Love Means Nothing

Norm Dvoskin

The sport of tennis is very popular on Long Island and it’s one of my favorite activities. If you look at Newsday’s Annual FUN BOOK you’ll find more than 50 tennis clubs listed. In addition to these, there are hundreds of tennis facilities in local parks and schools where you can play for free.

Tennis is great fun, good exercise and it’s a sport you can play all your life. You see people in their 80s on the local courts as well as little kids who are hardly bigger than their racquets.

Why is tennis popular? (1) It’s inexpensive. All you need is a racquet, tennis balls and sneakers. It’s also lot cheaper than playing polo. You don’t have to put up with the expense of buying and maintaining a horse. Of course you can’t put a horse in the trunk of your car.

(2) Playing tennis is good for the economy. It provides income for orthopedists and people who make and sell sports equipment, liniment and pain killers.

(3) It gives you the chance to let-off-steam. "My opponent made bad line-calls," "He didn’t hit the ball hard enough," "It was too windy,"...

Tennis looks easy but it’s a difficult sport to master. Before you start playing you should find out if you’ll really like the game. It’s important to learn the fundamentals. Some of the basics are: where to go for a beer after a match, picking the right tennis outfits so you look great on the court and how to put the blame on your partner when playing doubles.

Tennis is an international sport and everywhere you travel, you can always find courts and people to play with. There’s a strict set of rules that are the same throughout the globe. Beginners should acquaint themselves with these rules and memorize them. What’s even better, get yourself a lawyer to look them over. The rules are full of loopholes, and ambiguity which can be used to your advantage in a close match.

People who watch tennis on TV are baffled by the fact that nothing ever seems to happen yet the score keeps changing. That’s precisely the principle of tennis scoring. Often, when nothing happens one player gets 15. Sometimes it gets to be 15 all, but occasionally it’s 30 -15. In other word when nothing happens, it counts as 15 except when it’s 40-30, then it counts as 10. Every once in a while you get to deuce and nobody knows what that means. Of course there’s love. Tennis is the only activity in the world where love means absolutely nothing. One of the reasons I starting playing tennis is because I thought 40-love was an orgy. (Just kidding)

One of the most difficult challenges in tennis is to learn how to serve. It doesn’t come easy. It takes years of steady practice to be able to serve like a pro. Beginners usually have the most trouble. After a match they keep forgetting which wine goes with meat and which one to serve with fish...or whether to serve from the right and take the dishes away form the left or vice versa.

A lot is made about sportsmanship in tennis. You see people at tennis clubs, community courts and even at the professional level, ranting, arguing, cursing, throwing their racquets and generally misbehaving. The reason for this is that sportsmanship is not important in tennis. It’s extremely important in sports like football, basketball and hockey where the players weigh over 250 pounds and are 6 foot 6. So if you start anything you could get yourself killed. Everyone knows tennis is played mostly by snobs, nerds and sissies. Anyone who comes out in all white clothes and a sweater tied around his neck can’t be that tough. So you can get away with a lot of stuff. Thus there’s no need for sportsmanship. It’s hard enough trying to hit the ball over the net without having to worry about playing like a gentleman.

I sincerely hope that in this short blog I’ve acquainted you with the ins-and-outs of tennis. So if you’re a swinger, get your racquet, your shorts, sneakers and tranquilizers and get going.