It wasn't long ago when I first set foot and fell in love. It was a long affair that I had, and am in fact still having, but I do not wish to give it such a pinching name, for what I feel for him is only the truest and purest of love that one can feel. For a long time he kept me waiting for an answer, and in the middle I had almost given up hope, but finally he told me how he felt. It felt like a reawakening from the dead to me, it gave me so much joy to hear him say it. Yes, indeed my love for tennis is paying off...
When first my father tried to teach me how to play, I was too young to feel the passion for the sport, that I now feel for it. At that point of time I hardly played sports, and in fact was too lazy to take notice of them. I just assumed I was no good at sports, and went on with living my life. Later that year we started exercising, running, and playing sports on a daily basis, and I realized that I had more of a knack for it than I thought. Still I never could give tennis a chance as it wasn't taught to us in school, it requiring too many courts for the number of students in a class.
It was only in my second year of college that I could give the sport another chance. One of my good friends was getting some tennis rackets with his friends, so he decided to introduced me to this sport. Right from the first time I tried it, I fell in love. I enjoyed it more than playing basketball, and my friend and I often discussed how it was one of the most amazing sports we ever tried out. Sadly I was a slow learner, and to make matters worse I got an injury (not from tennis) because of which I had to stop playing. In the meanwhile my friend got better at it, and when I was well enough to play again, I was too far behind.
I finally decided to give up this sport I loved so much, only because I had no one to play with. The enthusiasm that my friends had about it slowly died out too. I did try to pester my friend to play again, but too much related to studies and placements were going on in our lives to really take out the time to play again. I really missed playing.
After placements, we did start playing again, and I did improve over the weeks we played. I didn't make as much progress as the other guys made, even though some of them were newer to the sport than I was. I was in that phase where I had to play for a good 20 to 25 minutes before I'd start playing properly, to get used to the racket, to get used to hitting the ball right. Sometimes that got me down, because I wanted to really learn how to play decent tennis, at least enough to play with guys.
Then it happened, the day that changed my life, well at least that part pertaining to tennis. In our annual sports fest, I had to play tennis singles and mixed doubles. I did dread the matches, considering the fact that I wasn't nearly good enough to play a competitive game. The first match I played was a mixed doubles match, in which I played so poorly that the girl on the other side started making fun of me (though she hadn't played any tennis previously, and was at least twenty times worse). The reason for my poor show was the fact that upto that point of time I needed to practice for at least fifteen to twenty minutes before I got a hang of the racket and got into the real mood to play. That day I happen to have just woken up and my partner refused to practice, being much too sleepy himself. Lucky for us, we won that match.
Later I practiced with the wall while waiting for my single's opponent to show up. Thus I got a hang of the racket, and by the time she came, I was playing much better. Now my opponent was real good, so I didn't beat her, but in that game I learned how to serve properly, and learned how to hit my shots better. This wasn't like the ususal learning I did in all my previous attempts at learning how to play, for this time it stuck. The next doubles match, I played much better, my serves went in, and I hardly missed a shot, but sadly our opponent was too good to beat. We did have a very close match though, which went onto seven games. So at least at the end of it I was satisfied with the turnout. We did win a silver medal for mixed doubles tennis. Tennis had finally accepted me back.
After that when I went to play tennis with the guys, I didn't need that first twenty minutes to warm up to my racket and get my game right, but it automatically came to me from the first ball I hit. While playing, we'd always play doubles, so on one day, I played four matches one after another (having different partners in each game) and it felt real good because I could hit some pretty good shots.
I still have a lot of scope for improvement, and I will definitely work on this game I've fallen in love with. There are two things I want to learn before I die, one is how to play tennis, and the other is how to play the guitar. At least I'm on my way to achieveing one of my dreams.
