Doubles

Lucky for me Samuel Johnson was long dead before I started playing tennis.  Otherwise, I might’ve bumped that dog walking on two feet to become part of one of Mr. Johnson’s crueler observations.  Same for my friend Bob.

Neither of us was a natural, or an Ashe, to be period specific.  But summers during high school, we walked the mile and a half to Marquette Park and tried to muscle our way onto the tennis courts.  In those days, the courts were most popular with players from the neighboring Lithuanian neighborhood; outsiders were made to wait, and wait, and wait some more, which we did if only to be difficult.  When our turn finally came, we proceeded to hit tennis balls the way Harmon Killebrew did a baseball.  No fence could hold our drives.

We became proficient (enough) after a while and continued playing into college.  I remember one summer we drove up Lake Shore Drive to the North Side; there were a bunch of courts off of Addison.  I hope we played better than at Marquette Park, but I can’t say for sure.  What I do remember was the drive back; at some point, I stuck my hand out, fingers to the roof, the way people used to in the days before air conditioning.  Imagine my surprise to be grabbing onto not a bit of roof but Bob’s tennis racquet, which he had left up there while looking for his car keys.

Then there was the time I visited Bob in college one weekend.  I took a Greyhound bus for the first and only time in my life up to Madison, where Bob attended the U of W.  Saturday afternoon we watched a Badgers’ basketball game, then had a quick hamburger, then played tennis indoors in a monster facility.  Bob might not have beaten me that night, but he was lucky enough not to have been given the hamburger I ate; talk about food poisoning.  Nothing like taking the bus home knowing you won’t puke because you left it all behind in a dorm bathroom.  And here everybody thought I’d been drinking.

You do certain things with certain people.  For me, it was tennis and Bob Dietz.  Later, I played a little with Clare, and she had potential, but she was a ballplayer at heart; hitting a tennis ball over the fence never seemed to bother her.  She moved on to baseball and softball while retaining a love for the Williams’ sisters.  The big summer tennis tournaments will be starting soon.  My daughter will ask me if I’m watching, which I might, but in truth I’ll be thinking of other times and other people.