Tennis is a game for the young, the strong, the fast, the focused, and the thin.  I do not meet any of those criteria.  I am too old, too weak, too slow, too scatter brained, and too fat to play the game of tennis.  I shouldn’t even be on a court according to most of the experts….but I am.  I do not fit the profile. I do not look the part.  I am not supposed to be a tennis player, but I choose to play the game.  Essentially, I choose to play tennis for the love of the game.

 

My tennis journey is fairly short.  I took my first official tennis instructional lesson just over two years ago.  Prior to that, I dabbled in tennis sporadically.  As a child, the closest I came to playing regular tennis was hitting balls off my garage doors in the afternoon after watching breakfast at Wimbledon in the 1970’s a couple weeks a year.  As I grew older, baseball, hockey, and soccer dominated my sports related history.  Through High School, I played those three sports at the highest level available and they dominated my time when they were in season.  The closest I came to playing tennis on regular basis were the sessions I would play with a high school friend on the tennis team during the off season.  He was trying to improve his game, I just survived on my basic athletic ability running down shots.  I had no technique or skills other than the ability to get to the ball and attempt a return.  The only positive I can take out of those sessions was the racquet I borrowed from my friend, a Pro Kennex Copper Ace.  It would become the basis in which all the following racquets would be measured .

 

After High School, my tennis activity became even more sporadic than the limited tennis I played in my High School years.  My first fall in college resulted in a torn ACL playing a pick up football game over Thanksgiving weekend.  It was an injury that was to plague me for the next two years as I went through 3 surguries to clean up, rebuild, and clean up scar tissue.  During this time, my tennis history was fairly limited.  The only tennis that I recall playing was a match against a D1 tennis player as a freshman where he played left handed against me in the rain (he destroyed me), and an intermural tennis tournament I played the following year.  During that intermural tournament, I made a discovery that would define my game until I started taking proper lessons in 2014.  As I had zero clue about tennis technique, I had no backhand.  During the first match in that intermural tournament, I discovered I could hit an underspin backhand with my standard forehand grip and consistently get the ball in (again, I had no clue about changing grips for the various strokes.)  I ended up riding that underspin backhand stroke through the tournament beating several former high school varsisty players and reached the final.  Unfortunately, my success resulted in me playing longer than I expected and the final match was going to result in me being late for a date with my girlfriend at the time.  Being young, dumb, and stupid, I chose someone to replace me in the tournament so I could go on the date.  She dumped me a month later, my replacement (who I beat in the second round) won the tournament.

 

I did not pick up a racquet very often for the next several years until I met my wife.  She enjoyed playing tennis occasionally, so we bought a couple of Pro Kennex Kinnetic racquets and would play on the local court a couple times a month.  We continued playing this way until we moved to Florida where we transitioned into playing golf rather than tennis.  A decade later, another move landed us into a new sitauation and tennis once again became the athletic pursuit of choice.  We joined a club that had climate controlled and clay court options as well as other amenities that would meet our needs.  For the first six months or so, we just continued playing occasionally with each other and I had moved into some Prince Original Graphite OS Tours just because I had always desired one back in the 80’s.  The next spring, we decided it was time to get something proper instruction and those lessons transformed me into the tennis fanatic that I have now become.

 

The journey has only just begun.