A return to tennis helps a writer regain his perspective.
Earlier this year, I was laid off from my writing job at a golf magazine. I’ve spent the last decade and a half covering that fickle, self-satisfied game without ever feeling fully at home in it. I was a tennis player.
Was. I’ve picked up a racquet maybe two dozen times since my last college tennis match, in 1992. The sport in many ways defined my childhood, and graduation seemed the time to put aside childish things. Adulthood meant no more thrown racquets, no more howling at my physical and emotional shortcomings, no more defining my worth by a score. In retrospect, the notion of tennis and adulthood as mutually exclusive underscored my callowness.
I became a writer and editor, drawn, I’ve realized, by the same desire for creativity and self-expression that tennis provides. Mostly by chance, I fell into golf magazines, and golf itself. It offered the chance to throw clubs, instead of racquets, along with howling at my physical and mental shortcomings and defi ning my worth by a score.
Like many in my field, I bounced around like a Satellite tour pro: seven different magazines in 13 years. But this latest upheaval feels different, and not just for the lousy state of media and the larger economy. I’ve worked almost everywhere in the sport that isn’t a website, and I’ve worked for some of those, too. If this is a dead end, it’s been a nice run. I’ve written some semiliterate stories, seen some beautiful places, talked to some interesting people.
This nostalgic mood is coupled with nerve-wracking practical concerns. I have a wife and 15-month-old son. A mortgage. COBRA costs. Until the next thing comes along, unemployment benefits augment the occasional freelance assignment, income from excess golf clubs sold on eBay, anything and everything.
The financial anxiety is acute. Worse might be the sense of being in fate’s cross hairs. I want to remember what it was like to utterly understand my environment, if not utterly control it. I want to play tennis.
By chance, the opportunity presents itself. A friend and former competitor, an entrepreneur, invites me to join him at a Florida resort for a few days of R&R, his treat. I decline. There are jobs to chase, diapers to change. Also, unless you’re an immature hanger-on like Turtle from Entourage, you don’t want to be Turtle from Entourage. A man has his pride.
My wife will have none of it. She needs a break from the 24/7 presence of a stressedout husband. “You’re going,” she says, and that’s that. I realize I no longer own a pair of tennis shoes, so we take a family trip to the mall. After an unsuccessful visit to Dick’s Sporting Goods, I head for, I am ashamed to admit, the footwear discounter DSW, where I try on my first-ever pair of K-Swiss shoes. They are very comfortable and blindingly white. If the tennis thing doesn’t work out, maybe I can try my hand at rapping. The sneakers are $39.99, and even at that bargain price I feel guilty. Still, I won’t play in running shoes. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Rich and I play two rounds of golf before we head to the courts. Golf is, in its way, the perfect lead-in. Neither of us has teed it up all winter, and yet our games evince little rust, largely because there is little to rust over. Our shot-making is as middling as ever. I’ve hovered around the ceiling of my golf ability for so long that the notion of tennis’ basement floor appeals.
The tennis complex at this golf-centric resort is 10 minutes away. Except for a small stack of towels, the pro shop is empty. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need Gatorade, fast, but the attendant doesn’t have change for the vending machine.
My friend and I do our Agassi stretching routine—one quick toe-touch (I reach my shins). I scan the court, a 39-year-old man returned to his childhood home, at once alien and eerily familiar. As my interest in golf grew, I used to tell myself how great it was that every course was different while each tennis court was the same. With fresh perspective, I realize that something similar could be said of an artist’s blank canvas.
This hard court has concrete stands adjacent to one sideline. Even empty, they add to the sense of combat. Barriers always surround a court just as ropes encase a boxing ring. My ambivalence about competition may have been real, but I am reminded what I found so pulsequickening about stepping onto a court with an opponent.
We’re off, trading groundies. It feels like someone dipped my sneakers in molasses. But my tennis legs appear underneath me sooner than expected, the ball slows from fast-forward to normal speed, and I begin to fall into something like a rhythm.
Gradually, I am reminded how true competence feels, what it’s like to be at ease with something—not from my present play, but by the memories being stirred. I suspect it’s something like the phantom limbs felt by amputees. We decide I should serve some points. We don’t discuss whether to keep score, and I don’t announce any, but after Rich would have broken me in a six-deuce game, he asks to serve a few. The competitive flame burns eternal. He holds easily as I shank three straight backhand returns. My feeble backhand also burns eternal. Still, the sweat feels good on my back, and I can feel tennis’ pull again, which was my real hope.
An hour in, I’m gassed. Just then, a statuesque woman strides onto the next court. She starts shuffling around slowly. Forward, backward, sidestepping. Then she begins some exotic, yogalike stretches. Without doubt, she’s a pro. Sure enough, a coach with a basket of balls appears, and soon the woman is blasting familiar ground strokes. It’s Nadia Petrova, sent here by the tennis gods to remind me that, even in my prime I was, in the grand scheme of things, a guppy. The perspective is mostly welcome.
By dint of talent, toil and maybe even fate, the blessed few get to spend their work lives at play. Most of us play to escape work. We get our shots in when we can. The rest of the time, we’ve got to grind.
Evan Rothman is a freelance writer from Staatsburg, N.Y.
Originally published in the Nov./Dec. issue of TENNIS.