Rallying with Parents: Confessions of a Tennis Player | Part 1 of 5
“My Friend, The Cheater” |Part 1 of 5
I remember when I was playing a big national tournament in Las Vegas which is where I lived at the time. I was matched up against one of my closest friends who also lived in the city. It was always nerve-racking playing a friend because I knew that my dad had already thought that I was too “soft” for sports. Later when I was seventeen, we would get in a terrible argument, and he would tell me that I was too nice to ever be a world-class tennis player. But this story isn’t about that. This story is about playing Anne. That’s not her real name, but that’s what we’ll call her. I was only about thirteen. At that age, my dad still believed that I had what it took to make it to the top. Basically, these were the few glory days that I had in the world of tennis.
The memory of opening the gate to the court and seeing my dad and Annie’s dad shake hands is still as fresh to me as wet paint. It was a solid shake, the way my dad taught me to shake hands with my opponents after matches. My friend’s dad walked up to me and Annie and rubbed both of our heads which caused our visors to slide off. We straightened our hats, and he wished us good luck. Anne and I walked to the benches on the court in the shade. We were both quiet. I was already shaking before the match had even started. My lips were dry. I kept telling myself that for the next two hours, Annie wasn’t my friend, but all I could think of was the time we jumped into the pool after practice one summer day. Water with the strong smell of chlorine dripped off of her thick eyelashes past her bright blue and orange eyes. We laughed so hard that day that if we would have been in the deep end, we would have surely drowned. At the end of that day, her freckled face was badly sunburnt, and I was a dark chocolate bronze. She was my best friend.
But, today, she couldn’t be.
Annie stood up. I stood up. It was time to play. We stood at the net, and Annie spun her racket to see who would be serving first. And then she whispered something to me that I’ll never forget.
“Jade?”
“Yeah?”
“Anything you hit on the line, I have to call out.”
“What?”
“I have to. If I don’t call balls that hit the line out, my dad will — he’ll kill me.”
“But that’s cheating, Anne,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. That’s okay.”
And then I won the spin and chose to serve. Of course, this could have been some clever trick to pull on me — a caring and innocent little girl who would feel bad for her friend — but to this day, I don’t think it was. I knew that Annie was afraid of her dad. And from what I had heard, I knew that her brother was too. I wasn’t sure if he just got really mad like my dad, or worse, physically hurt her in some way like some other dads did with their kids. For some reason, it was always really hard to tell. All parents wished us good luck before matches. They all seemed nice on the first day of a tournament before half of the children had lost their first round matches. Whatever kind of dad her father was, it didn’t matter; I didn’t want to risk it. I told her it was okay so she wouldn’t feel bad about cheating me. I would have never admitted this before — it would be unspeakable really at that time — but I was more willing to lose the match and avoid my friend getting hit in the face than I was to win and have her suffer the consequences. My dad got mad when I didn’t play well, but he never hit me. Never. That being said, I knew I could handle a loss. Better than Annie could, anyway.
But the thing is, I never gave up a match. I owed that much to myself after practicing for hours everyday of my life. I didn’t give up this match either. I remember this match being quite clean as far as line calls went. There were no opportunities to take for Annie, and I ended up beating her quite handily. I could tell her dad was angry. He and my dad had stopped speaking to each other by the end of the first set. The tension was there. Annie and I both knew that she was already in trouble.
I took match point, and Annie and I walked up to the net to shake hands. I stood with one of my hands on the tape of the net waiting for her. Her racket dragged along the ground. Her head drooped down. She wasn’t smiling, and neither was I.
“Nice match,” she said. Her eyelashes lifted at the last second to reveal those big blue and orange eyes that were wet with fresh tears.
“Sorry, Annie,” I said.
“That’s okay.”
We walked off the court. I watched Annie’s father yank her bag off of her shoulders and walk away without a word. His lower lip jutted out like a bulldog, leading the way out of the tennis complex. She followed quickly behind him with short little steps. I’d seen that and done that a hundred times before with my dad. She turned and looked back. I waved. She waved. That was the last I saw of Annie that week.
