes at Eagle Farm Aerodrome when a French tennis champion saw this little blond boy and walked over and gave him a tennis racquet.

On the ant bed tennis court was a tiny practice board, but the racquet was way too big. So Kenny tucked the handle under his armpit and wrapped his hand around the neck and starting hitting the ball against the board. He had to be accurate because the wire around the board was full of holes and if the ball missed and went through the fence the lady next door wouldn’t give it back.

Thus began what Harry Hopman twice called "the best forehand in the world."

Being older parents of an only child, Norm, a train driver, and Ethel, a housewife, were very strict.

They tried to keep Kenny at home or at school; but he was always escaping towards a bigger brighter world.

Aged 8 he’d be down at our cake shop making pies when Norm would appear with a stick; Aged 9 he’d be swimming in Ekibin Creek or up a mango tree when he was supposed to be serving as an altar boy at Mass; Every day Ethel would walk him along Ipswich Road to school at Mary Immaculate Convent -- and she’d lament to the ladies in our shop: "I’d be cooking in the kitchen half an hour later when I’d see this little blond head bobbing past the window."

Kenny had escaped again.

By the time he was seven, every Saturday morning Ethel would take Kenny by tram to Red Hill to be coached tennis.

By 10 he was beating all the boys his own age 6-0, 6-0, so he started playing older boys. One was Lance Mesh whose parents owned the Annerley Picture Theatre. They always played for a malted milk shake. Not only did Lance let Kenny into the Annerley pictures for nothing, but he bought Ken a hell of a lot of milk shakes in our shop.

Norm Fletcher loved to tell the story of the 23-year-old tanned athlete who turned up at Milton with his blonde girlfriend on his arm; six Slazenger tennis racquets in his bag; a green crocodile on his shirt, black hair slicked down with Spruso hair oil.

He looked around and said: "I’m looking for my opponent, a Ken Fletcher?"

"Yes," said Norm, "that’s him down playing on the swing."

"Don’t give me that!" the bloke said.

After being thrashed, the 23-year-old leaned heavily on his girlfriend as she carried him and his six racquets back to the tram stop.

In 1959, aged 18, Kenny escaped to the world when he was selected in the Australian Davis Cup squad that went to America under Harry Hopman and brought back the Cup. His name is now etched forever on that Cup.

Ken toured the world with official Australian tennis teams each year in the early 1960s -- escaping Australia for eight months to carry our flag all over the globe to exotic places like Saigon, Mexico City, Phnom Penh, Turin and Estonia. Name a town and Ken played there.

Overseas, Fletch concentrated on tennis, gambling, and girls… not necessarily in that order.

At Wimbledon in 1961 Ken shocked the English when in anger he belted a ball high in the air on Centre Court and it landed in the Royal Box. It had never happened before. At interviews later Ken said: "To be a champion you have to have a bit of mongrel in you. That’s why us fair dinkum Australians are hard to beat. They were only a couple of minor royals anyway."

Alf Chave was manager in 1962 and in Moscow -- with the Cuban Missile Crisis underway -- he warned the team to be careful of what they said in their rooms because most likely the Communists had them bugged.

Ken lost to the Russian champion in the final before a howling crowd.

Back in the Hotel, Alf Chave heard a commotion from down the corridor and went to investigate. There he saw, through the open door, Kenny addressing the walls of his room: "Righto you pack of Commie bastards. I know you’re listening, so I want you to know your whole country looks like one big second-hand shop!"

As a lonely only child Kenny set about acquiring big families early in life. In Brisbane he became part of the Lunn family and the McKeirnan family. In Cairns he became part of the Lee Longs; in Hong Kong he became part of the Sun family - direct descendants of Sun Yat-sen who made China a republic - and also in Hong Kong he befriended the Pakistani Khan family. Plus he was part of the Australian tennis family with lifelong friends like Frank Sedgman, Margaret Court, Jimmy Moore and Colin Stubs.

