The Game of Kings

Tennis is a grand game. It is the game of Kings. When I was in junior high, my parents signed me up with the Parks and Recreation Department to take tennis lessons from one Esther Foley. She was a famous tennis player of some note I was told. She seemed pretty good, but I didn’t know how famous she could have been -- after all, this was the golden empire of the lower San Joaquin Valley, known for little else than onion, cotton, and oil fields, and perhaps Buck Owens. We did not produce tennis players.

That of course was very wrong. Dennis Ralston, a Bakersfield native, was a professional tennis player who was as successful a player as most of them get. After his playing career he became the very successful coach of the Davis Cup team for 14 years. He went to our church. He looked just like an ordinary guy. He acted like an ordinary guy. He was easily disassociated from fame. A little harder to ignore was a classmate of mine who when he graduated actually became a professional tennis player. Hank Pfister was ranked as high as number 19 in the world and stayed in the top 100 for several years. That may not sound like the greatest, but he made an awfully good living playing tennis. Dennis and Hank probably knew each other. If they ever knew me, they’ve forgotten it by now.

Esther Foley was athletic and her skin showed a deep history of a life in the sun. She was leathery and brown, well passed middle age, or so it seemed from the vantage of a 12 year old. She could hit the ball anywhere she wanted to. I was often reminded of Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield fence he was going to hit the ball over, except Mrs. Foley would have somebody mark a circle on the other side of the court and she would put a ball in it from the baseline. She could do that with her backhand too. She was pretty good.

There were perhaps 12 or 15 of us out there on the courts trying to learn the game, starting, of course, with the fundamentals: “Shake hands with the racquet.” “Keep your elbow straight.” And the ubiquitous to all sports, “Keep your eye on the ball!” We would all line up on the baseline and practice our strokes under the watchful eye of Esther Foley. She would watch us, correct us and provide demonstrations of how it was supposed to be done. She wanted to make sure we learned her sport and gave it the respect it deserved.

These lessons were a ticket into a whole new world -- a world of relationships and socialization that had hitherto been unknown to me. I could now make my own “play dates” as it were. I could find friends interested in playing tennis and we could go off on our own with a couple of racquets and a can of balls to the tennis courts. I moved up a rung on my dad’s social calendar as well. He typically played tennis on most Saturday mornings with his friends, but occasionally one of them couldn’t make it and I became a substitute for a doubles partner.

I met Byron in Junior high school. He became one of my best friends for the next several years as we grew up, into and out of adolescence. Byron was always the more sociable of the two of us. I admired his easy way with the popular kids, and yet he seemed content to spend the majority of his time with us ordinary folk. To my complete amazement he managed to slip in and out of both circles with absolute ease. I could never grasp the concept of how to do that successfully, so I admired his easy transitions and his ability to stay untainted by his association with the riffraff.

It just so happened that Byron played tennis too. We became tennis partners. We would trundle off on our bikes to play tennis at the local park and while away the summer time mornings or evenings with the grand game. He would win as often as I would, so the game stayed enjoyable for us both. We were like most of the kids who take up the game though. We lacked a passion to master it. We played at the local park, had fun, and enjoyed ourselves, without the crushing weight of carrying the game on our shoulders.

When we came home from college that first summer, common ground was first established on the tennis court. Since I didn’t play at all my freshman year, my skills were rough and rusty. Byron began to pull away from me as a player. He started to win more often and that not only diminished my enjoyment of the game, but also brought me to realize that with some things: just a little bit of practice won’t make up the deficit in a basic lack of skills. It is the compounded effect of many hours of practice spread out over long periods of time that reap the most benefit. I noticed too that Byron had taken up weight lifting and the change in his physique was strikingly noticeable. Using myself as the measuring stick, these were palpable, real changes; evidence of real differences in how people use their time to better themselves.

As a brand new tennis player, I would play singles with my dad every once and awhile. He was very frustrating to play against because he never played the way Mrs. Foley taught us to play. He was the king of junk tennis. His friends called him “Bas the Ace.” He would put so much spin on the ball it would bounce back over the net before I could get to it, or, it would bounce to the right or the left instead of straight. He was all flat footed and bent elbows.

It is true that in tennis, you have a much better chance to win if you hit the ball away from your opponent, but I just didn’t think that it was fair. In my mind, the object of the game was to hit the ball as many times as you could and keep it in play, not necessarily to win. I found that this philosophy was in basic conflict with the rest of my fellow man and tennis partners. Everybody wanted to win. I just wasn’t born with that “killer” instinct. To me, winning was not everything, participation was. Only half the participants can win, but everybody can play. I even wrote my personal essay on my college applications about that very topic.

That essay was good enough to get me into college, and while I was there, I thought that I could get good enough to beat Dad at tennis. This, of course, was after the first summer home when I saw the fruits of applied labor that Byron had exemplified. So, over the next year I played more tennis with better opponents and tried to increase my paltry basket of skills at the game. Winning did not come easily, but after a little more practice, I tended to make fewer mistakes and my opponents more. But, there is more to the game (any game for that matter) than just the basic skill set. Not only do you have to want to win, you have to want to feel good about it.

Although my skills eventually increased, my operating philosophy had not. I still enjoyed hitting the ball to my opponent instead of away. I almost always avoided the “kill” shot. Overhead slams were mostly for practice, not for putting the ball away. I steeled myself against these thoughts when I readied myself for the big match with Dad. I was going to win. I was going to beat him at his own game; spin the ball off the court, hit it where he ain’t, stuff him with my serve. At least, this was my strategic design for the big match.

Now to be perfectly honest, my father did not know of my plan. He did not know that all the tennis matches we played over the years had put me in such a contrary state of mind. He nearly always won when we played together and we both seemed to have a good time, so I’m sure that he thought nothing of it. I, on the other hand, was in turmoil about these circumstances. I didn’t like losing when it happened all the time and I knew that it didn’t have to be that way. I knew I could beat him. I just needed to prove it to myself. This time, I was prepared to win. I just wasn’t prepared for what that meant.

We were on the tennis courts one summer evening at Beale Park. I was full of confidence with my new found skills and I won every point for the first four games. With each additional point won I could see my dad thinking twice as hard for every shot. He was trying for extra spin on every hit; putting all his strength into returns. There were glimpses of panic. I saw fallibility where I had never seen it before. Where once I saw confidence, I saw real concern. I saw a man who was seeing his relationship with his son changing. It was a haunting realization for me that with a victory here, our relationship would change forever. It would never be the same. In his eyes, I would not be his little boy; I would be an athletic rival. I could see it now with every stroke of the ball. I would be on equal footing for all things physical, all things manly. Ours was a relationship that was not built on winning and losing. It was much more subtle than that. And, winning was never about the score.

Dad won the first set 7-5, and the second 6-4. I had proven that my skills could serve me well. I hit every shot exactly where I wanted the ball to go. That’s all I needed. As hard as it was to accept, I thought that my dad needed this victory more than I did. Sometimes, just holding on to what you have is more important than what you have to gain with a win.

My dad never knew what the stakes were in this game. I am sure that he thought nothing of it. It had been just another tennis match with his son and the outcome was just the same. I have not ever spoken to him about this pivotal tennis match. We didn’t play much after that. My tennis skills have all but disappeared with time. I doubt that he would even remember an otherwise unremarkable warm summer evening where we played tennis at Beale Park.

Dad won the match but, there were two victors that day. There was nothing to regret.