On Tennis and Friendship Sunday, March 2, 2008

Hi Booty and Fish fans.  Thanks for checking in and for the comments and responses to the previous columns.  It's been fun hearing your reactions and thoughts.  Please keep them coming!

Having read Will's latest story about Booty and his professionalism, I got to thinking about how, for so many of us, tennis provides the context for a great deal of the connections, friendships, humor, beauty and transformation in our lives.  (By the way, Will, I can assure you of two things: 1. Booty was not always the professional that you met in France.  When we get a chance to meet up at a tourney, I'll tell you some stories about “Booty the unprofessional.” For example, I’m pretty sure the warm-up he did before your late night tie-break set was longer than the total amount of time he spent warming up for matches his entire junior year at GAC.  In those days Booty liked to save the lefty hook serve for match purposes only.  Why waste any in warm-ups? 2. By virtue of your coining of the phrase "Gustavus Spangled Banner" you are hereby named an honorary member of the Gustavus tennis family.  Welcome, mate.  Booty, can we please get this man a t-shirt or something?!)

As collegiate tennis players we get rather used to playing the game we love in the context of a team.  It’s where we have our most meaningful moments on the court and one of the rare tennis settings that provides the opportunity for a collection of us to become more than the sum of our individual parts.  This is where, for us at Gustavus, we became a family.  Booty and I and the rest of our mates could write books, let alone columns or blogs, of stories about our time spent together as teammates.  The curious thing is, however, tennis has become only a small part of our relationships.  Sure we love the game and talk about, watch it, and play it together as often as we can.  And having a teammate and dear friend on the ATP tour certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of keeping us involved and interested.  But the relationships formed around tennis can transform our lives and connect us in ways that go way beyond the game (and you don’t need to be a member of our team or any team to experience this transformation).  Let me explain.  

 By its nature, tennis brings people together.  At a very basic level the game requires someone on the other side of the net in order for it to be played.  On another level, we come together at tournaments, clubs, in the stands and in parks, with our families and friends, and often with people we have never met, in order to enjoy playing and watching the game.  How many times, though, has a relationship that you’ve developed because of tennis changed your life away from the court?  Hopefully you’ve had this experience at least once.  I know I have.  In fact, my life is filled with friendships and love that have grown out of this game.  There’s something magical about the game, but there’s also something magical about the moments when we come together as human beings.  Tennis provides us with some of these moments.  In his 2001 book Living a Life that Matters, Harold Kushner writes:

”When Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher and theologian, was asked ‘Where is God?’ he was wise enough not to give cliché answers: God is everywhere; God is found in churches and synagogues.  Buber would answer that God is found in relationships.  God is not found in people; God is found between people.  When you and I are truly attuned to each other, God comes down and fills the space between us so that we are connected, not separated.  Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else.  They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.”

These are some powerful words.  I’m not here to inspire you to be Jewish or Christian or to shape your image of God.  I call on Kushner and Buber merely to give you some words that speak to what I think lies at the heart of tennis for those of us to whom the game means so much.  It brings us together.  It creates that space between us that, when filled, represents the connections that make our lives and ourselves matter.

When Booty came home from the Aussie Open just a month or so ago, I got the usual call that he was back in town and would be crashing on my couch for a few nights before he took off for the next tour stop.  As usual, we caught up on the tourney, the Gusties, how the rest of our crew was doing, girlfriends, families, etc.  Boots was still on “Aussie time” so he made the brilliant suggestion that we stay up and watch the Djokovic/Tsonga final which started at 2:30am our time.  We talked a few of the boys into joining us, got some pizza and sodas, and saddled up for the match.  Much to my chagrin – and that of everyone else in the room outside of Narrsky and Booty, Tsonga took the first set before Nole settled in.  Somewhere around 5am, I looked around my living room and thought: “This is truly special.”  Here we were, some five years removed from the last collegiate match we played together, and our friendships were as alive and meaningful as ever. There’s nowhere I would have rather been at that moment.  I was with friends who have given my life tremendous joy and meaning.  We’ve worked hard and placed a lot of trust and love in one another to develop those friendships, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that they wouldn’t exist without the game. I’ve had this same thought at many junctures of my life, some more monumental, some more ordinary than others – ranging from teammates’ weddings or the hugs and support I got from my mates when I learned that my grandmother had passed away while we were on our Australia trip, to the simple yet meaningful conversations that have occurred sitting on a bench beside a tennis court or in the car on the way home after an afternoon hit.    

Surely tennis is just a game, and we would do well to keep this in mind – especially when we’re ready to smash a racket or lash out an opponent or official.  Yet somehow it’s more than a game. It provided the space for the “what could go wrong?” experience that Will described in his last column, and I know that it has provided similar space for many of you.  

I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes we take tennis a bit too seriously and not seriously enough all at the same time. We can tend to over-emphasize the matches and the wins and losses and under emphasize the space it creates that helps give our lives meaning and friendship.  It’s only a game, but for some reason, it matters a great deal to us.  I hope that deep down we can realize that it matters because of what it has given us in terms of enjoyment, but more importantly in terms of friendship and moments that make us realize that life is special and that we matter to each other.  

I’ll leave you with some words from one of my favorite athletes and authors, former Montreal Canadiens goaltender, Ken Dryden.  I know most of you don’t love hockey as much as I do (and you all better be rooting for the Duluth Marshall Hilltoppers in this week's MN state high school hockey tourney!), but I can guarantee you that Dryden’s take on why hockey matters to Canadians ring true for why tennis matters to us.  This Dryden speech comes from an article called “Timelessness and Historicity in Ken Dryden’s book The Game” written by a helluva guy named Don Morrow who teaches at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.  Morrow’s article quotes a speech Dryden gave when presented with an honorary degree from a Canadian university:

”What hold does hockey have on us?  It doesn’t put food on our tables or roofs over our heads.  It doesn’t cure the sick, raise the downtrodden, spark our minds to do great deeds and think great things.  It is just a game.  We are serious, ambitious people.  We have kids and jobs and bombs to worry about.  There are drugs on the streets.  Isn’t this attention, this preoccupation, misplaced; this money, time, and energy misspent?  Don’t we have our priorities wrong?  Why does hockey matter? It matters because communities matter.  Friends matter.  Dreams, hopes, passions; common stories, common experiences, common memories; myths and legends; common imaginations; things that tell us about how we were, how we are, how we might be – they matter.  Links, bonds, connections – things in common, things to share – they matter.  That’s why hockey matters.”

So next time you think about tennis and what it means to you, think of the links, bonds and connections that you share because of the game that extend beyond the game and make your life matter.  Then thank the people with whom you share these connections and tell them you love them.  

Until next time,
Peace,
T.