A Game to Remember

Written for Racquet Magazine – NYC – 1981

It was situated on a bluff that overlooked a lake surrounded by small cottages. It was quiet there, often deserted. The pine trees, Maine pine trees, as tall and proud as redwoods, formed a windscreen all around it and gave it a natural backdrop of green. It was a tennis court: dusty red clay, old canvas lines, saggy net—the first we ever had access to.  My brother and I, thirteen and fourteen at the time, hardly knew what it was at first. It was just a flat, open space to us, and we used it that first vacation morning as a suitable spot for pitch and catch. The net made a good backstop when the attempted curve went off course. We pretended that the baseline was third to home, that the doubles alleys were bullpens. We caught fly balls close to the fence. We had a wonderful time, played till we were sweaty and finally went off to take a swim in the lake.

When we came back that evening to pick up from where we’d left off, the court was taken. For some reason I think they were from Philadelphia, the Main Line; either stockbrokers or lawyers. They were very formal with each other, even for adults. They dressed in white, square-cut, baggy-seated shorts, polo shirts, wool socks and boat shoes. The finish on their racquets gleamed in the warm, late afternoon sunshine. The balls that they stroked back and forth were pink with loose clay. It was some crazy thing they were doing on our adopted baseball field. The short, stocky one took the ball, tossed it ridiculously high in the air, pointed at it with out­stretched left hand and then belted it, really whaled it, across the net. The tall, thin man on the other side, far from being intimidated, blasted it back. What was this? In my mind’s eye I can still see my brother and me watching, openmouthed, our mitts at our feet, forgotten. We felt a mixture of delight, confusion, and awe. Back and forth the two men glided, back and forth the ball flew, weightless, wonderful, back and forth until the tall player finally put it away.

“Nice shot, Phil.”

“Thank you, Dave.”

Dave would prove to be the better player by far, ranked in the East. Most of Phil’s shots would come flying back to land in far corners of the court. Phil ran a lot.

We went back to our cottage chat summer evening and laid siege. In the attic we found old racquets, Don Budge autograph models of iron durability.  Balls were found on a shelf down at the general store, Pancho Gonzalez-approved, whoever he was. Banishing hardball and gloves to the closet, we took to the courts. Phil and Dave played every day, singles, sometimes doubles with their wives and every day we watched, taking mental notes, waiting for them to finish so we could go out and imitate what we’d seen.   “All yours, fellas,” Dave would say as he came off, acknowledging us, even in our cut-offs and basket­ball sneaks, as fellow players. Overwhelmed, we’d try to impress him. We had potential in the power department but were severely lacking in control. Our cuts would often send the ball beyond the back fence, past cars, into trees and over rooftops. Only occasionally did the ball land where it was supposed to.

Our tutelage fell in the lap of one Max Rheinhart, age 78. Tennis players were scarce on the lake that July, especially on weekdays and Max, who understandably liked doubles, undertook the task of cultivating us as both partners and opponents. The game Max played bore little resemblance to the fireworks of Dave and Phil. Max not only couldn’t, but wouldn’t run – not more than a step and a half anyway.  Control was put at a premium and power tennis was berated.  We learned to keep the ball in play.  “Get that!” Max would shout, grinning and karate-chopping the ball across the net.  Stampeding to it, I’d carefully hit it back in Max’s direction. “Oh, you lucky cow,” Max would crow. “Now get that!”  And he’d shovel the ball off to the other side of the court.  If I was stubborn enough to hit the ball back again, Max would give up. “Yours,” he’d bellow and then look to my brother expectantly.  Needless to say, my brother learned early to perform under pressure. 

“I love this game,” Max would say. “I’ve been playing it for more than 60 years. It’s a great game… a game to remember. It’ll serve you young heathens in good stead, and you’ll play it always.”

