Tennis ist Krieg!

[el_diavalo]

Well, I lied. Tennis is decidedly not metal, but that didn’t stop me yesterday.

My friend Alice (aka Diamondgrrl - rollerderby, aka Comissioner Gordon - kickball) and Anne (aka All the Way May - kickball) took me out to City Park, and we tennied. Tennised. Tenniserated. Yeah, tenniserated. I like that - it’s got a certain ring to it. It’s like regular tennis, but with a heat index of 103°.

Anyways, outside of the Wii Sports package or a table-top, I’ve never really played tennis. Much like baseball, something was off with that brand of hand-eye coordination when I was a kid - I just didn’t play because I couldn’t. Besides, I had soccer.

I have to say, it was pretty fun, and I didn’t even wear silly clothes, despite the musings of the twitterati. And when I say twitterati, I mean just Neal.

We showed up early, and hung out for a bit before our court time of 7:30. Alice gave me fore- and back-hand grip basics, and we just kinda launched into it. One of the ladies was always on my side of the court and they rotated - giving the person across from me a good workout. Being on the smaller side of 2 vs. 1 isn’t all that fair. With the heat, I did work up a bit of a sweat - mostly due to the quick back and forth movements one makes on their feet. And nicely enough, my arm and back are pain-free.

All in all, I only hit 3 or 4 balls over the fence in the 1 1/4 hours we played, which I consider to be an achievement - I thought we’d have to throw the towel in early due to a lack of fuzzy yellow projectiles. Alice thought I did pretty well for someone who’s never played. Part of that hand-eye coordination problem crept back, but really only on the slow speed balls. It just messed with my head - too much time to think about where to stand, when to swing, what angle to hit it at, the exact timing, etc. To remedy, I just decided to move quickly towards the ball. This reduced the amount of time I had to over-think the situation, like Ramius turning into Tupolev’s torpedo. (I’m guessing only Pistolette got that one)

All in all, it was fun and worked out a different, rusty, part of my athletic side. Hooray for leveling up. :)

And who knows, maybe next time I’ll have to either sport one of my kilts, or even emulate this guy:




If I only still had my long hair. If I do end up picking up a cheap racket, I think I’d have to name it the Anvil of Crom™. Just for the metalness of it.

*EDIT* Thanks to Todd for the awesome Kids in the Hall Clip - ERADICATOR! (skip to 1:50):

Click to view

Perhaps I should transfer my bicycle polo nom de guerre of The Laser Viking™ to tennis as well.

Originally published at Prosthetically Hip. Please leave any comments there.