i played so much tennis my tendons cried

my year in tennis

Hello friends—

First, a word about my last post: The Substack team reached out almost immediately to see if something could be done to help with the difficulties I was having with Notes making me want to leave. I knew that part of it was down to my own lack of willpower in resisting Notes and using it as a social media platform, but I also felt that the way the notifications were set up on here, I would be continually lured back there. The team worked swiftly to help me get rid of all notifications and I am pleased to say that I haven’t been back on Notes since. I feel much calmer and better for it.

For some, Notes is a wonderful and useful social media platform. For me, it was not that, and I’m grateful to have been given a little nook of silence in which to write these posts.

So a big thanks to the team for working so hard and diligently to help me out. And for being so responsive to what I thought was just a personal problem, tbh. I do think that Substack has its criticisms, but I can’t really imagine Twitter or Instagram reaching out because a creator expressed difficulty with the way the site was functioning.

And also, wow, so many of you responded to that post, even if it was just to say, do what you gotta do. That’s really amazing to me. And I really appreciate it. And some of you guys had some really useful tips—bookmarking the dashboard!!!! and blocking the Notes timeline with a browser extension!!!!—that have totally turned this around for me. I’m really grateful because it had a concrete impact on my quality of life.

I think I somehow constantly underestimate what this silly newsletter means to people.

So for now, I think I’ll stick around if that’s okay.

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This year, I have been trying to figure out my tennis game.

I mean this both practically, technically and more philosophically, spiritually. For example, am I more of an all-court player or a baseliner? Am I more attacking or am I more defensive? Do I prefer the forehand or backhand? Am I a power player or someone who extracts errors from my opponent?

These were questions I had about myself at the start of last year, but I realized I wouldn’t really be able to answer them until I worked on my technique and developed solid enough foundations so that I could begin to express myself on the court. I undertook many months of clinics, group lessons, and organized play, working with coaches on specific things, watching YouTube footage of professionals, and also tutorials online. I pored over spec sheets for racquets and strings. I spent hours talking to the stringing guys at my local shop and talking to coaches as we picked up balls from hitting drills. Getting my grip right. Getting my timing right. Working on my footwork. Correcting my hitting form. Working on my closed-stance. Loosening up my arm. Fixing my ball toss. Working through my volleys, my overhead. Doing really exhausting hitting drills and groundstroke clinics. I worked to atomize my game and then to reconstitute it into a firmer, more solid version of itself. I worked very hard at my basics. Always beginning with the lowest skill level and building up from fundamentals until I felt I had a solid hold on my mechanics.

I worked in solitary pursuit of pure technique, or at least, my version of it. I found that pursuit very meaningful and fulfilling. At the same time, my life was rapidly depleting of people. What I mean, is that I woke up in late July this year and realized that I only ever really speak to two people. How had this happened? All of my friends were going to parties and hanging out together. They were in Brooklyn and Downtown Manhattan singing karaoke or going to restaurants for candlelit dinners or book launches. They were in dark rooms with the flash on, music so loud it was hardly music at all, pulsing through their Instagram stories. They were together, living their lives, and somehow I had come out of the picture, like a figure cut from the canvas. Even the two friends I managed to hold on to didn’t really share my interests, not really. And I thought, in July, that I would either kill myself or find new friends. I opted to search out new friends.

But New York is not a place to make friends, not if you have notions of friendship created in the provinces, where friendship means something entirely different. People in New York don’t even know how to hug. It’s almost as if they are hugging like actors in a play. Not characters in a play. Actors. You can’t even feel the strength in their arms when they touch you. They hug the air around you in this place. There are people I know in New York who only speak to me in other cities. That is what New York is. Still, I had to try given it was either that or throwing myself from my tenth-floor window out of sheer loneliness and the madness of watching the people I loved spend time with each other without me. I would find new friends and a new life. I would find people I could play tennis with so that I would at least have an excuse to text them or call them up and make arrangements.

This was kind of a fool’s errand for several reasons.

Playing tennis in New York requires either animal cunning or a kind of feudal privilege—it’s one of the few areas in the city where you can’t actually buy your way into knowledge. That is not to say that tennis is not expensive in New York. Court time is extremely expensive at some of the clubs, and you’re better off paying for the clinics.

