Tennis

As a boy, I was not the greatest of athletes. I lettered for the cross country team in high school, but that was the height of my accomplishments in organized sports.

My two favorite sports have always been baseball and tennis. Dad taught me baseball as soon as I was old enough to swing a bat and throw a ball.

It was Mom, though, who taught the game of tennis to both my brother and me during the summer vacations in between school years.

My brother, Adam, learned the game fast, but it took me a while. When I first started playing, I literally could not keep the ball inside the court. Almost every time I swung, I launched the ball over the fence. Mom was very patient with me, though. We actually learned to play using her and Dad's old wooden rackets. Eventually, I was able to keep the ball inside the fence and inside the lines, but it was a couple of years before I began putting topspin into my swings.

Adam, after Mom bought us our own metal rackets, used Mom's wooden racket to hit rocks from our driveway out into the corn fields surrounding our house. He played whole imaginary baseball games hitting those rocks, the New York Mets versus the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, sometimes. The rocks gradually busted the strings and chewed up the wood. He later said that he hated he messed up Mom's racket, as it really was a nice vintage wooden piece.

Adam and I played a lot against each other while growing up. He beat me most of the time, but my peak came when I was 19 years old. That was my freshman year of college, and I was in perhaps the best shape of my whole life. I took tennis as an elective course at Western Carolina University. The instructor was one of the football coaches, an old man.

He really did not teach us that much. I remember him telling jokes to the class like, "Do you know what the students cheer at Furman University games?...FU!"

Or "Do you know what the students cheer at Austin Peay University?... Let's go Peay!"

He gave us written instructions on how the game is played and how to keep score, but the only teaching of how to play was when he told us and demonstrated, "Remember, bend your knees when you swing, bend your knees."

For our final grade, he started a tournament pitting everyone in the class against each other. I easily won my first two matches. The coach stopped the tournament after that, as it was pretty clear that I was the best player in the class. I'm not sure that he liked me that much, as I think I acted pretty cocky on the court. He challenged me to game of ping pong, and it was closely contested. The old ball coach eventually won, though, and he seemed to take a good deal of satisfaction in that.

My freshman year, I met a guy named Thomas who was also a very good tennis player for someone who never played it in an organized setting. We spent many evenings competing against each other. It was about 50/50, who would win. My strength, he said, was that I could run everything down and get every shot back across the net.

Thomas was a nice guy. He and I were both from the eastern part of the state, and he gave me a ride home during the Christmas break of my freshman year- over six hours of driving. I was pretty naive during college, and it took me all year to realize that Thomas was gay. This sort of blew my mind, given my conservative Christian upbringing. I immediately cut off all contact with him. It is one of the regrets that I have from my life that I was such a homophobe in those years and that I cruelly abandoned a friend who had done nothing wrong.

My brother joined me at Western during my sophomore year, and we continued our matches against each other on the courts beside Reid Gym (courts that now no longer exist due to building expansion on campus). I remember that these courts played slower, and the ball bounced higher than on the courts beside the high school where Adam and I attended. The slower court helped my game against him, and I went on a long winning streak. Eventually, he stopped playing against me because I was trash talking too much.

One night we were playing against each other and got into a heated argument over whether a ball was in or out. Some guys playing on the court beside us stopped to watch in awkward silence.

Finally, I yelled at Adam, "I'm going to beat your butt! I'm going to beat your butt tonight!"

At that exact instant, the lights went out.

I think it was probably someone from campus security who was watching and was able to shut the lights down before things escalated even further. I never knew the lights to just suddenly cut off like that at any time before or after when I played tennis at night.

When Adam stopped playing against me, I would go to those same courts and hit a ball against a brick wall until I got blisters on my hand.

During my sophomore year, I took racquetball as an elective course. The course was fun and was taught by the quarterbacks coach of the football team. He would later become the head coach. He also started a tournament in the class matching the students against each other. I finished second.

Taking the course was a mistake, though, as it completely ruined my tennis swing. In racquetball, you break your wrist when you swing. In tennis, you should keep the wrist stiff.

Adam eventually started playing tennis with me again, but it was a pathetic show. I began launching the ball over the fence once more. It was like I had forgotten how to play, like I was picking up a racket for the first time. It was not enjoyable for either of us, and he could not understand what had happened to me.

In college, I had a pretty strong crush on a girl, and I remember her walking by the court one night and seeing me play. I hated that I looked so pitiful out there as she went by- if only she could have seen me before I took that darn racquetball course, maybe things would things would have turned out differently between us. But probably not. In my head, it was a very important thing at that time, though.

I never did get my swing back. Instead, I developed a method of basically just punching the ball flatly back across the net, without topspin, and using the other player's velocity. Adam said it was very frustrating to play against me and that he could not get better himself with me playing in that style. I never was able to get back to the level when I was 19 and playing almost every day against Thomas, taking full swings and hitting with topspin.

Now, in my 30s, I have not played in years.

On the professional level, tennis has arguably changed more than any other major sport in the past 30 years. This is due to the rapid increase in racquet technology, the change from wooden racquets to graphite composites to whatever material is used today.

It is really a power game, now. No one serves and volleys any more, and you do not see the strategy in building points like you used to. I quit keeping up with all the changes, but I remember when Goran Ivanisevic won Wimbledon in 2001, that was a turning point. Ivanisevic, 6'4", had a big serve, but that was about it. Since his win, tennis has increased the size of the ball by 6% and changed the type of grass grown at Wimbledon to try and slow the game down. The real solution is to just go back to wooden rackets, but that will probably never happen.

Now, the men's game is two guys standing at the baseline and just hitting the ball as hard as they can. The best players are over six feet tall, whereas before shorter guys had a chance. To me, the game is not that interesting to watch anymore.

Enough about how things used to be, though.

Tennis, like baseball, has given me a lot of joy. I can write more blog entries about individual matches that I watched or played. I can write about specific shots, even. Perhaps in the future I will do so.