Imparare da anziani a giocare a tennis? Possibile, ma quanta fatica! (The New York Tennis)

25-08-2012

There is seldom an hour I spend alone with Kirill when I don’t come to feel worn and inadequate.

It happened again the other afternoon. The thermometer on the side of the tennis house had reached 91 degrees, and there were just a few members playing on the club’s main upper courts. Down on the practice courts, where we were, there may have been a light breeze coming off the nearby westernmost reaches of Long Island Sound, but I couldn’t feel it, and the gray-green Har-Tru clay my sneakers grabbed for was powdery and uncooperative. Kirill was across the net from me, at the T between the service boxes, a wire cart at his side filled with hundreds of tennis balls. I was at the T on my side, already a little winded, trying not to fail.

The drill went like this: He began feeding balls to me, rapidly, 20 or so a minute, to my left, to my right. They arrived close to my body at first, then farther away, then farther and harder. At the moment his racket was about to make contact with the ball, I did my split step, a reaction maneuver that entails hopping in place, spreading my legs shoulderwide and landing on my toes, ready. I stepped toward the net, taking the incoming ball out of the air with a volley. Then I backpedaled once more to the T, volleying forehand, then backhand, forehand, backhand, on and on for three, four minutes — an eternity.

Moving, always moving, and all the time thinking and checking off: Maintain the continental grip, the base knuckle of the index finger of my left hand resting on the bevel one notch counterclockwise from the racket handle’s high noon. (Check.) Keep the racket in front and the racket head up. (Check.) Knees slightly bent. (Check.) Turn sideways quickly, and punch with your shoulder, don’t swing; and tighten your grip at the moment the ball is about to hit the strings.

Then Kirill, to mix things up, lobbed one over my head. Move, think: I turned sideways, began running back using a crossover step, stopped, pointed up with my free right hand toward the descending ball, brought my racket back over my shoulder, contacted the ball with a wrist snap — and watched my overhead smash hook, decidedly, a long yard off the court.

I bent over, grabbed the bottoms of my tennis shorts. The sweat and sunscreen coursed into my eyes. I let the sense of ineptitude sink in a little.
“Your grip, Gerry,” Kirill said, loudly enough but calmly.
“What?”
“Look. Your grip.”

My index finger knuckle, somehow, had rotated a bevel clockwise as I’d run back for the overhead. (How had he noticed?) I was clutching the racket with a backhand grip. I was destined to mis-hit the shot before I raised my racket.
“Come on!” Kirill yelled, encouraging me.
Come on, I whined to myself, having walked to the side of the court for a towel and a gulp of Gatorade. Come on. What was I doing, thinking I could be a tennis player?

Finding Kirill

It was a thought — being a tennis player — that first came to me five years ago when I was months from my 55th birthday. It wasn’t that I imagined I was going to become an athlete. I am a tennis fan, and I turn on ESPN and attend the United States Open each year with the understanding that the men and women I love to watch are, as they were not when I was a boy, a breed apart: selection for size and intense training and competition from early childhood is increasingly creating a sort of warrior class in sports. I wanted to become a very good recreational player. Someday.

I had never played, not really. I was born in Paterson, N.J., and grew up among the sons of truckers and contractors and factory workers, and no one I knew took tennis lessons, and clubs were places old guys played cards and drank little cups of espresso.

I wanted to do something difficult. That was why I wanted to try tennis. I had been good at things. I was still good at things. I didn’t need a hobby, or a way to meet people. I wanted to get better at something; it had been a long time since I’d sensed that. I wanted to learn something that I would not be learning by reading; I had been reading all of my life, had spent the better part of four decades reading for a living. I wanted, one last time, to struggle at something I could control because the last real struggles were going to be ones I could not.

Was this a crisis of late-middle age? Was it about the children being near college age and the weekend afternoons yawning? One of the few inspiriting aspects of late-middle age is that you grow more comfortable understanding that you don’t necessarily understand your motivations, don’t much know yourself in that way at all.

I was in good shape for my age. I had always been quick and coordinated. I had been a short, skinny child — too short and skinny to be consequential on any sports team I’d joined, not that I’m not over that — but now, as a result, I was thin and also had plenty of stamina. I could learn to play the game. What I needed was a coach, a teacher.
I spent a year having lessons with one pro, then another. It wasn’t working out. I realized I wanted not just instruction but a relationship — someone I was not only going to learn from but also talk with, or talk at, anyway, about all this stuff that might have been about tennis but was probably about a lot of other things. I was about to give up.

