A Love Letter to Grass

Every year anew, the tour splits down the middle when it comes to playing on grass. The same way the sea parted for Moses the tour parts for grass court season. There’s the half that thrives on it. And then there’s the half that takes a mental semi-vacation as long as the surface underneath their feet is green and alive. I belonged to the latter half until the very last bit of my career.

Grass is an organic, living biomass that adheres to the elements of time and weather. It plays differently in the morning compared to the evening, differently at the beginning of an event compared to the end of the event. The shade of a single tree (trees are experts in throwing shade) can alter the texture and therefore the grip of your shoes and the bounce of the tennis ball on that sweet green meadow. Humidity, dryness, temperature, what else lives in the vicinity. Everything matters when it comes to lawn tennis. You lay down the exact same measures and seeds for a grass court but the fact that there’s a building on one side and possibly a lake on the other will make both ends play completely differently.

Don’t worry, that’s the end of my gardening knowledge. What I do know, however, is that playing on pasture is unique in many ways.

So, even though I despised you, dear grass courts, with a passion of a thousand suns, this is my love letter to you:

Thank you for teaching me that sometimes smaller steps are the right way to go. You know that I was always a little too ambitious for my own good, that I preferred large leaps to shuffling ahead, and whenever I went too far, you brought me right down to my knees. Unfortunately, literally and physically down to me knees. At times, I wish you could’ve been gentler with me when teaching me a lesson but you, too, prefer a sledgehammer to a chisel when it comes to forming statues. In that way, we’re the same, I guess. I remember well how you strained my knees and beat my hip and pushed my back into positions it wasn’t meant to be in. Today, I understand that it was your way of saying flexibility is important in life, Andrea, and if you can’t adapt to me and others, if you can’t find compromise where there seems to be none, well, maybe you deserve to be alone. Thanks to you, lawn tennis, I now have great friends and foes in my life, both of which I keep close to my heart and to both of which I bow my head when my head needs to be bowed before I break a hip. In this case, thankfully, in the metaphorical sense.

You never were one for metaphors, were you? You always chose to bring your point across with fervor. You are practical, simple in a way really, straight-forward in giving feedback. Are you a Virgo by any chance?

The one thing I will always appreciate about you is that you never let me get away with my talent for words. Over explaining every loss, excusing my failures at length, describing the circumstances under which failures took place in depth – all of it, never worked with you. You didn’t care that I had a growth spurt at 15, just a few months before I stepped on your plushness for the first time, you didn’t care that I was tall. You never changed for me. I had to change for you. And in a way, I learned to change because of you. With time, I became less afraid of transformation. I won’t lie and say I’m good at it but I’m less afraid of it and that surely counts for something.

Don’t get me wrong, I fought you tooth and nail, an all-effort struggle against you and everything you stand for: the elements of time and weather and everything else in this life that is immutable, fixed, too big for humans to conquer. Until the very end, I believed I had a shot in this encounter when, really, it was futile from the start.

I don’t think you understand how it feels to be young when your youth lies a million years in the past. Let me try to explain it to you. You see, dear grass, when you’re young, you believe the world belongs to you, you think you can change it at will, that the sun and the moon, that heaven and earth, that sea and land, all move because of you. And then, you grow up and you realise that you’re nothing but a fraction of a salt grain in an Olympic swimming pool and I heard they drain Olympic swimming pools every three to five years.

It is what it is. I never mastered you like one masters a language. I never conquered you like Napoleon conquered land. But guess what, Napoleon was banished to live out his days on Saint Helena, an incredibly remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean, defeated and alone. I may be defeated but I’m not alone. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m tall.

Take that, Napoleon.

Maybe, we’ll never be friends - let alone lovers. I look at my tiny yard with the tinier pond on the right-hand side and its handful of goldfish and I still see patches of earth peeking through. The vivid plushness that brought me to my knees once upon time is suddenly missing when I need it most (and for aesthetic reasons) to ponder life and what you taught me about it.

I’m still grateful. At least I try to be. All the falls and slippages, the losses and errors and the desperation and fear that accompanied my every grass court season must’ve been good for something, right? How about acceptance?

Just because you love something doesn’t mean it will love you back. Sometimes, all you can do is find joy in loving.

Thousands of love songs have been written about unrequited love. Add this one to it.

Things that make me happy

Grass court season, of course. THE KNICKS DID IT! THEY ARE WORLD CHAMPIONS OF ELEGANTLY THROWING BALLS IN A BASKET! And this dress:

Things that make me unhappy

I can already see a generation of boys bopping around with terrible haircuts inspired by yet another soccer World Cup parade in the category of “questionable hair styles to hide the fact that I’m really scared to miss a penalty”.

(The masochistic part in me kinda loves it)

May your grass (whichever kind you prefer) love you back!

Yours truly, Andrea