Thanksgiving asks us to be thankful on command, which isn’t all that easy. When I walked down the street this morning, was I as thankful as I should have been for that last yellow leaf hanging from an otherwise barren tree on my block? Probably not—once it’s gone, after all, there’s only cold hard colorless winter ahead. If you have to think about appreciating something, how appreciative of it can you really be?
But there is one thing that I have no trouble being thankful for, and it happens to fit right in with this column. Even better, I get to appreciate it virtually every day. Here’s what happens: I walk into my gym, and on the way down to the locker room I pass the treadmills. There I see a line of people running in place, staring straight ahead at nothing—this gym doesn't equip its treadmills with little TV sets; all you get for your veiwing pleasure is another treadmill-runner staring back at you from the other side of the room.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I pass a dark room. Inside are a dozen people bicycling in place, as fast they can. Disco blares and a man yells, like a friendly drill sergeant, at the cyclists. It is at this point that I am officially thankful—thankful that I don’t have to get on a treadmill or walk into a dark room full of bicycles. Thankful, above all, that I picked up a tennis racquet as a kid, which saved me from those fates.
I realize that running and spinning have their appeal. I do the former in the summer, and I know people who swear by the endorphin rush they get from the latter. I need that rush, too. It lightens life, clears the cobwebs and the sweat, promotes sanity. Everything is easier to savor—your food, your music, your Martini—with exercise. Even bad music. Last week I walked back from the gym and stopped at the bagel store. The place pipes in soft 1970s pop, stuff you don’t have to pay attention to. It was the same on this morning, but the song that was playing as I waited in line—the ultimate in bubblegum pap, King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight”—suddenly sounded like a happy masterpiece. Its most comical line, “Everyone here is out of sight,” seemed like the simple truth of life revealed. Everything <em>did</em> feel kind of out of sight.
(It works with good music, too, by the way. Recently I played a morning squash game before work and put on my IPod on the subway ride afterward. As the IPod will occasionally do, it landed randomly and fortuitously on a forgotten favorite, Tom Waits’ “Hang Down Your Head.” I'd liked him in college, but I’d never been part of his cult, exactly; not enough tune to his songs for me. But on this morning, riding a squash rush, the song hit hard in a sad, mesmerizing—and tuneful—way. It’s a melancholy break-up song, but its elegiac quality was exhilarating in the moment.)
Back to my point, which is that tennis and squash offer more than the raw, mood-altering endorphin rush of exercise. There’s the mental exercise involved in strategic thinking, of course, as well as the hand-eye coordination and delicate touch needed to put the ball exactly where you want it to go. More important, there’s the society that surrounds these sports, that’s created by them. Ten years ago, the common conservative, small-town lament was that people in America were “bowling alone”; we weren’t joining together in clubs and on teams anymore. The <em>New Yorker</em>’s Adam Gopnik provided the liberal-urban counter-point, that the modern yuppie equivalent of the bowling league was the gym, where we were satisfied to be alone together. That seemed like a true, if not exactly comforting, explanation.
Tennis and squash bring us a step closer. We compete alone and together. While you may or may not like the round-robin format at the pro level, I’ve found it to be the best way to play the two sports. As a teenager, I was part of a loose group of players who got together and took over the local college tennis courts each day around 6:00 P.M. (There’s another societal change in the direction of workaholic yuppiedom—I’m still at the office at 6:00 these days). We rotated partners each day, but there was no set schedule. You’d finish a match with Gary, and call over to Rob, who was two courts down, “We’re on for tomorrow, right?”
The same is true at my club today. Two guys who are part of my rotation might be playing each other on the court next to me. On a changeover or during a break, I'll set up a future game with each of them. I can’t tell you why this simple interaction is so re-assuring. There’s a sense, I guess, that there’s always a match coming up, and that moving from one opponent to the next will always keep the sport fresh. Still, while it’s hardly cutthroat competition, the competitive aspect does count. “How did you do against so-and-so?” is always the question the next day. It's important to keep something on the line, so that tennis doesn't become <em>just</em> socializing.
The round-robin can be taken a step further in squash. My club has four courts, lined up next to each other, which means you can rotate between four or five opponents over the course of one afternoon. Soon, maybe next weekend, I’ll walk into the club, past the trudging treadmillers and the maniacal spinners, and walk up to the squash courts. There might be five or six people there (men and women compete in singles in this sport). One might be stretching. Two other might be talking about football or Wall Street or their 3-year-olds. Another will be out on the court, warming up, hitting that little black ball against the bright while walls. Like a tennis court on a sunny day, the squash court will appear to have all the energy of the world gathered inside it. The purity of the white walls set off by the simple red boundary lines is more than beautiful—it makes you hungry to get out on it.
Here’s the moment I’ll be most thankful for. The guy hitting on that court will turn around and see me. He’ll lean out and ask, “You ready?” I’ll take off my warm-up jacket, grip my racquet, start walking forward, and answer, with more antipication than I've had for just about anything else all week: "Let's do it."
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Have a good Thanksgiving