Tennis Memories

Tennis Clinic

As a kid we belonged to a country club. Each summer my mother signed me up for tennis clinic. It felt like every day, but it was probably three days a week. It started at 7 am, and when you evolved enough as a tennis player the pro, named Spencer, moved you up to the 8 o’clock clinic.

I was never promoted past the 9 o’clock clinic. At some point the fact that my younger brothers and cousins had surpassed me and none of my friends were still in the 9 o’clock clinic became such an embarrassment that I promoted myself to 10 o’clock. Spencer was kind. All he said was, “Oh, young Gutbloom, I see you’re in the 10 o’clock clinic now.” I replied, “Yes, I am.”

Tennis Whites

We had to wear white on the courts at the club we belonged to. I haven’t played tennis in a decade. I haven’t belonged to a country club for thirty years, but I still have whites. I always have a set of whites. You never know when you might be invited to play at someone’s club, right?

Whites on the Beach

When tennis clinic was over we would ride our bikes to the beach club (rough life, I know. I make no bones about my semi-patrician upbringing. I’ll give you the real dope if you want), so, in my mind, tennis whites are conflated with the beach. I spent a lot of time climbing on rocks and jetties, fishing with drop lines, and digging up clams while wearing tennis whites. My mother would flip out when I got tar on them. There used to be tar on the beach. It was congealed oil from oil spills, back in the day when nobody cared about oil spills.

Whites on the Babysitter

We had a babysitter that nowadays you would call an “au pair,” but who was really just a teenage girl my mother paid so she could have someone to boss around. I don’t remember the name of this one babysitter, my older brother could probably come up with it, but I was in love with her. I was young. This memory is at the edge of my ability to remember, so maybe, I don’t know… eight?

One day at the beach club she ordered me lunch and I asked for a chocolate milkshake. She got it for me even though she should not have. While we were sitting at a picnic table, a huge gust of wind flipped my milkshake onto her white tennis dress. It landed on her stomach and lap.

She was annoyed, perhaps even angry. The giant chocolate stain was outlandish. My emotions were in riot. I was both ashamed and afraid, fearful that my mom would be mad I was allowed a milkshake and crushed by the prospect that my babysitter would now hate me.

Let me just say that life is a weird thing. If there was a category of porn called “Chocolate Milkshake on White Tennis Dress” I would pay real money to check it out. I’m not saying it would do much for me, but I would look. I would definitely want to look.

My Championship Game

I have four brothers. They were all better at tennis than I was. I also have four female double first-cousins. Two sisters married two brothers, so my mother and their mother were sisters, and my father and their father were brothers. All of the girls are excellent athletes.

My cousin, Margaret, is a year younger than me. When she was 12, she won the much coveted 13-and-under championship at our club. She went on, in time, to win the 16-and-under and 18-and-under championships. She played varsity tennis in high school and college, and was captain of the Trinity women’s tennis team.

I beat her after she had won the 13-and-under championship. During the first set it was clear that she was sick with flu. I made her finish the match. She puked between games, but was convinced that she could still beat me. I won. She doesn’t really remember my victory. She only remembers being forced to play while she was sick. I remember the victory. It was almost my greatest achievement on a tennis court.

The Public Courts

I spent my summers in Rhode Island, but most of the year I spent in Hastings, NY. In Hastings, I played my friends on the public courts. You didn’t have to wear whites, but, of course, I wore whites. My friends in shorts and tee shirts kicked the shit out of me. I once lost to a guy wearing jeans.

The Squash Game

In college I got glasses and was told that my stigmatism probably affected my ability to track an object through space. This knowledge, coupled with my self-diagnosed “ fear of winning” explained, as far as I was concerned, why I was so bad at tennis.

I thought I would take up squash. I took lessons and started to play. I was OK. When I was living in Boston I belonged to a health club that had squash courts. I’m not sure how long I had been playing, but my cousin Margaret, 13-and-under champion, was also living in Boston. I talked her into playing squash. One day she came to my club and I taught her how to play.

Then, in the first game of squash she had ever played in her life, she beat me.

You know, anticipating where the ball will land is a more generalized skill than you might imagine.

The Best Game of My Life

I was dating a woman named Liz whose father had a summer house on Lake Champlain. We went one weekend to visit and her highly competitive Georgetown lawyer sister and her husband were there too. They were very nice people. The four of us decided to play doubles.

I hadn’t played tennis in a long time, but as bad as I am, I could still kind of play. I had, as noted, taken lessons throughout my entire childhood.

Liz wanted to beat her older sister. There was subdued sibling-rivalry in the air. I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to pull it off, but the rust fell off my game as we were playing. To the annoyance of our rivals, my serve came back on line just in a nick of time. I finished the match with an ace.

It was my greatest victory, but both Liz and I had to play it cool and just say “good game, that was fun”, like it was NO BIG DEAL.