Episode 9: Tennis Saved My Life
And How a Bully Gave Me the Courage to Save It
Hi friends,
Thanks for continuing to subscribe and share my work. If you haven’t seen it yet, Episode 7 was featured as part of Unlocked’s first issue, which was a pleasant surprise. Unlocked is a monthly newsletter of BIPOC, Global Indigenous, and POC voices, curated by
, , and , and I was so honored to be part of their inaugural issue. There is some amazing work in the first issue, so please do check it out.I also recently turned on paid subscriptions. Right now, that means you can support this newsletter for $7 a month. In the future, archives, audio voice-overs and other features will be available only to paid subscribers, but for now everyone will be able to access everything. So if you like what you are reading, feel free to support my work (but you do not have to).
Vivek.
Life in high school swirled around obsession: crushes, grades, and trying to master the kick serve. I would play tennis almost every day with the team or with friends on the weekends. Our team consisted of others mostly like me: white, asian, or desi. I played comfortably in my deep brown skin; but it wasn’t always like that.
Like many American children, baseball was my first sport, and like many it was disastrous. My memory of this time in late elementary school is raw, cobbled together from a faded team picture where I wore the yellow baseball hat, emblazoned with a big black “P” for the Padres, and the hat itself, its formerly vibrant yellow browned from years of dust.
Baseball was not for me. When I played, the coach would put me far out on the outfield and when I was up to bat, I inevitably struck out.
Minutes before one game I learned that my parents couldn’t come so the coach had to pick me up. I cried before going, sniffled in the cab of his truck on the way over, and unleashed tears in the outfield. The pang of embarassment or finger-pointing never crossed my mind. I think I cried not only because my parents weren’t there, but because the field and the glove and the hat never felt right and I had to face that all alone.
I wonder now if its because all the kids on my team weren’t like me. Or because I wasn’t like them.
After baseball, I saw my way through middle school via cross country. Because of my dad’s job, we moved a lot, from one state in one suburb to another. Before we lived in Augusta where I went to high school, we lived in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. And the middle school there had a cross country team. We would run for miles across sidewalks, over bridges, and through neighborhoods. We would obsess over the latest Brooks and Nikes, seeing whose parents bought which shoes for whom. The team had white kids, black kids, and brown kids. I found myself with the kids of color but I so wanted to skew the other way.
I was one of the few desis at the school, and I remember when another desi girl joined the school in my grade, everyone would say oh she smells like curry, you should date her. I eventually went by her locker and took a whiff and thought even her locker smells like curry and promptly fled.
This was a time when I so intensely felt like being white would be the answer to most things. But this was also a time when our family would move across country with only a few months notice. Everything felt temporary and I yearned for permanence. Maybe that’s why I wanted to be different, believing that would solve everything.
This was also when a bully picked on me in gym class. At the end of the school year, I had finally gathered the nerve to ask my fellow nerdy friends to help me, and when that bully was behind me on the stairs going down to the locker room one day, I turned around to throw a punch towards his big, white face.
I don’t remember if I actually made contact with the boy. But I remember the brouhaha afterwards: running away as fast as I could, my friends holding him back. He never bothered me after that.
By the time I starting playing tennis in high school, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras’ rivalry was everywhere. I studied Sampras’ serve, how he clenched the ball a little longer, and a little tighter, against the racket just before pointing towards the service box, throwing up the ball as he arched his back just before striking. Yet even though I mimicked Sampras, I loved Agassi. I don’t think I knew that he was part Armenian and part Assyrian, but I could see that he was not unlike me. And he had the best outfits. And the best sneakers. So I followed him closely. But Sampras was always there.
I was not nearly as good as some of the others on my high school team. I wasn’t consistent and my second serve involved as much force as a pat on the back, but I tried and I liked playing with the same friends that were on the math and science teams with me.
My high school was in Evans, Georgia, which as a suburb of Augusta, hosted a famous sporting event: The Masters. I didn’t get the big deal about the Masters at the time, but my friends would fantasize about spending their spring break working in concession stands at the event to make a ton of cash. I would never do this since I despised golf, associating it with the rich white kids at our school who comprised the golf club, their braces gleaming in the sunlight as they cut school to make tee time.
By the time I made the tennis team, I became aware of my mixed privilege. On the one hand, I took tennis lessons at an expensive country club, going nearly every week alongside other desi kids. Yet, when my parents bought me a giant igloo water bottle with a handle so that I could take ice cold water to practice, it felt extravagant. Not because they thought hydration wasn’t important, but because we spent weekend mornings cutting shiny coupons from the Sunday newspaper, filing them in alphabetical order so my parents could get the best deals at the cheapest grocery stores.
By the time we moved from Augusta to Texas after graduation, I didn’t feel adrift as I had in elementary or middle school. I was older, but also I felt deeply within my skin, carrying with me memories of playing tennis with other kids not unlike me, all of us trying our best to master that kick serve.