Three years ago I was seduced by the thwack of a ball on the sweet spot of a tennis racket. I was 52, had gray hair, school marm glasses, and avoided exercise the way most people my age avoided colonoscopies.

With our children soon to leave home, my husband and I needed a new common interest. Some of our friends at this stage of life had taken up the tango; others dabbled in real estate. But lacking both rhythm and enough money to invest in a plot of land the size of a Port-o-San, tennis seemed a good choice. 

  My husband had already started to play. With a rather big push of the imagination, I could see the two of us on the court looking crisp and svelte, and calling out endearments. "Darling, good shot!" "Sweetheart, you aced that serve!" I decided to take some lessons.

At my first tennis lesson, I found out what others have known for centuries. A simple round object hurtling through space has the power to seduce, mesmerize, transform. Until then I observed sports matches with a mild anthropological interest. Once at a baseball game, I discovered the thing that interested me the most: the Wave. What kind of person was most likely to initiate a wave, I pondered. Why did some waves falter midway while others made their way around the entire stadium with as perfect a domino effect as the one erroneously projected by the Government during the Vietnam era? I had just begun to plumb the depths of these questions when the ninth inning ended. I hadn't a clue who had won or what the score was. 

Tennis, though, was different. Surprisingly, I could get the ball over the net, sometimes twice in a row. It was during one such rally that I heard the satisfying thwack of a ball being forcefully returned.

The sound came from my instructor's racket, not mine, but nonetheless that thwack was my "open sesame" to an internal cave of buried emotions and drives. Suddenly I hungered to win. Well, not win, exactly, more like clobber, smoke, slaughter, dominate, chew up and spit out. 

After so many years, I had found my Inner Competitor.  

Soon I discovered my Inner Competitor wasn't as polite as I was. Once after I missed a shot, my opponent shouted at me, "Hey, Lucy! Wake up!"A fan of Emily Post, I would have normally let a remark like that pass. But not my Inner Competitor. Immediately, my Inner Competitor threw down our racket, marched menacingly toward our opponent, jabbed our index finger at him and shouted, "YOU wake up! That ball was so slow I'm amazed I wasn't in REM sleep by the time it got to me!"

As my Inner Competitor showed up more and more, things began to deteriorate. In the mornings I made the kid who delivers newspapers race me around the cul-de-sac. I challenged my five-year-old niece to thumb-wrestling tournaments. I grabbed food items from the hands of surprised grocery baggers so I could pull ahead and finish packing my bag first. And just this week I bet my librarian the amount of my overdue fines that I could recite more titles from the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series than she could. 

The important thing, though, is that my main goal has been achieved. With our children off on their own, my husband and I have found new intimacy rushing around the tennis court while slamming each other with linty, yellow balls. In fact, next Saturday instead of the usual movie date, I've reserved an indoor court where the two of us can experience the deep togetherness that comes from trying to hammer, annihilate, and clobber each other.

Return to top  Tennis Lessons by Lucy Greenburg
  ©Lucy A. Greenburg 2023
Publ. by The Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 5, 2002