I didn’t grow up around tennis. Nobody in my family played it, nobody watched it, it existed for me the way curling exists, a thing on television during some sporting doldrum, vaguely elegant, vaguely inaccessible. So it’s a little funny that in my thirties I’ve become the person who checks the weather three days out just to see if my Saturday court time is going to survive the late summer rains.
Here’s what actually pulled me in, and it wasn’t the aesthetics, though god knows tennis has plenty of those to sell you. It was the fact that for a couple of hours, my brain shuts up. Not in the wellness-influencer, breathe-into-your-third-chakra sense. I mean literally, structurally, I cannot doomscroll while a ball is coming at me at forty miles an hour. I cannot think about the state of the world, the latest unhinged executive order from the orange turd down south (he wants to bomb Oman??), the general moral rot of anyone currently hoarding obscene wealth while pretending it’s democracy. The court doesn’t care about any of that therefore I don’t care about any of that.
There’s something almost rebellious in that, or at least I’ve decided to frame it that way, because a body that moves is a body that’s harder to keep small …anxious…scrolling. Same reasoning I’ve applied to lifting, honestly. Strength as a form of refusal. Tennis just happens to be my cardio-related version of that refusal.
I will say the getting-there part of this sport is where the class stuff sneaks back in, because it always does. Booking a court in this city means being online at the right moment, comfortable enough with whatever tennis booking software your local club or parks department has bolted onto its website, because the good time slots vanish in minutes. It’s a small barrier compared to the actual cost of lessons or equipment, but it’s still a barrier, still one more place where technology oriented comfort and free-time-during-business-hours quietly decides who gets to play and who doesn’t. I notice it every time I successfully snag a Tuesday evening slot and feel a genuinely embarrassing amount of relief.
But once I’m actually out there, none of that matters, and that’s maybe the whole point. For a couple hours a week I get to just be a body hitting a ball over a net, badly, joyfully, with a surprising level of aggression. The aggression I promise has nothing to do with the person across from me and everything to do with everything else. I’m not graceful. I’m not going to be the next Naomi Osaka. And I love it, unreasonably, the same way I love lifting something heavier than I did last week.
So yeah. This is me, badly, joyfully, loudly loving a sport that has nothing and everything to do with the rest of what I write about here. Sometimes the resistance is a protest sign, we all need more protest sign.
