[You know, with all the hype and glitter about to rain down on us from the US Open, I just can't think of a finer, more "real" post to give you than this. Ray, is there such a thing as a "prose laureate"? - Pete]
A week has passed since my hit with Nathan. A serving drill we did has stuck with me: he gave me balls with their label down and had me try to read them while serving. This is harder than it might seem. You have to toss the ball without letting it spin, and really stare at it before you can yell out: "Penn 4!" The drill makes you concentrate on performing a very deliberate toss and focusing on the ball, and meanwhile your conscious mind is off your serve. After trying it for a while, I find my serve has almost magically become more consistent. Good times!
From the warmup, I have a sense that my last match in West Virginia, the final of the aforementioned Rotary Club tournament, is going to be tough. My opponent, Don, is about twenty-two and has solid topspin strokes off both sides. I don't see any weaknesses that I can exploit, and I doubt I can grind down a guy this much younger than me. He also seems to like a target, so I will have to come to net only off quality approaches.
But I have something pretty important in my favor: I've played tons and tons of tennis over the last two weeks. I feel relaxed, even as I discover than Don can hurt me with winners to my backhand side, and that he moves well enough to track down most anything I hit. After a long game with six or seven deuces, I break him in the first game and win the first set 6-2, largely because I'm fully dialed in, while his level is still improving.
The second set is a different story. I start getting a little cocky and hitting my serve too hard, missing too many firsts, and throwing myself out of rhythm. His shot tolerance gets higher, I double-fault a few times and the set slips away. Have I mentioned I have a problem with second sets? Anyway, because of the heat and the schedule, the director of the club tells us to play a ten-point match tiebreaker instead of a of third.
I'm nervous and calm at the same time. Something Steve Tignor once wrote pops into my head, to the effect of: "In tennis, no matter how bad it is, the other guy is always only two points away from the same feeling." That and a long-ago TW post on choking by Codepoke have really helped my competitive mindset - I try to focus less on my nerves than on making the other guy feel his. So on the first point of the tiebreaker, I hit a return wide to Don's backhand and come to net. He's ready. He hits a low pass that starts to get behind me, but somehow, I stab a backhand volley that drops over for a winner. Lucky, really. It's all I need though. I hit a couple of good serves to go up 3-0 and cruise the rest of the way.
I can honestly say it was probably the best match I've played. I was never a junior player or on a tennis team, so playing matches is still a big treat to me. Oh, and did I mention my tournament winnings? Four brand-new cans of tennis balls! Back at my dad's place, his comment is classic, "What happened to you in the second set?" Nothing can dent my mood, though, and we light some charcoal and eat a good dinner of grass-fed ribeye steaks. Early the next morning, we go to the courts a last time and, I confess it, I deliver a bagel to my father.
Taking the northern route, I stop for two nights with my sister in Buffalo, where I hit some balls with my nephew and niece. It's been a great trip, eighteen-hundred solo miles in the Jeep, but it still makes me happy to get back to my turf, good old Elizabeth Street. I'm looking forward to playing again on my home courts in East River Park on the Lower East Side, where you play to the din and rumble of traffic on the looming Williamsburg Bridge. (Sadly, my frequency will be down to two times a week, if I'm lucky.) As many truly pleasant tennis clubs as I visited and enjoyed, the frazzled democracy of New York City public courts is what I like best.
*
A question was on my mind during the two weeks of my tennis road trip. I wondered it about the occupants of other cars as I whizzed by cornfields and truck stops. I wondered it about all my peeps on the West Virginia tennis courts. I wondered it about the woman who rang up my deep-fried chicken sandwich with pickles. I wondered it about the guy who sold me corn and peaches from his roadside stand, and about the guy behind me in line, wearing overalls and a t-shirt that says "I taught your girlfriend that thing she likes."
Federer or Nadal?
As it turns out, most people I asked like Andy Roddick. Hey, it's the heartland. I love asking people about tennis - evangelizing about tennis is like one of my hobbies. It's even gotten me out of an imminent bar fight once. Of all sports, tennis is the one that offers fans the most revealing and dramatic glimpses into human character, and offers players the clearest test of their self-belief. No matter what you know about wrist snaps or racquet-head speed, you can be fascinated by the fear and desire that ebbs and flows in a tennis match, or by the way you can feel a double-fault coming like a darkening sky finally cracking open with rain.
The innate drama of tennis is what motivates me to play, too. I just enjoy feeling that some moments are more meaningful than others. Some moments can't be taken back. People smoke cigarettes, it is said, as a way to mark time, to cordon off ten minutes from time's endless unfolding. Playing tennis matches is like that: they're discrete periods in which everything else fades out of importance. I don't always enjoy playing - who does, when nothing is working? - and I'm just a junior varsity-caliber athlete who plays for no tangible stakes. But I always have a sense that it means something, if only to me: that it matters when you're on a tennis court.
--- R. Stonada