LOVE AND TENNIS

 
I beat my wife, usually on Wednesdays.

That’s when we play tennis.

We’re competitive types. I played high school tennis. Alice didn’t; she grew up before Title IX. But she is a better athlete than me. For 20 years, she taught physical education in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District and now, in her so-called retirement, she teaches yoga, Pilates, spinning and several other fitness things. Qigong? Yes. Aqua aerobics? Yes. She teaches at L.A. Fitness and the Jewish Community Center.

I don’t teach anything. I sit around a lot and play clarinet.

Alice and I did duel at Ping-Pong for a couple years, but we gave that up. I don’t know why. We should take it up again. But not right now, not during tennis season. Playing Ping-Pong in good weather wouldn’t be right.

Alice also plays pickleball regularly. Bu who doesn’t? Personally, I’m good for pickleball about every six months. I’m a tennis snob at heart.

But I grew up the hard way, vis-à-vis tennis. My summer hangout was the asphalt courts in South Euclid. (That’s probably why I go to dermatologists a lot lately for skin damage.) I lived three houses from South Euclid’s Bexley Park.

My wife, on the other hand, took lessons at a country club in Columbus, where she grew up. She acquired skills at the club. At Bexley Park I learned how to bet. Denny, a regular at the park, would bet on anything that moved or didn’t. Like how many first serves you’d get in. Denny was into “prop betting” decades before the term was coined.

Alice and I have been playing tennis together since the 1970s. Sometimes child-rearing interfered (for years) with our regular game. But we’ve kept at it.

Alice once convinced our family, including kids, to go to the John Newcombe Tennis Ranch, near San Antonio. I was not that into tennis, but we went because Alice had planned it. I picked up zero tennis tips in Texas. The most valuable tennis tip I ever learned was from reading a book, “The Inner Game of Tennis,” by Timothy Gallwey. He said to watch the spin on the ball as it comes to you.

Here’s a tennis tip from me: Don’t give your spouse pointers. Nobody likes criticism, especially from a person you’re living with. For instance, Alice occasionally overreacts to easy net shots and smacks the ball out of bounds. “Calm down,” I say to myself, not to her.

Andre Agassi wrote in his autobiography, “Every tennis player, sooner or later, compares himself to a boxer because tennis is non-contact pugilism. It’s violent, mano a mano, and the choice is brutally simple as it is in any ring. Kill or be killed. Beat or take your beat-down.”

Does Agassi play much tennis with his wife, Steffi Graf? Just asking. Alice beat me last year. I had no excuses. She posted about her victory on Facebook. She wrote, “Yesterday was a historic day for me. After 47 years of playing tennis with my husband, I finally won a set!” She got a lot of “You go, girl!” responses on Facebook from her friends.

I said to Alice, “It’s never going to happen again.”

I channeled tough-guy Agassi. Tennis, like marriage, starts at love-love, and it goes from there.

—

This essay was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday (9/13/26)