This Sunday, on my nine-hour sojourn back to school, Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan helped prove what I had long suspected: there is no such thing as a “friendly game.”
McEwan’s book, Saturday, follows a day (can you guess which one?) in the life of British neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, describing every minute detail of his existence, from the food he cooks to the early-morning roll in the hay he takes with his old lady. These titillating details aside, the book contains a particularly long scene which features Perowne, a doctor friend and one mean game of squash.
As far as I can tell from my admittedly limited experience with it, squash involves white shorts, petite rackets and even smaller balls (not a veiled Freudian reference to the athletes, simply an observation). McEwan, however, wrote the match in such a way that by the time the annoying British narrator had finished, my heart was racing, or at least I was as excited as anyone could be over a passage from a 14-hour book on tape. The “friendly” game between the two friends spiraled into a death-match, complete with mind games, foul language and internal struggle.
Ever since my last day of organized competition, my mother has been telling me that I need to learn “social sports,” which I could play for the rest of my life. In her view, these include golf, tennis, and well, that’s about it. Initially, my father took me out to play golf, insisting that my years of field hockey would make me a natural, a la Happy Gilmore. I did respectably my first time out on the greens, but between my father’s constant critiques (there is a reason why coaches are confined to the sidelines) and the curdling frustration I was forced to keep under wraps while I made polite conversation with the gaggle of fifty-somethings populating the course, I decided that the game was a little too social for my taste. Plus, I didn’t even sweat. How can it be a fulfilling athletic experience if you don’t even smell bad afterwards? Tennis, I decided, would be more my style.
I enlisted a friend to teach me the sport, true to the spirit of friendly competition and social athletics. I spent sticky afternoons in August learning the basics of the game. Despite my obvious deficiencies compared to my partner, an all-state tennis player, every time we took the court, I was transformed. At the surface it was a friendly game, but in my mind there existed the outrageous thought that I might crush him in an overwhelming display of blazing serves and racket panache, and that my status as an undiscovered international tennis talent would be revealed that day on the courts of the city park.
Shockingly, all did not go as planned. In fact, I lost every time, and I decided that in the interest of maintaining a friendship, I needed a break from tennis as well.
Which leaves me without a sport with to grow old with. Fifty years from now, when I don my swishy track suit and white orthopedic shoes, my athletic pursuit may well be a solitary one. Perhaps power-walking? I hear people get eight kinds of crazy when they hit the mean streets. I bet I could go pro.
