An 84-degree afternoon in September may not be the best time to take up tennis.
“Don’t turn your back to the net,” Sam, the Ghanaian tennis instructor, told me from across the court under an azure sky in Central Park on Thursday.
What I didn’t tell Sam is that I turned after hitting my forehand because circling back to the center of the court consumed less energy than moving there laterally while bouncing on the balls of my feet.
What I did tell Sam is that I’m out of shape. That is, I’m out of tennis shape, which is part of what brought me to Court 27.
My path started six days earlier under an equally blue sky at the U.S. Open. I made the trip aboard the No. 7 train from Times Square. “So you don’t have a car?” a nice lady from Fort Worth who happened to be seated next to me, asked me as we chatted about life in Manhattan, the players we hoped to see (she Roger Federer; me, Eugenie Bouchard) and the mild weather until recently in our respective cities.
“Lately we’ve had 13 days of 100 degrees, which means that the kids start football practice at 6:00 p.m. and the coaches tell them to drink water throughout the day,” the Texan told me.
I know what she means. On Court 27, I stopped play every 10 minutes or so to drink from a paper cone that I filled with water from a yellow and red Igloo cooler attached to the fence that runs behind the baseline.
Later I consumed a quart of lemon-lime Gatorade. Old-school flavor. While I drank I recalled the bounce in my legs that my 17-year-old self managed effortlessly in singles and doubles matches throughout four years on the tennis team during high school in Pennsylvania.
My sister and I also played a prodigious amount of tennis in our youth. Most nights after dinner we descended into our neon-lit basement, where we battled at table tennis for a half-hour before returning to our homework.
“I decided to take up a new sport at age 41,” Jessica, a woman who played on the adjacent court told me afterward while we sat on a steel bench painted green, our faces flush from the humidity.
Maybe tennis is my new, old sport.
Throughout the lesson, Sam directed me to stand at the service line, then in the back court and later at the net. At each spot, he hit a series of balls to my left or right. Maybe a dozen forehands, followed by roughly the same number of backhands. “Turn your body perpendicular to the net,” he called on the forehands that I hit wide. “Come up over the ball. Step into the shot.”
For every forehand I returned, I hit four more wide, deep or into the net. I also hit three balls beyond the fence. The ratio remained roughly the same on backhand and volleys. Sometimes, usually after rest, I experienced a surge of spring in my legs – a groove? – only to tire and bury the ball in the net a shot later.
At the Open, I made my way to the distant courts, where I watched Garbine Muguruza and Carla Suarez Navarro of Spain defeat their compatriot Arantxa Parra Santonia and Marina Erakovic of New Zealand in three sets.
I marveled at the apparent ease with which the women seemingly made every shot, even the ones that cost points. Every other game, the players retreated to chairs at courtside, where attendants shaded them with umbrellas opened expressly for that purpose. The teammates sipped water or sports drinks. Otherwise they said little, sitting quietly in the shade. Suarez Navarro tapped her feet continuously, as if she could not wait for play to resume.
After my lesson, I made my way back to the tennis center, which has an LED clock above the door the faces the courts. The clock has orange digits that give the place an air of precision. Near the other door a gentleman strung rackets on a stringing machine. All those rackets arrayed in a line appealed to me.
As I left the center, I passed a man a who headed toward the courts, two rackets poking through the opening in his backpack. “Beautiful day and so few people here,” he said as we paused to survey the rows of courts. “This is fun.”