I concentrate on looking like I’m concentrating.
I tell myself, ‘Focus Lucy – take this in.’ - which prompts my mind to spontaneously wander off to aimless thoughts of ex-boyfriends, work, why You’ve Been Framed still has video tapes in the title sequence animation when no one uses video tapes any more and whether I prefer daddy or chips.
The tennis coach must quickly suss out each client, not only their tennis ability or lack thereof, but a way to connect with them, he must pander to teenage boys and their flouncy tantrums, and middle-aged men and their flouncy tantrums. For the women he has a social responsibility to flirt with each and every one. His flirting is imperative to the wellbeing of the local community. If he can make all of the women he coaches feel attractive for an hour a week then they go away and don’t have to be prescribed anti-depressants.
Day after day, hour after hour he must repeat himself, not just to different clients but to the same person. Someone who, in the rest of their life, is perfectly educate-able, in this situation becomes utterly incapable of retaining information, or imitating what they are shown, or even coordinating one hand with the other.
I forget that he sees eight or more people a day and has to do the small talk with them all. When it’s my hour and he asks me something that he has already asked me, or tells me a story I have already heard, I am secretly affronted.
‘He doesn’t remember that we spoke about this during my last lesson, while I bashed a bucket full of backhands at him?! Pah.’
‘He told me that story three weeks ago when I was having a really good serving day, doesn’t he remember? Pah.’
I am convinced that people only drink so that they can recycle the same old stories and conversations with the same people over and over again. When drunk you can tell the same story to someone else who is drunk, who has heard it before, and neither of you will care. I have a brain wipe at the end of a night if I have had more than two large glasses of wine, which means that I can repeat that same night indefinitely. If I ever go out and I’m not drinking when the other person is, within about three minutes of them speaking I will say, “You’ve already told me that, yes, yes I know and then he got the sack, and then he killed himself, and you wrote a poem on Facebook dedicated to him, come on, drink up I want to go home.”
In the original version of one of my favourite songs ‘Eat sleep rave repeat’ by Fat Boy Slim – it is perfectly summarised:
“So. . . like. . . John called me the next morning.
‘Like. . .Dude. . .Like. . .where were you last night?’
I was like . . . ‘I was there.
He was like
‘. . . .Oh . . . yeah’”
When my boyfriend regales me about an event that I was stood next to him during, watching said event, commenting on said event, TO him, I am always very violently affronted. “I was fucking there man!!!”
When my mother tells me some snippet of news related trivia; “Oh yes and I’ve heard that they do in fact have mirrors on the front of dumper trucks so that they can see cyclists they are about to squash in front of them at traffic lights.”
“Yes Mum, I told YOU that.”
I have developed a technique myself where I make sure not to mention any events/things said without my description being so ambiguous that I am almost suggesting that they were there or said the ‘thing’. If you talk in such an inclusive way as if they have full knowledge of what you are talking about then they won’t be offended and say “I wasn’t bloody well there, don’t you remember?!”
If they foolishly respond with outrage then you could just say, “Oh, sorry, it just always feels like you are with me, even when you aren’t.” or “Oh it was such an intelligent, witty comment that I just assumed that it would have been you who said it.”
While you have tennis coaching you can pretend for an hour that you are an elite tennis pro, and that this is the coach you employ to get you to the Open finals. For perhaps ten seconds you manage to get in the zone and hit two shots in a row; which don’t bounce off the frame or wang over the perimeter fence - you are living the dream. The hour ends, you mix in with the other club players and everything goes to shit. Entire games of double faults follow entire games where every return goes into the net. There is a general consensus at my club that you cannot ‘mix in’ after a lesson because without fail you will be horrendous. Just the same as when you pass your driving test your teacher won’t then let you drive the learner car back home because he knows that you will have lost all ability to drive for the rest of the day.
If someone asked you to throw a ball straight up into the air, you’d think nothing of it, wouldn’t you? Not if you have just had tennis coaching. Serving to the veteran club members, all of a sudden I am aware of the infinite possibilities of my throw direction, height and speed. Each joint can contribute to a throw going wayward – fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder, head, any of these could randomly tilt just slightly the wrong way and off goes my ball. After no more than three bad throw ups I am so embarrassed that I just hit the next ball regardless of the toss up being the worst of the lot.
Coach has a script of how to break down shots and convey them to an eager idiot. As he talks me through it I listen. HARD. So hard that I go off into one of those wonderful hazy meditations where I am staring ahead, looking as though I am alert, when really I have been plunged into a consciousness limbo, he is mouthing instructions and all I hear is blood rushing through my own head and birdsong. I only break out of it when coach says, “Ok, now go down the other end.”
