Please indulge for a few minutes as I go far off theme (I do mention a book though!) and allow me to express my love for tennis.

I love tennis. More specifically, I love to WATCH tennis. I don’t play tennis. Everyone always asks me this. Have you ever noticed that pretty much the only sports people assume if you like to watch it, you MUST play it, are tennis and golf? Every two out of three people in the United States are probably football fans, baseball fans, or both, but when someone says they were enjoying watching the Super Bowl last Sunday, you pretty NEVER assume they must PLAY football as well. Right? But apparently the only people who enjoy watching tennis (or golf) must be people who also play it?

So let me get that out of the way: no, I don’t play tennis. I think, now, that I might have enjoyed it when I was younger (perhaps), but I was never given the opportunity to learn it as a kid. And as I got into high school it became very clear that I was never going to be the athletic type. I have absolutely HORRENDOUS hand-eye coordination, so even those physical activities I enjoy are NOT the kinds that involve either catching or hitting balls out the air. (I’m reasonably fit and stay that way with other things: walking, swimming, some light weight training, etc.)

But I LOVE TENNIS. I watched it intermittently as a kid because my dad liked to watch it for awhile. I didn’t watch a ton, just sort of catching a match here or there, and I only knew a handful of the very well-known names in the early 90s. I liked it, but it wasn’t something I focused on or obsessed over.

It was in college that I found myself watching it again, with more focus and interest. Within a year I had gotten hooked. I understood all the basics of the game, I was learning all the major (and not so major) players, and I was beginning to see the nuances. NOW, twelve or thirteen years on, I am kind of an expert, if I do say so myself. I’m pretty sure I could commentate if I really wanted to. I know almost every player in the top 100 of both men’s and women’s by name AT LEAST, and I’ve seen most of the play at least once. I can analyze styles and tactics. I know stats. I just KNOW THIS SHIT.

And my god I love it. I have never much cared about the usual sports people watch. I find baseball extremely boring. I don’t mind basketball or football, but I’ve just never CARED. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why I liked tennis, but not those other more commonly-watched sports. I think it simply comes down to the fact that I much prefer solo sports, over team sports. I find solo efforts far more impressive and compelling. So I love tennis. I also love a bunch of other less-than-common sports: motorcycle racing, gymnastics, figure skating (yes, figure skating is a sport, I DARE YOU TO DO A QUADRUPLE AXEL OFF A KNIFE SLICING THROUGH ICE).

I cannot do justice to the wonders of tennis. The speed, the agility, the power, the grace, the endurance. Few athletes of other sports are in such amazing physical shape as a good tennis player. Few other sports require the constant running and moving and endurance that a Majors match in tennis requires (no baseball player is running back and forth and smashing 100 mph balls for two or three or four hours STRAIGHT with almost no breathers). A good tennis match is a little like ballet (and ballet dancers are also athletes, I will fight you on this).

You know who else loved tennis and could absolutely do justice to its beauty: David Foster Wallace. (Side note: unlike me, Wallace did actually play junior’s tennis, and by all accounts he was pretty damn good.) He wrote a whole series of essays about tennis, and they are fantastic! Poetry! About tennis! Probably his most famous is this essay about Roger Federer published in the New York Times: “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” You can read all five of his essays in this collection: String Theory: David Foster Wallace On Tennis. He says it when I never could. I just love it.

Like David Foster Wallace, Roger Federer is definitely my favorite player. He’s the first player I really remember watching as a kid, even. He is… magical. He’s probably nearing the end of his career now — he’s 39, which is getting up there for a tennis player, and he’s had a couple knee surgeries — but even if his record is eventually broken (it always happens eventually because sports just keep evolving and people keep finding new limits for the human body), I will still believe is the greatest men’s tennis player ever. I say MEN’S tennis player, because of course, there’s always Serena Williams.

And, I mean, need a say more? Serena Williams has won 23 Majors. She won her last Major while PREGNANT. Can any athlete beat that? No, probably not. The woman is power incarnate. End of story.

I could go on about all the other players I love… (I even named one of my cats Petra, after Czech women’s tennis player Petra Kvitova), but I won’t. You get the picture.

All of this has been brought on by the fact that the first major of the season, The Australian Open, started on Sunday (at the same time as the Super Bowl, so you can guess what I was doing while the rest of my family was watching football). Last year was rough for those of us who are obsessed with tennis because most of the season was canceled due to COVID (which was absolutely the right decision, but I still missed it!). The season is still going to be… different… this year because of the continuing pandemic, but tournaments are finding ways of dealing with it, and hopefully the vaccine will allow more tournaments to return to mostly-normal throughout the year. But in the meantime, I have the Australian Open right now! I have tennis again, and all’s right with the world.