Here’s a rec column to end the week. For pro ball, check out my latest jingoistic war-cry at ESPN.com. (Can't really vouch for the headline)
I'll be back Sunday to report on the smoking ruins from Cincy and Toronto. For now, you can read Kamakshi from Canada.
Summer is always almost over, isn’t it? I start to feel like it’s passing me by as early as July 4. The season’s peak comes before I even know the thing has begun; and while I might not notice it, somehwere in my mind I know that each day is already getting just a little shorter. The final blow comes each August when, on a humid afternoon, I hear the cicadas massing in the trees in my neighborhood. It’s a harsh, beautiful buzz and a final warning that the heat is on, and it's on now. The days ahead are only going to get colder.
That sense of time slipping—or jetting—past seems to be summer’s dominant theme. Pete Bodo’s fellow outdoor writer for the NY Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg, recently wrote a column about farm life in August. After describing the various states of his animals, he wrote just one line about how he was spending his days: “I’m laying in all the thinking I can against a time when summer is in short supply.” Jonathan Richman’s great, evil campfire anthem, “That Summer Feeling,” ends on a note of almost spooky despair: “That summer feeling is going to haunt you the rest of your life.”
How do you make summer count while you have the chance? It must be through the rituals that you only do at this time of year—the things you repeat over and over until they make the season seem full. Some friends say a beach house share, where they can leave the city behind eight or 10 weekends a year, does it for them. I gave it shot with a weekend share house a few years ago, but it wasn't my style. For some reason, going off to read Proust by yourself while all your housemates jump in the hot tub is not considered a cool thing to do at these places. So I've returned to a favorite solitary pursuit: These days, it’s my four months of tennis that help make summer recognizable—tangible—for me. I play squash in the winter, so my time on the tennis court is limited. Right about the middle of August I can feel it beginning to wind down.
It’s harder now to get out of work in time to play before dark; my regular partners are taking their last shots at vacation; my shoulder hurts from a summer of hitting kick serves and trying to send my opponents into the low-hanging branches on Court 4 at my club. To be honest, it doesn’t bother me because I enjoy squash just as much, primarily because I took it up about six years ago and am still getting better. At this point, I can only get worse at tennis. So each spring I set the goal of getting better—in both singles and doubles—by the end of September. Then I start from scratch again the next year.
This season I peaked early and have been getting a little worse, a little more erratic, with each passing week. This must be because I have no real competitive goals for myself. I don’t play in leagues or tournaments; they remind of the stresses of junior tennis and now seem like exams I don’t need or want to take. The pick-up matches I play with three or four guys at my club are competition enough.
My main rival for the last five years or so has been a college administrator named John (my squash partners are all type-A hedge fund managers, ambulance chasers, and online poker kings; my tennis partners tend to be laid back university types). John is in his 50s but can still move like a 30-year-old. He’s all business when it comes to tennis; five minute warm-up, knock off a few serves, one overhead, and we’re ready to go. The sport’s rules committee could reduce the time limit between points to seven seconds and I doubt we’d ever break it. We’re also both absent-minded, non-mechanical types. Recently the net on our court was too low, but despite something like 60 years of tennis experience, neither of us knew how to adjust the center strap!
I’ve been beating John this year, but it’s never routine. That’s what makes it interesting: I feel like I should win, but I need to hit my best shots to do it. John is a born tennis player whose strongest attribute is his anticipation; I can only get the ball by him when I set up for a shot one way and then go completely in the opposite direction at the last second. John is also a first-rate competitor, but in a mild-mannered way. You know he’s angry after a bad shot when he stomps his foot and yells, “Darnit!” Our matches are full, with long rallies, tactical changes, drop shots, lobs, scrambling gets, and more than our share of shanked volleys. They're the right kind of test for me: I walk off satisfied and slightly drained physically and mentally, but at bottom it’s as much a social ritual with a friend as it is a competitive one.
Even more social, of course, is doubles. I play it sporadically, though in the past I’ve had a regular weekly match with three other guys. If you only watch pro tennis, you think of doubles as a pleasant sideshow. But anyone who has played it seriously knows that doubles, more than singles, is a man’s game, a grown-up version of the sport where decisiveness and aggression—rather than patience and consistency—are rewarded. This is not always a natural fit for young players, who need to cultivate a self-absorbed loner’s approach to be successful in singles. (Does this help explain in part why so many Australians and South Africans are consummate doubles specialists—because they’re basically social, rather than self-absorbed?)
In doubles, you stand at the net and face a potentially lethal shot directed at your chest (I’ve been hit there more than once). You learn to poach across the net before your opponent has even hit his return, a move that feels, for a split-second as you make your break, like playing tennis with the ground pulled out from under you. There’s nothing in singles that’s as scary, or as exhilarating when it works. One perfectly timed poach, where you careen across the net, the ball ricochets off your strings, and then skids past your momentarily terrified opponent, all in a millisecond, is worth 10 topspin forehand winners from the baseline. Most of all, in dubs you learn to move forward at all times and from all positions. At its core, it’s a brutish version of tennis that’s almost always won by the team that volleys the ball when it’s closer to the net and higher in the air, two things that are typically decided in about five seconds. You can, I suppose, win by staying in the backcourt, but what’s the fun—where’s the rush?—in that?
I learned to play dubs in college. I had a decent serve and return but was a borderline trainwreck around the net. By the time graduated, I could hold my own up there and had even learned to poach off my opponent’s first volley. In recent years, I’ve played with a group of what we euphemistically call doubles specialists, guys who aren’t consistent enough for full-on singles, but who have a couple solid shots—a strong overhead, a nasty forehand return, a smooth backhand volley—they can position themselves to hit over and over. I get frustrated when my team can’t beat what I might think of as two inferior players. How may times in doubles matches have you nailed a perfect volley into the corner only to see some guy move two creaky steps and hack it back over the net? But that’s just my singles chauvinism getting the best of me. Doubles is a different game, a different sport even. It’s no longer all you, and that’s a refreshing change of pace for the long-suffering, long-internalizing tennis loner.
After our matches, beers are generally discussed, not something in my experience that typically gets talked about by singles players (I guess two dudes hanging out afterward is a little weird). But I’ve also read recently that the social aspects of tennis are good for a man’s mental health. Men are encouraged to go out for the post-match beer because (a) we generally stop making friends at a certain age, and here are some ready-made pals right in front of you; and (b) it’s an opportunity to socialize with people who have nothing to do with the stresses of your home life or your work.
Sounds good, right? Still, it’s a step too far for me; a doubles match is enough socializing for this singles player at heart. I have no good excuse not to go—really, should I tell them that I’d rather head home to drink a beer, watch the Phillies play the Brewers, and put on an ancient doo-wop record I just discovered? I’ll keep that summer ritual to myself.