Nothing Keeps Leon Sanit, 97, Off the Court.
It’s like clockwork. Every weekday at 11 A.M., 97-year-old Leon Sanit arrives at the Oakwood Apartments courts in Los Angeles. He plays singles for an hour or two with the teaching pro or a member half his age. If no one’s around, Sanit will load up the ball machine. He lives for his court time, and nothing is going to interrupt it—not even life-saving bladder cancer surgery.
Sanit’s doctors don’t know how much time he has left, but they proposed a surgical procedure they say has a 50 percent chance of extending his life. But he’s ruled that out because it could keep him permanently, or even just temporarily, off the court.
“I want to go along just the way everything is now,” Sanit says, “and whatever is gonna be is gonna be.”
“My dad has decided that he’s feeling well now,” says Sanit’s daughter, Nancy Englander, “so he doesn’t think he should give that up for a surgery with an uncertain outcome. He’s going to play his tennis, which he loves, and make the most of it.”
Make the most of it he does, flummoxing his opponents with slices and spins that have them huffing and puffing from corner to corner. Sanit even puts Oakwood’s head teaching pro, Rodger Lolley, through his paces. “Everyone wants to play me after I play Leon, because I’m dripping with sweat,” says Lolly, who has been Sanit’s coach for 13 years. “Nothing makes him happier than hitting a winner off me.”
“If we have good rallies, I enjoy it,” Sanit says. “Even if we don’t have good rallies I enjoy it. I just like being out there.”
Golf used to be Leon’s game, when he was working as a court clerk in Brooklyn, N.Y. But he decided it was too tame and took up tennis in earnest 20 years ago, when he retired and moved to Southern California to be closer to his daughter and niece. He’s outlived two wives—each marriage lasted 30 years—and a girlfriend of nine years who passed away two years ago. “He never misses a pretty girl walking by,” Englander says. On Tuesdays, Sanit has a regular hitting date with Camilla Horen, 30, whom he half jokingly calls “the love of my life.”
Horen says she understands Sanit’s decision to forego surgery. “Tennis has been what’s keeping him alive,” she says. Leon agrees: “If I don’t play tennis I’m just sittin’ around and goin’ to sleep all the time,” he says. “Tennis is what gets me up. I know I have to be here at 11 o’clock every day.”
Lolley tries to encourage him to play more doubles, but Sanit says he doesn’t want to waste his time watching a partner hit half of the balls. Tennis may be the sport of a lifetime, but Sanit doesn’t want to waste a single minute of it.
Just a few months shy of his 98th birthday in January, he’s currently working on getting a little more action on his serve, but that’s not his big goal. “Rodger promised that if I reach a hundred, he won’t charge me for lessons. Free lessons for life!”
Originally published in the November/December 2010 issue of TENNIS