Blane Causes Racket Stroking Tennis

Recently I had the chance to practice a little with some of our 49ers tennis team, and this is a chronicle of my brief experience. It is the story about how I learned to never try anything new because you might not be automatically good at it, especially if it’ll humiliate you a little.

Now, that picture in the upper right corner, that’s me! Cool, right? No, probably not. That’s because it is photographic proof offailure.

It is a picture of me playing tennis against Daniel Henke, the top ranked male player on our 49ers tennis team.

More specifically, it is a picture of me earnestly swinging at a tennis ball that is a good seven feet away from me. Oh, and I am wearing tiny shorts, which expose my non-pigmented alabaster legs. If you can’t tell from the picture, my legs reflect the light beams of the sun directly into camera lenses and the eyes of passers-by.

If you are anything like I am right now, then you must be wondering how I’d gotten myself to that embarrassing point – which, in my defense, was a result of many small forces and thoughts that could form such majestic failure only when all combined together. I have to explore them all to find out where I went wrong with my athletic career. Follow me on my failure journey.

The first important force was the one that drew me into the sports section. This force is what I like to think of as “Strike One.”

In this edition of the paper I was initially planning either to write a review of Spiderman 3 or an interest piece on exotic animals with strange traits; I watched a

Discovery Channel special on the value of horseshoe crab blood, which I felt everyone should know about, and I wanted to share how I thought Spiderman 3 was the perfect storm of people making a movie and not really wanting to.

The only problem with those ideas was that they would have interfered with our adviser’s plan to not have those in the paper.

He’s got this crazy notion that we should have some consistency or relevance to what goes in this thing. And I don’t, so I usually subvert all my articles into irrelevance.

Really, that’s all I wanted to do. Just to go and try something new.

Alas, the Spiderman 3 and horseshoe crab articles were out of the picture and I didn’t have any more ideas, leaving me with an openness to suggestion.

Perhaps I could now try doing something that I hadn’t considered. Still armed with the spirit of irrelevance, I ended up here in the sports section. Because if any one section needed support from our staff, it would be Sports.

Hey, sports is not my area of expertise, but nothing is. Usually when the topic of the sports section comes up most of us on the newspaper try not to make eye contact with one another; most of us aren’t at all involved with sports, with the exception of our sports editor, Ryan. He usually ends up putting all the content in this section by himself.

So I figured the sports section was a perfect place for my unique style of filling up newspaper space with nothing of consequence.

The only catch was that I had to loosely tie back whatever I came up with to sports. Preferably sports on our campus.

Lightning struck in the form of an idea. I don’t know how it came to me, but the first sports article idea I had was to see how an under qualified person would match-up playing a sport against much more experienced or seasoned players. Kind of like in the movie “Invincible” with Marky Mark. Actually, I probably got that article idea because I had just watched that “Invincible” movie with Marky Mark.

However it had been instilled into me, now I wanted to do something amazing, sports-related. Maybe I could play some football with our team and get a touchdown on the kick return or on an interception. Or I could play some basketball and nail an alley oop, shattering the backboard. You know… something that would result in eruptions of jubilation and acclaim all directed toward me. Maybe I could invoke someone watching to do that that thing where they cover their hand over their mouth and say, “Ah, shiiiiit.”

I’m big on glory.

To have only taken a second to think it over before going through this ordeal with the tennis, I would have figured out I’m pretty gangly and uncoordinated, meaning that for me sports glory is a pipe dream. I now realize, however, that I am specifically designed to be awkward and sarcastic. I can be awkward and sarcastic in spades.

That’s why I am chasing that awkwardness and trying to use it to write something that is both pseudo enjoyable and sports related.

I wanted the sport to be tennis because I had heard that there was a pact for the tennis team that they would not shave until an overall victory for the team. I’d heard about it from Steven Lay, a tennis player that I have a few classes with.

With it only being something like a few weeks into the pact he’d already fully bearded out, which completely debased my own newfound facial hair self-confidence.

I’d finally just begun to show visible signs of puberty something like two months ago, and since that time I’d been watering and soothingly reading to my own weak whiskers with only the slightest wispy-pervo mustache to show for it.

Here it was, my inability to grow face pubes versus the idea of man beards. You could ask anyone who has known me, I’ve wanted two things since I was seven years old: a lumberjack sized man beard and super powers, in that order.

I’d go play tennis, for some reason.

Before Spring break I went to a game and talked to the Men’s and Women’s coaches, Mr. Josh Prager and Mrs. Helen Prager. They were nice and agreed to let me come to a practice and act foolish.

I’ve played tennis once before, but I don’t really count it. It was against an old lady who had never played either. She was formidable for a blue hair, but I’m competitive and I made her take the side facing the sun. After watching the matches, though, I figured that I should get in a little practice over the break so that at least I wasn’t lobbing it over the fence every time I came in contact with the ball, which isn’t good in tennis like it is in baseball.

What follows is my self imposed training regiment, or “Strike Two.”

I came to our campus on the first day of break and practiced against the wall for about an hour and a half. Let me tell you something: that wall is freaking unbeatable.

I don’t care how good a human player is, the wall will always win. Where as a human tires and sweats, the wall remains relentless. Which is why I didn’t take it as an omen that I was losing so badly.