“Urm, so take it early, hit the rising ball, power from the shoulder, whip the wrist?”
It doesn’t really matter what shot he has told me to make, whatever I am meant to be doing I end up capable only of doing the exact opposite, he may as well say, “Approach on totally the wrong foot, prepare too late, swipe at the ball in a panic, whack it with the frame and send it over the fence onto the roof of that car.” I guess if we all took on board what he said and were able to immediately do it he would be doing himself out of a regular income, and a new Harley.
The serve is the worst for too much information:
“Arms down and straight, lean back, throw the ball, lean forward, knees bent, arms up, arms back, leaping up, legs straight, arms down, leaping forward, arms leaping, legs leaping, leaping! Leaping! LEAPING!”
He watches my horrendous attempts to serve, makes idle conversation while I mess it up continually. When I actually get one over, he interjects, “That’s good. Now, didn’t that feel different? Did you hear the sound it made? Remember how that felt, that’s how to do it.” I give a kind of embarrassed nod, it’s almost more uncomfortable when I do well, I don’t quite know what to say, ‘thank you’ seems as though I know that I did a good shot and I am thanking him for acknowledging it. If I screw up my face and say “Was that really ok?! It was a total fluke” then it’s as though I have no confidence in his tuition and am effectively dissing him. Maybe subconsciously I mess up more than I do good shots because I feel awkward about being praised.
The problem with coaching; every shot sent to me is a pleasure to return, perfectly placed to help me hit it right – this is absolutely no help. Every shot I receive when playing social tennis will be awkward, too long, too short, ploppy or bouncing way above head height. If he sent me only bad shots I might actually improve my match play. If I play against someone really good who hits textbook shots I suddenly think, ‘Wow, I’m not half bad you know, I’m getting all his shots back.’ whereas if I play against a never-had-coaching type who has played for fifty years and has two ceramic hips they will humiliate me by hitting bizarre uncooperative balls.
I hate playing doubles, but I also hate singles. I think that I might only like having coaching or knocking up. In doubles no calories are burnt because at least half of the time is spent standing at the net listening uncomfortably to my partner at the baseline grunting and lurching to cover the 97% of the court that I am not. Eventually a drop shot is played. It is just far enough to the other side of the court that I hope perhaps technically it is part of the 97% that my partner is responsible for. I see them loom into my peripheral vision, staggering forward to reach it and failing. I say sorry. ‘I won’t do that again.’ I think, so next time, mid-rally I start skipping backwards to the baseline so that I can contribute to the rally, and they hit a drop shot. I say sorry. If I burnt calories from cringing and apologising then doubles would be a great workout. So too would my job.
I am the worst of combinations, a very competitive choker. I always prefer playing with men or boys because I feel like because there is less expectation for me to be as good as them and therefore I relax and play better. If I am playing women I realise that I smother my aggressive instincts for some reason. I feel uncomfortable trying to bash hell out of them, even though they have no qualms about doing that to me.
I never win my own serve, it is tradition. The minute I get even a point ahead I start thinking, gosh, I might win this game, and then I do a Jana Novotna. I think if I ever embraced my true competitiveness I would let out that child in me who used to have hideous rages. I have held in so many tantrums and screaming, unreasonable hissy fits over the last twenty five years that if I let one out now it may never end.
It reminds me of my dad driving us, in convoy, to Clacton for my 12th birthday outing. Half my friends were in the car with me and my dad and half were in the car of my friend’s mum. My father let the woman lead the convoy. She drove at 45mph all the way up the motorway, it was agony, and yet when we begged him to overtake her he refused saying that it would be impolite. Why are we so uncomfortable beating women?
Cold weather tennis presents its own special problem; Camel toe.
Any of the figure hugging, leg-flattering-bottom-perting-legging-type things out there have, as the yang to the ying, untapped potential for camel toe.
I wore my winter bottoms during the three times I played this winter and was so conscious of the threat of camel toe that I could think of nothing else. I had to check every five minutes to make sure that the crotch of my trousers hadn’t risen up and created the Mariana Trench. When I stood to receive serve I stood with legs stupidly far apart, just to make sure that the cotton couldn’t gather up and form an offensive outline.
