A Return to the Courts – III

Sundry / Tennis

Hello readers, and wishing you a joyful new year! Thanks for your continued support for FWS. Also read: Parts I and II -

A Return to the Courts – I

A Return to the Courts – II

- of this riveting, indefinite series in which I document the new beginning of my lifelong engagement with this incredible sport.

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My new year began with a bang, tennis-wise. I featured in my first tournament in over a decade. It was a small, sleepy affair – a local tournament organized by the tennis academy where I play once or (if I’m lucky) twice a week – miles away from where I live. And yet, I turned up with a heart thumping with excitement; playing any sort of competitive tennis is a core childhood memory and I couldn’t help but feel like a younger version of myself for that glorious Sunday in the first week of January. It went better than expected: I was competent in my sole win and dignified in my twin losses to better players, eliciting some applause and acknowledgement. And to cap it off, as I made to head back on my hour-long commute back home – body aching pleasingly all over – I was handed a memento proclaiming ‘Best Backhand’. It wasn’t fully deserved, of course: the eventual winner of the tournament – off whom I took the one game on their serve, much to my delight, regardless of how the rest of that match went – had a much better backhand. But I accepted with much gratitude, considering this a cosmic recognition of my dogged determination to come up with a backhand I’m not scared to hit; all the better for it to have been – after much agonizing back-and-forth – a single-hander. It is now kept on our mantelpiece, where I suspect it will stay for a long, long time.

This was, of course, all too good and romantic to be true. Not two weeks later, much buoyed by my prodigal return to the (if I may) competitive circuit, I turned up at a second tournament – even further from home and on an even more beautiful day this time. With the lure of prizes in both cash and kind, this one was larger in scale and promised to be far more fiercely fought than the last. Winning was out of the question – the average competitor age seemed to be 16, and average skill level far too high for my liking – but I did feel fairly confident of acquitting myself honourably. But, as it happens in sport, it turned out to be a day on which, barring a couple of unreturned serves and an ace or two, not much went right. The bread-and-butter strokes I rely on to get out of jail failed me. Double faults, which I’ve reduced considerably since I re-started playing summer of ’23, showed up at just the wrong moments. And my second serve, which I’ve been quite happy with, having never had a decent or consistent one (much like the backhand), was punished without mercy, sitting up for winner after untouchable winner.

The teenagers I was grouped with played me almost with half their attention – seeming to regularly look over at the matches ongoing at the adjacent courts, as if fully secure in the knowledge that their engagement by me was to be brief and unremarkable. And so it was. No amount of mid-match theorizing about slowing it down, switching it up, or stepping up the aggression to match theirs worked. I failed to win more than two games in each set. The matches, and my stay at the tournament on a picture-perfect tennis day, was over before it could properly begin.

In true childhood spirit, I was insufferably grumpy and peevishly sad for the rest of that beautiful Saturday, and decided to take a week-long break to give myself a chance to get out of this mini-slump.

Within twenty-four hours, I had: (a) rented a court, solo, and practiced both first and second serve ad nauseum, failing to hit the target cones even once; and (b) played (post service practice) and lost another set 2-6, in which my marginally better play than the previous day was not nearly enough to make the session competitive for my opponent.

Such slumps may be stubborn, but, much to my satisfaction, irrespective of how I might react to downturns in other arenas of life – so is my tennis-playing self.