Playing Ball: A Personal Year in Review

’Tis the season...for Top 10 lists. The best players, craziest shots, most dramatic matches, biggest chokes, ugliest insults: An 11-month tennis-watching season will always produce its share of memorable moments, as well as a few that we might charitably describe as “part of the learning process”—are you listening, Nick Kyrgios? To me, it has been worth recalling that while this was the year of Kyrgios, it was also the year of Tim Smyczek. Remember when the American gave a first serve back to Rafael Nadal late in their five-setter at the Australian Open, and reminded us, for a day or two at least, that sportsmanship wasn’t dead after all? Yes, that happened in 2015.

But if looking back at our seasons on the couch can be a rewarding and clarifying experience, what about our seasons on the court—what are the "takeaways" from them? Maybe there’s something to be gained from reviewing your own highs and lows over the last 12 months, and seeing what, if anything, they reveal. Here's a look back at a few of mine.

In New York City, where I live, this was a tennis year that began in darkness and bitter cold, and ended in disturbingly glorious 65-degree weather.

It’s difficult to remember now, but at this time last year those of us in the Northeast were in the midst of what a hardy soul might call a “proper winter.” Boston was soon to be buried by a bizarrely relentless series of blizzards; the last of that city’s snow wouldn’t be carted away until late spring. While things weren’t quite as dire in New York, my memory of tennis in January is one long, icy, slippery, deathly-dark walk from the subway exit to a set of bubbled, badly lit Har-Tru courts.

This year, for the first time in a decade, I played in a winter foursome once a week. While the clay was bumpy, the court was crowded, and the bubble had seen better days, those evening sessions eventually paid off. With just an hour to work up a sweat, none of us wanted to play doubles; it’s fun, obviously, but not a great workout. Instead, we spent six months playing baseline games, moving from one rally to the next as quickly as possible. By the time May came around, and the bubble came down, I was hitting the ball as consistently as I had hit it in, well, a decade. And for the first time in a long time, it felt like my game wasn’t destined to slowly but surely erode.

By the time Christmas and winter roll around, the spring hard-court season is largely a blur in my memory. How did the Djokovic-Federer men’s final in Indian Wells play out? What hilarious thing did Jelena Jankovic say to her coach on the sidelines in the women’s final? I watched both of those matches live, but they feel like distant memories now.

Yet that’s not true of the tennis I played in the desert this spring. On two early mornings during Indian Wells, an old college teammate, Lee, and I got out on the hard courts at the nearby La Quinta resort, where he was staying. Lee and I had run into each other at the tournament the previous March, but this was the first time we had played in more than 20 years. It didn’t take us long to find a familiar groove, on court and off. Our side-to-side rallies seemed to pick up where they had left two decades earlier,  and after a few minutes I found myself calling him by the nickname we used for him on the team, “Leo.” A lawyer with kids now, he looked virtually the same as he had in the early '90s, when he wore a red headband and fist-pumped his way through our run to an NCAA Division III title. “Too good!” he would bark in his opponent’s direction after hitting a winner.

Twenty years later, there were no fist pumps, or even many winners, between us. Lee and I spent those early mornings, at the foot of the rocky Santa Rosa mountains, as the desert air grew stickier by the minute, happy just to move each other around and get off the court before the sun climbed too high in California’s wide blue sky.

Tennis and books went hand in hand for me this year. Getting to my club requires an hour-long, two-borough subway ride each way, and you never know what the service will be like on weekends. The upside is that reading is pretty much all you can do to pass the time. Those long, stop-and-start treks through the city allowed me to grind through a few books I may or may not have had the patience to finish otherwise—Savage Detectives, My Struggle, Roderick Hudson, The Duke’s Children, Dept. of Speculation, Redeployment, Island at the Center of the World, Rick Perlstein’s history of conservatism, Before the Storm, Eric Foner’s post-Civil War history, Reconstruction.

But the tennis-and-reading connection reached its peak for me during a weekend that I spent away from the city, at a camp in upstate New York. It's a immersive experience: You’re on court for 10 hours over the course of two days. When I was done, I had a newfound respect for anyone who has to play a five-set match. By the end of those five sets, you must be not only physically exhausted, but also thoroughly sick of seeing your opponent’s face on the other side of the court. No wonder the top guys don't want to hang out together.