I thought that I’d gotten quite a lot done; I could hit the ball more than twice in a row. Plus, this was good for me; I hadn’t done anything physical for a while. I left feeling invigorated.

Over the next couple of days I was walking like I had ridden a horse for ten hours and feeling decidedly not invigorated. Sore and not so optimistic about returning to the wall, I decided that maybe I could benefit from a shift to analyzing the theoretical practice of tennis.

To begin with I did some internet research. I looked up some interesting fun facts, but then got distracted. Before that happened I got some good stuff. IBM’s website claims that The Championships, Wimbledon receives a global audience of 159 countries with approximately 2 billion television viewers. This is approximately a lot, considering that the estimated population in July of 2007 was 6,602,224,175. So that is just about thirty percent of the world. I think IBM.com may be lying. Maybe that many people watch professional wrestling, because even though it’s all fake, except for the matches for the belt that sport is crazy popular all over the world, but not tennis.

Next, I thought of a wonderful way to resume wall training without going outside. My friend made a Visual Basic practice pong video game in our high school computer programming class. It’s like pong, but you can never get it past the other player because it is a wall. This makes playing the program virtually the same as practicing against the wall.

Finally, if I wanted to play tennis, then I had to look tennis. I don’t know where I really got the idea I had on how tennis players dressed. It is more than likely that I watched some 80’s movie that ruined the concept of tennis apparel for me.

The only tennis I’ve watched on the television has been women’s, and I figured that there must have been some reason for their clothing choices. I chalked it up to reducing wind resistance.

My reasoning probably was that I could take notice of the sage tactics of the professional athlete and increase my skill through emulation. Nietzsche puts it, “No victor believes in chance.”

So, with some short shorts, I could shave valuable seconds off of my reaction time. Also, I bought one of the cool sweat head bands that I always see tennis players wearing to keep the sweat out of their face. I was rigging the deck.

I’d put my faith in the practicality of some sporty and tiny athletic shorts and the utility of a sweat gathering headband. With these I’d be formidable.

I was ready, as ready as I’d ever be. The bad news was that when the day to play came I showed up really early and had to sit in my tiny shorts losing confidence and bravado over time. Then people started showing up, but by this time the bravado level was zero. It was one thing to have fun and dress in tiny shorts, it is another to have people see you. I think Gandhi said that. The game was afoot.

It turned out that that little of a difference in air resistance didn’t even help my mobility. And the worst part is that in the back of my mind, I think I knew.

Nobody else even had sweatbands. “Strike Three.”

Yep, Strike Three before I even played any tennis.

I mean, I thought it was pretty funny. Not really anyone else did, though.

That’s about when I remembered that, while looking up the internet fun facts that I thought might come in handy, I read that Gussie Moran wore a short, lacetrimmed skirt in 1949 and was accused by the AELTC of ‘bringing vulgarity and sin into tennis.’ Everyone else’s reactions to my tennis shorts were probably a little closer to this instance than I’d initially hoped.

Maybe I thought it was funny, maybe I thought I was going to be playing tennis in the eighties. I don’t know.

Once there I was defeated easily by everyone. My first match was against Daniel Henke, the number one ranked player on the Men’s team. I can’t write about what happened because I blinked and missed it. That picture at the top is one of my better attempts at returning his serve.

Losing my way through the team’s ranks, I ended with Elizna Van Zyl, who played against me in flip-flop sandals. Even with the handicap she was defeating me easily, casually. After awhile of losing, an image came into my mind; I pictured the part of a Steven Seagal movie where he casually walks into a room full of gun wielding bad guys and calmly karate-murders them one-by-one.

It was like every one of my swings was one of the faceless/nameless bad guys in the crowd who stayed in the fight because they were convinced they would succeed where the others had failed. It made me sad. I could have just gone home and had a good cry.

Oh, and I almost forgot. On my way to the tennis courts it struck me that I’d probably get really thirsty and dehydrated from all that running around and failing. So I veered my car toward a grocery store to pick up a little dihydrogen monoxide.

I started out with a clear goal in mind: a couple bottles of water and maybe some gummy bears. It is part of my financial strategy to go in to the market with a plan so that you don’t just pick up anything that sounds good. I realized, though, that Gatorade is scientifically designed to quench thirst, like with scientists and electrolytes and everything. Plus, there was only one flavor for water and to tell you the truth it doesn’t do much for me.

Gatorade has a bunch of different flavors: orange, yellow, glacier, dark blue, light blue, Hawaiian Punch. But I got distracted trying to pick one and forgot all of the reasons why I was buying a drink.

That’s how I ended up bringing a gallon of chocolate milk to satisfy my thirst. I guess that I didn’t realize this, but when it is hot outside and you’ve been running around for almost two hours and the chocolate milk has been out for at least thirty minutes more than that… chugging half of it without shaking it first is a bad choice. Another in a long line. It was the cheap, weapons grade chocolate milk too. Not satisfying.

I learned absolutely nothing. Well, a little bit about the individuals involved with our Yuba College team.

I knew already that it was important for people to have their own outlets for their creativity, gifts or special abilities. Like

Captain Planet with recycling, or like being a good athlete, or artist, or mechanic, or even having talent to loosely entertain for no good reason through assorted jackassery. We’re all on the same team… Education.

But anyway, real tennis article. Like I mentioned, I happened to actually find out about our team and get some decent pictures of serious tennis.