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.



Problem was: I’m not the kind of guy who can live with not taking winning seriously. After getting beat by enough guys with games even uglier than mine, I began to feel that I had to get better or find another sport. Thus began my experience with a long list of pros. In the twenty years I’ve been working to improve my tennis game, I estimate that I’ve hit with a couple dozen professionals, one of whom floated to mind specifically when I decided to launch this blog.


Richard Stephenson came to work at Saw Mill not long after I’d picked up my game with intensive training from a local pro who’d just left the tour. To my delight, that pro had me hitting both consistently and big. I’d always had the occasional fast-moving flat drive, but my new strokes resulted in a heavier ball, and I began feeling pretty good about myself.

Along comes Richard, new to the club at that time (he’s since left), but with four decades of tennis under his sweatband. As I recall, he hailed from Jamaica, where he’d once ranked very high in all of the Caribbean. He had something of an old-fashioned game: a forehand that he seemed to caress rather than whip, a one-handed backhand, looping groundstrokes, a serve that penetrated the box with relatively little velocity (by pro standards, anyway). We hit regularly for the better part of a year, I think, and I believed at first that I could give him game — which is to say, play him relatively even, maybe win the majority of sets on a given day.

Wrong I was.

Richard was freckled and lanky. He moved like Federer (though no one had yet heard of Federer back then), like a gazelle with padded hooves. You’d think you had hit the ball into an open court or at an impossible angle, and he’d just appear, unhurried, lay his racket on the yellow sphere, and reset the rally. You’d work the next point, sure you had the advantage this time, and there he was again, presto, reversing your momentum.

Sure, I won some games, maybe even a set or two off the guy. But on the whole he mastered me, and he didn’t even seem to be trying.

To make matters worse, for several years prior to meeting Richard I had expended a great deal of time (and not a little money) modernizing my game, learning to hit the big topspin ball, to bring pressure, to brush angle shots from mid-court. And Richard’s game wasn’t only better than mine; it was a refutation of half of what I’d learned. You hit Richard a loopy shot and you got a loopy shot back, six inches inside the baseline. Okay, most good players do that. Then, on the rare occasion you were lucky enough to get a short ball, you stepped in and drove it, but a split second later, when you looked up, there was Richard’s ball, looping back into the space you’d vacated on the baseline or in the corner or, maybe, six inches from the sideline.

Looping, looping. Argh!

I emphasize: it didn’t matter how hard or soft you hit the ball to Richard. It always came back at a measured pace and it almost always landed in the court. He was human alkaline. The great neutralizer.

Richard matched this game with his demeanor: even-tempered, an easy smile, showing you the big space between his front teeth as if to demonstrate how much room you had to beat him.

After my worst outings against Richard, before I’d fully resigned myself, perhaps, to the knowledge that I’d never hit many balls past him, I must have shown that look of frustration that all those who play this game of racket and ball and net see from time to time — or feel forming on their own faces. I must have shown that look because Richard would tilt his racket and shake his head and say, “It’s an ungrateful game, mon.”

We give tennis all this love, work so hard to earn the right to win…and the game doesn’t care. It requires us to prove ourselves every time we step out onto the court, every time we turn our shoulder for a backhand, every time we send a service toss into the wind, every time we approach the net, every time we hit a great shot and watch it looping, looping back to us and stand there wishing it out, this once, this one damned point.

And of course that ball drops in, and unless we give chase with every muscle in our legs, tennis won't return the love just then. It cares only about how we execute now, in this moment, and not a whit for what we’ve given it in the past.

Point taken, Richard. Point taken. And in defiance of the game, I am grateful.