Soon we’ll return to those traditional rituals of the off-season, the obligatory yet addictive year-end Top 10 lists of the best matches, most memorable moments, and most egregious golden handbags of 2009. We’ll be busier than usual this time around, since there’s also the little matter of summing up the entire unnamed decade that we’ve just left behind, one that was much better for tennis than it was for the world around it. Before we get to those Top 10s, though, let me expand in a personal way on the idea I talked about at the end of my last post, about Spain’s Davis Cup victory.
That idea was the oxymoron known as team tennis. The concept is still a rare luxury for players, but it has gained ground in recent years. League tennis in the U.S. has become more popular than tournament play, and today’s multimillionaire pros haven’t lost their patriotic passion for Davis Cup. It’s not hard to understand why: There’s something primal and tribal about playing on a team. It’s like being in a gang, or, at a higher evolutionary level, in a band. Tom Verlaine, singer and guitarist in the group Television, described the fundamental appeal best. He said, “being in a band is the best way of being alive.”
The experience of playing on a team may not be quite that intense. But it does offer solace to tennis players that they can’t get anywhere else. Suddenly the loner’s sport doesn’t feel quite so lonely; you’re no longer tightrope-walking without an emotional net. There’s something more to practice and play for—i.e., your buddies, your coach, your school—yet you still have the satisfaction that comes with winning on your own. Most of all, for lack of a better term, it makes tennis a lot more fun.
The first time I played on an organized tennis team was in high school. Along with two other area kids, I had traveled to junior tournaments in Pennsylvania for three or four years before I joined the team as a freshman. Williamsport Area High School is a sprawling red brick campus that was built in the early 1970s at the top of a hill on the outskirts of the town. It gathered up more than 2,000 unruly teenagers, both from Williamsport and the surrounding sticks. Imagine the suburban New Wave style of Say Anything mixed with the small-town, classic-rock-pickups-and-football ethos of Dazed and Confused and you have a pretty good picture of what my high school was like.
We were the biggest school for hundreds of miles, and our numbers made us a power in everything from basketball to cross-country in Central PA; everything, that is, except for chess and debating, which didn’t field teams as far as I can remember—Williamsport weren’t no college town, after all. We were the best in the area in tennis as well, even though only a couple other guys had the money or took the sport seriously enough to play it year-round. The courts on the school’s hill were some of the windiest I’ve ever played on, especially in spring, when we had our season. We spent much of our practices showing off by hitting balls straight into the air, running as fast as we could to keep up with them as they were blown by the wind, and cupping them out of the air and safely onto our racquets. I can remember one farm kid yelling, “How the hell did you do that?”
Our trips to away matches, to Berwick, Mifflinburg, Danville, Lewisburg, were taken in big yellow school buses. As you aged, you got to move closer to the back. All I can recall of those trips now is a blond kid in the row in front of me turning around so we could argue about who was a better drummer, Keith Moon of the Who or John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. (I went with Moon, of course; that kid was out of his mind, as I’m sure you would agree.) Bumping along on a back road on those ripped rubber bus seats, surrounded by blinding blue spring sky and acres of farm country, we’d trade our Walkmans back and forth. “Listen to this solo!” We had no idea what we were talking about.
Then we’d get out and play a bunch of kids who looked they’d picked up their racquets the day after they’d been cut from their school’s football team. I don’t think we dropped a set, let alone a match, during my junior and senior years.
*
That, obviously, wasn’t good preparation for tennis in college, where the team was a much bigger part of our lives—the sport had helped most of us get into the school in the first place. Now that the joy of certain wins and the sting of certain defeats has faded, what lasts in my mind is the camaraderie and the personalities of my teammates. Tennis teaches you how to win and lose as an individual, but playing it with a group of people teaches you that those things, which seem so central at the time, are just incidental, temporal, ultimately forgotten. What lasts are the seemingly trivial social aspects of team life, the running jokes and the trash talk. Here's a little of what I remember after almost 20 years.
