THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 14, 1994 TAG: 9406140326
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Marc Tibbs
DATELINE: 940614 LENGTH: Medium
At least that's what I thought.
{REST} It's that time of year when most recreational players find their way back to the court - the cusp between the French Open and Wimbledon - when your mind tells you that you really were just a lesson or two shy of a career on the pro circuit.
But what a difference a year can make.
After an hour of huffing and puffing behind the fuzzy green ball (only to send a few of them flying over the fence), I realized that even though I might feel like 20, I'm a lot closer to 40 in both my age and my waistline. Darting around the court is a lot more difficult when you're carrying 10 extra pounds of gravitational pull.
I blame my surplus weight on having kicked the smoking habit, but I soon learned that there are never-smokers in our league as well whose aching bodies are moving them closer and closer to the senior circuit.
Raynell and Mel are two of the best players in the league. But Raynell, a 40-ish, bearded baseliner, is a little more over the hill than his youthful shag ponytail might suggest. And Mel, his doubles partner, who seems just a tad younger and who once scampered all over the court, is recovering from off-season surgery to repair torn ligaments in his shoulder.
After we'd all hit for an hour or so, we sat around the courts at Booker T. Washington High School and talked about the changes in our games and our lives.
Comparing notes, one thing became increasingly clear - while tennis is indeed a ``sport for life,'' sometimes a lifetime can pass between one season and the next.
``Good shot. Great serve,'' are compliments heard loud and hardy in a match between the more ``mature'' players in our league, and it's not because older players have more etiquette. We're just more inclined to watch a shot whiz past us and praise it than we are to go chasing it down for a return.
Nearly everyone had a tale of falling prey to the middle-age myth: ``If I could just peel away an inch or two of this waistline, my washboard stomach would re-emerge,'' we tell ourselves, jostling a pound of our paunch in our paws.
Play smarter, not harder, is our unofficial motto, which can easily be translated, ``never let them see you fret.''
Breaks in the action become longer and longer. Seems like we'll spend more time talking about tennis this year than we will playing.
And I can remember when these courts were famous for vicious matches at 8 o'clock on Sunday morning. Now, only the young players rise that early. The Geritol crowd won't play until 10 a.m., which means we only have to last for two hours until lunch.
by CNB