What I mean is that tennis is so gatekept in this city that money itself is not sufficient to gain access to the knowledge you need in order to play. In most cities I have lived in, the limit on my ability to play tennis was finding someone to play with. The courts and the procedures to book them were not arcane knowledge. The cost also was not super high. In New York, it is difficult to find people to play with and the procedures are so mysterious and so shrouded in lore and arcane ritual that even if you did have both money and a companion, the odds of knowing where to look even would not be in your favor. The solution is to have been born in New York or to be friends with someone born into a tennis-playing family in New York, to have access to the deep lore of clubs and sign-up procedures. You can’t know how to play tennis in New York until…well, you know how to play tennis in New York. And by then, when someone asks you how to play or where to play, you are so overwhelmed with the task of trying to make the process legible and understandable that you can only gaze into the distance with a faraway look in your eye as though recounting the horrors of a great battle.

You might think that I am joking, that it really is about money. But I actually don’t think this is the case because if it were about the money, the process would be far more efficient than it is. For example, to sign up for a weekly clinic at Sutton East, you cannot actually do it over the phone or even at the front desk. You have to take the email of the guy who does all the arranging and then email him, at which time, you get an automatic response with a long list of options and explanations that you must enter into a Google Form, and then enter your payment information. Then, you wait and wait and wait, and one day, an email shows up and it says, okay, you got a spot in the clinics, we will charge you now, here are the dates and times, etc.

In order to book drill and play or liveball or any of the one-off clinics, you first must sign up for a platform (sounds good, right, online, great), but then you must call them to arrange for credits to be added to your account, and then you go back to the app and use the credits to book your individual classes. To book court time, you have to call on the phone or show up in person and ask about availability. Ditto if you want to book a private lesson.

It is my personal belief that a software engineer with a Squarespace template, thirty minutes of spare time, and access to someone not afraid to use a phone could make an absolute killing booking court time for phone-anxious millennials or at the very least, buying up court time in Manhattan and selling it to millennials too afraid to use the phone. I’m not even joking. That’s how I know the gatekeeping isn’t really about money. Because with very little effort, the court-booking and clinic-management landscape of Manhattan could be modernized, streamlined, and turned into an app that would be infinitely more efficient and smoother than what we have now.

You know how I know? Because there is an app already functioning sort of like that put out by Sports Illustrated called CatchCorner. It provides, at a glance, available courts at participating clubs and links out to those places for booking—often resulting in…well, having to speak to someone on the phone. The USTA has, by far, the best court-booking scheme of all places in New York. You make an account and then use that account to book courts either outdoor or indoor at the National Tennis Center. It’s so easy. So simple. We have the technology.

In many ways, the codes and mores governing tennis playing in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens insulate the tennis world from change in precisely the same way and for precisely the same reasons that the codes and mores governing the world of Edith Wharton’s New York insulate that social sphere from change. What I mean is that it is possible to read the tennis world of New York as a novel of manners and to come to the same understanding on which all novels of manners converge: that manners are a means of preserving and perpetuating the supremacy of a small, cultural elite, even if change would save the very world we are aiming to preserve.

Every time I meet someone through tennis in New York, we discuss how hard it is to find someone through tennis in New York, how difficult it is to know where to play and how to book courts. There are people who only want to play and those people cannot play because they don’t have the time, energy, or luck to accidentally click on the right link on a badly designed website that will take them to a form they can fill out to get information. True, they could call, but for most of us, phone calls belong to a totally different register of life. Imagine if you had to call your gym to see if the machines were free. Or if you had to call the pool to find out if lanes were open. If you had to call to find out if the bookstore had room for your browsing. Consider how seldom you actually have to call in order to find out anything anymore, and you will begin to understand how absolutely cracked this system is. How absolutely rickety.

There are reasons for this, of course. Part of it is the giglike nature of the work performed by most teaching pros. Much of the infrastructure governing tennis clubs and tennis courts grows out of the ad hoc migratory patterns of the traveling teaching pro. You can imagine how a mostly cash-based business done informally on courts across the country might be resistant to the notion of things like traceable app-based standardization. What we have is not so much infrastructure as a series of loose agreements arranged into something approximating semi-permanence. Most of the scheduling gets written in an actual book with actual pages with an actual pen or pencil. It’s all extremely low-tech. Which is great on one hand, but on the other hand, I’m not calling anybody on the phone. That’s crazy.