Then I found Kirill.

Kirill Azovtsev, when I first met him four years ago, was 21 years old, just a few years older than my oldest son. He was an assistant pro at the New York Athletic Club’s tennis facility in Pelham, N.Y., where I live. He had begun playing competitive tennis at 14 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was born, and arrived here a few years later with a tennis scholarship to attend Concordia College in Bronxville, where he was part of a team that reached the top 10 in Division II. Even before he graduated, in 2008, he had gotten the training to become a tennis instructor.
One of the first things he said to me was this, in his faintly accented English: “To hit a tennis ball well, so many things have to go right. And then you have to be ready because it is coming right back at you, and you have to do it again.”

I had found my pro: a Russian philosopher.
Eyes on the Ball
“Short steps! Short steps! Short steps!”

This is Kirill’s twice-a-week way of reminding me, however inadvertently, that I started playing tennis too late. Footwork is key to tennis, and taking short strides as you are approaching the ball sets in place the underpinnings of everything that might lead to a good shot. Short steps allow one to be neither too close to nor too far astride the ball. But short steps are not what you learn when you spend your childhood playing football and baseball and basketball.
I had learned to run by taking long, extended strides. Now, as a result, and even after hundreds of hours with Kirill, I still cannot roam the baseline and routinely get myself in the proper relation to a tennis ball to strike it at just the right arm’s length. It’s a lesson in why you read about pro tennis players who have been playing since age 6. It’s a lesson, too, in limitations.

Kirill is a real athlete. He started playing tennis when he was 8. The impetus was a foray into kickboxing. “It was my father’s idea, and the first class, Gerry, this kid kicked me in the head,” he told me not long ago. He still seemed offended. He said he knocked the boy unconscious.

I tried to register neither surprise nor dismay. “So, tennis, then,” I said.

He told me the game came easily to him, even though no one in his family played (he is an only child; his father fences) and his first lessons were on slick tile courts, indoors, in the Russian winter.

The first year with Kirill was brutal. The prescribed continental grip felt awkward when I first began to serve. I thought I was turning my shoulder, properly, to prepare to hit a backhand, but wasn’t. I thought I was, properly, following through on my forehand, and wasn’t. It was the strangest thing. I had no sense at times of what my body was doing. And that, to some extent — a frustrating and at times embarrassing extent — continues. And it continues despite the incessant midplay appeals from Kirill to correct this, correct that. One of the things about having a coach is that no one has watched how I move more intently since I was a toddler.

There is one mistake I cannot seem to stop making: when I hit a backhand I don’t keep my head down and my gaze on where the incoming ball is meeting my strings. I look up instead to see where the ball might be headed.
I have sought many cures for this. I have repeatedly watched a YouTube video of Roger Federer, in slow motion, ripping a one-hand topspin backhand and not lifting his head for a full beat after the ball has left the picture frame — it’s as if he is studying the contrails of a missile he has just launched. Early one morning last year at Wimbledon, I stood in the cool damp and watched Federer up close during a workout, doing much the same thing, repeatedly, as if he had no interest in whether a ball he struck cleared the net or landed in (which it mostly did, and did). It was — there is no other way to describe it — beautiful, in that unobtainable way.

I have gone so far as to take my problem to southern Utah, where I attended a tennis camp and, among other things, had myself videotaped failing to keep my head down. I asked the pro who was leading the camp what he thought my problem was. He wasn’t a philosopher but he was a kind of shrink.

He said I was a product of the life I had led: I was a New Yorker, a professional, overly concerned with success, too “results oriented.” Small children learning tennis, he explained, happily whack balls into the net as they learn the proper way to do things. (He’s right; I’ve seen it.)

This struck me as insightful, though, for the development of my game, perhaps fatal. I raised it with Kirill the next time we hit.

He smiled, extended his arms palms up, and shrugged.

“Gerry,” he began, “ you yourself have said you want to get better, and you are getting better.” There followed a series of rhetorical questions involving whether the Utah coach was getting better, anyone else my age was getting better — whether he himself was getting better. He swept his arm up toward the main courts and noted that some of the players in the midst of matches up there, men in their 40s or early 50s, had been on high school teams and college teams. Wasn’t I holding my own in playing doubles with them?

“Gerry, you are improving,” he told me. “Who knows where that ends?”

I biked home later, imagining a chart where the line of my improvement crosses the line of some 1970s N.C.A.A. champion’s decline right around the time we’re both 69. And if he has had a hip replacement, I manage to stay on the court with him.

