Tennis Vows

How is a tennis match like a marriage?

No, this isn’t the entry point to an off-color riddle.  It’s an attempt on my part to understand why, lately, I’ve forgotten how to win.

For the past two months, I’ve been losing a lot of tennis matches.  More than a lot, in fact.  Most.

Partly I can attribute this drought to the fact that I’m hitting against the same three guys, and all of them are tough competition for me.  One (Eric H.) is a solid 4.0 player who could compete at 4.5 and has competed a great deal at 4.0 singles, winning most of his matches last season.  Another (George W.) is a former teaching and hitting pro who in his salad days occasionally hit drills with Ivan Lendl.  The third (Joe D.) is a young teaching pro with a fairly big game.

All of these guys are winners, and I’m the big loser.  I give them a run on any given point and in any given game, but I’m having a great deal of trouble taking sets off of them.  Sometimes I lose very badly, and the occasional set that I do win is almost never lopsided in my favor.

The Pickle-Ball Pickle

Paddleball.  Paddle tennis.  Racquetball.  Squash.  Table tennis.  Tennis.  Pickle-ball?


Just when I thought I’d at least tried every sport involving hand-eye coordination, a ball and a plate-like object (i.e. a paddle or a racquet), along comes pickle-ball.  This strange new permutation of tennis resembles paddle tennis but without the platform or the tightly fenced enclosure.  And here’s another distinction: it involves a perforated plastic sphere more like a whiffle ball than a tennis ball.

Maybe I’m late to the pickle party, but I only found out about this game last week via a short video on the front page of my iPad Wall Street Journal subscription.  The title of that piece was “Move Over, Tennis, Pickleball Is Here!”

On Gratefulness

I‘ve had a racquet of one sort or another in my hand for most of my life. Growing up, my friends and I would knock the tennis ball around from time to time at local parks or at camp — not tennis camp, just camp. There was also the very occasional tennis lesson at the country club or on vacation. For a time in my teens we got into paddleball, now a lost art, it seems, in which one smacks a lively little ball against a concrete wall. In college I hit the tennis court and the squash court once in a while, but only just enough to convince myself I hadn’t grown bookish. And when I lived full-time in Manhattan, I went through a period where I regularly played racquetball at a downtown health club called The Printing House.

Through all these permutations I usually had enough talent and eye-hand experience to hold my own among equally unskilled decent athlete, but I never stood a chance against a serious tennis player. Then, in my late twenties, we moved to Bedford Hills in northern Westchester County and joined a facility in Mt. Kisco called the Saw Mill Club.

I hacked it around there for a few years at the sub-3.5 NTRP level, playing my usual uneven game of one impressive shot spaced between half a dozen mediocre ones and a dozen flat-out lousy ones. Yet my opponents had similar games, and you could dine out on the one great shot of the set and have a good time so long as you didn’t take winning too seriously.