<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Growing up only two blocks north of the tennis courts located at the Marquette Senior High building gave me plenty of opportunities to play tennis.\u00a0 There were four more courts between the NMU dorms and the National Guard Armory just north of our house and many public courts sprinkled across town.\u00a0 Taking two free group lessons from legendary Marquette High tennis coach Mickey Johnson in seventh grade began my life long association with the game.\u00a0 Watching major tournaments like The French Open and Wimbledon, I often wondered what it would be like playing on clay or grass courts as they do in those events.\u00a0 The closest I came to the feel of a grass surface was in my freshman year tennis class at NMU.\u00a0 On inclement days, we were told to report to Hedgecock Field House for class instead of the dorm courts near the Armory where we normally played.\u00a0 At that time, Hedgecock had a synthetic rubber floor with a couple of courts lined on this multipurpose surface.\u00a0 We noticed the balls hit with force tended to skip as much as bounce.\u00a0 Lee Fredricks, our instructor said, \u201cThat is kind of what it is like to play on a grass court.\u00a0 Asphalt or cement courts will always make a ball sit up (bounce) more than it will on grass.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first summer that I worked at the Huron Mountain Club, I asked fellow kitchen worker John McDonald, \u201cWho is the long haired skinny kid?\u201d we saw crossing the compound one morning.\u00a0 John replied, \u201cOh, he takes care of the tennis courts.\u201d\u00a0 That they had tennis courts was news to me.\u00a0 John surprised me again when he waved his hand to the east and said, \u201cThey also used to have a golf course where that big stand of jack pines is located along the lake.\u00a0 There is also a skeet range.\u00a0 Some days we may have to go to and launch clay pidgeons between kitchen shifts.\u201d\u00a0 Once we discovered that we both played \u2018fuzzball\u2019, we resolved to try out the courts when time allowed (and when the club members were not using them.\u00a0 For some reason, the club members always got first dibs).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Soon enough, John and I found ourselves standing outside a chicken wire enclosure that was held up by what can only be described as small telephone poles.\u00a0 There were actually two courts with a gravel road between them.\u00a0 The look of surprise on my face finally registered with John when he asked, \u201cOh, did I mention they are clay courts?\u201d\u00a0 Apparently the young man who maintained the courts spent most of the month of June raking and rolling the courts to smooth out the bumps that popped up from frost action.\u00a0 Once they were relatively smooth, he would line them and then repeat the raking, rolling and lining business periodically over the summer.\u00a0 The courts were located among a grove of very tall pine trees so if it had rained, it took a bit for the wind and sun to dry out the surface.\u00a0 To say the courts were a little slippery when wet would be like saying the ice on a skating rink is a little cold when frozen.\u00a0 The light coating of dust that covered the courts when they were dry acted like millions of small ball bearings when one put on the brakes and tried to stop.\u00a0 \u2018Stop\u2019 is a relative term here as one tended to slide to a stop.\u00a0 In the days before they marketed the colorful, fluorescent tennis balls, all tennis balls were white, at least until used on a clay court.\u00a0 The clay powder on the surface of the court turned the balls a reddish tan in very short order.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0John and I ended up playing a lot of tennis over the next few years on both the clay courts at the club (for three summers) and on the hard courts back in civilization.\u00a0 John was the better player because he used a very effective strategy.\u00a0 He rarely tried to make \u2018winning shots\u2019.\u00a0 John\u2019s philosophy was to frustrate his opponent by returning everything that landed on his side of the net.\u00a0 Oh, I did manage to win a game here and there, but we played tennis for several years before I claimed a whole match.\u00a0 Net play was never a strong point in my game.\u00a0 Any time I would rush the net, John would make me pay by deftly lobbing the ball over my head.\u00a0 He did this to me so many times that after years of practice (and studying how the pros handled the same situation), I got better at playing the net.\u00a0 Not only did my skills at retrieving lobs improve,\u00a0 so did my ability to trick him into lobbing the ball without actually rushing the net.\u00a0 A feint toward the net that caused an unnecessary lob resulted in a soft bouncing cream puff of a ball that could be returned with force.\u00a0 The skill didn\u2019t help me much playing John as he was still \u2018mister return everything hit his way.