Tennis Memories

by Jeffrey Meyers

Much have I traveled in the realms of tennis, and many goodly states and playgrounds seen.  Now that injuries have forced me to quit the field, I console myself by remembering all the weird places and people I’ve known through tennis.  At my summer camps in Massachusetts and New Hampshire from the age of 5 to 15, I was allowed to hit the ball wildly, missed the chance to get proper instruction and was never taught how to develop a strong backhand.

Today’s huge tennis stadiums—with their noisy crowds and sales of luxury items, vulgar advertising and television cameras, lucrative endorsements and gigantic prizes—are worlds apart from the genteel atmosphere surrounding the tennis tournaments in the early 1950s.  When I grew up in Forest Hills, New York, and walked from my house to the U.S. Open at the West Side Tennis Club, almost all the players were American, English and Australian.  There were grass courts and wooden rackets, white players, white clothes and white balls.  Everyone behaved with polite reserve and good manners. When one player got the benefit of an unfair call, he didn’t swing at the next shot and evened up the score.

As a graduate student in Berkeley, I played mixed doubles with my girlfriend, my best friend and his fiancée.  The pretty girls wore white tennis outfits and enticingly raised their skirts to get the ball they kept Velcroed onto their thighs.  Our court-ship held promise of sexual showers and pleasures to follow.  The delightful “Tennis Girl” photograph of a tall, tanned, blond, leggy young woman approaching the net fired my imagination.  Pointing one toe on the ground, lowering her racket, seen from behind and  dressed in immaculate white, she lifts her skirt and exposes her voluptuous bare bottom.

When I left teaching and returned to Berkeley in search of a suitable partner— harder to find than a mistress—I ran into some bad manners.  One intolerable player screamed “I blew it” every time he missed a shot.  Despite my protests, he kept throwing his racket to punish himself and improve his game.  Another short-lived malefactor claimed he was distracted by people walking behind the back fence, insisted on replaying some shots and cheated on close points.

Other companions were more appealing.  A partner from Thailand brought his helpful girlfriend to retrieve our stray balls.  I played with one Cal professor on his private court that had a swimming pool and a superb view of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay.  One wealthy friend would drive me through the hills of Tilden Park in his Mercedes convertible to play at his club in Orinda and swim in the pool.  Afterwards, at home, he would open a bottle of excellent Pouilly Fuissé.  When I first arrived in Berkeley I called John, who was supposed to be a veteran of the Foreign Service.  I was especially interested in him since my daughter was currently a diplomat.  I asked where he’d been stationed, he said “Wyoming” and I replied, “I didn’t think we had a consulate there.”  In fact, he’d said “the Forest Service.”

My age and height, and free for weekday singles three times a week, John was (like me) a hard hitter from baseline.  If I ran up to net he’d jokingly say, “Get back where you belong!”  Scrupulously honest about close points, he even insisted on reversing my call in his favor and giving me the point.  We were evenly matched, played thousands of congenial sets and divided the wins equally over 25 years.  John also invited me to take the ferry across the Bay to Angel Island, with spectacular views of the stars in the dark night sky, and share a weekend cabin with him.

When teaching at UCLA in Los Angeles, I saw the promising young student Arthur Ashe competing on the next court.  A friend invited me to play on the private court of the fiery Pancho Gonzalez, who’d won 13 professional Grand Slams, when he was away from home.  During a scandalous court case, Pancho had terrified his opponent by holding him upside down outside the high window of a building.

When I was teaching in Boulder, Colorado, one fanatic shoveled snow off the court so we could play, bundled up, on cold but sunny days in winter.  I also played indoors in the winter on fast wooden floors that made the balls skid and slide.  One early Sunday morning I was unexpectedly summoned to complete a doubles foursome by an unknown Dr. Kurtz, the namesake of the cannibalistic madman in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  Recalling that Kurtz had treated my late friend for brain cancer, I asked him, if the disease had been discovered earlier, whether my friend could have survived.  Kurtz gloomily replied that he was doomed as soon as the first cancer cell divided in his brain.

