Rich ended with “Do you still play tennis?”<\/p>\n
What<\/em>? Tennis? Tennis was another lifetime ago, Rich.\u00a0 And what exactly is “tennis”? Hacker tennis, club level, or college caliber?<\/p>\n When Rich and I were in high school, tennis was a tree of life to lay hold fast of.\u00a0 Rich shoveled the snow off the courts at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights.\u00a0 Nuts.\u00a0 He played so well he wound up on the UC-Santa Barbara team.\u00a0 Maybe the Cali coaches needed a court shoveler.\u00a0 (Rich has been out west for decades.)<\/p>\n Contemplating tennis — and not playing — was like practicing music without an instrument. \u00a0\u00a0It was doable, but not much fun.\u00a0 I had Bill Tilden’s book on singles and Gardnar Mulloy’s doubles book. \u00a0There was no tennis on TV.<\/p>\n I wasn’t in Rich’s league.\u00a0 (Correction: I was<\/em> in Rich’s league. Rich went to Cleveland Heights High and I went to Brush High.\u00a0Heights and Brush were in the Lake Erie League. No question, though, Rich was much better than me.)<\/p>\n Tim Gallwey in<\/strong><\/span> The Inner Game of Tennis<\/em> recommends watching the spin on the ball.\u00a0 Focus on the rotation of the ball’s seams.\u00a0 The author of The Inner Game of Music<\/em> said something similar.\u00a0 Focus.\u00a0 I can’t remember on what.\u00a0 (Not as good a book as Inner Tennis<\/em>.)<\/p>\n When I was a sub on a gig, the bandleader shouted at me: “Listen!”\u00a0 Meaning “Listen to the music!”\u00a0 Maybe I was distracted by the hors d’oeuvre.<\/p>\n In my twenties, after college, I thought tennis was just stupid.\u00a0 Dumb.\u00a0 Existentially dumb. Two adults hitting a ball over a net.\u00a0 That was not solving any world problem.<\/p>\n I hung out with Rich at his tennis pro job in Rocky River, Ohio.\u00a0 Rich said he couldn’t teach the middle-aged women — the 35 year olds — anything new.\u00a0 He said, “I wish tennis hadn’t boomed.\u00a0 It would force me to do something else.”\u00a0 He spent time arranging interclubs between “our girls” and Lorain.<\/p>\n “First position” means playing diatonically (no sharps, no flats).\u00a0 It is usually simple non-bluesy melodies. First position, initially, is insipid and idiotic, just like tennis.<\/p>\n Then you grow up.<\/p>\n —<\/span> Rich Greenberg, a former tennis pro, thanked me for the blues harmonica lessons I gave him 32 years ago.\u00a0 My lessons — in conjunction with pros’ instructional videos on YouTube — had helped him, Rich wrote in an email. Rich ended with “Do you still play tennis?” What? Tennis? Tennis was another lifetime ago, Rich.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age","category-sports-pages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3182"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8749,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182\/revisions\/8749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"order-in-the-court\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/order-in-the-court-300x253.jpg\" "\\"order-in-the-court\\"")
Rich taught <\/strong>me<\/span><\/span> an important life lesson: how to wait.\u00a0 I waited six months every winter to play tennis.\u00a0 I wasn’t going to shovel courts.\u00a0 Think about it: no snow blowers in the 1960s, and the courts had to be perfectly dry.\u00a0 And right after you shoveled, it would snow again.<\/p>\n![\"green-cot\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/green-cot-300x106.jpg\" "\\"green-cot\\"")
I sometimes focus on a green cot, as a mental image, when I play a concert. The cot is an emergency-shelter Red Cross cot.\u00a0 Keeps me calm.<\/p>\n![\"harmonica-racket\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/harmonica-racket-300x100.jpg\" "\\"harmonica-racket\\"")
Rich, in his <\/strong><\/span>email, asked if I still played harmonica. I said I sometimes play harp in first position on the song “Tsena, Tsena.”<\/p>\n
\nPlease see the next post too.\u00a0 It’s an original video from Klezmer Guy Studios.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"