\u2019\u00a0 We had some epic battles and even though I lost a lot of games to John, it made me a better player.\u00a0 The first match I finally won was doubly satisfying because it made him angry to have lost.\u00a0 John\u2019s strategy was to win the war, not necessarily every point, but he still didn\u2019t like to lose.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It would follow that John\u2019s tennis playing strategy mirrored his approach to what we affectionately referred to as \u2018ganip-ganop\u2019 around the club employee\u2019s recreation room (ping pong by any other name).\u00a0 John\u2019s habit of returning every shot hit to him as opposed to trying for outright winners usually prompted his opponents to try for higher risk shots to win a point.\u00a0 The reality usually meant John either made another frustrating return or his opponent completely missed of the table trying to slam it by him.\u00a0 Unlike our epic tennis matches (where I eventually won a few matches), I don\u2019t recall ever beating John in table tennis.\u00a0 In one particularly annoying game, I banged my paddle on the table in frustration.\u00a0 I lost my grip and the paddle bounced out of my hand, flew across the table and winged John in the forehead.\u00a0 In his failed attempt to dodge the missile, he hit the floor with such force I vaguely remember thinking, \u201cOh boy, I hope I didn\u2019t kill him.\u201d\u00a0 He laughed as he picked himself up and continued to dismantle what little there was left of my ping pong player ego.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t a terrible table tennis player, but John\u2019s strategy was just one nut that was too hard to crack.\u00a0 Undaunted, we all kept trying (not that I recall anyone else beating him, either).\u00a0 We suckered many a self proclaimed hot shot ping pong player into playing John by telling them up front that there wasn\u2019t a shot that they could hit that John couldn\u2019t return.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The biggest problem with playing tennis on a clay court stuck in the woods had less to do with the footing than it did with the bugs.\u00a0 At times, we found ourselves bombarded with huge deer flies that would circle around our heads in a most annoying fashion.\u00a0 It was not uncommon to see one\u2019s opponent suddenly begin swinging their racket wildly about trying to nail one of those buzzing behemoths.\u00a0 It was always funny, but only if it was the other guy getting bug bombed.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My second year at the club, a former neighbor of mine worked as a guide in the children\u2019s program (guides organized hikes and campouts for club kids and their \u2018keepers\u2019 (club slang for their hired vacation babysitters)).\u00a0 This former high school QB (also named John) turned out to be a tennis player who joined our little circle of clay court fuzzball action.\u00a0 Kitchen John\u2019s good friend Stu Bennett was the head of the guide program.\u00a0 Apparently Stu and Guide John had engaged in some banter about who would beat who in a tennis match.\u00a0 Instead of simply playing each other, they dragged Kitchen John and I into the conversation and it suddenly became a doubles grudge match.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t start out as a grudge match because I was a little miffed that I got stuck playing with Guide John against Stu and Kitchen John.\u00a0 It became a grudge match when I realized that both Stu and Kitchen John shared the same passion for winning.\u00a0 The first time out, Stu and Kitchen John waxed us pretty well.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The second match started out much the same as the first until Guide John and I made a couple of unusually good shots.\u00a0 Guide John had a better backhand than I did so he played the left side and uncorked some winners from far off the back corner of the court.\u00a0 Once I realized that Stu and Kitchen John were always trying to serve wide to my right side, I began cheating that way and was able to short court them on the server\u2019s side of the court.\u00a0 It only took a few of these winners before Stu and Kitchen John started blaming each other.\u00a0 Guide John and I were just having fun but when two very competitive people like Stu and Kitchen John play together, getting beat doesn\u2019t go down lightly.\u00a0 Guide John and I won and couldn\u2019t leave the court until we agreed to a rubber match.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I do not remember much about the third time we played because we never got to finish the match.\u00a0 A foursome of club members showed up a few games into our match and insisted that they wanted to play on the court we were using.\u00a0 We obliged and moved across the road as club rules dictated.\u00a0 After we played a couple of more games, the foursome on the other court decided they wanted to play singles and booted our butts off the second court.