Sri Chinmoy died on Thursday, October 11.

Bermudians with memories dating back 30 years might remember the name. Then again, when I asked ten friends today, of varying ages, if they'd ever heard of Sri Chinmoy, all of them said no.

I'm looking at the death announcement –- a little feature article, actually, in Canada's National Post newspaper (Tuesday, October 16, 2007).

It is headlined "Mystic performed rare physical feats". And I thought back to the day, 30 years ago in Bermuda, when my friend "Cressie Swan" (then in his early 80s) gave Sri Chinmoy his first "serious" tennis lesson.

The "genial Indian-born spiritual leader", as the newspaper article described him, died at his home in Queens, New York, where he ran a meditation centre. He was 76.

One particular paragraph of the "obit" caught my eye:

"Hundreds of his disciples gathered (last) Friday at his private clay tennis court, which doubled as a verdant meditation site known as 'Aspiration Ground'."

Sri Chinmoy would have been 46 the day I introduced him to my friend Cressie Swan – the greatest "senior" tennis player (I believe) who ever picked up a tennis racket. Cressie was so good as a "junior" in his teens that when he played Don Budge – the first to win all four grand slam events in one year – they played on level terms. And Budge, reflecting on racial realities of the time, told Cressie: "Ah son, you were born too soon." More about that in a moment.

Sri Chinmoy had come to Bermuda in December of 1977, with about 50 of his followers, ostensibly to give public talks about meditation (and be interviewed by the TV station where I worked throughout the 1970s) as well as to run a marathon around "the Island, 21 miles long and a mile wide".

His followers were mostly young men from New York – many of them, I recall with Jewish family names and given names from India. Names like "Harsha" and "Ashrita" (given to them by Sri Chinmoy).

I was a reporter for Bermuda's CBS affiliate ZBM when I attended a public talk on meditation; there I spoke with one of Sri Chinmoy's followers – his name was "Harsha" – who told me that Sri Chinmoy had "just taken up tennis" and "plays for several hours a day".

"Would he like to play with a real tennis master – a Bermudian in his 80s?" I asked. Their meeting was arranged the very next day at Bermuda's public tennis stadium, where Cressie had spent some of his finest hours.

It was on the same greenish-gray, clay court that I'd watched with amazement as Cressie played on level terms with some young "teaching pros" from one of Bermuda's largest hotels. It seemed to me that Cressie would "ease up" on his game – just enough that the young pro would pull out a narrow victory – and feel good about himself. (Good enough to pay for the court time, and perhaps look forward to playing Cressie "again some time".)

After arranging the meeting on the tennis court for Cressie and Sri Chinmoy, I was prevented (by my job) from being there. But it seemed to have been such a wonderful learning experience for the 'meditation master' that he asked Cressie for another meeting the next day. I caught the tail end of that "lesson" – the second and final meeting of two "masters".

My picture was snapped by one of Sri Chinmoy's followers, as I stood next to Cressie, who was beaming with pride and happiness. I remember looking at him and thinking that he was glowing with a sort of youthful energy.

"Harsha" provided me with this photo of Cressie Swan and Sri Chinmoy at the net.

Weeks later, I received by mail a copy, signed and dated "December 30, 1977". Included was a brief note. Harsha wrote that, when the colour slide photos of their Bermuda visit were shown at his meditation centre in Queens, Sri Chinmoy singled out my picture – recognising the person who'd arranged his first real tennis lesson, with Cressie. Harsha claimed Sri Chinmoy pointed me out, saying: "This man did a great thing for me!" Harsha added a personal observation, that this was "a very rare thing" for Sri Chinmoy to say (and) I thought you'd like to know that."

Cressie was 16 years old when Don Budge first visited Bermuda. Cressie was then looking after a grass tennis court in Pembroke. The court, long-gone by the 1970s, had been located not far from "Top Hill above Cox's Hill" where Cressie and I lived next door to each other.

"The court that Cressie built," had a most remarkable reputation: it stayed green when all other grass courts had been burned brown and dead-looking during periods of drought, when Bermuda has to import water to top up tanks and cisterns depleted by lack of rain.

Don Budge heard about this court and came, ostensibly to see it. He met the young groundskeeper, "Cressie", who demonstrated the incredible hardness of that green surface. Cressie told me: "You could hit a ball into the court and it would fly up and over nearby trees!"

