Certain tennis players, myself included, like to emphasize the brutality of the sport. Underneath the genteel image, we say, it’s a vicious mental struggle, a game for tenacious loners, boxing without gloves, hockey with a full set of teeth. And it can be all of those things. But, while this may disappoint the bloodthirsty and the militantly masculine among us, it doesn’t have to be. For one, you’re not really alone on a tennis court, except when you go out to hit a bucket of serves by yourself, and anyone who has ever done that for more than seven minutes knows how much of the charm of this individual sport vanishes when there’s just one individual doing it. And as for the viciousness part, when you scan a set of busy public park courts, or watch the players at your average tennis club on a weekend morning, do you see or hear a lot of competitive savagery? Frustration, yes. Disbelief, yes. Maybe even agony. But if the courts near you are anything like the courts near me, venom is rarely in the air.
What I see and hear is, aside from the moans and groans over missed shots and blown opportunities, a lot of joking around, a lot of razzing, a lot of self-deprecating one-liners. A lot of enjoyment, in other words, of the social rather than the competitive aspect of the game. Everyone at my club is in it together, and on a Saturday morning or a Tuesday evening the place becomes a refuge from the aggressive striving all of us must do in every other aspect of our lives. In this sense, tennis is the opposite of combat. Instead, it’s a rare chance to be outside and to relate to people we know in a way that isn’t about our careers or our families or our ambitions or our raw survival.
Men and women, husbands and wives, friends and doubles teams, play for an hour in the morning, have a burger from the grill for lunch, and head back out for doubles in the early afternoon. Politeness becomes more elaborate and enthusiastic—“take two!”—but at the same time it's the good-natured elbow in the ribs—“Next time just text me your excuses before you get here, Tom”—that is elevated to the highest form of social interaction. The ancient, animalistic need for doing battle may be the foundation of it all, but it isn’t the point, any more than the need to fill your stomach is the point of going to dinner at a good restaurant.
Playing a match in the midst of a crowded weekend morning, you sense the atmosphere of a tennis club through its sounds—words, grunts, barks, laughs, shrieks, hisses whatever they may be. I played Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this past weekend; let me try to conjure a little of the atmosphere through what I heard.
*
“Feels great, doesn’t it?”
These are the words of my playing partner, Keith, as we make the slow, back-stepping walk from the net to the baseline before we begin to warm-up. He’s flinging his arms out to his side as he talks. On the one hand it’s the typical rec player’s half-hearted attempt at stretching, but it’s also the movement of a guy who has spent too much time cooped up at work and is savoring the chance just to get his body in motion. What “feels great” to him is the sunny, dry weather, and the lucky chance to get out and play after a day at work. He’s right, it does feel great
*
“Ha-choo!”
I hear this, as I’m running for a ball, from the apartment building that sits right next to the court where I’m playing. I miss the shot. How do the pros block that stuff out? When I tell my opponent that’s why I missed, he’s not overly sympathetic. I'm not sure he believes me.
*
“Let’s go, El Presidente, get out here!”
This is yelled from Court 1 toward the club’s president, who is late for his doubles match.
*
“Do you practice that shot?”
My opponent, John, has just missed a towering defensive lob by less than half an inch. Two games earlier he landed the same shot smack on the line, quietly enraging me. He has an uncanny accuracy with this shot, but he smiles and shakes his head at my question—no, he doesn’t practice it. This doesn't make me any happier.
*
“Do you think you could beat Bill Tilden, if he time-traveled to this court?”
I’m asked this by Keith. We both think, based on no evidence, that we could. Then again, when I watch the 1980 Wimbledon final between Borg and McEnroe, I feel like, at times, that I could beat both of them. I couldn’t.
*
“I thought I played well today, and I thought you were a little inconsistent.”
This is John as we shake hands after our match. He's beginning a part of the tennis experience that I especially look forward to: The post-match analysis of my game and my opponent’s game. We play, and then we come together afterward to talk about how we played. It’s as if we did it only so we could talk about it.
*
“Kill the sun, gonna kill the sun.”
This is me, muttering after a double-fault, very angry that the sun chose that moment to come out from behind a cloud and get right in my eye as I tossed the ball. When I watch the pros, I usually scoff when they blame a bad bounce or something else beyond their control. Now I’m talking about killing the sun. What would I do if there was money on the line? Throw my racquet at it?
*
“You hear that, man? He’s scared of you, he wants it to rain!”
This is the club’s groundskeeper talking to my opponent, Rich, as we wait to go on court. I’ve just asked him whether it’s supposed to rain that afternoon.
*
“You’ve never seen me in full regalia, have you?”
I’m asked this question by a gregarious, gray-haired of the club who typically plays in a tank top. Today he’s dressed up. He’s wearing a T-shirt.
*
“Spring!”
This is simultaneously hollered, à la the old “Norm!” greeting in Cheers, by three members of a doubles foursome as their fourth clanks open the gate and walks on court. His last name is Spring. What is it about calling someone by their last name that says so much more about the person than calling him by his first name? “Spring!” sums everything up about him, with that double-edged male combination of irony and affection. You can see that hearing it makes Spring feel good, recognized, an individual but also one of the guys. You can also hear that it makes the guys who are saying it feel good; its always great, unaccountably great, to see a friend. It's for this moment, as much as any other, that we come down on a Saturday morning to play tennis.
*
I don’t like you
But I love you
Seems that I’m always thinking of you
Wait, what is this I hear, while I’m collecting a ball at the back fence, from deep inside an apartment right behind me? It’s part Fender, part John Lennon scream, part soaring harmony, part thumping drums: It’s the sound of a Beatles song, which I never expected to here deep in this section of Brooklyn, where disco and reggae reign. This is a digital version, which is fine, but you don’t have to be a music snob to recognize that nothing can beat the jammed-up power of the Beatles in old-fashioned, original mono. It will take the world’s audio geniuses a thousand years to come up with a new recording technique that begins to approach the excitement of hearing the Beatles on a mono slab of vinyl.
The sound of that Fender, of Lennon’s voice: It triggers a thousand memories as I play. Riding back from Kmart staring at the Sgt. Pepper record my dad had just bought me when I was 11. Sitting a couple inches from my parents old hi-fi listening to “All My Loving”—have I ever been as excited about anything the way I was excited as a kid when the first notes of that song rushed in (and more than most songs, they rush in)? Up in my room with a 6th-grade friend, who had just started “going with” a girl who lived on my block, playing “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” over and over to infuriate him. In a car with two college friends blasting “Roll over Beethoven” and “Thank You Girl.” My roommate and I were in the front seats; we were old friends and had bonded over our shared music obsessions for years. We were just starting to hang out with the guy in back. At one point he leaned forward and said, “I love how Lennon just screams everything. Has anyone else every sung that way?” My roommate and I didn’t look at each other, but there was a moment of silence—electric silence—that communicated everything. Call it the music lover’s version of a group hug. We knew we had a new friend.
*
“Tssssss.”
This is the hiss of the black cat that hangs around the courts. At dusk, when the last players are walking off, he—or she—wastes no time in sliding through a hole in the fence and immediately plopping down on the first court in full lounge mode. It looks like the cooling clay feels good. He’s right behind our court now. I'm pretty sure he’s saying that it’s time for me to go.