Leroy Neiman, “Tennis Players”
The U.S. Tennis open begins Monday so here’s a New York tennis poem to kick it off. I may have played on the East River public courts with my son Darien last summer. Darien and I bond through tennis, and one also sees father-son bonding at work in the poem. In a poignant and understated way, one sees the two of them learning to live in the wake of the wife/mother’s death. The tiny incident with the Gatorade bottle shows that the father is grappling with the challenges of raising the son by himself.
Practice
by Caleb Gardner
After we finished playing tennis the other day
down at the East River public courts just past
the little league field, the father of a kid who
had been training on the court next to us came over
and asked where we were from and if we’d
be willing to play a match sometime against his son.
“He wants to play for Stanford,” he said,
to which we couldn’t say much else than “all right”
and nod our heads, his son being so young and Stanford
being so good and there being so much left to happen,
even just in terms of tennis, between now and then.
“His mother went to Stanford,” he explained a moment later.
“She died when she was thirty five, he wants
to follow in her footsteps.” We couldn’t say
much to that either, except maybe to ask
how long ago it happened, which, looking back,
might have been the question he was waiting for,
but right then we didn’t end up saying anything,
which was OK too, I think. Instead, the three of us
just stood there and watched the guy’s son play
for a minute before exchanging numbers.
It also happened to be the first day that felt like fall,
when the leaves on the ground start to mean something,
or, rather, when you’re forced to finally acknowledge
that, of course, they’ve meant something all along.
So, needless to say, we didn’t waste much time
putting on our sweatpants and long-sleeved shirts
and picking up our bags and walking out the gate,
and, by turning our attention to the rest of the day,
forgetting for the moment most of what had just occurred.
After walking fifty feet, however, for some reason
completely unrelated to the man and his son,
or, at least, as unrelated as anything can be
to something that happened so soon before,
I turned around and took one last look at the courts.
But then, once I was turned around, I couldn’t help
but take notice of the two of them, who I could still see
quite clearly through the chain link fence.
The boy had just then stopped playing,
whether for good or only to rest there was no way to tell.
He was stretching against the net post while,
behind him, his father took a blue Gatorade
out of a small red cooler and wiped it on his shirt.
Then it looked like he was about to unscrew the cap himself,
before he stopped, as though thinking better of it,
and finally handed the bottle to his son unopened.
A note on the artist: Leroy Neiman’s painting can be found at www.mynewmaster.com/canvas/Tennis_Players_1825.html.