After chatting with Cressie for a while about how Wimbledon could use his expertise at keeping courts green, the two played some tennis. And Don Budge realised this teenager was exceptionally gifted. That was when the tennis great told Cressie, sadly that he was "born too soon".

Cressie, who was very poor, and depended on relatives for accommodation, used to spend a lot of time with my wife Irene and me. We would watch Wimbledon together. Cressie had great insight into tennis — it was almost spiritual, his level of understanding. Often he would say to me: "Watch, he'll lose the point." And the volley might continue for several more shots, but his prediction always came true.

"How did you know?" I would ask.

His answers varied: One time he might say, "You have to know when you're beaten by the ball." That would be after one player managed some extraordinary return – running cross-court and managing to get the return, but only just barely – expending a lot of energy in the process. (I watched Cressie do this to younger opponents – keeping the ball just barely within reach of his opponent, in order to set up some longer volleying – draining his opponent of energy when the fellow should have known "when he was beaten by the shot" and should have conceded the point.

Other times, when Cressie said: "Watch, he'll lose this point," it was a case of one player being the first, in the midst of volleying back and forth but from the same angle, so that the two players were remaining almost stationary in one area of the court. The first player to interrupt that volleying, by changing the direction — so the opponent suddenly had to scramble to reach the ball —- that player who initiated the change very often lost the point. (Watch for this, next time you take in some tennis action.)

My friend Cressie was even more amazing, to me, as a carpenter. Fine carpentry (including wood panelling jobs for the apartments of millionaires in New York City) was his other achievement in life. And he was a true master carpenter.

In Bermuda I spoke to tradesmen, then middle-aged, who told me things like: "Cressie installed a door for my mother when I was a little boy. It's still swinging perfectly today!" (A reflection about Bermuda's high humidity, which wreaks havoc with doors and door frames causing them to 'bind' against each other.

Lesser carpenters, Cressie said, would blame the wood, saying it wasn't seasoned as well as "in the old days", but Cressie said that was just a "workman blaming his tools" for a job poorly done.

When Cressie installed doors in the luxury hotels built in Bermuda in the 1940s and 50s, some of those other carpenters would ridicule him for taking an extra half-hour to install each door. But those doors, he recalled to me, would always swing perfectly because of the "tricks of the trade" and the special insights Cressie brought to his work.

As I write this, I'm looking at page 178 of the 1988 Guinness Book of Records. It shows a big colour picture of one of those young men I met among Sri Chinmoy's followers 30 years ago. The photo is captioned: "Pogo Stick jumping: Ashrita Furman, 31, of New York, set a distance record of 11.5 miles in eight hours, 21 minutes on 8 January 1986. His route was up and down the foothills of Mount Fuji Japan."

I remember reading something from the Guinness Book of Records to Cressie. It concerned the thinnest slice of anything that anyone had ever made. Some sort of diamond saw cutting some form of rock — its thickness measured in thousandths of an inch.

"No, no, no," said Cressie. And I watched with bafflement (that would soon turn into amazement) as he took out his plane and got a piece of Bermuda cedar (the island's national tree and which Cressie, as a master carpenter, knew from experience, could produce the finest of wood shavings.

After sharpening the blade to his satisfaction (a process that seemed to take forever) he took a couple of preliminary strokes. Then he stroked the plane one more time and produced a small shaving. He stared at me intently, as if to ensure I appreciated the significance of what I was about to see: namely, the finest shaving of anything, that anyone had ever made in the history of the world.

He held it up for me to see, above his head and released it. In the still air of the room, my living room in Bermuda, the shaving took 45 seconds to reach the floor. It looked to me (I would say today) a little like that feather at the end of 'Forest Gump', as it appears to flutter upward, as much as downward.

Just as an aside: In the almost ten years that I knew him, Cressie Swan was single. He confided one time over dinner at our place that he'd had a girl he'd intended to marry but she died young. And it broke his heart and he never found anyone he could love as much. Oh yes, and how did he get a name like "Cressie"? He told me that when he was born, there was a ship parked in Hamilton harbour named . He laughed when he told me that, as if to say: "What's in a name?"

Cressie made it to age 100 (I'm told) living out his final days in an 'old folks home' in Bermuda – more than a decade after we'd said goodbye, for the last time, as I returned to Canada. I'd like to think that there's a heaven where these 'masters' of their respective fields get to meet for the first time. Or perhaps to "meet again'', in the case of Sri Chinmoy of India and my friend Cressie Swan of Bermuda.