Chop Wood, Pick Up Tennis Balls

I recently went to play tennis with my dad, at his club, and he killed me. He beats up on me when we’re just warming up - or hitting, as he’d say - but the game we played in the end felt particularly ruthless. Perhaps he was having a bad day. Maybe I was.

He was hitting the ball deep to my backhand which forces me on my heels so I can’t hit through it. I use a heavy racket, like he does, which makes my one-handed backhand drive terribly ineffective when I don’t hit it right, and I often don’t hit it right. I can hit over it when I have time, but even then it’s shaky. My racket’s too heavy so I don’t use my wrist enough. My slice is pretty good but if the ball lands too deep all I can do is chop at it. It goes too high, or it lands too short, and he’s there to just put it away.

And he always does.

He’ll either hit a winner behind me or a drop shot that I look foolish trying to run to depending on what he’s working on - I’ve never been too fast. I’m moving pretty well these days, but not well enough to get there. If I happen to it’s not graceful, and it’s just the next ball that does it - likely a lob over my head. I hope these sessions are at least helpful for him, because the only thing I feel like I’m learning is that, at almost seventy, he’s much, much better than me. I’d say still, but that’s likely forever. He reminded me, as he toasted me at my wedding, that I’ll never have a chance.

I had already accepted that some time ago.

But maybe I hadn’t, and I’ll get him next time. The idea that I’ll put it all together, one of these days, does keep me going. The idea that my time will come.

I don’t make it easy for myself, though. I never have. Not only do I use a racket like his, I use his exact same racket - just one of his spares - strung the exact same way he used to string his, like some of his magic might’ve been inherited.

Loose, so you can really feel the ball. Loose, so you have to be gifted if you want to control it. Loose, like you know something your opponent doesn’t. Loose, so you have to be sure.

Admittedly, my dad and I had had a disagreement over text about something a few days before our session, and I’m not very good at compartmentalizing, or communicating with him. If something bothers me I bring it on the court with me - I bring it everywhere with me - and I struggle. He had misunderstood something, which I finally gleaned when I called him, and I had taken that to mean he didn’t care. When understanding is your most valued commodity, you’re mad at everybody all the time. Better, for me, to be understanding than to be understood.

Or at least to just be the person who calls.

Ilie Nastase was a tennis player who played, for a time, against my father. He was known as Nasty, for his on-court behavior. He was notorious, notable as much for his antics as he was for his play.

My brother and I used to play tennis at a club called Tennisport in Long Island City. My brother had a temper - believe it or not - that he displayed when he lost. This particular day, Sean was losing. He made everybody know.

From one court over in the bubble we heard someone bellow - who is that, McEnroe’s son?

We heard everyone laugh.

My brother gave up and went back to the locker room. We found out later that was Ilie Nastase, joking around.

I played tennis growing up, but my dad never wanted us to play in any tournaments. He wanted us to know how, but he left it there. The rest we’d figure out for ourselves.

I was the captain of my high school team, and eventually, when I was a senior, my brother and I played doubles together. We were the number one seed in our league but in our year-end tournament we lost first round. My brother only brought one racket and when his strings broke he couldn’t play with my spare.

It was too heavy.

I was recruited by a few college teams but only because of my name. It seems in retrospect I could’ve felt lucky that I might get into schools for this reason, but the fact that I was considered recruited, even though no one had come to watch me play, offended me. I never liked anyone assuming they knew me before they did.

In college I didn’t play my first year - due to this assumption - but I made the team my second. I was proud of that, as I had to try out. I played doubles, for the most part - my team was pretty good - but I’d made it. After that season it was recommended that the players go to Sarasota, Florida, to train over Spring Break. As a D3 tennis player, I chose to study abroad in Europe that semester instead.

I thought Sarasota, or maybe it was Bradenton, sounded really bad, and I still think I made the right choice. Although my ideas about myself, and who I should be, can sometimes be the problem.

I started playing again in rehab, after some years off. My muscles had atrophied when I was in the hospital - I was there for a month, and I couldn’t much walk - so my first time trying to serve I fell face forward into the ground. I was top heavy - skinny legs and a chest cavity, and organs, carrying too much fluid - and I didn’t have a sense of myself.

I couldn’t carry my own weight.

Eventually I picked it back up. I was good - for rehab. I beat up on all the other junkies. I got fitter and my legs got stronger. I needed something to do besides think about me.

I eventually joined a club, when I left, and asked if there were any good players who wanted to hit. I met my friend Gabe, and we played every Sunday for about a year. I never once won - he was a former D1 athlete - but I began to take him to three sets every now and again. He had a mode he could fall into, when cornered, where he just never missed. I didn’t have the patience. We played two hours every Sunday. I got healthy, and strong, and I learned how to lose.

Gabe beat me, probably, a hundred times in a row, but I kept coming. Honestly, I think I could take him right now.