Winning and Not Losing

Kirill is no longer a club pro full time. He has begun working in commercial real estate at an office in Manhattan, limiting his coaching to the weekends and a few nights a week. I meet him once in a while for lunch or dinner, and one night last month at the Oyster Bar he was explaining to me how the cold calls he makes to potential customers as he tries to get their business is a lot like tennis — how, when you are playing a new opponent, you have to feel him out, and how ultimately it is up to you to control the exchange as best you can and come away a winner. Most of all, he emphasized, you can never lose confidence.

“In tennis, it is just you, and I always liked that,” he said. “No excuses. I feel good in that situation.”
As it happens, I was reading a ruefully captivating new memoir called “Swimming Studies,” by a onetime contender for the Canadian Olympic team, Leanne Shapton, which explores how growing up a competitive swimmer formed her habits of heart and mind. Years later, her daily rhythms and life choices, her nightly dreams, her understanding of duration, pleasure, pain and reward, remain informed by her hours in the training pool. Swimming strokes carved the contours of her inner life, and it’s not at all clear she is thankful for that. Of course, Andre Agassi, in his memoir, writes of how the aloneness of singles tennis — the very thing that imparted to Kirill a kind of Emersonian self-reliance, as he understands it — just enlarged his loneliness. You never know.

Interestingly, Shapton does not come across as preoccupied with winning: a competitive swimmer who was not so competitive? Kirill is competitive. When he is leading a group session, he loves jumping in and crashing the net and punching remarkable volleys at impossible angles. And when it is just the two of us, and I hit that rare ball that forces him to make a bad shot or, even more rarely, get one past him for a winner, I know that during the next rally we have, he is going to crush the ball, hit a winner I never get close to, then quietly say sorry, as if he were working a little something out.

He said there was no way he could ever have been a pro player, and that he knew that in his early teens — for one thing, there wasn’t the money to get him to tournaments beyond those near his home. He plays competitively now one night a week, which is all his schedule allows, hitting with guys his age who had played serious college tennis and, in some cases, joined the low rungs of the pro tour for a year or two.

Earlier this summer, I got to half-watch him play just a couple of courts away from where I was playing. The club had arranged a set of doubles pitting Kirill and another young tennis instructor against two players from the Pelham High School tennis team who had recently won the state championship in doubles. The two of them, terrific teenage players, had been playing together for years; Kirill had had a hand in their development. So, what I was mostly interested in, honestly, as dozens of club members gathered on the veranda of the tennis house to watch, was how Kirill would deal with this, what the etiquette was: Would he be nervous or restrained?

No, he would not. The club pros won, 6-1.

When I saw Kirill the next day for a session, I brought up these prematch concerns of mine. It was clear immediately that such clouds had never crossed his mind.

It wasn’t complicated, he said. (Note to self: Growing up a tennis player doesn’t make things complicated. Growing up a reader does.) “When a match is on, I play to win, period,” he said.

“So winning has always been important to you?”
“Actually, not losing is important. I hate to lose, Gerry. Hate it.”

Why someone who hates to lose would spend his youth competing struck me as complicated, but I grabbed my racket and headed onto the court, where I compete fiercely only with myself and the passing of time.

The Lessons Continue

If I had come too late to tennis to get very good, or for the game to play a role in who I am, there are experiences and sensations it has been providing me while I’m on the court that are new and surprising. I feel helpless when I tire and lose focus — focus has never been an issue for me. I get angry with myself at times while playing, Andy Murray angry, though I have never gone so far as to repeatedly slap my forehead with my palm. I think you have to be really good to get away with that.

But it’s not all downside, emotionally, a reckoning with limits and failure, that I’m feeling when I’m playing with Kirill. I have gotten better and am proud of that. Getting to spend a couple of hours each week playing with a gifted athlete — and a natural teacher — is gratifying in and of itself. There is also, for instance, the patience I feel at times — patience, finally, as I near 60 — when Kirill and I are rallying for 8 or 9 or 12 or 15 shots. He has a way of sensing when I have found a rhythm (he has told me as much) and he will start hitting with more pace, and I will feed off it, and then he will alter his shots — topspin, flat, slice — to make me take the ball in different strike zones, high to low. And as I at once concentrate but do not overthink; move quickly but without restless tension; and am neither consumed with winning the rally nor anxious about losing it, I am as serene in a moment as I have ever been or am likely to be.

Kirill is making me better, I will think as a rally like that ends. He is making me better, or trying to.