!Tennis-ball-rebound-1a Warning: This is a bit of a tearjerker. But it's been in me for a long time.
Four years ago, while walking around the side courts at the French Open, I recognized a one-handed backhand. I didn’t recognize the player who was hitting it, just his stroke. A gray-haired lefty in his 50s, he kept his arm and racquet close to his side as he pulled the frame around and slowly rotated his upper body toward the net. His legs, meanwhile, remained rooted to the court, and it didn’t appear that he could get a lot of pop with such a constricted swing. But his timing was so pure that the ball darted off the strings with seemingly no effort at all.
I stood watching him for a few minutes, still unable to put a name to the backhand, or the face. Eventually, as I walked on, a 20-year-old memory flashed through my mind. Andres Gomez, Ecuador’s finest, had hit his one-hander just like that. A check of that day’s schedule at Roland Garros confirmed it: The 1990 champ was in town to play the senior tournament.
Like the face of Dorian Gray, Gomez’s stroke had stayed young even as the rest of him had aged. He’s not the only one. From Cliff Drysdale’s big-cut two-handed backhand to John McEnroe’s no-backswing one-hander to Pat Rafter’s half-volley pick-up, the signature shots of the best players remain largely as we remember them, even if their faces and bodies and footwork don’t. In this sense, a tennis stroke has more in common with our emotional makeup than it does with any of our physical traits. Our strokes aren’t part of our bodies; their part of our personalities. Notice the phrase we use to explain how we can hit them the same way over and over: "muscle memory." We've given our arms and legs tiny little brains of their own.
Like everything else about us, we first learn our shots by imitation. You might even say that athletic talent is nothing more than the ability to imitate what we see. I guess it says something about me that as a kid I was able to imitate the stances of famous baseball players to a T, but their swings not so much. As far as tennis went, one of my first coaches tried to teach me to exaggerate my extension through my ground strokes, å la Jimmy Connors. But it never felt right. I wanted to hit the ball like my favorite player, Bjorn Borg, so that’s what I did. The result was, and still is, a pretty severe Western forehand grip that still draws stares from people. “Where did you learn that?” they ask as I whip the frame straight up behind the ball. But I never really stopped imitating the pros. A few years ago, when Andy Roddick was No. 1, I would hear that my forehand looked like Roddick’s. Now I hear, every so often, that it looks like Nadal’s. It doesn’t really, but I am left-handed and my grip is similar. Still, it’s obvious that I've continued to internalize a lot of what I see on a tennis court.
There was another early influence on my forehand, though, one that I never mention to anyone now, but which was just as pervasive as Borg’s. It came from an older friend, practice partner, and teammate named Greg. When I was a freshman in high school, he was a senior; he played No. 1 singles and I played No. 2. But as two of the best players in our area of Pennsylvania, we’d known each other, hit together, and traveled in our parents' cars to junior tournaments for years. Two of my most memorable formative tennis experiences came against Greg when I was 11 or 12.
The first was at a Saturday clinic at our indoor club. We’d been playing a round of pro sets, and I’d beaten everyone in our group pretty easily, to the point where I was feeling slightly cocky. Then I played Greg, who was 14 or 15 at the time and the best junior at the club. If anything, he’d copied Borg’s forehand even more meticulously than I had. In the unassuming and workmanlike way that I would soon get to know well, he drove me crazy by looping balls high into the air, above the club’s low-hanging lighting fixtures. What was worse, he never missed. I lost 8-0, but the upside was that I knew I needed to get better. There weren’t many standards to shoot for, tennis-wise, where we lived, but Greg was one of them. I started to notice how much time he spent on the court and how seriously he took the sport. He never lorded his age or status over me. We became friends, and, I like to think, pushed each other’s games along.
That summer, or maybe the summer after, Greg, his younger brother, Jeff, and I were playing at the outdoor courts near our houses. I was losing to Greg again when I suddenly ripped a couple of effortless crosscourt backhand winners past him. I still lost the set, but those two shots stuck in my head. They’d been so natural, so easy. At some not-quite-conscious level, they must have let me know that I had some talent. I can still remember, with vivid exactness, how it felt to hit them. Playing against Greg, a better, older player, must have inspired me.
The most notable aspect of Greg’s game was his forehand grip. It was as extreme as any I’ve seen, this side of Alberto Berasategui. As he took it back, he tilted the racquet face toward the back fence before snapping it forward to make contact—even Borg didn’t go as far. Gradually, during the years that I played with and against Greg, my forehand began to tilt in the same direction. It became more extreme, which wasn’t such a bad thing. I got more topspin on the ball, which gave me more power even as I was able to control my shots better. When other players in town would see us walking on court, they'd yell out, “Let the topspin wars begin!”
In that way, I felt like a younger tennis brother to Greg. He and I, along with his real brother, were pioneers of the junior game in Central Pennsylvania in the sport's boom years and just after. During our one season as high school teammates, a good-sized photo of the two of us—me happily flashing my braces—appeared in the sports section our town’s paper. Each of us was in the process of running through an undefeated season. When school was out, much of our summers were spent in family station wagons, heading to humid and glamorous locations like Lancaster and Carlisle, Altoona and Scranton for tournaments. We practiced indoors and outdoors, a couple times a week, all year round. Even though I improved and closed the gap between us, I don’t remember ever being beating Greg, until we played a practice set the day before he went to the PA state championships. That day I whipsawed him all over the court and won easily. Greg sat down on the sideline afterward and said, with a slight snarl in his voice, “Why don’t you play like that all the time?” He knew I could do better. When I finally did beat him for real, at a local men’s tournament a few years later, I was thrilled but guilty. It felt great, like a breakthrough that had been a long time coming. But it didn’t feel quite right.
From the title of this post, you probably know where this story is going. So I’ll just say it: Greg was killed in his mid-20s in a car accident in Pittsburgh, where he was living. I was in New York by then, and at that point I was a little burned out on tennis, but naturally the news stunned me. When I eventually got back to playing, I immediately recognized Greg’s influence on my forehand. It's still there. This summer I’ve been asked again how I learned to hit it, and I’ve answered, as always, “Borg.” In my mind, though, I’ve put Greg’s name right next to his.
The same thing happens each time I play now. I walk back to the baseline, twirling my racquet. My opponent lofts the first ball of the warm-up over the net. The sun hits the top of it, making the yellow fuzz shine on one half and leaving the bottom half in darkness. There’s something wonderful about the top of that ball coming at me, spinning, shining. It, for lack of a better way to say it, makes me glad to be alive. As it descends toward me, I take my racquet back for a forehand with my Western grip and tilt the face toward the back fence like I always do—I’ve aged, but my stroke is still the one I learned across the net from Greg years ago. You’re still here, in my swing, in my game, in my thoughts, brother.
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No comments on this one; email me your thoughts or stories if you have them. I'll be back Friday, and then writing from Toronto from Sunday on.