Doubles or Nothing: The Game’s the Thing

An odd aura of the forbidden has surrounded the public tennis courts in Laguna Canyon for as long as I can remember. More than a a decade ago, when I moved to the city from Newport, I couldn’t help but notice the constant activity on the canyon courts. I wasn’t a player; I was just curious.

“Don’t go there,” I was warned. “The players are way too competitive.” Or, “It’s a bunch of guys who don’t like outsiders.” Or, “I think they’re private courts--you have to pay dues.”

A little more than one year ago, I took up the game of tennis, largely as an acceptable excuse to hit things hard. The rumors about the canyon courts continued, magnified by the local tennis grapevine. One day I walked up to the fence and looked in at the furious doubles matches taking place. I watched a while, then walked away. It looked scary.

I related this story to a friend, tennis buff and Laguna beauty Irene Bean.

“Nonsense,” she answered. “Those are the nicest bunch of people out there. They’re a stitch! Just go--you’ll see.”

It took me about six months to don a mantle of courage, but I went. Choking on nerves, I walked across the empty courts one weekday afternoon. Nobody here, I thought, great! But at 3 o’clock, players began to arrive. An older man beheld my newness, pointed to the lot alongside the courts and said, “You can park there if you want, except during the Art Festival.”

Play began. At the time, I had been playing for almost a year, and any reputable pro would have ranked me somewhere in negative numbers. I was one step up from dismal, still well short of horrible. I was teamed with a very good player and we got killed. I mumbled apologies, explaining to John that I was truly an awful player.

“You’re not awful,” he said with a sly smile. “You’re just . . . learning the game. “

Encouraged by the fact that I was not asked to leave and never show my face again, I returned to the canyon courts the next day. I met Charlie, Phil, Barbara, Mark, Jim, Tom and Craig. I played a set with each of them as partners, and lost every set; no one verbally assaulted me; no one purposefully drilled balls into my groin area as I bobbed alertly useless at the net, wondering how to hit something going by so fast.

During the next two weeks, I played a lot. Certain verities prevailed: My team always lost. Serves whizzed past my ears like hummingbirds. I ground-stroked my shots into trees that surrounded the courts, or directly at net opponents, who sent them back to me with ballistic velocity or merely dumped them six inches into my part of the court and smiled as I grunted futilely after them.

Gentle words of advice and encouragement came my way, too, and I tried to absorb them all. Charlie went out of his way to help. The tennis master Ray Thornton gave me a free doubles lesson when I was paired with him in, of course, defeat. (It occurred to me later that Mr. Thornton’s direction was likely offered for his own self-defense as much as for the love of the game.) Van gave me advice regarding the net. Barbara asked me one day whether I was having fun. Yes! Four days after my debut, my team won its first set, and I was deeply gratified.

Doubles is a mystifying, fast game, very much different from singles. You get only half the court, but which half keeps changing, and you’re twice as responsible for covering it. You return shots into what seem like forests of opponents on the other side of the net. If you make a poor shot, someone pounces on it. Most important, though, you are part of a team out there; you have the honor of your partner to defend, and no amount of I-just-started humility can erase the indignity of helping your courtmate to an 0 to 6 shellacking. Spirits sour. Mumbles ensue.

All of which is to say that after two weeks of tennis bliss at the canyon courts, the honeymoon was over. I noted panicked players clamoring to the other side of the court, so as not to be paired with me. I noted the grimace of desperation across the faces of those stuck on my side. The typical pregame line from my doomed partner was something like, “Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us.” After that, a kind of dense, tension-filled silence prevailed during the opening flurries of any given set, a silence that I correctly interpreted as meaning, “Let’s see how bad this guy is going to be today.”

At this point, the wise man regroups and the dolt blunders onward, so I blundered. Darkness prevailed. Days of defeat, weeks of it. But within that darkness, a tiny light began to flicker. The light said: “Haveth thou no pride? Get thy butt in gear.”

Slowly, intermittently, occasionally, my team began winning sets. Maybe just one in a four-hour session, maybe two. But every now and then, the canyon courts would reverberate with a victory for my team. I began to crawl from the muck of hopelessness onto the more stable ground of simple underdogness.

One day, Kevin and I came back from a set point when trailing 3 to 5 to win not only the critical ninth game but the set, too. I had served well the whole set.

This was the pinnacle of my canyon courts career. I shook hands and left the court feeling Godlike, forgiving, smug with temporary superiority. Half an hour later, however, I would get my partner and me murdered 2 to 6, so my glory was as short-lived as it had been hard-earned.

The heart of the game, of course, is not whether you win or lose, but how often you win or lose. For my part, I will confess that I’m happy winning a very occasional set at the canyon courts, though perhaps The Times should allocate some space to publish opposing points of view from those very fine and generous men and women unlucky enough to get stuck with me as a teammate.

Charlie said it best, one day when I was at the very nadir of my tennis spirit.

“It’s just a game, Jeff, “ he said sympathetically. “A serious game.”

True. And though these players will always be better than I am, the game will always be better than any of us.