The Best Tennis I’ve Ever Played

My first job out of college was teaching tennis at Club Med in the British West Indies. I was fresh off the standard U.S. college grad backpacking trip through Europe where I’d consumed a fair amount of gyros and warm beer, but played zero tennis. I showed up with two Kennex Black Ace rackets and a bit of a gut.

I taught three lessons a day. After two weeks, the strings in both my rackets were gone. I’d left my stringing machine at home, but thankfully, Club Med had some kind of a racket deal with Rossignol and they had about two dozen on hand for the guests.

The Rossignols were made of wood, and the heads were beaucoup small. I’d been using mid-sized graphite sticks for at least two years. But since getting a racket strung meant sending it to Miami, I started using the Rossignols. It was rough.

To make matters worse, the courts were rocket fast. Whoever built them must have laid the cement and then painted them without adding any sand. It was like playing on ice. With the wooden rackets, it was almost impossible.

And I was supposed to be a tennis instructor. Every Saturday when the new guests arrived, we’d do an evening exhibition, basically a set of doubles with one of us on the PA, and for a while there, I could not hit a ball. Into the court, anyway. I hit them into the grass outside the court, into the restaurant next door and one time I thought I heard a splash.

I also heard one of the New York guests say, “Yo, Rachel, that guy sucks.”

In a few weeks, though, I pulled it together. I tweaked my swing, realized I couldn’t put as much spin on the ball as I usually did, and thanked God for my eastern forehand grip. I’d read The Inner Game of Tennis, and I followed its advice: concentrate completely on The Ball. I zenned in on the seams from the moment it left my opponent’s racket. I said, “Bounce” when it hit the court. “Hit” at contact. I employed The Force.

I started dialing in. The other instructors were solid players and both the chief animator guy and the dude who ran the bank were ex-instructors. We used to play matches when there was nothing else going on. All of them routined me for the first month, but once I got the hang of the courts and the wooden rackets, I started holding my own. Pretty soon, I was tuning them up and dominating the Saturday night exhibitions.

I didn’t lose a match for months. I was playing so well by the end of the season that one of the other instructors asked me to play tournaments with him in Europe. I was thinking of doing it until my parents guilted me into giving up Club Med for the real world. “If you stay there, you’ll never get a good job.” “We just paid for four years of college.” “We’re selling your car.” From their perspective, I was wasting my life. My mom thought I was in Cuba.

I was a 23-year-old round-headed kid from the California suburbs with a trident earring in my left ear. I was ripping backhands, gobbling buffet seafood, and doing better than average with the female guests. I was tan, fit and self-actualized at 23. I should have told my parents, “Look, I appreciate the advice, but this is my life and I’m going to live it here for a while.” But I didn’t.

I took the earring out, moved back to LA and got a job as an inside salesperson for a company that hired out computer programmers on a contract basis. I interviewed 50-year-old programmers, grilled them about their FORTRAN experience and cold-called to find them work. I spent two hours a day on the 405 in a brown polyester suit and wide tie combo. It sucked.

My earring hole got infected.

My office was on Century Boulevard down the street from LAX. On particularly soul-rending days, I’d drive to the airport and sit in the Bradley terminal watching happy families catching flights to exotic locales. Then I’d drive back to West LA to my apartment and play Mario Brothers.

It messed me up for about 15 years.