“So, what is your weakness?” my foot doctor asked after I’d told her how well my tennis game was faring lately, largely as the result of the orthotics she’d prescribed some time ago to keep me on my toes, ever poised to pounce.
Aside from not being able to move, I said, I couldn’t think of any, frankly.
To watch the doubles games I and my peers play must be as exciting as watching the grass grow, though maybe that’s embellishing. All too frequently we stand as if transfixed, waiting, it seems, for something to happen, rather than advancing, as presumably we used to when younger, with brio, with elan.
You’ll generally find us rooted somewhere around the service line, in “no man’s land,” neither here nor there. And yet we’ve come far: Simply to contemplate the countless operations and prostheses that have enabled us to get to this inert point can excite wonder.
Long ago I learned that to boast of having two titanium knees was, in the company I keep, pedestrian.
“I’ll see your two titanium knees and raise you one hip replacement, one shoulder surgery . . . and seven stents.”
You can’t win. There’s always somebody more dogged than you.
Actually, it does occur to me that I have another weakness. “Anybody can hit the ball,” Bud Collins once told me. “It’s what’s up here,” he said, pointing to his head. Ah, if I only had a brain. . . .
Temperance, at least temperance on the tennis court, has never been my thing, and that is why I am so keenly aware of the need of it when it comes to my grandchildren, who seem, I’m happy to say, to be even-tempered, and who, even in their early teenage years, give promise that they can treat triumph and disaster as the impostors they are.
Those words of Kipling’s are there for all to see, at the entrance to the Centre Court of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
But in thinking of my motilely-challenged comrades and me, Freddie Mercury’s words ring true too. “We are the champions, my friend / And we’ll keep on fighting to the end.”