I don’t want much. Just once I would like to retain the score in my head for the whole of my own service game. In maths lessons I used to hear the teacher reciting a longwinded, many facetted question involving bus timetables, average speeds, sharing sweets with multiple people and counting out change. After the first stage to the question I always lost everything else, I just about managed the first calculation but lost the end goal and no longer knew why I was holding in my head a figure of 25, what it meant, whether that was time or sweets and what I was meant to do with it next. I would repeat over and over 25, 25 and look deep in concentration whilst swivelling my eyes to their maximum trajectory to try to see what my partner was doing with her 25. They talk about children needing to learn to fail, I knew plenty about it, I learnt to conceal failure, I learnt to somehow scrape through an hour’s lesson without being asked a question by thinking invisible, acting quietly confident and like I knew what was happening so that the teacher wouldn’t see through my poker face.
I get this same panicked feeling playing tennis when I realise that everyone else has also lost track of the score. One of them will come out with; “Well if you are serving from that side then it must be either 15 all, 30 love, 15/40 or deuce.” Huh?!! Everyone but me seems to see the possible score combinations of each side of the court laid out, like Google glass in front of their eyes. I see nothing. On the one occasion I asked my mother to list me every single score combination for each side of the court so that I could learn them like multiplication tables, or at least write them on each arm, she herself got so muddled up she couldn’t explain. She knew them if she was playing but could not break them down for an egit. I think it might have been an act so that she can always manipulate the score when we play, exploiting my dyscalculia.
One of my favourite eccentric players at the club; Roger, when asked the score says, “I’m afraid I don’t keep score.” It’s the perfect answer, its as though he doesn’t believe in scoring. If the rest of us want to be frivolous and make this activity about scores then that’s up to us but he is not here for such superficial reasons, he is just here to hit the ball.
We all hit a wall at some point where the worries we were putting aside by going to play tennis creep back in. It hits me suddenly. While waiting for the serve near the end of the first set my thoughts switch from hitting the perfect backhand and return to worrying about the tax return, the boyfriend, why iCloud has stopped backing up my phone and the concentration is gone, it’s over, I won’t get it back today, time to go home. But the others haven’t yet hit their worry wall so I must play on. When there is social tennis going on, we all play longer than we want to. We are at the mercy of the six games rule, counting down to the time when everyone swaps partners. Either side of me the other courts all finish and are saying, “We need a man over here!” “Ladies four?” “Who’s leaving?” I am still playing, trying to get through the last crucial game while the woman serving is yelling back at the others’ “I simply have to go, I’ve got potatoes to roast!” as she sends an ace past me. When I finally pluck up the courage to whimper, “I think I’d better be going now.” I hear an angry mob shout “But then we will be NINE/FIVE/SEVEN” as though odd numbers are the work of the devil. So I carry on playing and someone else two minutes later announces they are leaving, mid-point, because a ham has to be boiled and everyone yells’ “BYEEEE Jillian!”
I believe that I like tennis, and yet the very moment I start playing a set I am thinking about the end of it and being able to stop and go home. When I think about it there aren’t many activities that I can do without wanting it to end quite soon. Sleeping is one, and reading, but the reading takes place in bed, just before the sleeping so I never get to the point of wanting the reading to end because the sleep sweeps in and takes me away.
When I have a big gap between playing I become frightened to go back, worried that my serve will have deteriorated. So I don’t play and my serve deteriorates. I finally pluck up the courage to go back to the club. I drag someone related to me up there and pull them aside before I go on court, grabbing their arm, looking deep into their eyes pleadingly, “Promise me that you will refuse to play doubles, if anyone asks, remember, YOU and I are just doing singles because my serve is not for public consumption yet, I couldn’t cope if we mix in, promise me, PROMISE ME!!” And then some bossy woman insists almost immediately that we both ‘mix in’ with everyone and my mother skips off to play on a distant court and I have to play doubles with three people who don’t know that I always lose my serve, how I can’t stay put at the net and how I am incapable of keeping score.
Your parents, when they get you to play tennis as a child hope one day to be thrashed by you. They hope that other club members will marvel at their child’s stunning, immaculately coached shots. They won’t mind losing a bit because they will be so proud. What has happened with me is that I never got good enough as a child to thrash them, any sets we played were always 6-0 to them with a few lucky winners from me and being told that I had lots of potential, if only I played more. Well, my parents have finally got their wish, I have started to win games off them, though not because of my superior technique and match sense developed over twenty years of sporadic play, no, it is purely because enough time has passed that they are now old and even if I serve entire games into my own face somehow I will accrue enough points to win. It is most disturbing to watch your parent staggering to the net to reach a sneaky drop shot, conflicted by the emotions of wanting to win the point but also not wanting to see them fracture their pelvis.
