Tennis in its old, pre-showbiz form, was a sun sport. The amatuers followed it to Australia, through the European continent, and across the sea, by ocean liner, to America, where the U.S. circuit finished with the extended wrap-up party known as the Nationals. That party, now called the U.S. Open, is still held over the same end-of-summer weeks, but it no longer marks the end of anything.
In recent years, though, the close of the U.S. Open marked the close of my own playing season. Maybe it was the overload of tennis I got during those two Grand Slam weeks, but for a decade I’ve been walking off the tennis courts in Flushing Meadows and onto the squash courts in my neighborhood. Late April to mid-September seemed like the right amount tennis for me. I could let the racquets hibernate in the closet over the winter. When I picked them up again in the spring, they felt new, strange, fresh when I spun them in my hand—they felt good again.
This year was different for a couple of reasons. First, having done both weeks of the French Open and Wimbledon for the first time, my tennis season didn’t get underway until mid-July. That would have only given me two months to run around outdoors before I committed myself back to the great grim indoors of the gym. Second, after finally doing something I should have done five years ago—switching from a 90-95 inch frame to a 100—I was playing some pretty decent tennis. Now that I had a little juice back on the ball, it seemed a shame to chuck that 100-square-inch racquet into the closet so soon.
So this time around I kept myself planted on the tennis courts through September and all of October. Last night was the annual year-end dinner at my club, which must be some sort of hint. The nets do stay up, though, and some of the crazies I know play through the first snow and beyond. But with the sun, the temperature, and the leaves all falling fast, my days outdoors are numbered.
I’m glad I lasted as long as I did. I’d forgotten that this summer game is really at its best in autumn. It may be hard for those of us in the North to remember now, but we had a blazingly hot and humid July and August. I recall them mainly through afternoons spent sweating on sun-baked clay courts, with the cicadas' vicious music rising all around me. By October, the cicadas were gone, replaced by hyper squirrels, and the air was very different. It was easy on you; it even felt, when I was playing well, <em>helpful</em>.
There are other changes that I’d forgotten. People seem a little less competitive in the fall, a little more willing to chat and laugh with an opponent, start a conversation across courts, or talk to people outside of their normal cliques. The battles, such as they were, are mostly over, the club tournament is finished, the hopes for permanent improvement are long gone. We’re happy just to have these few last days to play in the weakened sun. For most of the people at my club, which is outdoors-only, all they have to look forward to is a long, overpriced winter under a nearby bubble, slipping and sliding on bumpy, ill-kept clay.
On the downside, or at least on the challenging side, the sun moves at a much lower arc across the sky now. By mid-October, it could barely lift itself above the five-story apartment buildings that sit a few feet behind the courts on their south end. When you face that way, you get an eyeful of glare; it’s all you can do to raise your lids high enough to glimpse your opponent as he sets up to serve. And as the ball comes to you, it passes through half-a-dozen transitions from light to shade that are created by the tall trees that surround the courts. Now you see the ball, now you don’t, now you do, now you don’t, until it’s right on your strings.
No one minds, though. The leaves alone—they’re red and yellow now instead of the lurid, overgrown green of summer—are a reason to play. It’s hard to become suitably enraged over an error in that colorful environment. If you do, though, you can always kick an acorn across the clay. I also like the feeling of playing in a sweatshirt, and the delayed sweat you work up under it as you go. In the fall, sweat isn’t automatic; you know you’ve earned it.
I’ll be back again this time next year. Unitl then, I'll keep one particular memory in mind. It was an early Saturday afternoon last month, and unlike early Saturday afternoons during the summer, there was no problem getting a court. The air was at its crispest and most helpful, the way it so rarely is in New York, or anywhere east of the Mississippi. The leaves were changing, the squirrels were bustling, there was a football game on the club’s TV. Even the cars in the parking lot looked better than normal in the lower light. I felt from the first swing of the warm-up that I was going to play well—also a rarity—and I did. My partner and I stayed out for nearly three hours, much longer than usual. At each change of ends, we took a sip of water, nodded our heads, and repeated the same thing before heading to the other side of the court: “Perfect day for tennis.” There was nothing else to say.