Maybe that’s why we all called him "Uncle Ken".

In London Ken created his own family of Carole and their children Julien and Jennifer.

Then in the 1990s, when he returned to Brisbane as a bachelor again, Ken used to say "I’m looking for a girl who is on my side". Finally he met and fell in love with Cathie Creagh and, no doubt about it, he found one. At the same time he acquired Cathie’s huge family to add to his own, and Ken told me he never felt lonely in Brisbane again.

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Ken Fletcher was the best tennis player ever to come out of Brisbane. By far. He won 37 international singles titles -- even winning the Philippines championship on crushed coral.

In Bombay he made the final on a cow dung court.

That day it was 50 degrees in the shade when Ken walked out for the final. He looked up and there were a dozen vultures watching from the trees above. Ken turned and said: "I’m really in the poo here Hughie. If I fall over, I’ll get tetanus -- and if I don’t get up those bloody vultures will eat me!"

In the mid 1960s, Fletch played 10 Wimbledon doubles finals with five different partners, but he never came to terms with the fact that he didn’t win the singles. Seeded as high as three, he was beaten by the winner three years in a row in close matches. In one he served for the match in the fifth set. Which caused Alf Chave to write: "They say that opportunity knocks only once: in Ken Fletcher’s case it has almost battered down the door."

His name became so well known in England that when Keith Fletcher was appointed captain of the England cricket team some London papers called him "Ken Fletcher".

Tennis players the world over accepted that Fletch was more brilliant than themselves: but also more mercurial and less likely to apply himself.

Nothing could keep him down for long. When I was working in London in 1966, Fletch rang me from Nice and said "I’ve won a motza on the roulette tables. I’m rolling in it. I’ve sent you an air ticket. Come over."

At Nice airport Ken was a bit shame faced and said: "Have you got any money for petrol? I’ve done the lot, but I won this VW off the bloke next to me at the table. He wrote out the transfer of ownership on my serviette." So Fletch and I headed off in the VW to the next tournament in Monte Carlo -- and all the way Ken sang at the top of his voice: "I’m the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo."

In Monte Carlo he gambled with Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Princess Lee Radizwell, and Onassis’s nephew Peter Theodore Acropolis at the casino.

Ken was always trying to "pull a rort".

While other tennis players prepared in Europe for the French Open and Wimbledon, Ken played in the back blocks of Egypt in exchange for a free round-the-world ticket from Egypt Air; and then he played in Uganda because he was trying to do a deal importing beaded cardigans and jumpers from Hong Kong into Africa.

The biggest rort Fletch ever tried to pull was when a Chinese millionaire offered him a Rolls Royce if he could get his son into Wimbledon. So Ken entered the Wimbledon doubles with this boy who had no international experience. But the Wimbledon Committee said they would have to play the qualifying tournament.

"Don’t be silly," Fletch said, "we’d never get through." So Ken entered with Newcombe instead and they won the title.

Fletch seemed to like turning up to Grand Slams unprepared.

Margaret Court was shocked when Ken turned up for the final of the 1963 US Mixed Doubles to play Billie-Jean King and Dennis Ralston. "Ken!" Margaret said, "This is our chance to be the first pair ever to win the Grand Slam of Mixed and you haven’t shaved."

"Shaved?" said Ken. "I haven’t even been to bed."

They won anyway.

In the 1965 French Open at Stade Roland Garros, Ken was playing the German champion Ingo Buding on the Centre Court. Ken led early but the French crowd was putting him off by cheering for the German. They didn’t want yet another Australian in the last eight.

Finally Ken walked over and looked up at the crowd towering above, sweat running down his forehead, and yelled: "The bloody Germans were goose-stepping down your Champs-a-bloody-Elysees 20 years ago, and now you’re cheering for the buggers."