In mid-September, I signed up for a weekly tennis clinic that was to run eight weeks. My session was initially 10:30am, but then it got bumped to 11am. Every Sunday for those eight weeks, I took the train or (if I was very late) a car to Sutton East, an indoor tennis facility next to the Queensboro Bridge. Unlike most indoor facilities in the United States, the courts at Sutton East are red clay, which makes for variable bounces and sometimes dodgy calls. The white strips comprising the lines are tacked to the ground, and these white strips cause the ball to dart and shoot in odd angles. Nets separate the courts, and some of the more competitive players are known to aim their shots both at the line and into the nets, making for difficulty in returning.

I have done a lot of clinics at Sutton East over the last year. A lot of what is called Drill&Play, where you do an hour of hitting drills and games and then play doubles for an hour. The Drill&Play sessions have eight or so people in them, or they should, but it is not uncommon for there to be six or five, requiring the coach to get involved and to play alongside us. There is minimal instruction in Drill&Play, and sometimes I wonder if this is because the coaches don’t want to teach us for free or because some of the players don’t want an errant pro to meddle in their technique. I have seen evidence for both cases in my time on the red stuff. There’s also Liveball, which is basically the first half of Drill&Play, mostly emphasizing point play and scenarios. Liveball is more active, closer to cardio tennis, and it keeps you on your toes. It goes quickly, that hour.

The social texture of Sutton East is interesting to me because you really see a cross-section of Upper East Side life. There are the regulars with their weekly court time. Doctors and lawyers and retirees from the white-collar professions. Then there are former DII and DIII college players, the ones from good families who went on to law school or business school or medical school rather than becoming touring pros after college. Those guys are routinely under 5’10” and have the boxy physique of middle-stack Tinder prospects. Then there are the former DI ones, who are to a one over 6’0,” muscular, and hit the ball so hard and so deep that it’s like they’re auditioning for something. What all the former college tennis guys have in common is a certain joyless meanness in their groundstrokes. The former DII and DIII guys hit like they’re trying hard to get something back that was never very much to begin with while the DI guys hit like they’re trying to hold on to something. Yet, there is such a feeling of tragic depletion when I watch them hit, and so I try not to look too closely.

There are a lot of white-wearing women with ponytails. They wear gray knee braces or braces for their elbows, and they walk with a tight, prim inward twist. Their groundstrokes are almost all ugly. Their backhands are hard and flat. Their forehands have strange loops and twists and little inefficiencies. But what they lack in beauty of form, they have in potency and effectiveness. There is nothing scarier than a 40-year-old woman across the net from you because you just know it’s about to be a real dog fight. What I find amazing about them is that they don’t lose matches. You have to take it from them. Truly, you have to put your foot on their neck and wrench the match from them because they simply will not give you anything. The men can be coaxed into losing. They can be steered into errors. Into collapse. But the women, they are rock fucking solid. The ball always comes back. And it’s always short. Playing two women in doubles is my unique idea of tennis hell. I have been ground into dust by their floating shots and weird ass spin and their sudden injection of pace. They are impervious to winners going by them. It’s like they delete it from their memory.

The drop-in clinics are always random assortment. Some people seem to have booked regular time, so there are a handful of people I’ve been at a few sessions with. We know each other enough to say hi, to nod, to take our place at the start of the session, always two lines, two balls. That is, one forehand line, one backhand line, each person taking two shots in their designated line, rotating out and around, and taking their place in the other line. Like a ball scene in Jane Austen, the unspoken rules of the courtly dances, everyone knowing the choreography, it becoming incredibly awkward and painful when someone doesn’t.

But do I know these people? Not really. We hit the ball. We pick up the balls. We play doubles, change teams. Sometimes, I’m an hour into a session before I even learn a person’s name. Yet, it’s nice. I am not alone for that time. I’m not anything for that time. Not myself. Not a writer. I am just a string of actions resulting in either a favorable or unfavorable outcome. Sometimes, the coach offers a word of advice, adjustment. But mostly, we’re just in it.

