Opinion: A joyful return to tennis in Portland

This summer, I’m determined to not take John Updike’s lament of the “sometimes sportsman” lying down.

Updike, a golfer, begins his poem about the occasional athletic competitor greeting the spring with these words: “When winter’s glaze is lifted from the greens/ And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing/ Triumphantly the stifled golfer preens/ In cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing.

“This year, he vows, his head will steady be/ His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal/ And so they are, until upon the tee/ Befall the old contortions of the real.”

I’ve only golfed a few times; at age 11, I discovered a love of tennis. Now, at 61, I experience “the old contortions of the real” when returning to the courts each April.

As Updike describes: “So, too, the tennis-player, torpid from/ Hibernal months of television sports/ Perfects his serve and feels his knees become/ Sheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts.

“Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss/ Which shall be high, so that the racket face/ Shall at a certain angle sweep across/ The floated sphere with gutty strings – an ace!”

Updike does not let himself (or us) off easily, concluding his verse with this dose of reality.

“The mind’s eye sees it all until upon/ The courts of life the faulty way we played/ In other summers rolls back with the sun./ Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.”

Since mid-May, the tennis matches with my most reliable partner have been fairly even, though marred, in my eyes, by my “faulty ways” of seasons past. Resolved to not fall prey to these familiar failings, I reached out recently to a local coach in hopes of getting some instruction to elevate my game.

After a 30-year hiatus from Maine during which my wife and I pursued our respective careers and raised our children, we’ve moved back to the adjoining towns where we grew up. When my new instructor suggested we play on the “Park Street courts,” I smiled.

I’m a graduate of the Park Street School – now converted to affordable housing units, but at the time home to the third through sixth grades in our town. For a graduation present in 1974, my parents gave me my first tennis racquet: a Wilson T-2000, the same metal racquet that Jimmy Connors used at Wimbledon that year to defeat the Australian Ken Rosewall, whose racquet was made of wood.

Like many, my childhood summers were mostly spent playing with neighborhood friends. But that year, when they were occupied, I focused on hitting a tennis ball against the backboard I had fashioned on the inside wall of our family’s two-car garage, where I adhered a strip of duct-tape to indicate where the net would be.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

To this day, my mother and older siblings complain about the racket that rattled inside our house while I practiced my strokes.

Then, on the weekends, my father would take me to the courts where he patiently taught the other elements of the game, from serving to keeping score.

These memories came rushing back, last week, driving to my lesson on these same public courts – resurfaced, one imagines, a time or two – and realizing it was exactly 50 years ago this summer that I first learned how to play.

I don’t harbor illusions that this year’s season will end much differently than those of my past. In fact, what’s changed is less about looking forward than looking back.

For as I drove by the windows of my former fifth and sixth grade classrooms, parked the car, introduced myself to my new instructor and walked onto the courts, the rejuvenating sprig of hope I experienced was comfortingly familiar. I felt like a kid all over again.