We returned home to…public courts.  They were within bicycling distance and were rarely used in the evening, if at all.  Having a brother a mere year’s difference in age now seems part of some divine plan. There was no scrounging for practice partners. That summer was the beginning of countless sets and a passionate competitiveness, a marathon tennis match that lasts to this day.  My brother had unassailable patience, and a shameless will to win. He would run and scramble and throw up sky-high lobs and somehow manage to get almost anything back. I, on the other hand, was an early victim of delusions of grandeur. I liked to win points with the great shot, the impossible shot, the shot hit three times harder than necessary and I double faulted with conviction. We were vocal in our disdain for each other’s style of play.

“You play like a girl,” I would yell, having just missed his third lob in a row.

“Hot dog,” my brother would roar, one of my miracle shots having found the eyes both to pass him and stay in the court.

“Those brothers are at it again,” the other players would murmur to each other.

Our brotherly rivalry would, over the years, become more famous than a circus. It never culminated in a fistfight, but one of us was always stalking off the court while the other was beseeching him to come back and one of us was always returning, only to have the other soon refuse to continue unless coddled accordingly.  In between screams we hit a lot of tennis balls. The game was our teacher, and if my service toss didn’t go much higher than my head, and if my brother hit his backhand out of an impossibly open stance, we really didn’t care. The ball was beginning to go where we aimed it.

Something can happen that, in retrospect, makes all the difference. For us, as tennis players, it was a simple thing. That winter one of the first indoor tennis facilities in Connecticut opened in our town. Suddenly basketball had a rival, and at least twice a week we were dropped off at the tennis center to play. Beyond that, the center drew accomplished players from all over Connecticut.  We watched and learned.  And then, on a January Saturday, who should appear at the center, tanned saddle-brown, arms loaded with racquets, but two of the great Aussies.  John Newcombe and Roy Emerson were playing a fledgling event in Hartford known as the Aetna Cup and needed practice time. They were miracle workers. The ball was like a living thing with a mind of its own as it flew on a line between racquet and racquet. When Newcombe came to the net, Emerson fed him a steady stream of laser beams, and Newcombe, possibly bored with the perfection of his forehand and backhand volley, returned the ball from between his legs, behind his back, and around his neck. It was a level of play we hadn’t known existed. Later in the locker room, when Emerson gave us a cheery “How you hittin’ the ball, mates?”, we could only mumble incoherently as he threw himself on the floor and ripped off an effort­ less 100 push-ups. 

We graduated that winter to different tennis racquets, my brother to an aluminum Head Master and me to a Dunlop Fort. The Dunlop was the racquet that Rod Laver was using and, more than that, was the one that Dave had wielded that first summer evening in June.  I loved that racquet, loved the aesthetics of it, the grain of the wood, the finish which featured the Dunlop logo emblazoned like an arrow across smooth throat. I was convinced that one of the reasons Newcombe and Emerson had been so good was because they always got to play with new racquets. My ambition at the was to get good enough to be worthy of a second Dunlop.

I broke my arm that winter in a late-season game of touch football, and so basketball was eliminated from my schedule. It was my left arm that was enveloped in plaster though, and so right-handed, my Dunlop and I began a war with the local Y.M.C.A. wall. As my brother involved himself with full presses, I whaled away, hoping against hope to gain an edge in our ongoing marathon match. Tennis is not a game designed for one. Yet if I realized that winter that a wall always wins, I also learned that not many things are as gratifying as hammering a tennis ball at an opponent who can’t complain about it.  That winter at the Y, I disrupted many a fast break in pursuit of tennis balls that got away.

I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “tennis boom.”  Tennis had been my favorite sport for some time now and my reaction to the news that it was boom was one of quiet pleasure and confidence. I felt I had a head start on everyone else. Suddenly there was tennis on television, and World Championship Tennis at that. Suddenly Morton’s Pharmacy had tennis magazines next to Mad and Road & Track. Suddenly it was difficult to get court time – occasionally we had to wait at the public courts. And suddenly there was talk of a town tournament.