South African champion Cliff Drysdale wrote: "Fletcher is a man who loves to get OUT of trouble. He is volcanic, humble, apologetic -- ALL AT ONCE! This man Fletcher mixes with Royalty; gambles with TV stars; and yet likes eating in hot-dog stalls with peasants."

In 1970 Ken abandoned Wimbledon at the last minute to fly to the aid of his friend Farid Khan when Farid had his throat cut by a robber in Coober Pedy, the opal mining town in the middle of the desert.

Fletch accompanied a wounded Farid on his return to the town. I asked Ken if he’d carried a gun. "Carried a gun? I got a bloody cramp in my hand from holding on to it," he said.

That was the end of Ken’s Wimbledon career until the year 2000 when Wimbledon honoured its greatest 60 players of the last century. They flew Kenny over from Brisbane to walk across the red carpet before a capacity Centre Court.

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Kenneth Norman Joseph Fletcher was always looking for sorrows greater than his own.

When I was in his unit one time, many years ago, I went into Ken’s en suite and was surprised by the picture stuck to the back of the door. It was cut from a magazine and stuck up with sticky tape.

It wasn’t a Playboy centrefold; it wasn’t a picture of a racehorse winning at Ascot.

It was a photo of a little child starving in Africa.

I asked Ken why, and he said it was to remind him to seek out those who need help. Which was something Ken did all his life.

I was there in Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1964 when Fletch announced he’d organised to take half a dozen orphans out for Christmas Day: ferry rides, a trip to Kai Tak airport to see the planes, and lunch in the Grand Hotel.

Ken had done it all before and he had a great time.

He always wanted to "make a million dollars" so he could "do good". But it was impossible as a tennis player back then: when he and John Newcombe won the Wimbledon Men’s doubles in 1966 they each received a 20-pound voucher to Lilywhites store.

Ken thus gravitated towards people who could "do good". And his contacts around the world were unparalleled in Australian history.

Ken once talked the Shah of Iran into paying him to take a team of Iranians on a world tennis tour. He took Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Charlton Heston to Wimbledon. Ken took Gerry Sung, one of the richest businessmen in south-east Asia, around the world with him one year as his doubles partner.

Believe it or not, they even won several matches.

An Arab sheik used to send a plane to London to fly Ken to Spain for "fun" weekends. On the way home Ken would open the envelope he was always given: inside a gold watch, or maybe 1000 pounds. This was a real boon for Ken who sometimes had to borrow money to buy his weekly groceries.

Then Ken rang me up: "I’m afraid I’ve put a spoke in the wheel. I’ve told the sheik I can’t spend any more weekends with him because there’s no grog, no gambling and no girls!"

Ken stayed on in London until his 50s and became one of the 330 members of the exclusive Wimbledon Club. Over the decades all of his friends got to experience Ken’s generous hospitality at Wimbledon during the tournament.

Ken’s closest friend in London became the man he most admired: Leonard Cheshire VC, the great British Strategic Air Command pilot. Ken admired Leonard Cheshire -- not as a World War II hero -- but because Leonard opened homes for crippled children and the disabled across Great Britain and in 55 other countries.

"Leonard is a saint," Ken always said.

Back in Hong Kong days in the 1960s Fletch befriended a young Irish-American businessman called Chuck Feeney who opened a duty free store at Hong Kong’s airport. Over the next 30 years, Chuck expanded and ended up with 2,000 duty free stores around the world.

But Chuck did much more than that.

Besides bringing peace to Ireland, Chuck made himself the biggest philanthropist in the world by putting $6000 million in cash into a charitable trust to give away in his own lifetime.

In 1992, Fletch brought Chuck Feeney out to see his home town of Brisbane. Chuck loved our city and decided Ken had escaped for too long and should come home -- so he appointed Ken his man in Australia.

Chuck has so far given more than $200million to Australian medical research institutes and universities: most of it in Queensland.

None of this would have happened but for Ken Fletcher.

Fletch, you did good.