My first weekly clinic ran September to November. We were five or six total. Sometimes people didn’t show. Sometimes, everybody showed. We would start with a long hitting drill to warm up, the coach feeding us out of his hand. Then we switched to more targeted drills. First ball up the line, second ball cross court. First ball cross court short, second ball, cross deep. First ball cross deep, second ball up the line, third ball cross short. Like a ballet instructor giving out a long combination during rehearsal, he’d speak (too quietly) a string of shots he wanted us to produce, and we’d do our best to do it. Sometimes, he fed us a string of balls starting from the far ad side and then ending with us in the deuce side alley, wanting us to sprint back and forth to work on our timing and to work on our recovery to the center. We worked on volleys, learning how to massage an approach shot and then to look immediately for the reply to put away the sharp angled volley. And so many overhead smashes from so many different places in the court. He wanted to hit both inside-out and inside-in from both wings. I don’t think I ever hit through so many different positions and scenarios from both sides of my groundstrokes before. By the end of that eight weeks, I truly felt like I had a detailed understanding of my mechanics.

And who were they, these five or so others? I don’t know. I didn’t really get their names. One of them wore a Hearst totebag. One was a blond woman who worked in hospitality. Were they nice? Very. Everyone was very supportive. Very deferential when it came to letting people take the shot, sometimes too deferential. I felt like we were all well-matched as far as level goes. One of the players had a very heavy, very hard cross-court forehand. One player had a sharp, mean serve and a ferocious competitiveness. One of the men, very tall, liked to loop his shots and got a great deal of spin. I remember their games in great detail, actually. I remember their preferences. Their aversions. My go-to strategy for getting points out of them. I remember what drills they liked, which ones they didn’t. I remember the banter. The color of their towels. Their brand of racquets and string. I remember some of our conversations about how hard it was to find people to play with. I remember what they wanted to work on in their game. What they didn’t really care about. I remember their laughter. The way they’d screw their eyes shut and shrug off a missed shot. I remember, too, our coach. Partly because I’ve had him preside over a couple Drill&Play and Liveball sessions. I sometimes feel shy about him looking at my strokes now, wondering if he sees any improvement. But, yeah, I don’t remember their names. Those eight weeks meant something to me, but it would be hard to explain to someone why that is when I can’t remember the most basic details. Remember is the wrong word. Why do I keep saying that. I can’t remember it because I never learned it.

My more recent session began in November and will run until January. I will miss some sessions because I go to Paris in December to each for the first couple weeks of January. The vibe is very different from my other clinic. For one, I had the feeling of coming to something late. That is, some of the people are already known to each other, and I feel like I was added on. This isn’t bad or anything. They don’t make me feel excluded. It’s just that they know each other. They talk about their lives outside of tennis. They talk about plans and weddings and dates and all that other stuff that unfolds outside of the white bubble. I am keenly aware of the extent to which my own life remains evacuated of people when we’re standing there catching our breath and they’re talking about their weekends. Then the drill resumes, and we forget ourselves for a time.

Despite the differences, I am as aware of their playing as I was of the playing in my first clinic. I know that one of them has immaculate form and I can anticipate her forehand jumping an extra foot when it hits the clay. Her backhand is a crisp drive. Her volleys will land in the very last place I want them to land. Two of the women are similar in that they have really excellent backhands, though one hits with marginally more spin on that side. The one with the spinny backhand has a tendency to smother her forehand. The other with the flatter backhand makes more errors into the net, but her forehand is flexible and very consistent. The one with the flatter backhand also has a very good overhead. There is sometimes a shorter, older guy who plays with us. His form is not great, but he is very good at getting the ball back, and putting it in some uncomfortable places. And he has a tendency to get back balls that you think are done, so that you have to back pedal just when you’ve set your feet. There is a taller guy who plays with us too, who will one day have great form. The forehand is big. Dense. The backhand is floaty. But he is very fast. They are all very fast, actually, so that I have to be on my toes when I hit a slice because when I think the point is over, they’ve gotten to it and sent it back in my direction. On the whole, I would say the vibe is different, but fun, energetic.

