period from April to July
when it needed lithium badly, tending to gust without pattern, swirl and backtrack and die and rise, sometimes blowing in
one direction at court level and in another altogether ten feet overhead. The precision in thinking required one to induct
trends in percentage, thrust, and retaliatory angle—precision our guy and the other townships’ volunteer coaches were good
at abstracting about with chalk and board, attaching a pupil’s leg to the fence with clothesline to restrict his arc of movement
in practice, placing laundry baskets in different corners and making us sink ball after ball, taking masking tape and laying
down Chinese boxes within the court’s own boxes for drills and wind sprints—all this theoretical prep went out the window
when sneakers hit actual court in a tournament. The best-planned, best-hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic
unlyrical problem. It drove some kids near-mad with the caprice and unfairness of it all, and on real windy days these kids,
usually with talent out the bazoo, would have their first apoplectic racket-throwing tantrum in about the match’s third game
and lapse into a kind of sullen coma by the end of the first set, now bitterly
expecting
to get screwed over by wind, net, tape, sun. I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd in practice,
located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn’t plan
for. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the ages of twelve and fifteen against bigger,
faster, more coordinated, and better-coached opponents simply by hitting balls unimaginatively back down the middle of the
court in schizophrenic gales, letting the other kid play with more verve and panache, waiting for enough of his ambitious
balls aimed near the lines to curve or slide via wind outside the green court and white stripe into the raw red territory
that won me yet another ugly point. It wasn’t pretty or fun to watch, and even with the Illinois wind I never could have won
whole matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice
of losing to a shallow-chested “pusher” because of the shitty rural courts and rotten wind that rewarded cautious automatism
instead of verve and panache. I was an unpopular player, with good reason. But to say that I did not use verve or imagination
was untrue. Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I
at least felt the wind had some basic right to be there, and found it sort of interesting, and was willing to expand my logistical
territory to countenace the devastating effect a 15- to 30-mph stutter-breeze swirling southwest to east would have on my
best calculations as to how ambitiously to respond to Joe Perfecthair’s topspin drive into my backhand corner.
The Illinois combination of pocked courts, sickening damp, and wind required and rewarded an almost Zen-like acceptance of
things as they actually were, on-court. I won a lot. At twelve, I began getting entry to tournaments beyond Philo and Champaign
and Danville. I was driven by my parents or by the folks of Gil Antitoi, son of a Canadian-history professor from Urbana,
to events like the Central Illinois Open in Decatur, a town built and owned by the A. E. Staley processing concern and so
awash in the stink of roasting corn that kids would play with bandannas tied over their mouths and noses; like the Western
Closed Qualifier on the ISU campus in Normal; like the McDonald’s Junior Open in the serious corn town of Galesburg, way out
west by the River; like the Prairie State Open in Pekin, insurance hub and home of Caterpillar Tractor; like the Midwest Junior
Clay Courts at a chichi private club in Peoria’s pale version of
when it needed lithium badly, tending to gust without pattern, swirl and backtrack and die and rise, sometimes blowing in
one direction at court level and in another altogether ten feet overhead. The precision in thinking required one to induct
trends in percentage, thrust, and retaliatory angle—precision our guy and the other townships’ volunteer coaches were good
at abstracting about with chalk and board, attaching a pupil’s leg to the fence with clothesline to restrict his arc of movement
in practice, placing laundry baskets in different corners and making us sink ball after ball, taking masking tape and laying
down Chinese boxes within the court’s own boxes for drills and wind sprints—all this theoretical prep went out the window
when sneakers hit actual court in a tournament. The best-planned, best-hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic
unlyrical problem. It drove some kids near-mad with the caprice and unfairness of it all, and on real windy days these kids,
usually with talent out the bazoo, would have their first apoplectic racket-throwing tantrum in about the match’s third game
and lapse into a kind of sullen coma by the end of the first set, now bitterly
expecting
to get screwed over by wind, net, tape, sun. I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd in practice,
located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn’t plan
for. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the ages of twelve and fifteen against bigger,
faster, more coordinated, and better-coached opponents simply by hitting balls unimaginatively back down the middle of the
court in schizophrenic gales, letting the other kid play with more verve and panache, waiting for enough of his ambitious
balls aimed near the lines to curve or slide via wind outside the green court and white stripe into the raw red territory
that won me yet another ugly point. It wasn’t pretty or fun to watch, and even with the Illinois wind I never could have won
whole matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice
of losing to a shallow-chested “pusher” because of the shitty rural courts and rotten wind that rewarded cautious automatism
instead of verve and panache. I was an unpopular player, with good reason. But to say that I did not use verve or imagination
was untrue. Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I
at least felt the wind had some basic right to be there, and found it sort of interesting, and was willing to expand my logistical
territory to countenace the devastating effect a 15- to 30-mph stutter-breeze swirling southwest to east would have on my
best calculations as to how ambitiously to respond to Joe Perfecthair’s topspin drive into my backhand corner.
The Illinois combination of pocked courts, sickening damp, and wind required and rewarded an almost Zen-like acceptance of
things as they actually were, on-court. I won a lot. At twelve, I began getting entry to tournaments beyond Philo and Champaign
and Danville. I was driven by my parents or by the folks of Gil Antitoi, son of a Canadian-history professor from Urbana,
to events like the Central Illinois Open in Decatur, a town built and owned by the A. E. Staley processing concern and so
awash in the stink of roasting corn that kids would play with bandannas tied over their mouths and noses; like the Western
Closed Qualifier on the ISU campus in Normal; like the McDonald’s Junior Open in the serious corn town of Galesburg, way out
west by the River; like the Prairie State Open in Pekin, insurance hub and home of Caterpillar Tractor; like the Midwest Junior
Clay Courts at a chichi private club in Peoria’s pale version of
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