Watching the U.S. Open and Dreaming of What May Have Been

If there's one sport that I can watch for hours on end, it's tennis. I know, I know, many of you will go "Uggghhhh, how boring!". I think a lot of the appeal for me is that I was an only child. Although I've always been a very competitive person, I played very little team sports. I also was raised by a Dad who was very athletic. In his youth he excelled in tennis, basketball, baseball, and golf, so those became the sports I was exposed to. Growing up, I was also one of those kids whose parents had to occasionally shop in the "Husky" section. In these PC times, no department store would dare use a word like "Husky". Now, you're just "short for your weight". Or "normal".

All that changed when we moved to a small city in the middle of Mississippi when I was 13. We moved there for my dad's job, and it was all a big adventure for me. Shortly after, an aunt, my mom's sister only five years older than me, joined us. We lived in a cramped 2-bedroom, 1-bath apartment in town. Luckily just down the street was a brand new park, with six lighted tennis courts. To escape the small apartment, we started playing tennis pretty regularly. With my mom not being very athletically inclined, we had many epic Australian doubles matches (which is 1 versus 2). Over the course of that first summer, we all became pretty good, although my dad was always the victor. Just making it close was a victory for me. During singles between my dad and I, play would get pretty heated, but I never won a match that I remember.

During all this, I was volunteered for the JV football team, mostly because I was "Husky", not that I was a football phenom. I was pretty ignorant about the rules of football, really. The coach kept putting me on the defensive line, and all I knew was to tackle the guy opposite me, and not to go after the guy with the ball (How weird this all is years later!). I got mad because I collected splinters on the bench and quit football. I guess all the coaches figured they didn't need to teach the rules to the Yankee.

It wasn't until my senior year in high school when this redneck school decided to add tennis to the curriculum. Yay! Something I could do, finally! (Although I had figured out the whole football offense/defense thing by now, who wants to do that in Mississippi, in the heat, at a school without air conditioning?). Unfortunately, they couldn't afford to hire a real tennis coach, so the football coach would have to do. As far as we knew, Coach had never picked up a tennis racket in his life. And as far as strategy, Coach didn't have a clue. In our matches with other schools, you had boy's and girl's singles, mixed doubles, boy's doubles, and girl's doubles. And you could only play in one category.

Now, I knew I was the best boy on the team, so naturally I should be the boy's single player, right? No, since I was the only one with doubles experience, I was always stuck with the worst female player in mixed doubles, to "even it out". Needless to say, I saw very little action on the court, as the female player became the focus of our opponent.

I'd thought I was on the path to tennis scholarship, to playing for a University, maybe being the next Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, or John McEnroe. No, I was on the first step of being the new Manager at the Jack's Hamburger joint. I had been working 40+ hours most of my high school years at the local hamburger place, cutting down to part time during tennis season.

Things I did accomplish: I moved out of Mississippi the morning after graduation; I later played a guy on the University of South Carolina tennis team and beat him; and I never shopped in the "Husky" section again.