McEnroe Temperament

Cristin has enrolled Phoebe in tennis lessons so after getting her booster seat and suffering through Ellie’s inevitable breakdown upon realizing she didn’t get a booster seat we went to Dicks to get tennis rackets.  I haven’t bought a racket since 1987 so I am out of touch with prices and technology.   I was amazed to find they had composite kids rackets for $19.99.  I should stop being amazed about such things because of course this is enabled by China but the idea that someone can create and string a composite racket for a major brand and ship it to Dicks who sells it at $19.99 and somehow everybody makes a profit is amazing.  There was a lot of variation in the string tension and given that it would cost more to restring it than to buy it in the first place, we spent some time finding the best of the bunch.  They have smaller rackets for the kids but they are not to scale.  They simply shorten the racket and maintain a head size that is close to that of adults. When I last played in the 1980s the companies were toying around with head size and Prince had made a name for itself with their oversized heads which seemed to be aimed at women as all the ladies just had to have these.   I have a lot of respect for Tennis. Singles tennis is in my opinion the ultimate sport combining fitness, skills, and strategy.  It is equally mental and physical.  I chose tennis over baseball as my spring sport in 8th grade for reasons I can’t really recall.  Most of my friends played baseball but I was never very good at it and my only memory of 7th grade ball was anxious moments at the plate and way too much time spent scratching patterns in the dirt around my infield positions.  Tennis makes you more tired for sure but at that age the game are too often mismatched.  In my case I had a significant weakness, my backhand.  If exploited I did not have much of a chance.   Sometime in high school I quit tennis and spent springtime going to the gym every day with Corey where all we did was completely overtrain our bodies.  Corey now owns a gym so I hope the advice he gives to others is not based on the strategy we used back then.   Back to 2015, Phoebe has taken interest in hitting tennis balls back to me.   I can’t imaging how you really get a five year old to play the real game but her buddy Gavin will be joining her so she will have fun no matter what happens.   I haven’t picked up a racket since I beat Cristin on the clay courts at Princeton.    She likes to rewrite history and to this day denies the outcome of that match as well as the absolute throbbing she received in a game of hungry hungry hippos.