In the spirit of learning new things, I have been taking some tennis lessons lately. I am old enough now to realize I suck at all sports, but I go out and still play a few things during summer days to burn a few calories while taking pleasure in doing so. I used to think I was the next Tendulkar back in the school days. We would decoratively draw stumps on the wall with a chalk and heavily tape a tennis ball to get the bounce just right. True or not, I believed I was a star batman among my cousins and a few friends in the neighborhood. Those days are long gone but sometimes I think back as to why I wasn’t persistent in at least one form of sports to have a decent enough skill set.
My parents weren’t all that encouraging but then they weren’t discouraging either. They didn’t actively forbid me from indulging in various forms of sports. In fact, I once remember signing up for after-school swimming lessons and my dad even paid for the lessons without a single question asked. I remember being inside the grand Dasharath Rangasala for the very first time in my life and the embarrassing moment of accidentally walking into the ladies’ change room as well. By the time I got back home, it was around 6:30pm and I, on my own, decided it was somehow going to interfere with my studies and gave it up. My dad had to talk to the vice principal to drop me out and get the refund.
We played a lot of things growing up – badminton, table tennis, cricket, football (or soccer as they call it here in the US), swimming. There never was a dedication to a single sport and of course we lacked proper coaching to build the foundation and learn proper techniques. May be that’s why the skills never got better. Or may be I simply wasn’t inquisitive enough to acquire new skills with each passing day and get help from any resources I had at my disposal. Whatever it was, I ended up being a jack of all and master of none. Even calling it “a jack of all” is an insult to any of the sports I claim I play.
So, I decided, this late in life, I am going to take some lessons in a sport I never played growing up. There was a wooden tennis racquet that hung at the back of my bedroom door and it had taken me a number of years just to figure out what it actually was. My dad had used it in his college days in Dehradoon and I kept wondering why the badminton racquet was so heavy and had such a big head.
After figuring out what tennis was, I watched quite a bit of tennis. My dad was a little bit into watching the sport and he could explain the rules whenever I asked. Came 9th grade, there was an essay in Gulmohar English Textbook about a famous Wimbledon final match (can’t remember for sure who the players were—Drobny and Rosewell I think). All this had made tennis a fanciful game in my mind but I never had the opportunity to actually try it. Much later in the US I tried playing a few times but I was so bad that I couldn’t bear to drag myself back to the court with any of the friends I played with.
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| My Racquet |
In graduate school, I mentioned my coveted desire to learn tennis to a friend who was quite decent at it. He gave me a racquet of his, the kind used by Venus Williams, saying it’s a good beginner’s racquet. As soon as I moved to this city, I decided I was going to take some lessons and I did. I took 6 group lessons that summer and played quite a bit with three guys in particular -- a tennis partner I befriended during the lesson, a friend from the college days but who works at the same place I do now, and a Nepali friend who’s been dear to me in this new home city. That was the first true summer of tennis for me. At the end of it all, I could actually return a few balls that came my way.
The weather started to get chilly, snow started to accumulate on ground, and with limited and expensive indoor courts, the motivation to arrange everything to get out and play withered away and three years have passed by and everyday my Venus Williams racquet that was restrung the very first year I moved into this city blankly stared at me every time I opened my closet door to get a pair of shoes or a jacket and I shyly looked away.
Now three summers later my tennis spirit has been rekindled with a move to an apartment where a good public tennis center is at a walking distance and they are offering cheap group tennis lessons. I have signed up for two sets of group lessons and an hour-long private lesson. I have a found a tennis partner to play with on weekends as well.
I like to believe my forehand stroke has gotten smoother and my backhand improved quite a bit after figuring out left hand is supposed to do most of the work in a two-handed backhand and right hand is there just to guide the shot. Simple principal of split and right foot forward for the back hand volley and split and left foot forward for the right hand volley and some drills to do it have helped as well.
I know I still suck at tennis but with some persistence it might just become the sport of my choosing. The biggest challenge now is to find an indoor court and a partner who is willing to pay and play tennis with me through the winter. Summer time is when I seem to be sporty and come winter it’s all movies and beer. I wonder if I can turn things around this year.
