Teaching an old dog ...

Last Wednesday night I had my first tennis lesson.

But before I say anything about the lesson, let me go back and provide a little background:

Tennis and I have a long and somewhat troubled history. I used to play it ... way back when... (ahem) ... when I was younger, (although I never took formal lessons). I got by ok, and I basically liked playing tennis, although I was never either a very avid player nor exceptionally skilled. Truth is, I never really took tennis very seriously: as a teenager, my idea of a "sport" was playing Dungeons & Dragons, and I only really started getting into tennis about the time I started college. By the time I was starting to get any good at all, circumstances were conspiring to make playing tennis a less than pleasurable activity. This is a long story, from before I came to Brazil, that I won't go into (most of my family will know what I am talking about anyway); suffice it to say that it has to do with an old high school friend and tennis partner who never grew up, and whose annoying enthusiasm for tennis turned the sport into an agonizing obligation for me rather than the recreational pastime that it could have been. (I refer you to the first season episode #4 of Seinfeld -- entitled "Male Unbonding" -- for a good example of what my predicament was like ....)

Nearly 15 years have passed; for this reason and many others, until last year I almost never again played tennis-- in spite of the fact that, for the last few years, I have been member of a club that has tennis courts, and have a nephew (Bruno) who plays tennis... and who actually takes lessons.

Then, last year, circumstances suggested an opportunity to return to the game. The first was my doctor, who didn't specifically suggest tennis, but did recommend that, as I encroached on my second score of years in age, an aerobic activity would be a wise move for health reasons. Of course I didn't really need the doctor to tell me this: the diagnosis had been tangibly manifesting itself through an unmistakable burgeoning of my waistline over the last few years.

The second circumstance was that my brother-in-law Gustavo and his wife Regina (Cristina's sister) had temporarily moved back to Brazil. Gustavo had been taking tennis lessons in the US, and was interested in playing here in Brazil, if he had someone to play with. Our nephew Bruno was a natural candidate; but I also saw it as my chance to get in some much needed physical activity and maybe have some fun too.

So the three of us got together and played a few times... not as often as we wanted, but it was a start. I began to feel enthusiastic about the idea: physical activity, besides being a salubrious undertaking, can be mentally therapeutic, and I was passing through a moment in life in which I felt like I needed the distraction as well as the exercise. (I still do, for that matter!). I bought a racket. Bruno gave me the telephone number of his tennis instructor, and all I had to do was call him and agree on a day and time to start taking my lessons.

My enthusiasm was to be short lived, however; Gustavo and Regina decided to move back to the US. Having lost my potential partner, I procrastinated calling the tennis instructor until my fervor had cooled almost completely.

"I still want to play tennis ... " I would tell myself, "but there's no use in starting now because I have to <fill in the blank> first. As soon as <fill in the blank> is done, I'll give the instructor a call."

Another year passed by, and I was still putting off calling the tennis instructor when Gustavo and Regina came back to Rio for a visit in July. Just before they left to return to the states (actually, on the very day of their return flight), we got together for an impromptu match, this time joined by Sergio, my sister-in-law Ana's boyfriend, who is an avid tennis player. The picture shown above, of me in action, and the one below, of the four of us, were from this outing. I post these pictures mostly for the benefit of my brother-in-law Celinho, who was somewhat dubious of my claims that I still know how to play tennis after 15 years!



This event managed to reignite my interest: Bruno had recently stopped taking lessons, and was thinking about restarting if he had someone to split the cost of the instructor with him. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a day and time in which the three of us -- the intructor, Bruno, and myself -- were all available for the class.

Then the Fates intervened: Sergio, who also takes tennis lessons at the same club, asked me if I wanted to take a class together with him, since his current tennis partner had injured his knee in a freak rock climbing accident. This was apparently the only way to get my lethargic butt onto the tennis courts: an act of God (along with someone else taking the iniciative!)

So that's the current state of affairs ... as long as Sergio's partner can't play (at least another month), I'm playing tennis on Wednesday nights. Hopefully I will make the leap and maintain the momentum after Sergio's partner returns to play ....

****

But first, I will have to learn to play. Here's what I found out last Wednesday:

I suck.

Well ... I guess that's a crude way of saying that, although I know how to play tennis (i.e. I understand the rules), and I can play the game (i.e. I hit the ball back and forth over the net), my technique is all wrong: my grip is all wrong; my backhand is all wrong; My serve is all wrong.

I have to admit: I started out thinking that tennis lessons would be a piece of cake. I would augment my serve, I imagined. Polish my backhand. What I really needed, I always thought, was lots of practice. And, in the worst case scenario, I figured, I just wouldn't get any better; if perchance I found out that I really don't have a natural bent towards tennis.

What I didn't count on was that, in the first fifteen minutes of my first lesson, I would be reduced to an inept rookie, who could barely keep the ball in the court! To be sure, all I had to do was shift to my original, albeit wrong grip, and I wouldn't look like such a fool. But the instructor would quickly call me out, as would Sergio.

It's one thing to learn something new that you have never done before; quite another to break a bad habit you've spent years developing. I felt like a child trying to learn how to walk: it looks easy enough, but it's soooo awkward; I mean, crawling has gotten me where I need to go all this time... so why should I bother to blunder around on just two legs??? What's the point?

My instructor will have her work cut out for her: the main thing that I've got going for me is the fact that I've not played for a long time.

It actually reminds me of learning to snow ski as a teenager, although it wasn't exactly the same situation. It was at Keystone Colorado, with my cousin Greg and my brothers and sister. When we arrived on the slopes for the first time, Greg and I were really hyped up. Before taking the lessons, while the others were still moving about unsteadily, and falling down constantly, Greg and I were flying down those bunny slopes and having a great time. Of course we had no control over our descent: but since the bunny slopes had no curves and levelled off steadily at the bottom, there wasn't much challenge to it. We were riding high, thinking we were pretty cool.

Then came the lessons: "snow plow ... snow plow ... put your feet together and do a snow plow to control your skis."

"What the heck is a snow plow"? I just didn't get it. Neither did Greg. The subtlety of applying gentle pressure to the ski opposite the direction you wished to turn just wasn't natural... and it seemed beyond our capacity to grasp. After a few hours, we were utterly exhausted, no closer to curbing the stubborn will of our own legs than when we had started. Meanwhile, the younger kids were running circles around us, holding their skis in exagerratedly "v-shaped" little snow plows.

We eventually did "get it". And I guess that's my point, if it can be said that I have one.

I'm not really pessimistic about learning to play tennis now that I know it won't be as effortless as I thought it would; I'm trying to look at it from the positive point of view: actually, it signifies that there is a potential for radically improving my game. Or not. Time will tell.

But it's interesting to note that, sometimes, unlearning something -- letting go of something we already think we know, but that may be wrong -- can be far more difficult than just learning something new. To get someone to open their mind, you may have to empty it first.

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I say the bigger problem is getting him to unlearn the old ones.