\u00a0 We tried to convince them that we could all play if we played doubles against them on both courts (they had the high ground – they were members and we were just employees), but they were having none of it.\u00a0 We weren\u2019t even out of sight yet when they went back to playing doubles on one court so it seemed to be more of a power struggle than anything.\u00a0 Guide John didn\u2019t return the next year so we ended up playing more singles my third year at the club, but even that was a bit limited.\u00a0 Kitchen John ended up working as a guide the next year (thus becoming \u2018Guide John 2\u2019) and our schedules didn\u2019t always match up.\u00a0 It was also a colder, wetter summer which cut down our court time even more.\u00a0 Beating a couple of the new busboys wasn\u2019t nearly as much fun as losing to John.\u00a0 I still like to think of the year of the doubles grudge matches as the Huron Mtn Open.\u00a0 The other years, we were just playing for the fun of it.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When I returned to civilization in the fall, it took a little bit for me to get used to playing on hard courts again.\u00a0 Even when dry, one had the tendency to slide a bit when trying to stop chasing down a shot on a clay court.\u00a0 On hard courts, the stop is usually much more immediate and I found it took me a couple of weeks to adjust.\u00a0 Having my foot actually stop in one spot combined with my forward momentum caused me to take a hopping step or two until I got used to hard courts again.\u00a0 One of my regular tennis playing buddies (Numby Wayne as we used to call Wayne Nevala) watched me crashing about during one match and inquired if I had been drinking before we played.\u00a0 One part of me wished I could have found a clay court to play him on so he could see how playing on that surface for three months messed up one\u2019s center of gravity.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wayne and I were pretty equally matched on the tennis court.\u00a0 I could never in my life beat him at a game of one on one basketball, but I had a better than 50-50 chance of beating him at tennis. The last year I was at the club, Wayne doubled down on his game with the intention of surprising me when I got back in the fall.\u00a0 Where my service game had been my biggest advantage against Wayne, we were pretty evenly matched in how we played our ground strokes.\u00a0 When we played that fall, I discovered that lefty Wayne had honed his serving game to the point where I could not return his first serve.\u00a0 When he had to make a second serve, I had a chance but first serve after first serve rocketed by me like my feet were encased in cement.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ve been practicing,\u201d was Wayne\u2019s explanation.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t an exaggeration and the only chance I had to beat Wayne hinged on whether or not he was on his service game that day.\u00a0 Unfortunately for me, he never seemed to have an off day.\u00a0 When he went off to medical school, I stopped losing so many matches.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My other in-town tennis foil was buddy Jim.\u00a0 We had only played each other a few times early in high school and I had the upper hand for most of our matches.\u00a0 We really did not get much chance to play after my first year at NMU (Jim was a senior at MSHS that year).\u00a0 When we resumed playing tennis the next summer, it became apparent that like Wayne, he too had been practicing.\u00a0 We were so evenly matched by then, we played some long games trying to break tied games (one must win two consecutive points to finish off a game).\u00a0 The Marquette Senior High School\u2019s numerous courts were almost always busy, so we would ride around until we found one of the smaller courts that were open.\u00a0 We would play anywhere we could, but our favorites turned out to be the court near the old zoo at Presque Isle Park, the courts near the Parkview School,\u00a0 and the small court behind the Sandy Knoll School.\u00a0 If there weren\u2019t standing puddles on the surface, we were ready for more epic battles.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Kitchen John and I continued to play tennis occasionally after we were done working at the club.\u00a0 Whenever we got together, talk would always turn to those clay court battles that we engaged in at the Huron Mountain Club.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t played on a clay court since and have never had an opportunity to play on a grass court.\u00a0 For me, it is much easier to read the bounce of a tennis ball on a hard surface, especially when I am not switching surfaces in mid-season.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Cream with\u00a0Anyone for Tennis<\/em> which appeared in the movie\u00a0The Savage Seven<\/em> as well as the movie soundtrack and as a single release.\u00a0 Probably taken from a 1968 TV spot.\u00a0 Did they take this seriously?\u00a0 On another program, they strummed tennis rackets, so you decide!