Sure, I said, I’d love to do it, regretting immediately all the overeating I’d done during the holidays, and also not exercising as much as I had planned. At least I’d been hitting the ball regularly, playing doubles once or twice a week, although I had not played singles since September.
I immediately looked her up. Anna Mamalat, 15, ranked 920 at the time in the WTA based on a 6-6 record in professional tournaments. She had finished second in the 18-and-under 2009 USTA Winter National Championships, losing in the finals 7-5, 7-5.
In the photos I found online, she looked very young, and one newspaper article said she appeared smaller than her reported size of 5-feet, 2-inches and 115 pounds. I had been told that she was being homeschooled to allow more time to focus on tennis, and that her coach would accompany her to our match.
At the time I was two weeks shy of 43, 6-feet, hovering around a post-Christmas weight of 190, making my ritualistic New Year’s resolution to drop 15 pounds. I have a 4.5 NTRP rating with a winning record in USTA league play, but my best tennis was 25 years ago when I was a junior player in Georgia. How would I fare against a girl not even old enough to drive? A girl born in March 1994, five years after I graduated college? I have T-shirts older than she is. Would I win a single game? Or did I have a chance to win a set, maybe even the match?
I met Anna and her coach, Joe Totoro, at the Green Valley Tennis Club in Haddon Township, N.J., on a frigid Wednesday night. She looked like a high school freshmen or even junior high school girl, with a brown medium-length ponytail and a baby face that could pass for younger than 15. She smiled warmly and shook my hand in a very light grip. She spoke softly, too, like a kid from whom you might order an ice cream sundae.
I had worried that she might have something in her game that I didn’t see often, a style that would make me look silly, such as a nasty lefty spin, or ferocious topspin groundstrokes that would eat me up, or maybe two hands from both sides. My suspicion turned out to be correct—she hit two hands on both wings, her forehand peculiarly so. A righty, she had a normal one-handed forehand grip, but placed her left-hand on top of her right hand so that it overlapped, releasing her left hand on the follow through.
She struck her groundstrokes early and very cleanly, driving them deep with intense velocity and angles. I knew after only two balls in the warm up that there was no way I could hang with her from the baseline. My only hope was to bash the ball, rush the net, and play quick points—my natural inclination, especially since I’d been playing mostly doubles.
I double-faulted on the first point, trying for too much when I saw her move several feet inside the baseline (she didn’t seem small anymore, waiting to pounce on my second serve). I went on to hit a few strong first serves and charged the net for all I was worth and nailed some crisp volley winners. I saved a few break points and won the long, first game. I felt relief changing sides, knowing I wouldn’t be skunked.
Anna's serve was not on par with her groundstrokes, but she spun it consistently deep into the box. I tried to chip and charge, but unless I hit a very hard and low stinger, she passed me, nailing lines down both sides with precise groundstrokes fired like bullets.
I held serve to go up 2-1, but then she rolled through five games to clinch the first set. I didn’t serve well on the big points. If I couldn’t get a first serve in, I had little chance unless I really popped the second ball, which I did on a few occasions, an attempt that led to too many double faults.
In the second set I relaxed and my serve came back, and she lost concentration or maybe was being polite in order to let the old man win a few. I went ahead 3-0, and then 4-2, but she woke up and realized it was getting late and started to play better. I also had the dooming realization, “Hey, maybe I can actually win a set,” and tensed up. My serve disappeared again, and she rolled off four games in a row to finish me off 6-2, 6-4.
I was happy with the result, a respectable showing against an accomplished junior with victories in professional events. At least I had given her some practice returning serves and hitting passing shots. I figure if I played her 20 times, I might win once or twice if my serve went into the zone and I could hit some lucky return winners.
And the match was the most fun I have ever had losing. I had been expecting a prima donna, but Anna was as sweet as could be, smiling and friendly and polite, not to mention being very generous with line calls, particularly on my serves, one or two that may have been as much as a foot out.
I also had assumed I would be playing a rich kid from Philly’s Main Line, but she is a first-generation American from a Ukrainian family who live in an apartment in the city’s Great Northeast, a sprawling section of working class neighborhoods west of the Delaware River. Her dad works the night shift at UPS and her mother in a laboratory. She is training and traveling on some grant money from the USTA, and also what Totoro and other supporters can pull together to fund her.
After the match I drove over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge toward my home in the city and thought about how damned difficult it is to make it as a professional tennis player, especially in the middle of winter in Philadelphia, where aspiring young stars occasionally have to scrape together practice matches with the likes of me.
UPDATE: Since I played Anna in early January, her WTA ranking remains relatively unchanged at 938. Her best result for the year was winning an ITF Juniors event, the International Grass Court Championships in Philadelphia in June. She was the number four alternate to get a spot in the Orange Bowl qualifying draw starting this week.
