April 2022

By Randy Capps

About 30 years ago, I lost a bet. What that bet actually was has been lost to time — or the effect of advancing age on my longterm memory — but the result was I had to try out for the Marion High School tennis team.

Now, I was athletic enough to play the game but had never picked up a racket until the early spring of my junior year. I made the team, mainly because there wasn’t much competition for bench spots, and started learning the basics.

I kept at it, and got good enough to play doubles as a senior. I was paired with a freshman, who was greener than I was, but we won far more often than we lost by following the prime directive of winning tennis, which is the idea of hitting one more ball back in play than your opponent.

I left Marion and went to Gardner-Webb, where I walked on to what was then a Division II tennis team in much the same way that I made the high school squad, which is to say they needed a warm body. I actually played a bunch out of necessity and lost a ton. I played for a couple of years, then decided that graduating on time was more important than tennis. I was burned out and took a few years off from the sport.

I played quite a bit in my early 30s, then I took another decade off as my weight got out of hand. I picked up a racket again last fall, reconstructed my dodgy forehand (thanks, Mike) and started playing again.

It’s a thinking man’s game, which has always appealed to me, but it also makes me feel young again. It reminds me of hitting balls in my hometown, on the public court with no bathrooms, or of the time my first coach at GWU banished me to a side court with a ball machine and told me, “Don’t come back until you’ve learned how to hit a backhand.”

It’s a game that taught humility to a young man who needed some and one that still offers lessons and hope to a much older version of the same guy. Even as my shoulder or my knees ache after a couple of sets over at South Johnston, I’m still glad I lost that bet.

Whatever it was.