By Christopher Demarcus (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: September 18, 2013
Sex articles are popular nowadays. It’s the stuff drugstore magazines are made of. But I’m not about to entertain you with anecdotes of my new battery-powered lover. I’m going to tell you about how I lost my virginity to tennis. And yes, it did hurt.
No, I didn’t fall on the racket and end up leaving the emergency room with an awkward story and a comical x-ray photo. I’m remembering back to the first time I played the game.
My coach explained it as a game that was complex, like chess. I didn’t see how something that was like Pong could be like chess, but I believed him.
It was like golf. I wanted to play because it was something rich people did. My boss and his friends played. Their kids played. They spent a lot of time talking about the politics of matches and the thrill of winning. It seemed like a good place to build up some business contacts and fit in. And hey, I already had a pair of tennis shoes.
My first problem: the only sport I was good at was football. The main goal as a lineman in football is to be big. Being big lets you master gravity in two ways: stop people or knock them over. Football works on the principle of short and massive power. Snap. Boom. Repeat. In tennis, gravity isn’t something you master – it’s something you dance with. Flexibility and endurance are the key attributes of each player. My box-truck frame, balanced poorly on my teacup ankles, did not agree with tennis; we weren’t physically compatible.
Tennis tends to be an upper-class sport like golf, and also like golf, its method is fluid – highly reliant on a class form totally unnatural to me. My body was built to topple and catch things, not to send them back from whence they came.
I needed a math degree to understand where the ball was going. I never got past playing against my only opponent: a concrete wall. Like a puzzle in quantum mechanics, the ball never went the way it was supposed to go. My body chased after it like a desperate Pac-man-shaped bulldog. I could never catch it in time. It was a lot harder than Pong. I expected my first time with tennis to be euphoric. Maybe I was doing it wrong?
I thought if I decided to go all the way, take those first simple steps onto the green court, it would be an entrance into the world of tennis clubs and white polo shirts.
It turns out, like most sports, to enjoy tennis you need to have a knack for it – along with a lot of practice. Some people fall in love with tennis. For some, it doesn’t hurt. For me, tennis wasn’t a sport I could play. It was a complex set of problems coupled with a heart attack, bouncing around in a green and white square of death.
Like sex, tennis looked a lot more romantic on TV.