—We practiced on a set of 10 courts. The first time I came out as a freshman, I started hitting on the middle court. A senior walked past me, and without breaking stride or looking in my direction, said, “Beat it, Tignor.” I had to start, like all freshmen, on one of the end courts. Rarely have I ever enjoyed a moment the way I enjoyed saying those same two words—“Beat it”—to a freshman who made the same mistake when I was a senior. It had been a long wait, but it had been worth it.
—Before dual matches, each singles player was introduced by his coach and cheered by his fellow players. When our coach announced the name of one particularly mellow, even-tempered member of our team, all of us would yell, “Take him down, Psycho!”, “You’re the man, Psycho!” or "Stay cool, Psycho, stay cool.” We liked to think this would leave his opponent a little frightened, at least until the match began and Psycho started complimenting him on his good shots.
—Now and then, a friend and fellow classmate on my team would bend down to smell some flowers on the way back from practice. He would breathe deeply and say, “Mmm, smell those.” One of us, often me, would inevitably bend down and put our noses in the flowers, at which point he would push our faces all the way into them and let out an evil cackle. I now have two questions about this: Why, over the course of four years, did we always fall for it? He was the last person on earth who would care what a flower smelled like. More important, why, when I put my nose down to smell anything now, do I still think someone is going to slap me in the back of the head? And why do I still think such an idiotic gag is so funny? This must be why the collective IQ of any group of teammates descends so rapidly when they’re in each other’s presence. We can laugh about any joke, no matter how moronic, because we know we’re in it together.
—Giving a pair of skateboarding teenagers the finger from the windows of the team van? Check. Running off with the flag from the 17th green at Pebble Beach on a team trip to California? Someone had to do it. Trying your hardest to drill your coach with the ball in practice? Naturally. Working harder to perfect the eyes-closed drop shot than any real shot? Do you even need to ask? Angrily telling your teammate in a close challenge match to “stop breathing so loudly!” That was yours truly. Going out of your way to kick a pompous English professor off an indoor campus court, just because you could? Guilty as charged. Stealing a school jacket from a member of the opposing team? This was a ritual, until one of us was caught and screamed at by the opposing coach in front of everyone, including our own mortified coach. We were disgraced, but now that moment brings back a bigger laugh than all the others.
—Another of my teammates, who was a year behind me, mastered the art of getting under his opponent’s skin. After hitting the first ball in the warm-up, he’d say, loudly and quickly, “Yea!” (as long as his shot had gone in, of course). He’d do the same thing after lobbing in his first warm-up serve. Now that his opponent was a little riled, or at least confused, he’d ramp it up as the match began. After his first winner, he’d put his fist in the air and yell, “That’s too tough!” The clincher, the one that usually really enraged the other guy, was when my teammate would win an important point, pump his fist, and grunt, “That’s clutch!” He won a lot of matches for us; he left a lot of opponents red in the face. His antics were always half-joking, and you could forgive it all because he was on your team, not across the net from you. If he’d played for someone else, we would have detested him. As it was, we just laughed and called each of his antics a “veteran move.”
—Jim Stahley was a teammate who was a year ahead of me. We liked to sing along, tunelessly, in the van to soft-pop songs on the radio. Seals and Crofts, America, Crosby Stills and Nash, ELO, Todd Rundgren, 10cc’s magnificent “I’m Not in Love,” this was our wheelhouse, much to the annoyance of everyone else. When we won the D. III NCAA championship my junior year, all of us ran through the rain afterward and piled into the van at the same time. I was in the last row as our coach floored it back to campus. I remember it being the fastest ride of my life, as if the moment were trying its hardest to fly by and into the past. Stahles sat in front and turned on the radio. A cheesy favorite, “Still the One” by Orleans—you know it and likely hate it: “We’re still having fun/And you’re still the one”—came on. “Turn it up,” I called from the back. Then I added, in the irrational exuberance of the moment, “Stahles, this is what the Edmonton Oilers played when they won the Stanley Cup last year!” For some reason, no one felt the need to respond to that statement.
Did we sing along? Thankfully, I can report that we did not. But as the blocks raced past and the future raced toward us, we were all leaning forward, feeling good. We’d never be in it—never be in anything—together like that again.