37. Adopting a new sport
Keep swinging!
As a tall girl, I was forced to play on a coed basketball team, which was pretty much a disaster from start to finish. Coed teams have gender ratio rules, but nothing in their structure to change the biases of a middle school boy. Though I was bigger than most of them, my memory on the court was of the fellas circling around me at all times, opening and closing their ranks to avoid rather than engage.
As an adult, I am no longer considered extraordinarily tall. I have still played basketball occasionally for fun and once in an amateur league where we won the equivalent of a Miss Congeniality award and a $200 gift certificate to a local bar. One of the girls I didn’t know bought us all Fireball shots with it and then left. Sports are good for people when they’re not taken too seriously, but most people who enjoy sports are very serious about it. Activity is fun and camaraderie is great, but I tend to find those things separately now.
In September, I stayed with a friend who had impulsively purchased a ping-pong table. She then got incredible at table tennis. She could not get enough of it. I was nowhere near good enough to be real competition for her, but I buckled down and really tried to meet her in The Zone, which is where you go when you lock in. We then played badminton. I played badminton a lot as a kid as well, at the community garden next door to my house. It was so so fun and still is, but I was moving up in the world of hitting a thing with other things. I have now, three months later, landed on tennis.
Tennis in New York City is a very exclusive club. Compared to other group sports, there is a much higher cost of entry and a much smaller group for every game. Theoretically, one day, I may be able to play doubles. But for now, I have only coaxed one person into playing with me regularly and I think that they will soon surpass my skill level and look for someone more challenging. In the meantime, however, I have adopted it as a sport I want to play consistently and improve on. I have taken a lesson. I have bought shoes. I have a racket. I call it Red Robin, though not out loud to anyone.
Another thing about tennis is that you need a permit during the regular season to book almost any court. Certainly any free court. But even courts that cost $50 an hour and up are being fought over. I’ve played at 10:30 PM, the only slot available, which is insane. To play outside, I waited until November arrived and the official permit season was over. Then I rolled out of bed at 6 AM to go sign up at Fort Greene park. Around 6:30, a man who did not seem to work at the park at all arrived and pinned a printed out sign up sheet to the gate, then skipped off. Everyone already waiting lined up politely to pick their time slot. It was a long line. This was in November. I can’t even imagine what the scene will be like in spring and summer, when I will also have to get a permit—without that, you can’t sign up at all.
Now that I am interested in tennis, I see it everywhere. Young men and women carrying their rackets on the train. The random guy who explained the sign up sheet to me and who is always lingering around the courts. People posting about going to games and tournaments. A new hobby really does open up your world by revealing it to you from a new perspective. I play tennis. Lots of people play tennis. They are all around us, pretending to be normal.
Do I like tennis? Honestly, no. I am not good at it. Ping-pong is much easier to improve at quickly, because there are fewer demands on your body. The balls and paddles are light, the amount of running is considerably less. With tennis, I’m always sprinting or galloping backwards or watching the ball fly over the fence when I pop it too hard. Again. The scariest thing about tennis is how often I don’t connect with the ball at all when I swing. It has started to make me wonder if I have something wrong with my brain and I don’t want to think about that. And yet I must. For tennis.
I have my hobbies and they are performing and making things that accumulate in drawers and cupboards for no reason. The ephemeral and the concrete. Tennis is more in the ephemeral category, I suppose, though it leaves behind skill (questionable that performing has done the same). It has also just been new. It’s exciting to do something new, really do it, and really try to keep doing it. Considering it’s the dead of winter and I have plans to play this week, I’d say I am being more consistent than anyone would have bet.
It is also a nice sport to do with a friend. It’s almost parallel play, though you are trying to influence one another. I get to hang out with a buddy and not really make conversation or work too hard to make it fun or figure out what to do next. What we are doing next is quite clear. We are hitting the ball back and forth until we have to stop. We are feelings the sun and the wind. We are crunching the leaves. We are sweaty, we are tired, we are happy. Sport.
Please do not adopt tennis as a sport, it’s hard enough to get a court already.
JK, do it and then play with me.
I’ve taken no photos or videos of me engaging in this game, this is my coming out post. Thank you for reading!