I signed up for the weekly clinics at Sutton East because the courts of Central Park close for the fall and winter, and I didn’t want to go a long time without playing again. Since 2023, I’ve taken five or so sessions of group classes in Central Park, where there is also a fascinating social topology at work. There are almost never any men in the group lessons in Central Park at the times I play. I told a group of friends at dinner once that Central Park tennis divides very neatly between second wives and first wives. The second wives are always in athleisure. They are in their mid-thirties or a little older, but not very much. They are late to playing tennis, but athletic, interested in learning. The older coaches, almost all male, flirt with them. They smile behind their sunglasses, passively accepting the flirtation, offering nothing back.

The first wives are older, the youngest in their mid-forties, but mostly early-fifties and older. Similar to Sutton East, their strokes are hideous, but efficient and flat. They play as though they’ve been at it for decades. They are specialists in doubles. They know all sorts of rules. They have the coaches’ games memorized. King and Queen of the court, 0-5-10, Offense-Defense. They know every conceivable method of warming up and mini-tennis. They wear stiff skirts and sensible sneakers. They talk about schools by first name like discussing old friends. They wear sunglasses. Sunscreen. They do not check their phones on changeovers. They walk with excellent posture, and slap their thighs in frustration. They tell the coaches when they find the drills boring. They talk back. They complain about the pace of class not being fast enough. They ask for different drills. They are in control. They do not take sessions with the older male coaches. They only take sessions with the younger guys, tall, fit lads from Africa or the Caribbean. They take classes with their friends. Some groups have been going on for longer than some of the coaches having been playing tennis.

If you show up and you’re in a group of first wives, prepare yourself. They mean business.

In November, I joined a UTR Flex League through UTR Sports. UTR stands for Universal Tennis Rating, and the platform began as an attempt to create a tennis rating scheme that could transcend international borders. The rating scheme runs from 1.0 to 16.50, and it involves an algorithm performing some set of weighted evaluations on your UTR-sanctioned match results to assign you a rating. I wasn’t interested in the rating per se. I just wanted to be in a league. The UTR Flex League allows you to join a group of players in your relative area. The admins of each Flex League sort you into groups based on relative skill level and you duke it out in a set up matches across a set number of weeks.

I joined the flex league in part because I felt like I was reaching the end of the social utility of bonding with people in my clinics and also because I wanted to understand how my tennis game held up under the pressure of competition. I also thought it would be nice to meet more people through tennis and maybe even scope out some new places to play or even get some people to play matches against. I played four matches over four weeks and had a 2-2 record. I found out things about myself, like, I have a tendency to spiral and lose focus. I sometimes piss away winnable matches. I discovered many things about my psychological frailty. But also, it was nice to know what it feels like to be nervous. The physical immediacy of having to problem solve in real time. How cold and numb my hands get when I’m thinking really hard. But also how good it feels to blast a ball by an opponent set-point down. That sort of thing.

I am not a competitive person by nature anymore, I don’t think, but something about keeping score brings a different of stakes to life. There is an urgency to the play then. When you know precisely how screwed you are going to be if you get broken serving to stay in a set, it really puts somethings into perspective.

Throughout all of this, I tried a lot of racquets over the past couple years. Tennis grip sizes run from Size 0 to Size 5, and they move from 4 inches to 4 5/8 inches. The smallest head size you are likely to find in stores is 95 square inches, though 98 is more common. The largest head size you’re likely to find is somewhere between 100 and 120 square inches. 120 sq.in. used to be more common, but there’s been some retraction at the top-end of the field. 100 sq.in. is a pretty common headsize these days, especially among recreational players.

In general, the smaller the size of the racquet head, the less powerful but more controlled the racquet is. Also, the less forgiving of off-center hits because the “sweet spot” is smaller and harder to hit from suboptimal positions. By contrast, the larger the racquet head, the more power you can generate across a wider surface of the racquet, meaning a more generous sweet spot relative to smaller head sizes. This comes at the cost of control and precision and feel. Larger racquets are also sometimes harder to maneuver and get through the air, so you sacrifice a bit of spin and finesse.

Other things to consider in a racquet are weight and stiffness. Weight means two things usually, both static weight (the mass of the racquet when it’s still) and swing weight (how heavy the racquet feels when it moves through the air). Stiffness refers to how readily the racquet bends—a very bendy racquet might be comfortable but it will be weaker because bending loses energy and this means that less of the energy of your stroke is transferred to the ball while a stiff racquet will give you a more powerful shot but result in more discomfort.

