Playoff match in smoke
Do you have any idea how seriously ordinary people take USTA tennis? By that I mean folks who are parents and have jobs and aren’t professional tennis players. I thought it was bad enough that they yell at the refs at Little League games, but they are even harder on themselves. I joined a beginner tennis team, a group of very nice ladies out to have a fun time. Going into the playoffs we were the underdogs like the “Bad News Bears,” but we won our first playoff match, and I found myself playing doubles in the big second round after being spied on—I mean “scouted”—by our opponent’s captain. We gave her a bunch of phony names so she couldn’t look up our records. On the big day we were the visiting team and our opponents had bleachers of fans—husbands or boyfriends that had turned the event into a tailgate party—coolers of beer, scant attire—barbecuing! It was high noon—almost 90 degrees, hotter on the courts. The loud, getting-drunker-by-the-minute crowd cheered whenever we hit into the net. We won the first set 6-1, and then our opponents were out for blood. Things went down from there. The barbecue engulfed our other doubles team in black smoke. Eyes tearing, they asked for another court, and were denied it in a way that wasn’t pretty. I heard that whenever our team served, the meat men waved the barbecue hood, igniting a dark cloud on the court. On my court, adjacent to the black-out, our opponents questioned a line call and judges were brought in—two guys loitering at our net posts, drinking beer. The crowd ate it up. Four sweating gals playing cave woman at the net—the fans hooted and whooped as if it were female mud wrestling.
Fried and freckled, hands sticky with Gatorade and soot, my partner and I tried code words to crack each other up. “The girls from Spokane,” my diehard partner said sweetly when we were down in the second set—it would have made me cry if my eyes weren’t already tearing from the smoke. I tried to block out the Mardi Gras party going on a few feet away. While trying to keep my eye on the ball, I imagined the sloshed bear and chants for flung bras. “Lipstick” —I know a team that uses that code word (forget the fancy hand signals of the higher leagues) because if they’re losing and want to slow down the game (a strategy that works) they take a break to apply lipstick. My partner and I go for identical all black ensembles for domination (!), matching ponytails and pink shoes to confuse them. Actually it’s more exciting at the 2.5 (beginner) level because it’s rogue tennis—anything goes. Or maybe it’s more like Kindergarten, where not much is expected of you. Foot faults are ignored and bathroom breaks can be extensive, but there’s a big range of players because most are self-rated (2.5S)—some look like they should be professionals, and might very well be. The S is for Sandbagger. But that makes it fun, too. So we lost the match and I actually feel terrible about it—I guess I’m hard on myself, too. We’ll be back. See you girls out there next year.