If you’ve spent any time around tennis courts populated by serious competitors, you’ve seen it happen:  A player misses a shot and lets loose with a hellacious yell, perhaps a stream of scandalous curses, and slings their racket, sometimes end over end, other times skidding along the hardcourt or clay, into the fence or net.  If the racket doesn’t part with the hand, it may be bashed into pieces until the frame is held together only by the strings, ending up in the courtside trash can.

            For juniors, especially boys, this feisty behavior often can be expected, and is predictably whiny.  But with full-grown men—and although I’ve seen a few girls and women with fiery tempers it most often seems to be males who really blow their tops—it can be surprising and on occasion approach the level of temporary insanity. 

Often this ranting on-court behavior belies the demeanor of the man off-court.  I met a player two years ago in the South New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia through a singles league.  He often cursed and chastised himself whenever I won a game.  If I won a set, he catapulted his orange Head racket into the backstop from thirty feet away.  On-court he gave off the impression of someone mentally imbalanced, perhaps bipolar, a man with many voices in his head.  Only after getting to know him a little several months later did I learn he was a polite, sane fellow outside the fences.  An Argentine buddy of mine is a very friendly, garrulous fellow until he steps onto the court and his rolling topspin groundstrokes start to miss or he drops a second serve into the net and he begins to bark out his passionate anger in Spanish.  (I must say, cursing in Spanish sounds to my monolingual ears much more elegant than the standard American profanity.) 

Another friend, a very easygoing, likable actuary is 41, exactly my age.  He and I played a singles league match this past summer that lasted almost three hours and went to a third set tiebreaker. His father, who often plays doubles with us, was courtside, and near the end of the match, his mother stopped by to watch.  My friend made an error on a key point that put me in a position to win, and then hurled his racket like a Frisbee from deep behind the baseline and it skidded all the way to the net.  “I can’t believe I threw my racket when my mother was here,” he said later.  

I must admit that I have had plenty of shameful moments on the court, mostly in the juniors.  In a 12-and-under tournament in Atlanta, I jettisoned a Dunlop Maxply clear out into the parking lot.  A year or two later I doublefaulted and slung a cheap wooden Adidas racket—fittingly it was an Ilie Nastase model—against the backfence. It struck squarely against the support post and the head collapsed like a scored two-by-four in a karate demonstration.  On particularly bad day of play when I was 16, I smashed two of the rather expensive Prince Woodie frames nearly into sawdust (that was my career temperament lowpoint, a day my dad, an elementary school principal who had paid for the rackets, will occasionally remind me of if I need to be brought down a notch.)

Much more often than racket-breaking, as a junior I would yell sometimes at the top of my lungs, cursing God and myself and whoever else came to mind in the grips of my anger, usually at a puny backhand dumped in the net or an overaggressive forehand that went awry.  I have mellowed some, and I am marginally pleased to say I haven’t broken a racket in at least ten years.  (I still have the last frame I damaged, a Wilson Pro Staff Classic 6.1 with a slight crack in the head—it is playable if you don’t mind the clicking sound it makes on solidly hit balls).  I almost never punish my rackets anymore for their frequent misdeeds, although occasionally I’ll shout after a poor play or sometimes utter a profanity worthy of an early Scorsese film if no children or easily offended people are in earshot.  

I am not saying I’m proud of this behavior.  I’m just saying that sometimes I—and I think all of us—need an occasional outlet to holler and maybe throw something. A tennis court is one of the few places where it’s socially acceptable (at least passable without repercussion) to get away with a fit. Everywhere else is off limits.  If you are mad on your job and you snatch up your telephone and hurl it across the office or you drop-kick your laptop out the window, you’ll probably hurt someone else and almost certainly end up at the unemployment office.  If you get mad at your spouse and you throw dishes into the kitchen wall or smash furniture, you will end up alone and maybe even in jail.   If you cuss out your own kids, you hurt them and should be ashamed.  If you flip out and start screaming in traffic, it’s called road rage.  If you walk down the street cursing and throwing things, somebody just might call the police.  I am a Christian and find comfort in my faith, but I don’t intend to go to church and start kicking over the pews and slamming down the hymnals.  It would be quite unbecoming.

But on the tennis court, inside that sacred series of rectangles formed by fences and baselines and sidelines and the net, you can usually get away with a few curses and a sling or two of the racket.  It is a sanctuary where, while certainly not encouraged, uttering a string of four-letter laments and racket throwing is permissible. Nothing gets hurt except perhaps your racket and your reputation as a stoic. And I don’t know many stoics.

Let’s face it, life sometimes can be hard.  It often is unpleasant having to get up early in the morning and work for a living, nor is it always easy to try get along with family and friends and co-workers.  And there is a much to worry about: stock-market collapses, dwindling 401ks, housing slumps, reports and projects due, pending sales that fall through, papers to grade, bills to pay, grass to cut, snow to shovel, diapers to change, leaky faucets to fix, flat tires, illnesses, tennis injuries, insurance paperwork, sex, death and taxes. On a larger scale there are wars, global warming, famine, genocide—the river of misery running through the world is too much to ever get our minds around.  Or maybe your cat won’t stop peeing on the new carpet or a good friend won’t stop talking about politics. 

Eight years ago I lived across the Hudson River from New York and participated in several fiction-writing workshops in the city.  I’m convinced more than half of those participating were doing it because it was cheaper than therapy, that writing was a more-economical and enjoyable way to grapple with whatever was ailing them than paying to see a head doctor.  I don’t know anything about what I’ve heard called scream therapy, but the name is pretty obvious that screaming is the way that you release and work out your problems.  Not for one minute would I pay a therapist to direct me in my screaming.  I have my tennis club dues to cover that.  T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem “Burnt Norton” that “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.”  I know what he was talking about.  For me, and many others, the sanctity of a tennis court is a place where we can try to bear the reality, one missed shot at a time.

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