That’s not even including the strings and different considerations in picking an ideal string set up. Do you want poly? Multifilament? Nylon? Natural Gut? A hybrid? What tension? It can be as complicated as you like. Or as uncomplicated. But at the start of my tennis journey last year, I wanted to really understand myself, so I started from scratch, racquet and all, to figure what I needed and what I wanted.

In March 2023, I bought a Pro Staff 97 v. 13 and an Ezone 98, both Grip Size 2 because I’d always wanted to try a smaller grip size and because I have a one-handed backhand. I really liked the Pro Staff 97. It has a slender beam and a high stiffness rating. The 97 square-inch head emphasizes control while its heaviness and stiffness gives it a kind of crisp power. It is an attacking frame, suited for people who are always moving forward. It’s not necessarily the best frame if you are defensive or trying to absorb power. It is also particularly unforgiving on off-center hits, meaning that if you are scrambling to throw up a lob or catch a ball late or reach for it, you are not going to get a ton of power and almost no spin, leading to a lot of easy balls for your opponent.

But man, when you’re in the zone, there’s nothing like it. With that racquet, I felt like I was carving away at the other player’s defense and creating opening sthrough which I could drive winners. I favored a kind of down the line drive on that racquet. There isn’t a ton of free spin or free anything in the Pro Staff 97. You really have to know what you’re doing to use it, and if your concentration lapses for even a moment, the ball is simply not going to do anything you had hoped.

The Ezone 98 was interesting too, more control-oriented than its 100-square-inch sibling. Perhaps this was down to the grip size, but the racquet fluttered a lot in my hands. I didn’t really feel as though I could drive through the ball. It lacked the weight of the Pro Staff 97 and also its directional control. As a result, I kind of fell away from using it and for many months, the Pro Staff 97 was my main stick.

Then I tried the Babolat Pure Strike, but it was too stiff for me. I couldn’t get the ball to go anywhere I wanted. I had virtually no directional control, and I didn’t really know what the racquet was for, actually. Was it for spin? Control? Power? I have never experienced such incompatibility with a racquet before or since, and I think I must have used it a grand total of two times before I put it away forever. However, using that stick taught me something important. I got it in a size 4 grip, which is 4 ½ inches, and it felt immediately much more comfortable in my hands than my staff and my Ezone 98.

In May 2024, inspired by an impending trip to Paris, I bought a Tecnifibre TF-X1. At the time, I was into their aesthetic, and also, I had just bought a string of control racquets with 98-inch heads and wanted something with more power and forgiveness. It’s not that my tennis wasn’t evolving, it’s just that I wanted something that could give me freer access to pace and spin. At the time, I was playing with a lot of big hitting guys with dad bods and hatred in their eyes and sleek, gray-haired dudes with incredibly flat strokes, and I needed the help.

It's odd, because I had the TF-X1 strung with a muted string and didn’t love it, honestly, at first. In Paris, I took a lesson with a hitting pro, and I almost immediately switched to my favored Pro Staff 97. I just didn’t know how to hit with a power frame, so I shied away from it. But this would not be the end of my relationship to the TF-X1.

When I returned from Paris, I was still in pursuit of racquets with more power behind them. So I tried were a Babolat Pure Aero 98 and a Babolat Pure Aero 100. As a lifelong hater of Rafael Nadal, I was hesitant to go with a Babolat racquet. It felt like a betrayal of Roger Federer. But the reviews for the Pure Aero made it seem like it might suit my game. So I tried them, and honestly…I really love them. The Pure Aero 98 and Pure Aero 100 are in many ways the same racquet, but also, not at all the same. The Pure Aero 98 is an absolutely lethal racquet that rewards swift, brutal swings and decisive action. It is an attacking racquet with some flair on the defense. The biggest downside to the Pure Aero 98 is that it punishes you for cowardice. If you slow your swing or if you hesitate, the ball dies on you. Into the net or a short, easily attackable ball for your opponent. You need to commit with the Pure Aero 98, and it reveals all of your timorousness to you. The Pure Aero 100 is simply a ballbashers dream. If you get under the ball just a little bit, you can almost guarantee the ball will dip in at the last moment. It’s so easy to create spin and space. If you find yourself scrambling, just getting the string bed on any part of the ball will get you pretty much back to neutral. Never has my defense been more total than with the Pure Aero 100. The problem is that it tricks you into thinking you’re better than you are, and so, well, if you don’t exercise a little restraint, you can start hemorrhaging errors and free points.

