The winter sun blazes on our legs. At the tennis courts they have taken the nets down for the season, so we hit the ball against the backboard. A white line across the green board measures where the height of the net would be.
For days now, as soon as the school bell goes, my brother and I would run out to the courts where we pound a ball against the board. When we don’t have rackets we hit the ball with our bare hands. Thwack! My brother is seven and I am nine. He’s so sweet that I can convince him to do anything.
My brother is too short to see over the net. He has skinny brown arms and can’t hit the ball as hard as me. We laugh and goad one another. I tell him he better get it back this time and I hit the ball as hard as I can. I notice someone in my periphery. Behind the portable seating, a man is leaning against the wire mesh fence, his fingers threaded through. He is watching us. I try to pretend he’s not there. I thought of yelling at him, Go away!
The next day after school the man is there again. He’s not even pretending not to watch us this time. What’s he doing there? I am angry. I tell my brother to whack the ball as hard as he can. When he doesn’t do it hard enough, I command, pretend you hate me. “That’s it”, I say. I make my brother yell, I hate you! as he whacks the ball. We both laugh our heads off and my brother improves a lot.
I tell my brother to whack the ball as hard as he can. When he doesn’t do it hard enough, I command, pretend you hate me
We run home from school the next day, wanting to eat and run back to the courts. I dash in the house and fall silent. There’s a strange man sitting at the end of the table talking with my mother. His face is sunburned and he has bright blue eyes that watch us through a straw blond fringe. I wonder if someone has died because my mother and this man are serious, falling silent and watching us. Even my brother is quiet. “I want you to meet someone,” my mother says. We sit at the table. The man speaks with a broad American accent. He’s a tennis coach. It’s at that moment our childhood, as we had known it, is over.
From then on we train three times a week and play all of Saturday. We travel all around the country playing. We play with the adults. Even though we are the poorest, using scraggly rackets and worn shoes, my brother beats everyone and I most people. My parents use all their money taking us around to tournaments. We never, ever go on our long summer holidays camping by the sea all together again.
It is my mother that takes us to the tournaments. My father does not come, not once. He has to work on the weekends. My eldest sister is good at tennis too and she comes along, but my middle sister is not so good and she stays home with Dad.
I loved tennis and I loved those years playing competitively but that was undoubtedly the pivotal point when our family changed. We were no longer a unit, enjoying relaxed time together. We were a tennis family, only that tennis family didn’t include all of us.
Local press clippings. Source: Supplied
My brother got sponsorship. He got free rackets and shoes. By the age of 12 he was playing in the men’s competition. That same year he was offered a scholarship to a private boarding school and left home. I’m not sure my parents properly understood the pressure he was under or the class difference he encountered there. I missed him and our family had changed.
I often wonder how different things would’ve been if we’d never met that American coach, if I hadn’t said to my brother play as though you hate me. I was always determined, but tennis taught me an absolute type of focus that has served my desire to write well. As a kid my brother had golden curls, dimples and the brightest smile. Everyone in the tennis world knew who he was. I’m sure that he’d be very different without tennis, but I can’t say with certainty in what way.
Sometimes we live those pivotal moments in which we make decisions that will affect who we become so quickly, and so intensely, that we don’t have an opportunity to reflect on how they would change us, or who those decisions are for. Sometimes, we don’t recognise the significance of seemingly small decisions until much later when we see the consequences.
So many families have those stories; pivotal points when things changed for them. I think there’s something to learn in sharing them, in talking about them. Considering this one and how it affected my family has helped me to become more reflective in making decisions in my adult life. These days, I take a long time over them, trying to be careful and aware of consequences.
In my 40s now, I recently bought my first tennis racket since I gave up playing as a teenager. I go out to the court with friends and we howl laughing and yelling, “fluke!” Sometimes, for old times’ sake, I sting a forehand down the line. I’m going back for a visit to my hometown soon. I might challenge my brother to a game; try to get him to yell something kinder as he whacks the ball back this time.
