Indian Summer came to Brooklyn this past weekend. That meant the return of sun and humidity, and, according to most forecasts, a ton of rain. This was bad news at my tennis club, where our annual year-end tournament, which lingers through all four weekends of September, appeared destined for some U.S. Open-like disruptions. But unlike this year’s real summer, the Indian edition defied the weatherman and stayed surprisingly dry. That meant on Sunday I got to play some tennis, with a friend, and then watch some tennis. The match I saw was a B-level doubles quarterfinal. It wasn’t close, or good, but there’s something about seeing people compete, at virtually any level, that is compelling to me. The highlight on this day was overhearing one player snap at his partner: “Just do what I tell you, OK?” Whatever he was doing, it worked, because they won.
I didn’t play in the tournament, in singles or doubles, and I haven’t played it often over the years. The pesky U.S. Open gets in the way, but I’m not sure I would enter anyway. Tournaments are generally a little too much for my adult competitive appetite. I like playing people I know, mixing the competitive with the social—life off the court is serious enough. So on Sunday, while the tournament was going on around me, I played an old friend and USTA-league doubles partner, Jeff, who had moved out of the city three years ago.
Speaking of the club tournament, Jeff won it a few times before he made that move, with his wife and two young children, from Manhattan to Westchester in 2008. Soon after he got there, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He went through chemo and endured multiple surgeries afterward due to complications. As late as this past June, he was back in the hospital with another problem. At that point, he and his doctor decided to try some new things with his treatment, and he’s been OK since. He played doubles in another USTA 4.5 league in his area this summer, and came out of nowhere to reach the final of the men’s open singles at his new club.
Jeff was ready for more, so we played a match—he has a bigger appetite for competition than I do, and he’s been starved of it for a while now. It was déjà vu, as they say, all over again, right from the first ball. I hit my hardest serve down the T and it came straight back at me. Jeff was as fast and consistent as I remember him, and his looping topspin backhand that pushes me into the back fence was just as irritating. The only physical difference in him was in the shoulders, which were thinner. Because of that, he doesn’t have the same pop on the ball, especially on his serve. But he got to everything I threw at him, including an admittedly diabolical drop shot—maybe my appetite for competition hasn’t shrunk that much, after all—and he wasn’t winded even after 90 minutes of fairly long rallies.
The membership at the club hasn’t turned over too much since he left, so we were interrupted many times by people who were glad to see Jeff looking and doing (and playing) so well. He’s also a tennis-history buff, so afterward we talked about old pros and matches and wooden racquets. I said at one point, “You must have wondered if you’d ever get on a court again.” He nodded and smiled and said, “Yeah, definitely.”
On one level this was a dumb statement by me. He wasn’t just worried about whether he would play tennis again; he was worried if he would ever see his wife or kids again. Getting back to them, and to his job, must have been foremost in his thoughts, but the way he answered me, it was clear that tennis had entered his mind as well. That made me think about seeing him back on court now, doing all the things that a tennis player must do. Not just the running, but the timing that goes into every shot, the body coordination and control it takes to make even the supposedly simple ones look so simple.
The gap between that, and the days spent in a hospital, seemed too vast for my mind to span. Jeff had a sort of starry look when he remembered wondering if he would ever play tennis again, and it must have felt just slightly short of miraculous for him to find himself in a full-scale singles match. Not that he didn’t show some flashes of frustration out there. He thought that one of his looping backhands was going to loop long, so he let out a grunt of disgust, only to see the ball drop inside the baseline. I eventually won the point, and we laughed at his outburst. “You would have had to invoke the Serena rule on me there,” he said. Hopefully, I would have let it slide (hopefully).
The same must be true for people who play other sports. The golf course, the soccer pitch, the basketball court: To someone who is ill, they must all feel like they’re a million miles away, residing in some other, unattainable universe; too far, perhaps, even to worry about. All sports require a level of coordination that we regularly underrate, but tennis, to this biased player’s mind, requires the most. Later, I thought about Jeff moving to his right for a passing shot. I thought he was going to go down the line, so I covered that part of the net. At the last second, he flipped it crosscourt, behind me, the same way he had many times in our matches in the past. It's a shot he owns, one that his body can do from memory.
Tennis, even at a moment like that, is hardly essential to existence. But for someone in that position, it might be just as important, because it's a symbol of how far you've come—you've come back, not just to life, but all the way back to a particularly beautiful and unexplainable, and just plain fun, part of life: a crosscourt pass on the run (even the words sound good). Tennis in that sense might seem to be a luxury, but in its casual intricacy, in its invisible blend of the psychological and the physical, of grace and power and speed and touch and eye-hand coordination, it can also look like the ultimate expression of health.