I remember my first tournament, the way a teenager might remember their first high school prom. Weeks in advance my brother and I put aside the on­going marathon match and took to the court to drill. We were not the best practice partners.  To hit my megaton groundstrokes with any consistency, I demanded rhythm, pace and a regular bounce. My brother’s game was based on hitting no ball the same way twice in a row.  Only the importance of the upcoming event kept us from quitting in frustration. We practiced overheads, volleys, and serves. We hit groundstrokes up and down the line, then crosscourt, forehand to backhand, backhand to forehand. To prepare for the doubles we played what we called “half-court” tennis, diagonal to diagonal, all shots going crosscourt. It might just as well have been Wimbledon we were preparing for. After all, the stages were the same.

We went shopping for new shorts and shirts. Part of the early tennis boom was the reaction against the all-white clause, which had ruled tennis attire for so long. Players now took to the courts in togs that resembled fantastic, mutated flowers-reds, greens, checks, plaids, lightning bolts. After much careful deliberation, I opted for a mix of old and new: plain white shorts and a navy-blue shirt. My first match would be played under a 90-degree summer sun, and I would learn something about navy blue. It holds heat like an oven. Ten minutes into the first set, that shirt, soaked with sweat, would be as heavy as a backpack. I also bought one of those floppy, white tennis hats. I had recently seen a picture of Laver wearing one and had read that he lined it with wet cabbage leaves on hot days. I considered that the final badge of professionalism.

Arthur Ashe had told an eager press he liked pancakes on the morning of a match. The day of the tournament I was up at dawn preparing pancakes. I wiped down my rackets with lemon-scented furniture wax. I filled an extra racquet cover with wristbands, shoelaces, a towel, and candy bars. I made lemonade and put it in a plastic cooler. I was ready.  It was 6 o’clock in the morning and I sat down to wait.

It occurred to me later that day that singles should more appropriately be called triples. There seemed to be three antagonists on the court during my first tournament match: me, my opponent, and my jangled nerves. Seen in that light, the game might easily have been called quadruples, for my opponent’s nerves were shot, too. Set-ups were mashed into the bottom of the net. Serves not only didn’t land in the service box, but they also often touched down beyond the baseline. It was a classic confrontation. Both of us were intent on playing the game the way we thought it should be played-all fireworks, Sturm und Drang, but neither of us had the ability or the nerves to do it that way. Overheads were blasted into other courts. Lobs landed like downed birds in the laps of pic­ nicking spectators. We flailed. We clobbered. Both of us were from the “go for broke and maybe you’ll relax” school of stroke production. When we weren’t screaming in anguish at the sky and at each other, we screamed at ourselves.  “Nobody ever said tennis should be fun,” intoned my brother to me on a changeover. In his first-round match, he had pit-patted an adult into an early grave in less than 50 minutes. To fail in front of him would be unbearable.

I hit burners. I hit smokers. I hit banshees and bullets. Some of them even went in. When the dust and sweat and blood had settled, I had won. My paralysis had been less than that of my opponent.

Sweet victory – how fast it makes us forget. I had sung a litany to myself during my first match: “Keep it in play, keep it in play, try just once to keep it in play.” I had vowed to take a page from my brother’s book. Give your opponent a chance to make a mistake, and he will. But my win drove all that from my mind. I saw only the great shots I had hit, the outright winners, the aces. Such would always be the case. I would ultimately fall into that group of players who would rather play well and lose than play badly and win.       

I came up against the second seed in my next match, a fine player, one of the best for his age in our area. With nothing to lose, I went out relaxed and calm and, guns blazing, defied the odds by playing him to a standstill. I came back to earth only in the clinches, losing 7-5 in the first set, 6-4 in the second. Little did I know that this was also a precedent. To this day, I clutch against the opponent I feel I should beat, play over my head against the opponent whose skills far out shadow my own.

