Tennis the menace

I happened to watch and follow the Australian Open more closely than I have done for some time now. Few marathon matches were breathtaking. And the final was really amazing. Marat Safin and Lleyton Hewitt played awesome tennis. I liked the way Safin played.
The point is that the event rekindled the awe that I used to watch tennis with (just like every kid wants to become a pilot, every youngster wants to play tennis). Off late, my interest in tennis was on and off (with toggling of ATP rankings of Sharapova and Serena) but the Australian open brought it back. And at such time, Parag popped me the question – Would you play tennis with me? That weekend we both were hunting for tennis rackets across Pune sports’ shops. Our criterion for tennis racket was simple – it should look cool. Then the cost factor and finally the quality came into picture. So we did find two rackets (Dev Sports on Laxmi Road happens to have a lot of them in spite of being such a small shop. Camp also has a lot of shops with lots of options). When I first showed the racket to my mom, she stared at my badminton racket (which had failed to see the badminton court ever since I bought it). But I assured her that tennis was the game for me.

Luckily, that evening we went to a tennis court and we had our first encounter with this fabulous game (la Club Hirabaug). More than anything, that one hour taught us that the most important entities on a tennis court are not the umpires, not the linesmen, not the audience but the ball boyz/girls. We spent 50% of our effort in getting the ball back to the court. Thanks to our power-play. One of my full-blooded double-handed backhand made me jump off 8 feet wall and climb back. There was a scratch here and a bruise there, but its all part of the game. We also realized that bigger court does not mean easier to find accuracy. Single handed shots fell short of the net, double handed shots made the court look short. Drop volleys were tough to reach, baseline shots were too fast to reach. And to serve you needed more than just the nerve. In short, its not an easy game at all. But it is surely very enjoyable.
After that, I happened to play tennis a couple of times (its just a few days mind you). And each time I wanted to play longer. Though the game is highly energy-sapping, I was glad to have had energy to wish to play longer. Ratnadeep and Mandar too joined the club. Couple of times we couldn’t find the court empty and had to fall back to plan B – table tennis. But tennis will remain the game to look forward to, surely for quite some time to come.
Let’s hope no weekend is tennisless and this ‘tennis-the menace’ continues for days and days to come.