I thought I was pretty much settled on the Pure Aero, but then over the summer, in August, it was announced that Roger Federer had a new line of racquets coming out, specially designed by him with the Wilson team. This would be different from his RF Autograph Pro Staff and wouldn’t just be a slight tinkering of an existing racquet stock. This was a totally new entry into the market, rare for tennis.

Like everyone else on earth, I awaited the release. I was in Stockholm, taking lessons on a slick indoor court, hitting with a Pro Staff two grip sizes too small, when the racquet finally became available. I would be going back to the States soon and didn’t know if I had the luggage space to take it back. So I ordered the RFs to be sent to my apartment in NYC. I got both the RF 01 Pro and the RF 01 standard, in Grip Size 4, my now favored grip.

Now, because I am me and this is an essay written in 2024, in an arid secular era of the non-epiphany, when all capacity for hope and wonder have been stripped out of the world by the eradicating impulses of capitalism, you are probably expecting one of two things: (1) that hitting with the special Roger Federer racquets was really disappointing and anticlimactic or (2) that hitting with them was okay, but I still preferred the Babolat.

Well.

Actually, the RF racquets were really amazing, and the RF 01 Pro became my main stick. How to describe the experience of the RF01 racquets. Like its ancestor, the Pro Staff, the RF01 is putatively a control racquet. It specializes in precise placement more than overwhelming force or dizzying spin. The racquet gives a pure, dense ball with a low angle darting over the net. The RF01 Pro is heavier, being a player’s frame, and offers unmatched stability and heft, allowing more power if you’re up to the task of swinging it. Unlike the Pro Staff, the larger headsize and undulating beam width makes the racquet much more amenable to spin and off-center hits. In my hands, I find the string bed very responsive and very even-tempered. When I dump the ball into the net or overcook a short ball, I know exactly why I’ve failed. There isn’t anything between me and the ball with the RF01s. I know exactly what I need to do and when I don’t do it, I know that I will fail. You feel like you’re constantly on the knife’s edge when you’re using the RF01.

I prefer the Pro model, honestly. I think all that time swinging the Pro Staff around has given me a taste for the beefy boys. But also, that racquet just swings so beautiful, and when you’re on, knifing approaches off short balls and killing the volley, you really do feel like you’re slashing your way through the opponent. It’s basically point and shoot sometimes, with the RF01 Pro.

But it’s heavy. And I played too much tennis, and in October, I played a guy who hit the ball so hard and so deep so often that I popped something in my arm. I felt first heat, then agony, and then a racing cold numbness down to the tips of my fingers, and then my wrist began to ache. For days, it ached. Low, unremittent, sometimes flaring into sharp, tingling pain. I was recently diagnosed with tedonitis. My first injury.

Anyway, I wasn’t up to the task of swinging the RF01 Pro, so I swtched to the Babolat Pure Aero 100, which is lighter by some margin. But it just doesn’t have the same punch as my preferred stick, even with softer strings.

Then I thought, maybe…the TF-X1 300. I had ordered a new version, this one with a Size 3 grip—there are so few size 4 grips of this racquet around—and tried it in a few of my flex league matches. I really loved it. I got great pop off the ball. Such easy power. I could scramble and get balls back without having to flex my wrist too much. It became a good multi-use stick. And I’ve been carrying it with me every time I play so that in case my wrist starts hurting, I can switch off.

When I started playing my league matches, I had too many racquets, too many options. The two matches I lost, I lost because I was trying too hard to problem solve my hurting wrist and my shaky play by going from the Babolat with this string to the Wilson with that string, etc. But the two matches I won, I won in part because I used the TF-X1, with its generosity and power. When I went to Drill&Play, I used that racquet because it was forgiving and easy to get control and spin. The racquet I had rejected earlier in the year became a site of respite for me as I recovered from an injury, and it was the racquet that won me my two matches.