At the end of one of those grueling sessions, I walked slowly and a little creakily back to my room, which had a view of the rural campgrounds. I put my aching legs up, and flipped through a poetry anthology until I came to a Thomas Gray poem whose quiet description of a countryside at sunset echoed the early spring scene outside the window. The sun was down but the sky still blue; the air was brisk and while it was already April, the tree branches were still leafless. Tennis players, solo and in small groups, their backs bent forward by the weight of their racquet bags, walked on paths that led to the camp’s various sets of courts. The world, just as it was ready to grow again, had come to a standstill. In the months since, I’ve re-read the poem, but never recaptured the feeling. Being so exhausted must have left me open to the words’ mood of muted contentment.

The season peaked for me in early August. I had improved through the summer; the Tuesday hitting sessions in the bubble, the weekend at the upstate camp, the twice-a-week matches at my outdoor club in Brooklyn had come together to help me play better, steadier tennis than, frankly, I thought was possible. More important, perhaps, I had lost 10 pounds at my doctor’s insistence, and restrung my racquets for the first time in a year.

More speed, more stamina, more control: Out of nowhere, I had them all. At times, the ball seemed to jump off my strings, and go where I wanted to go, with hardly any conscious effort from me. I wouldn’t even say I was conscious of being more “confident,” as we like to say in tennis; the quality of, say, my return of serve was a surprise every time. It made me think that confidence is less a mental process than a physical one—what matters most is practice, and being fit enough to put yourself in a position to repeat what you’ve practiced over and over.

May, June, July: I hit the ball well throughout. Finally, in mid-August, I traveled to a club north of the city to play a friend who I had rarely beaten in the past. He’s younger, physically stronger, hits a bigger ball, and has the modern forehand topspin swing. Where I flatten balls out and sidespin them into corners with my forehand, he rips over top of his with a Nadal-like uppercut. I need to need to hit two forehands to win a point; he can do it with one.

But this, I felt, was my chance; this time a win over my friend didn’t seem out of the question. Through the first set and a half, it looked like it was going to happen. I was the player hitting big serves, the one controlling the rallies, the one putting together shot combinations that led to winners. He was the one who was pressing.

Down 2-3 in the second, though, he stopped pressing. He seemed to decide that, while this was just a pick-up match, and while he had nothing to prove and probably didn’t care about winning, he did care about losing—i.e., he didn’t want to do it. From that point on, he was more patient, more willing to rally rather than just rip. And that, in a nutshell, was the end for me. If he was willing to hit the ball with depth and consistency, there was nothing I could do to hurt him. I lost the second 6-4.

We had split sets, and the sun was going down, so I got on the train back to the city. The triumphant capstone to my summer had eluded me. So why did that match feel so good to play, and why does that warm afternoon glow in my memory now? Thinking about it, I remember what a respected tennis coach once asked me: "If winning is everything," he said, "why don’t we just play opponents we know we can beat?" It isn’t winning by itself that matters; it’s challenging yourself. This year I was good enough to challenge myself.

As 2015 winds down, I feel like my tennis life has been extended. I’m in the middle of it again, with a chance to change what had seemed an inevitable downward trajectory. It’s winter again, and I’m making the same dark trek to the bubble each week. My last match there came on the darkest day of the year, in fact, December 22. Walking though the streets to the courts put me in mind of another poem, Robert Frost’s well-known "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," which is set on the same date.

There’s no snow in New York now, only rain, but the early darkness at this time of year can be just as torpor-inducing as it was for Frost. Still, as long as the ride to the club is, and as tempted as I am at times to skip it and stay home, I always walk off those bumpy clay courts happy that I made the effort, and happy that I played. Even in the dead of winter, tennis can make the blood flow again. For me, that’s the most important takeaway from 2015, and one that will keep me playing into a new year.

Have a great holiday, and I'll see you back here in 2016. A new season, on the couch and on the court, is almost upon us.