Ever year as the opening matches of Wimbledon
get under way, I can’t help but think back to those years when I was a kid and
my friends and I shared a mutual love of tennis, a love that seemed to equal that of baseball or any other sport we played. Among that group of friends who played often, I ranked somewhere
near the lower end of the upper tier of players. I was capable of upsetting those better than me and more than capable of blowing matches I should have won. As much as anyone, though, I loved the game. That love continued well into college and beyond, and even though I haven’t
played in years, my every intention is to take the game up again somewhere down the line when free time
becomes less difficult to locate.
As difficult as it might be for kids
today to believe, 30 years ago or so, American youth not
only loved to play tennis, they played it with gusto and followed it avidly.
Even living in a small Nebraska town of barely 2,000 people, my running mates and I were full aware of the world of global tennis, and we hit
the courts at least three or four times a week during the summer months trying to better our game. We held our
own double-elimination tournaments, served as our own umpires, and fiercely competed against each other. Sometimes, those matches got heated and words were exchanged. More often,
though, we knew who was likely to win but just loved to play anyway.
We might have had one decent ball among us, but we still played. We might have a broken string or two in our racket, but we still played. We might have a crack in our wooden racket that we patched up with a half roll of tape, but we played on. We played before, during, and after it rained. We played in the
morning, in the dead of the afternoon, and until the lights turned
off at night. We played singles, doubles, and if there wasn't enough players for doubles, we played one-on-two. We played among
ourselves and with the older people who were flooding the courts, which had
just been built in my town and were becoming a progressively more popular destination. Everyone it seemed took up the game. We did more than that, though. We took up the game with passion. We saved our money to buy a new can of balls at Gamble’s. We hoped, prayed, begged, and pleaded for new rackets for our birthdays. And we mimicked our favorite players right down to their serving style, the way they wore their socks, and the headbands they donned around their foreheads. It was a grand, grand era for
tennis filled with the likes of Connors, Borg, McEnroe, Lendl, Becker,
Noah, Gerulaitis, Wilander, Evert, Navratilova, and Austin. We reveled in it.
As much as Wimbledon reminds me of those
days and playing with the likes of Timmy and David and the Paars and so many others, it reminds me
of watching Wimbledon men’s singles championship year after year on early Fourth of
July mornings with my mom, who was as avid and knowledgeable fan herself. I lived for
McEnroe. She was a Borg follower, and I’ll never forget the encounters the pair had or how the stress and tension of their matches would gradually rise in our living room to
unbearable levels the deeper the battled on. My mom and I seemed to live on every
point. We spent hours glued to the television watching every point, yelling at
every break point, going berserk at every double-fault, and feeling exhausted ourselves when the match was over.
These days, I glance at Wimbledon
results each day online, but I don’t devote hours to watching finals matches. Somewhere
along the way, I lost the love I once held for the game. My interests turned elsewhere, which is OK. But
what I haven’t lost is the appreciation for traditions like Wimbledon or the grandeur or what those tradition and grandeur mean to certain people. Who knows, maybe this Fourth of July I’ll
make a point of tuning in. Hopefully, Dick Enberg is still making the calls.
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