In the middle of this charming country-style kitchen sits Maplesugar's venerable cat Frances. Maplesugar writes:
This is my all-suffering cat, Frances, my tennis match-watching partner. Luckily, she is somewhat deaf, as she is an old gal, so she only hears the most high-pitched of my tennis-watching shrieks. Her eyes get as large as dinner plates, and before she leaves me (sitting on the edge of my couch, eyes glued on the T.V.), she seems to give me a backwards disdaining look as she departs for a more civilized part of the house.
(I notice that many of our pet stories so far involve emotional encounters during matches.)
Doesn't she look cute? Don't you want your pet (or you yourself) featured here? Send in photos. And news, too! When am I going to get to practice my Page-Six style of writing?
On the thread about Asad, Andrew and Tom’s journey out to play at Flushing Meadows, we were all swapping our own tennis-playing stories, so today I will regale you with the story of my lessons, such as they have been. I’ve taken two sets of community group lessons and progressed reasonably well, though all I really learned was a few basic strokes and a serve. The slice and I are still strangers to each other except by accident, and footwork—well, my footwork basically consists of reminding myself to take those “few little adjustment steps” that Johnny Mac or Courier or someone is always blathering about on TV. I’m sure I look like I’m trying to cha-cha out of the way of the ball, but it’s a start.
The first coach I had was a former NCAA player from Romania, and the second one was a then-active NCAA player from Germany. (This was around last summer, when P-Mac was singing a lot about the woeful influx of foreign students into the NCAA tennis ranks. Based on this sample size, he had a point, but I happen to know that both were on teams full of Americans.) Both were hilarious. One taught open stance, one taught closed. One really got us up to working on volleys and the serve, one clearly thought we were all a lost cause and just worked on groundstrokes.
I bought some cheapo equipment for the classes, and just for the record, the $20-clearance Wilson tennis shoes are still fine, but the Wilson Grand Slam racket ($25, I think) has to be the worst racket for any but the most recreational of players. It’s feather-light and has an embarrassingly large surface area, which would be all right if the head had any weight. Since I am clearly a child of this generation and have no skill or game plan except to whale the stuffing out of the ball from the baseline, I need weight on the swing!
End of rant. I dragged a couple of friends to the classes with me, and the classes only had 8 people each, so I had my own posse. We didn’t really learn anyone’s names, but there were definitely personas. I thought they were all fine to encounter for an hour each week, but one of my less charitably minded friends started giving them all Homeric epithets: Obnoxious middle-aged woman. Obnoxious hard-hitting guy. Airheaded girl. You get the idea. (Her vocabulary is not poor; I am using ‘obnoxious’ as a stand-in). I had some sympathy for Hard-Hitting Guy, who I think hit hard because he had no ability to control his power, like me. Middle-Aged Woman, who was substantially older than anyone else in the class, felt the need to mock her practice partner constantly. Maybe she was trying to be funny and/or helpful, but I did notice that there was no self-mockery happening.
I was surprised, though, at how little most of the students knew about tennis. Almost nobody watched tennis for fun, knew how to keep score, or could explain what the doubles alleys were for. I thought it would be full of crazy tennis fans trying to learn, like me, but a couple of women were talking one day about tennis’ popularity and asked me which was more popular, tennis or baseball. I don’t know if that’s encouraging or just plain weird.
My ranking remains a dismal 2.5 or so. I have trouble finding people to hit with regularly, because most people who are as bad as I am don’t find it especially fun to play. I also tend to overheat easily in the sun, and I have to wear contacts to play because glasses fly all over the place (how does Clement keep those sunglasses on?) but have always had huge problems with contacts. They stick so that I start seeing the ball double, they bother me constantly, I have to keep stopping to put in eyedrops. So I’m not sure that tennis and I are meant to be. Still, next time I’m anywhere near Flushing Meadows, I think I’ll go smash my $25 racket there, feel like Safin, and go buy a new one for my next tennis adventure.
-Heidi Kim