To get on a court is all I want most days. My desires are simple. One hour on a court to hold me over until that next hour, like stepping stones dropped across my weeks. To conduct this casual business on baselines and benches, to get to the place where I can fire balls into the net and curse my form, is to undertake a complex social choreography. I need someone to hit with. A body to hit at.
The obvious genius inherent to all physical activities, besides tennis, is that they are mostly solitary affairs. Self-directed feats to be completed at the convenience of one's own schedule, dictated by mood and mentality, without the burden of another. This is the physical event as a mechanical process—if the system requires a run to burn off the day or a furious hour in the gym, press the button and get it on. You do it, no preparation necessary.
Or so I imagine it to be. I've never indulged in autonomous exercise. Tennis, for reasons that I can't recall or simply don't have access to, has always been the thing for me. My chosen and default method of sweat. Like a runner in a three-legged race, I've lashed myself to it, and to whomever is available, to fulfill this need, hour by hour, week over week.
It's turned me into an opportunistic weasel. I am a cold-calling salesman, angling to get my foot in the door.
It's turned me into an opportunistic weasel. I am a cold-calling salesman, angling to get my foot in the door. A search for "hit?" in my text messages retrieves hundreds of threads, spanning years, cities and countries. I pitch, plea, and barter. Times and days are negotiated with sterile diplomacy. I simply must close. I'm always happy to slide an offer across the table. I can't do 2pm on Fridays anymore, but how's 9am on Monday? I'll book it now.
This is the social game of tennis. Some have a feel for it. They are active collaborators, allies in achieving a common goal. They arrive early and wait in line. They bring balls. They pre-pay for court time. Others, well, they'll never get asked back (though exceptions are made in emergencies). Take, for example, the marketing director who arrived at a paid court-time twenty minutes late, only to slice his thumb open on a ball can top. We staunched the flow of blood with a borrowed bandage and powered through a clumsy ten-minute hit. Or, try the assistant director in Los Angeles, a glib communicator with a shape-shifting schedule, who finally agreed to hit after prolonged negotiation. As I warmed up on our court, on the chosen day, this lifelong Angeleno called to say he had, in fact, driven to a similarly-named park over one hour away.
To get to where I want to be (on a court for one hour), I have to navigate power dynamics and communication styles, subtle demonstrations of indifference or desire. How many times to chase a person who is (coincidentally I assume) always booked on days that I propose? How much of the logistical burden should fall on my plate? (Why don't you choose the court…) Do I play dumb with regard to those who ask hyper-specific questions, requiring on-the-ground-intel, about wait times, conditions and traffic, or do I manage expectations?
A better player is often an in-demand player, booked solid for the coming days. But one's level doesn't always translate into ethics. There are some who make it known that you are their fallback partner, a stop-gap compromise. Am I grateful for their time and their skills, that they'd hit with a feeble-bodied amateur such as myself? I am. Will I accept foot-dragging body language when I hit a stray or accept patronizing evaluations of my game after being pummeled? I'd rather play with someone who has never once changed their strings.
There are some who make it known that you are their fallback partner, a stop-gap compromise.
As a partner, I've committed a spectrum of faults. May this serve as a record of my penance to all potential partners reading. These incidents have run the gamut from piquant to perplexing and, most likely, totally exasperating. There have been occasional fits and shameful outbursts. Rackets launched into fences and walls, smashed without warning onto the very courts I adore, flung into the net with a petulance that has stunned even myself. In time, I've come to worry less about how this rage reflects on me and more about how it affects my partner. Are they embarrassed by my mania, my expletives, my lack of control? Is that the creep of self-consciousness on their face? More importantly, will they call me to hit again?
Then, I've been the perpetually late victim of traffic, attempting uptown hits at midday, in defiance of New York City congestion patterns. I've been tardy and shambolic. A late arrival without excuses and, on more than one occasion, without a fresh can of balls (or any balls for that matter). A late arrival with a hangover and one with an unshakably bad mood. Once, while vacationing in the humid swelter of south Florida, a late arrival without any socks to wear on my feet. (To this day, I think of my partner's resilient patience and strive to be more like them.)
As a freelancer, the court has been an occasional conference room for my work. Put more bluntly, I've been selfish, desiring pleasure despite my business, double-booking myself in the process. (Do you mind if I take a call? Five minutes.) I've fielded them from recruiters, bosses, curious editors, lawyers, and subjects for stories. On a tennis court, this deputized office of mine, I've been hired, and fired, from jobs against the beating backdrop of rubber ricocheting through space. And once I've hung up, as quickly as I can, as if nothing had occurred, I head back on.
But there has been growth, a gradual reform taking place alongside the steady rise of my level. My outbursts have tapered off, and I always try to have a can in hand. I manage my own expectations and try not to push the limits of what is possible with my schedule. Arrival time has, above all, become holy and untouchable. The real measure of my growth as a partner. On the morning of a recent 8:30am court time in Flushing, I awoke to find that my car had been towed and impounded at the Navy Yard. At 8:30am, after a frenzied Citi Bike ride in frozen rain, after flying off that same Citi Bike onto the asphalt, after paying the tow fee while my leg quietly oozed blood, after driving across Brooklyn in morning rush hour traffic, I walked on court. The scar on my knee is still a faded plum purple.
In his introduction to David Foster Wallace's String Theory, John Jeremiah Sullivan describes tennis as "perhaps the most isolating of games." If only. Being a partner in this game is to be exposed and ripped from isolation. I can't hide from you and still obtain the desired thing. No matter the levels of my introversion or introspection on a given day, my presence is required, always in a full frontal position. My partner is an observer, watching me descend into fits of madness, and an eavesdropper, listening in on private conversations with myself. They are a witness to the self-pity and despair, the self-encouragement and uncontained excitement that flood my brain.
My partner is an observer, watching me descend into fits of madness, and an eavesdropper, listening in on private conversations with myself.
To get on a court and experience the actual thing requires, above all, an other. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was big on the idea of the "Other." He thought that the ego, and its formation, were dependent on all kinds of external objects—language, images, people—society in other words. Applying this idea, ever so gently to tennis, makes me think that maybe the individual, that isolated solitary "I" that so many associate with the game, is a grave misconception. If only it could be played in isolation. If only it were isolated from all the other things in our lives. Instead, this game is a bit like a net, a wide web stretched across our daily lives, catching all the strays that fly our way.
Of course, I love when we build a good point together. (Look at what we just did!) I don't have words for the sensation that follows, but it lifts my head straight out of my body. When I look back at all the hits, strung back end-to-end, I don't remember the points, the wins, the performances, or anything that happened during the game. Instead, I think about things like the summer Steve and I—both unemployed, newly single and looking for apartments—met at the net between points to chew over our personal chaos. Or the time Adrian and I, as we warmed up, watched a car rocket into the side of the BQE, bursting into a roundball of flames, moments after the driver rolled to safety. I think about the times both Noah and Jacob shared the surprise news about their new jobs as we walked onto the court. How Sam told me, while waiting for our court in Brooklyn, that he was finally, after a decade in New York City, moving back down south.
I remember things like that doubles hit, winters ago, when Harris texted us minutes before to say he'd just learned his wife was planning to divorce him.
"Are you sure you still want to hit? We really don't have to." I replied.
"No, it's fine. I don't want to be alone," he wrote. "I just wanna get out there."