Richard Moore, from "The Tennis Ball." Poetry Magazine, January 1972.
Showing posts with label tennis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tennis. Show all posts
a nice set
A History of Tennis by E. B. Noel and J. O. M. Clark, Oxford University Press, London. 1924.
Detail from A History of Tennis.
Birmal all metal lawn tennis racket, ca. 1920.
Eton presentation racket with engraving: "W. Burns, winner of single racquets, Eton 1889."
Thomas Stevens of Coventry: late 19th century woven silk "Stevengraph" of a tennis match.
'wear white. mind losing.'
Call questionable balls his way, not yours:Robert Pinsky, "Tennis." Sadness and Happiness. Princeton University Press, 1975. Longer excerpt available here.
You lose the point but have your concentration,
The grail of self-respect. Wear white. Mind losing.
Photo: Gobert showing a tennis racket by Agence Rol, 1913. National Library of France, Public Domain. Discovered here.
this weekend
Hopefully no rain delays.
A few things out of many things:
Take care this weekend.Image: photo of Tracy Austin by Walter Iooss, Jr. for the 9/17/79 cover of Sports Illustrated. She was just 16 and won it all, becoming the youngest champion (male or female) in the history of the U.S. Open.
imaginary outfit: tennis player
I think the most perfect joy I have felt in my life has come from hitting tennis balls. It took countless hours of relentless practice, hours of yelling, hours of frustration, and I never got anywhere near great, but somewhere along the line my muscles learned what to do, and I could hit. I could have that moment of grace, feel the total connection of will, racquet and ball and hear the hissing, perfect pok as the ball snaked back over the net. I loved hitting an ace. I loved watching opponents helplessly chase balls I hit. I loved chasing down a shot someone thought was a winner and slamming it back across the court. I loved fighting every point, game, set and match.
I love tennis.
I suppose I am one of the last generation that learned to play with a wooden racquet. My parents had five or six piled in the closet, and they would drag us kids to the courts to thwack the hell out of dead balls. Years later, when I got better and a little obsessed and had saved up to buy my own fancy racquet (my teenage expenses fit in three neat categories: car, tennis, other) I still liked to play with an ancient, rusting Wilson aluminum beast that had survived from early days. It weighed a ton and the sweet spot was smaller than small, but if you were good and precise, it let you hit the ball like a freaking hammer. It was perfect for Monica Grunt Tennis - the game my high school teammates and I invented to play after practice. The rules were simple - you had to return every ball (we played across three courts), you had to hit as hard as possible, and you had to grunt on every hit. We'd play until they shut the lights out.
Good times.
string theory
I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) fixed positions, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables -- i.e., a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racket, height of backswing and angle of racket face, as well as the 3-D coordinates through which the racket face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out and out, on and on, and then on much further when the opponent’s own position and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in. No silicon-based RAM yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange; smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then it can really be done only unconsciously, i.e., by fusing talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.David Foster Wallace
still life
Tennis wear still life photographed by Carl Kleiner, styled by Julie von Hofsten. Via krisatomic.
racquets
A complete and unique set of highly decorative portable teak display cases containing Dunlop Maxply tennis and badminton racquets.Via Mary Caple's svpply.
balls
J.D. Salinger, 'Just Before the War with the Eskimos'FIVE STRAIGHT SATURDAY MORNINGS, Ginnie Mannox had played tennis at the East Side Courts with Selena Graff, a classmate at Miss Basehoar's. Ginnie openly considered Selena the biggest drip at Miss Basehoar's - a school ostensibly abounding with fair-sized drips - but at the same time she had never known anyone like Selena for bringing fresh cans of tennis balls. Selena's father made them or something. (At dinner one night, for the edification of the entire Mannox family, Ginnie had conjured up a vision of dinner over at the Graffs'; it involved a perfect servant coming around to everyone's left with, instead of a glass of tomato juice, a can of tennis balls.)
Photos by Esther Bubley, via the Library of Congress.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)