Casually reading
about the presidential candidates stumping Iowa, readying themselves for the
coming election, I was struck by two things. Candidates, eager to mix with the
hoi polloi of voters, attend summer state fairs where the most vile and
calorie-laced comfort food is de rigueur and various games of chance and skill
lure the un-skilled, previously skilled and never-had-any-skilled participants.
Naturally, I was
sent tumbling back in my personal memory because of something one of the
candidates did. He spied one of those radar guns that record how fast a
baseball can be pitched. I think in a
person’s mind how fast he or she can throw a baseball is nearly always much faster
than the speed that person is physically capable of achieving, usually
light-years difference.
I remember an
incident when, as a newspaper reporter, I was covering the campaign of a local
candidate for county freeholder. Montvale had a summer fair and surprisingly
one booth had a radar gun. Today, radar guns are incredibly common, if not apps
on smart phones. Back in 1978, (I know, I know, when dinosaurs like me roamed
the earth) a radar gun was not so common. This was probably one of those
horribly inaccurate police versions which routinely clocked brick walls at five
miles over the speed limit. (My editing self cringes at the expression “over”
the speed limit because, technically, it should be “more” than but what person
has ever had the experience of that state trooper ambling up to your
rolled-down window and saying “Sir, I think you’ve driving more than the speed
limit allows?”)
In those days,
we did not have Pete Sampras rocketing tennis balls at 120 mph but we did have
Arthur Ashe. Non-players, need to know something about his style of play. He
had a cannon of a serve. Instead of volleying back and forth to gain position,
he game was mostly rocket serve that produced an ace and failing that, a couple
of quick, hard volleys and the point was either gained by a hard return or lost
when he hit it out. All or nothing.
The serve only needs to catch part of the line
My mother
dragged me out on the court when I was 12 years old and wearing all whites and
tennis shoes was a requirement of walking on a court. It’s something known as etiquette.
(Isn’t that a word foreign to millennials – please scratch that if it sounds too
snarky.) Tennis seemed polite in those days. In mixed doubles, you were
supposed to lighten your serve when serving to the female, etc.
My first racquet was a Bancroft
My serves even
through high school were somewhat patty-cake compared to what I became. A
second serve, following a failed hard serve, was usually a spin serve, made
harder by slipping an “Eastern Forehand grip.” I was at the top of the second
tier of players on my high school team. The top was Brien Duffy who had all the
serves and speed. I simply tried hard to perfect the service taught to me by
Brother McPadden who’s main objective was to avoid double faults by making sure
the serve got in the box—hang the speed.
Wilson T-2000 steel racquet
The summer after
I graduated, I changed all that. I traded my wooden racquet in for steel and
completely revamped my serve. My new serve had the racquet striking the ball at
the absolute highest point, directly overhead like a Juan Marichal or Mel Stottlemyre baseball pitch. When I was
making contact at that highest point, the tips of my sneakers were either
barely touching the court or they were one to two inches off the surface,
depending how high my toss had been. I worked to perfected that serve all that
summer. When we vacationed for a week in Maine, I found the local college,
wrangled my way on to the court, and served ball after ball, even launching a
few balls into the ocean, which came to within a dozen feet of one corner of
the court.
Note Ashe's toes at the top of his serve
The combination
of steel, trampoline effect, and height produced a laser of a serve. When I was
on, I could serve three to four in a row into the service box. When I was off,
my success rate was more like one in three. Instead of following a failed first
serve with a less fast, or spin serve, I would simple try another rocket. If I
double faulted on one point, the following point was usually an ace. Most
tennis players couldn’t handle two lasers in a row, one whizzing by their ear
and the next one taking a divot out of the court.
One advantage of
attending a small college, I reasoned, would be the ease of making the tennis
team. So hanging up my ice skates and going south to Baltimore I could cushion
the disappointment of no hockey with at least the solace of playing college tennis.
The first day I was passing the gym’s trophy case and noticed that Loyola had
won the Mason-Dixon tennis championships about 18 of the past 20 years and my
heart sank at the very real prospect that I was not making that team. Through
luck, hard work, good fortune and help from a good friend, John Davis, I was finally able to make the varsity by my
junior year but that’s an even further digression.
The 1963 undefeated Loyola tennis team
Back to that
summer fair in 1978 and the radar gun. In my mind, I was capable of 120 mph Arthur
Ashe serves. By 1978, I was five years post college tennis and not a regular
player anymore. As with all former athletes, you think that after a few tries
to “knock off the rust” you are capable of duplicating any feat you routinely performed
when you were at your peak.
I went through
the motions normally used to loosen up my shoulder. Think of those cutaway
shots during a baseball game when they announce a pitcher warming up in the bull
pen. He stands up and immediately you see him stretching out his shoulder. I served two or
three balls with a hard overhead—not my lunging, all-out, earth-scorching motion
(please, there were young children watching) and signaled I was ready for the
radar gun.
BOOM, the
familiar sound of the ball exploding off the racquet strings. I turned expectantly
to the gun expecting to make Arthur Ashe jealous and was crushed to read “70
mph.” That had to be a silly mistake. BOOM, second try: “76 mph.” BOOM, third
try: 79 mph. That radar gun must be defective. Young children’s eyes be damned,
I followed with the scorched-earth laser launched with my tippy toes inches off
the ground. BOOM, “83 mph.”
My mind conjured
up a stream of alibis. I didn’t have my steel racquet. I hadn’t picked up a racquet
in months. I didn’t have the proper time to warm up (The truth was that by my
forth hard serve, I was already fatigued.) It was over: my foray into old man’s
tennis at the ripe old age of 26 was beginning.
Today, reading
that article about candidates throwing baseballs and eating comfort food at the
summer fair was enough to trigger those memories. I had a wry smile on my face
when I read the candidate saying (after his throws) “my shoulder is ready to
fall off.” I’ve been there and, yes, I was shocked to learn I wasn’t immortal.
There was one thing
about those politicos rubbing elbows with the proles, the riffraff, and the
great unwashed. I would still be competitive after all these years in one category:
consuming vast quantities of outrageous (think pork chops on a
stick, deep fried Snickers bars, corn dogs) comfort food. That’s one ability that, after
all these years, has not eroded.
