Winter Tennis

 

Winter Tennis

By Paul Greeley

 

On a freezing cold and breezy winter night, we 12, a motley crew, come together. Outside. To play tennis.

When I hit the courts, I suggest that if 3 others want to join me and get a beer instead, the remaining 8 could still play. No takers.

In weather more conducive to football in Chicago, ice fishing in Green Bay or skiing in Colorado, we dozen gathered to play doubles.

If you think of tennis players as sunny day-only country clubbers who wouldn’t be caught dead on a freezing winter night hitting lobs on public courts, then you don’t know the right tennis players. We’re talking fanatics here. We don’t want to play in the cold; we just want to play and it happens to be cold.

Wearing an assortment of hats, caps, berets, skull caps, and wool pull-overs, we start hitting balls. One guy is wearing a knitted wool hat with tassels hanging down over his ears, the kind Tyrolean sherpas might wear trekking up Mt. Everest. 

The balls don’t bounce well in this cold. They make tennis balls for clay, for soft courts and hard, but they don’t make a version for winter.

Our outfits are a mish-mash of designer gear, sweatpants and sweaters. No one is thinking about making any fashion statements tonight; it’s all about keeping warm while still being able to move.

One guy’s got cut-off jean shorts over what looks like black leotards. He looks more dressed for a sandlot football game in South Philly than Southlake Tennis Center tennis in Texas.

And he’s wearing garden gloves to top off this fashion statement. 

There’s very little chit chat before or during the game. No one sits down between games to cool off. We laugh when one guy’s top freezes on his water bottle. 

Teams are quickly picked, and for the next two hours, we play.

Lobs tossed up into the air become the property of the wind, drifting aimlessly this way and that, as players circle under it wondering where it will land. Drop-shots die a quick death as the semi-frozen balls refuse to bounce. A common tactic in doubles is to poach at the net, picking off a weak shot and drilling right at the net guy across from you, often hitting him in the body somewhere, winning the point. Over the years, I’ve been hit directly in the face twice. It only hurts for a few seconds. Tonight at the net, the players are wary; no one wants to risk the feeling of getting hit with these frozen balls.

To stay warm, we remind ourselves of nights during the summer, when we played in 100 degree heat. Sweaty and thirsty, we all would sit down and down copious amounts of water, and pour even more over our heads. On those hot evenings, there was no hurry to change sides quickly.

By the end of this night, we’d all warmed up to some degree or another. And as we all gathered our gear to leave the courts, we were still divided on whether it was too cold to play. But when one player barked an expletive about where he stood when it came to the cold, we were unanimous about how we couldn’t wait for spring, warmer weather and tennis balls that bounced true.