“Love All”
by
Joshua Schwartz
If you ever wanted to smash your tennis racket into a million little pieces, I guarantee you are not alone. I've been there. So, I asked my father how he would deal with this random anger, and he told me something interesting. He said that during big moments in his life, he'll often go back to a memory in middle school when some girl in his class threw a plant pot at his head. My father said that no matter his scenario, that memory calms him for some reason.
Why this memory? He wasn't sure, but the advice stuck with me, and I knew I needed my own calming moment to bring me some clarity when frustration began to boil on the court.
And that moment came at the Knickerbocker, a whimsical little tennis club dating back to the eighteen hundreds. It lives almost in secret on a very ordinary Brooklyn-looking street between a graffiti-filled train track and a couple of beat-up brick apartment buildings. My father and I ended up at the Knickerbocker to honor a family friend who loved the club, and we quickly realized this feeling of love was shared by anyone who entered the worn-out front gate.
As we arrived, we were greeted by the president of the Knickerbocker, who set up a doubles match for my father and me almost instantly. Little did the president know, my father hadn't picked up a tennis racket in 20 years, and even when he did pick one up, it was probably to hand it to someone else. But my father is a competitor to the core, so there was no way he would let the lack of knowing how to swing a tennis racket be a reason not to play two excellent players.
During the warmup, balls flew over the fence and into the apartment complex that hovered over Court 1 of the Knick. These balls, of course, came from my father's racket. What part of the racket, I am not exactly sure. As ball after ball sailed over the fence, you could see our opponents begin to wonder if we were lost. You could also see the club president start to wonder if he really needed my father's donation check to the club in honor of our family friend.
We went down 0-1 after my father ran into the fence and then whiffed on a serve return, which I think the president was happy about. Not because his team won the point but because my father's whiffing meant a tennis ball was saved from a one-way trip over the fence. I would have been more on edge in any other competitive environment, but watching my father slide on the dusty har-tru courts in New Balance hiking shoes made me laugh harder than ever.
Miraculously, we won my serve and tied up the match 1-1. From a scoreboard perspective, this would be our peak. But I'd argue my father's winner was pretty good, too. He hit the ball with the racket's frame, and it soared about two hundred feet in the air only to land with a spin no tennis ball had ever seen before.
After the match, we shook hands and all shared a good laugh before wandering into the clubhouse, which is a shrine to the Knickerbocker itself. Plaques of past champions dating back centuries and old pictures of the original Knickerbocker Club fill the clubhouse walls. Some of the greatest tennis players of forgotten eras, like Pancho Segura, won tournaments at the Knickerbocker, and now I was hitting around on the same holy ground in Brooklyn.
We spoke to one of the past championships, who was now in her late eighties, yet she walked around the grounds with the same stride as I. They say those who play tennis live longer than those who play other sports, and I think it's because we aren't 100 percent sure there are tennis courts in heaven. She told us about the club's year-end singles champion. An eleven-year-old boy who beat a seventy-five-year-old man.
Only on a secret tennis court in Brooklyn would an eleven-year-old boy and a seventy-five-year-old man share a moment together. But that's the magic right there. The magic of Brooklyn. Of New York. Of tennis.
That's the magic of life.
The only time a ball wasn't flying around on the five courts was the moment to honor the club's success and our family friend who gave so much to the history of the Knickerbocker. The president said a few words and then handed the mic to my father. If the tennis court is heaven for some, then a mic and an audience are heaven for my father, who delivered a speech good enough to save our performance on the court earlier.
The crowd laughed, especially when my father said he almost wrote James Dolan a check instead of the Knickerbocker tennis club.
"Who knew Morty was such a big New York Knicks fan!"
Eventually, we said our goodbyes and returned to the real world with a dozen new friends. I don't know much about any of those people we met at the Knickerbocker, but I know they loved tennis. And they were nice to me. In the real world, though, it's not that simple.
Bombs fly, life has injustices, and I'll double fault every so often. Life is filled with moments that make you want to smash your tennis racket but also with moments of laughter. I focus on those now.
If there are courts up in heaven, I bet they look like the ones at the Knickerbocker on that sunny Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn.
No comments:
Post a Comment