When Fern and I moved in together it was the end of COVID and we both liked upstate New York. We thought we should try it, before we made a decision, so we decided to rent and moved to Pleasant Valley, on the other side of the river from where I am now.

I joined the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club, and participated, when asked, in the local doubles tournament. I’m often asked when my name is written. I won, with another newcomer - we beat the defending champions - but that’s not what I remember. I remember Fern coming to watch and hearing people say “he’s certainly not his father.”

I remember how mad it made her. I remember I just shrugged.

A year ago I started teaching tennis because my wife didn’t want me to go back to bartending, and I needed a job if I wanted to continue to write. For the first time since I got sober I thought about quitting writing, and maybe going to, I don’t know, business school, because it had begun to feel selfish. My book wasn’t selling, so if writing isn’t helping us pay our mortgage then it’s just for me to amuse myself. I can find some other way to deal with my feelings that’s less masturbatory. Maybe I just need to shush.

But Fern didn’t want to hear that. She believed in me, like I her.

“It’s not what you do, it’s who you are.”

I shook my head.

“So then I have to work in a bar again.”

She stood up and got her computer.

“Shhh.”

I didn’t like what she was doing, as she buried her head in her laptop, but I’d scared her - moving backwards - so I decided to let her go.

I found out a few minutes later, after she’d already set up a few interviews, that she was offering me up to clubs as a tennis coach. I bristled. I didn’t like it as an identity - because I hadn’t chosen it - but I liked doing it. I’d been playing a lot - everyone wants to play with a McEnroe, even if it’s the wrong one - and she can see that. She has a sense of what’s good for me that I can’t always see. She has a sense of what’s sensible - it helps me get over myself.

I got a job at a local club and I started writing on Substack. I’d never written about myself before - I was a fiction writer with a completed novel that was sitting in my desk drawer, supposedly being read by editors - so why not. There’s freedom in desperation. Maybe I can just do whatever I like.

And I have. I’ve written about myself for the first time, and I’ve realized that I used to hide because I liked the distance in fiction - I liked to be able to say it wasn’t really about me - because I wasn’t sure what people would think. I thought if I just said who I was it might sound like complaining. I thought if I spoke too freely then someone might get mad, or sad. Then someone might get hurt, and then want to hurt themselves. I thought it might make them want to run.

Or maybe I thought it might make me.

But they haven’t - not yet, anyway - and nor have I. This has been a life-changing medium - writing, but Substack in particular - in that people truly want to support each other, here, so for that I’d like to say thank you. Thank you for supporting this - which lets me like my job teaching tennis - and thank you for my tennis job, too. I really like that I get to help people get better. And thank you for letting me be me, and for caring. Thank you for letting me write too long, because it reminds me I’m human. AI now summarizes emails - the world wants everything shorter - but sometimes people don’t know what to cut, especially when they’re trying to be honest, so thank you for letting me stumble.

Thank you for letting me share.

In many ways, teaching tennis is healthy bartending. I help others - I stay out of the way - and I work on my feet. I have to remember their names - which I’m horrible at, just like I was then - but I try to. I have to say chief, or big guy, when I forget - it’s much harder when I get groups of women - but I try to just not write it off anymore as “just not my thing.”

I try, and when someone says something like Michelle with two Ls it gets easier. I immediately wonder why that’s important when I’m not writing down her name.

I’m tired at the end of a long day in the sun but I feel like I did something. When we had a leak in our basement I was able to pay it off with my tips, not my book.

I’m fitter, I’m stronger, and I’m capable - none of which seemed possible when my liver was failing - and the goal, in life now, is to be able to hit with my dad, and enjoy myself, and to write whatever I want and maybe, sometimes, take my wife out to dinner.

I’ll let you know when I get there.

What surprises me most is that one hand feeds the other. I like writing more because it doesn’t have to be something I don’t want it to be just to sell it. I can pay my mortgage over there and love writing, here, because I don’t need it: I’m choosing it. It’s 6:17, and I have to be at work, at 8:30, and this is my choice.

And I like tennis more, too, because it helps me. It doesn’t hurt me anymore. People find out and I’m proud of my name, even if they’re disappointed. Sometimes it makes their day, just the proximity. I’m also realizing that maybe, the whole time, they were just disappointed I wasn’t proud.

There’s a long hill that leads down to the courts, and I have to bring two hoppers with me each time I coach. Walking up the hill, after a long session - three hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, plus three privates - is the hardest part of my day, and it’s always the hottest, and each and every time I consider a world where it’s the last time I have to do this, but I get to the end and I drop them off and feel better. I do it because it’s what’s good for me - what’s great for me - even though it’s not what I would’ve guessed would be. It’s something I never understood about my own recovery - that you can make changes, yes, but sometimes you can choose to be what you are. And maybe what you are isn’t all that bad, anyway.

By the time I get to my car I want to come back the next day.

Or, at least, I’m willing.