On a grant year, and around the corner from my flat in Hampstead, North London, I played for the first time on lovingly-cared-for, soft-bouncing grass courts.  I learned there to step in (instead of waiting) to hit the bouncing ball.  I still remember the names of Young Dai-vid (as he was called) and the geriatric couple Sid and Aggie.  Everyone stopped religiously at 4 P.M. for tea—in the middle of a game or even a point.  At the posh Queen’s Club in West London, I watched the pros practicing for the championships in Wimbeldon, South London.  I also played at Wimbledon!  Not at the All England Tennis Club, but at my friend’s private court across from the grounds of the tournament.

Tennis adventures abounded abroad.  In tropical Kenya I had the luxury of energetic ball boys.  They crouched professionally and dashed across the court while I rested contentedly at the baseline.   An all-inclusive hotel in Jamaica offered unlimited daily lessons with an excellent and sympathetic pro.  I later looked him up in Connecticut and under his tuition slightly refined my game.  Friends in Bad Brückenau, Germany, arranged a match for me.  My opponent formally called the score, with a slight bow, after each point: “Vierzig, dreizig.  Jawohl, Herr Professor Doktor.”

During a torrid holiday on the Turkish coast my new racket slipped out of my sweaty hand, hit the ground, got squared off at the edges and completely twisted.  A little boy watching us eagerly rushed over to it, picked it up and treasured it.  In Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, I played with an ex-convict on a narrow rooftop court.  It had very little space between the baseline and the back-crushing back wall.  All our wild shots flew over the fence and fell six storeys down to the street.

In Tenerife, in the Spanish Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa, the winds were fierce.  The courts were deformed by breezes, gusts and downdrafts.  Nets, like sexual erections, stood out parallel to the ground and hard-hit balls made sharp right turns and flew onto the next court.  Natural forces had extinguished all play.  In the early 1970s I lived in Spain for four years and played a lot of tennis in the perfect weather.  In Fuengirola, on the south Costa del Sol, I played with an older Dane who owned a hotel with a court.  After a hot match it was blissful to swim and drink an icy beer.  But one day I drank from a hose spigot and after playing singles got shingles, which tortured me when I flew to London for a job interview.  For many years the Dane, with droit de seigneur, spun his own racket and won every toss to start the serve.  This infuriated me but I remained silent.  He redeemed himself when he arranged a superb dinner and musical evening at his hotel for my American visitors.

At his tennis club in Mijas, just above the Costa del Sol, the Australian champion Lew Hoad told me that when he won the British, French and Australian Grand Slams as an amateur in 1956, he earned only a few thousand dollars.  (Today’s professional winners can earn millions in a single tournament.)  One quiet day, when he couldn’t find a partner, Lew asked me to join him in doubles.  That was the height of my tennis career.  Young English trainees, cocooned at Hoad’s club, saw nothing of the country, didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t even know the name of the capital.  When I tried to overpower an old Wimbledon player, Jack Warboys, so stiff he could hardly move, he stood fixed at the baseline and with deadly accuracy placed most shots beyond my reach.  Drinking after a pickup doubles match, I asked my partner Phil what he did in London.  “I’m a writer.”  “What do you write about?”  “T. E. Lawrence.”  “Then you must be Phillip Knightley.”  He was mightily pleased that I had recognized him.  We became lifelong friends when I lived in London, and he helped me get an agent and publisher at the start of my writing career.

Memorable phrases from the land of tennis stay with me.  In London after a good shot one player rejoiced, “I like it, I like it, it’s good.”  When the Turk missed a shot he confessed, “I regret that very much.”  In Berkeley the much-younger-than-me Peter Pan (who’d never heard of the famous play with his name) described his escape from Vietnam and gave me a back-handed compliment: “You run fast . . . for old man!”  I met a powerfully built Italian professional soccer player.  As soon as the wife dropped him off at the court, he’d give tender, arm-around, very intimate lessons to a poorly coordinated but exquisitely dressed Japanese girl.  Whenever he made a tennis error he comforted himself by singing the “Laugh, Clown” operatic lament: “Ridi, Pagliaccio.”

Jeffrey Meyers’ books James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath appeared in 2024.  He will publish 44 Ways of Looking at Hemingway (also with LSU Press) in the fall of 2025.