Squashbuckling

The squire of the middle classes (like the knight of the Middle Ages) is expected to have his own jousting kit: a can of balls and a tennis racquet. Tennis is like that—lots of huff and puff and Munsingwear heraldry, each player fighting to master his own windy fatigue and stab his opponent with a stinging topspin to the backhand. Even if the belligerence is cloaked in bridal whites and muted with athletic decorum, tennis (like chess or polo) is a mime of combat and eroticism. It’s also a mixed metaphor of sexual equality —thanks to Billie Jean the Tennis Queen—and a fading insignia of upward mobility, as spurious now as a mail-order family crest. One used to talk of old money and new; one talks’ now of old tennis and new. “New tennis” is an army of panting, teeth-gritting parvenus like myself who scramble across the clay in sneakers and pompom socks.

Personally, I am off the stuff, having found the martial art of tennis to be more pain and self-reproach than leisurely fun. I may be shimmying back down the social ladder, but it is decidedly safer on the bottom rung. Until tennis, with its compelling voguishness, nudged me out of a splendid existential lethargy (“I rest; therefore I still am”), I believed firmly that there was no point in shortening my life by Stretching my tendons. Back then, ice skating was my only recourse. It is the ideal sport for a natural recliner. You skid along, defying friction with a precipitous momentum, while the ice undertakes to move you.