Anyone for Tennis?

What with Andy Murray’s spectacular win at Wimbledon I thought I’d post a couple of highlights from my own tennis career.

Both of these occurred at the property of friends in Miami, Florida—Rod and Carol Mandelstam. Rod was quite well known in tennis circles, having been on a winning doubles team at Wimbledon at some stage in his career:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCMPy4O4EUw

The Mandelstams had a large property in South Miami with two tennis courts and a bunch of exotic birds roaming around the place. (I was reading in the garden one day when the wretched ostrich snuck up behind me, pecked my head and grabbed a bunch of my hair—and one of the stupid peacocks crippled itself when it saw its reflection in the chrome hub-cap of a car and kicked furiously at its perceived rival).

I haven’t seen Rod for years, but he was kind of conservative in nature when I knew him. But his friend Patrick—another tennis player—was, like me, rather partial to a glass or two of beer.

One afternoon, Patrick and I were quaffing a few ales when the subject of tennis came up. At the time I believe Patrick was ranked around 100^th in the world, but he claimed to have a serve faster than that of Bjorn Borg (who belted his serves over the net at around 120 MPH).

Patrick—aware of my limited prowess on the court— avowed that I couldn’t even touch one of his serves. Of course, after a few beers, I was not about to allow such a claim to go uncontested. And never mind the simply touching bit—idiot here bet him fifty dollars that out of twenty serves, I’d return two.

Well, I didn’t even see eighteen of them—they flew past me like bullets. I did however manage to make contact with the final two, but they almost knocked the racquet out of my hand.

Bye-bye fifty dollars!

The other memorable incident occurred with, instead of a racquet, a pistol in my hand. But it sort of had to do with tennis. It came about during a New Year’s Eve celebration at the Mandelstam's. There were only seven of us: Rod and Carol, Arthur Ashe and his wife Jeanne, Patrick, Yours Truly and wife Judy.

The evening went without a hitch until midnight, when Patrick pulled out a pistol and began firing into the air (a not uncommon practice down there on New Year's Eve). This seemed like wonderful sport to me. I knew where Rod kept his pistol so I borrowed it and joined Patrick. But rather than firing into the air, I threw a couple of beer cans into the swimming pool and the two of us began blasting away at them.

I noticed Arthur hiding behind a tree at one point and during a lull in the firing, he darted into the house to join Rod and the ladies.

Next morning when I phoned to thank Rod for the evening, he made a point of mentioning that he’d spent the last hour diving to remove spent bullets from the pool.

Edited by Davina