I managed to not buy any more racquets until very recently, meaning in the last week or so, when I was looking for something just a little easier on my arm in case my tedonitis takes a long time to clear. I got another Tecnifibre racquet, a TFight-300, based on a model used by Daniil Medvedev. It’s another 98-inch square model. But wow, what a comfortable frame. What easiness of control and spin. I also got an Ezone 100 after Demoing it because I love how easy it is to spin my serve in, and the power is really something else. I also got a Head Gravity, for the control and heaviness of shot. It’s also pretty comfortable. I’m entering my comfort era.

So, what have I learned about my tennis through all of this playing and experimenting. It all came to a head this past weekend. I went upstate to a place called Total Tennis, and I stayed from Sunday to Tuesday afternoon. On Monday, we played tennis for five hours, basically, with three hours on Tuesday morning. We did drills, games, we hit so many balls. Our teaching pros gave us really granular feedback and insight into our technique and games. I thought I would get a lot of corrections, but I didn’t get a ton. I did get small adjustments to hitting form and htings to keep in mind. On the whole, the coaches liked my swing. It was just a matter of timing and seeing the ball more clearly. I felt relieved in a lot of ways, at Total Tennis, because for the first time, I was able to just wail on the ball and see how hard I could hit and with how much control. I think the biggest take away for me was that I self-throttle. I hold back. I don’t swing out, which makes my arm tight and robs me of power.

I’ve always thought of myself as being rather underpowered, but the coaches helped me to see that part of why I’ve gravitated to control frames over the years is that I’m looking for a way to take some of my natural power away. And that if I learned to just add a bit more spin, I could modulate my own strength. I also realized that I was flattening my shots out unnecessarily. Basically, I learned more about my innate capacity for spin and depth. I learned that I had good directional control, and that changing direction was actually a bit of a specialty for me. Also absorbing pace and changing speed in rallies. All of this is useful information to have about yourself.

I also thought that they would “fix my serve” but they actually told me my serve is very good and what I need to do is learn to back it up with my ground game. To believe in my serve and to go after it more rather than holding myself back.

I should mention something about stringing here, but already this piece is too long. What I will say is that I found a stringing set up I really liked, Yonex Polytour Spin in the mains and Yonex Polytour Pro in the crosses, both at 47lbs. It’s a stringing set up favored by Casper Ruud, a Norwegian player. I really love Ruud. He is the epitome of some guy, the most normal of players. He favors the string set up because it gives big spin, and in my experience, this has been true. I remember the first time I tried it in the RF01 Pro, the ball was dipping like crazy. At 47lbs, it’s not too stiff.

I am thinking, though, that I may go up to 52lbs, to get some control back. The tighter the string, the more control but less power. The looser, the more power, but less control. For poly strings, you can string looser and still it plays as though it were strung tighter. Especially modern polys. But the issue is that they are muted and they can sometimes lead to injury, as is perhaps my case. But maybe that’s just from overuse. I don’t know.

In July, I got more serious about tennis to try to make new friends because I thought that would save my life. I don’t know that I made new friends. And at least in one case, I lost a friend. Or gave up a friend, I should say. So in that sense, the grand tennis experiment was a failure. I am as lonely as I was before. I still am typing this newsletter lying in my bed, pantless, alone, listening to the rain pummel New York. Upstate at Total Tennis, there were four of us: a married couple, a married woman, and me, and they often talked about their children, their lives, their families. While I was just myself. After we finished our tennis camp, bonded and friendly, they drove back to the city and their families. My Uber cancelled on me and I had to get a ride from a teaching Pro.

On the way to the Rhinecliff station from Saugerties, he asked, “You come up by yourself?”

“Yes,” I said. “Solo.”

“Yeah,” he said, but didn’t add anything else. I knew what he meant. It’s how I feel in the city, too. By myself. Alone among married people or people looking to soon-ish be married, coupled. I sometimes feel like the last of a species. Though I know I am not the only single person. Anyway, I felt a special kind of loneliness up there. It was fine, for the most part. I’ve gotten used to it. Tennis didn’t cure my loneliness. But I did come to understand myself more deeply and thoroughly. I discovered a whole new set of preferences and ideas about myself. I got better, guys. I got so much better at tennis.

Next year, I’ll do it again.

b