My brother eased through the second round. In the third round, he faced my conqueror. It is said that the term “moonball” became part of the tennis language when Harold Solomon, Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger arrived on the tennis scene. It was not invented by them. It was invented by my brother on a brain-frying, hot August day in 1969.  For three hours he battled out there, running, lunging, throwing back the crushing blows of his more skilled opponent, prompting that opponent to holler, “Why can’t I hit the ball? It’s sitting up there as big as the moon!” I understood what he was feeling, having been there many times. “Tennis is not pretty,” rejoined my brother. He won in the third set, proving to all who watched that victory is not as much a matter of technique as it is a state of mind.  He barely lost to an experienced opponent in the next round.

Looking back on tennis is like looking at a slide show of what are essentially very meaningful nonevents. My college tennis coach was the football coach called into active service for a sport he knew next to nothing about. He was a game and good-natured man whose answer to an unreliable forehand was a four-mile run. I impressed him from the beginning. On the first day of practice, in a fit of hopelessness, I heaved my racquet over the fence. He was wild with excitement when he suggested I report to the track coach as a potential hammer thrower.

But how wonderful to hit a cafeteria after a hard practice, breathless from wind sprints – hamburgers, we called them – and stride over to a beverage machine, there to down a quart or two of water, juice or soda. How wonderful to spend a snowy winter day in the gym, to play an impromptu game over lowered volleyball nets, the ball coming off the polished wood so fast that the game was one of trying for everything in the air-making crazy shots, hope­ less shots, playing rebounds off the back wall. Or a Saturday in early May, bright sunshine, coeds watching from the stands, and your game is on.  Thwack. First serve hits the back fence head high off the bounce, ace down the middle. Thwack. Backhand passing shot, buzzing with topspin, drops toward the line as if it has airbrakes.  Thwack. Forehand approach, come in behind it, and the ball comes back right where you thought it would. Boom. Volley it away.  Game, set, match!

Such good memories.

I don’t play as much as I’d like to now. I live in a big city, and courts are scarce and expensive. It’s all too easy to fill my hours with other things. And yet, sometimes I wonder if, by not playing the game as often, I don’t appreciate it more. I don’t expect so much, don’t need so much, am more aware of the experience than I am of the outcome. Victory or defeat means little now. It’s just a game, and I am aware of the wonderful moments when the game possesses me, moments when it feels as I am the game and the court is like something I own. I can’t wait for the next point to begin. I feel it in my bones that the next shot will be perfect, so smooth and strong I’ll feel it right down to my toes. I pity the poor golfer – the better he gets, the less he gets to hit the ball. I pity the baseball player – three strikes and he’s out. There is an awareness, as I play, of breath drawn in and out, and of the miracle of motion. There is awareness too, of fatigue and aches and pains and there is the thought of how the cold beer will taste along with the post match conversation when I’m done.   

As my brother said once over that beer one time “Is there any doubt why they score this game love?”

FOLLOW UP – 2023

A game to remember?  How about a game hardly started.  1981?  I would have been 28 and living in New York City at the time.  A (tennis) babe in the woods.  Little did I realize that the next 52 years would be filled with even more tennis memories and that like the early ones, those memories would be so intimately woven with memories of my beloved brother as to be inseparable.  Brigham Metcalfe’s tennis journey took him back to Connecticut, to clay courts in summer and to indoor courts in winter. Mine took me to Southern California, to hard courts and balmy weather year-round.  Brigham became a highly ranked USTA tournament player in New England, and I became a competent recreational player whose fiercest opponent remained myself.  Oh, but the marathon match between us? It continued!  There were cross-country visits and vacations.  There were professional tournaments to attend, the US Open in New York and sometimes Indian Wells in California; excuses to visit and get together more than anything else, to share time and to take to the court.  “Those brothers are at it again!” our families and friends would say to one another.  And we were.  My brother, Brigham, passed away in December of 2019. The final score of that life-long marathon match between us?  Love.