My tennis "playing"

When I first arrived in London, my English friend said he’d teach me to play tennis.  

There were two parts to it, he said: serving, and hitting back.  As one starts the game serving, that was what he taught me first.  

This went on for a few weeks, once a week, then the weather got cold and I started college, so the sessions stopped and I never learned how to hit back.

A year later, someone at university said his parents were going away for the weekend, so he and his siblings decided to have a children’s partying weekend at home, inviting their friends round.  

They had a tennis court at home, so this friend invited me to play singles with him.  I told him I’d only learned a bit the previous year.  When I served beautifully into his court, he said, “I thought you said you’d only learned it for a few weeks?  That was good!”  But when he hit it back to me, I’d either miss it altogether or hit it way up into the air.  We spent more time retrieving the ball than hitting it.

At one point, however, he said something that made me very angry.  I then found myself doing something quite surprising:  not only was I able to hit the ball back properly, I was even able to hit it back into the furthest corner away from him, to make him run all the way across the court for it.  Back and forth, back and forth, I kept it up for quite a few minutes, in perfect control of the ball.  

I had never been able to repeat it since.  Interesting how anger is capable of making one do things one’s normally unable to…

The hitting the ball high up into the air bit, I was able to repeat without any trouble at all.  A few years later, a friend invited me to play tennis at a tennis court surrounded by plane trees.  When my racket did actually manage to make contact with the oncoming ball, it’d send the ball flying high up into the trees.  At the end of the hour’s session, the plane trees all had a big pile of green leaves at the base…