(4 of 10)
Why sex and tennis are so often a flammable mixture lies partly in the intricate and marvelous nature of tennis itself. It is a game, one of the very few, that can accommodate in one match on one court a fair range of differing skills. Few sports can equal its sweetness—when one's timing is on and all's right with the world. No player easily forgets the delirious thwop as racquet perfectly connects with ball, or those tigerish moments when even a hacker happily coils himself under a sun-touched, softly falling lob, certain that this time—for once—he is going to pulverize it with an overhand smash, and then watch the dust kick up near the helpless enemy's baseline.
But tennis is treacherous. A golf ball just lies there while the player, lost in private concentration, slowly gathers himself to address it. Ping Pong strokes go so fast that the point is over before the player knows it. Besides, a week's solid practice will make a competent and more or less reliable Ping Ponger out of almost anybody. Not so tennis. Except for the backhand, its strokes are unnatural motions. Both ball and player are always on the move, and each individual shot is very much in public view. Every tennis player, from pro to patballer, is haunted by the knowledge that suddenly, for no discernible reason, his forehand may forget its cunning. Many games, sets and matches may pass before it can be relied on again.
How to explain (and correct) inexplicable disaster lies at the heart of primitive religion, superstition and the game of tennis. A litany of familiar player excuses is more often offered ritually beforehand, to ward off evil, than as ex post forehand exculpations.* After the fact, of course, if a convenient scapegoat exists, too many tennis players will make use of him/her—whence some of the agony of mixed doubles.
The precariousness of tennis and the high visibility of tennis players are only contributing reasons why the game is so intense and unsettling. According to one of New York's tennis-loving psychiatrists who has watched friends please or torment each other on her private court for 30 years, tennis is a kind of vortex for assorted inner and outer stresses. "In neurology, there is the concept of the final common pathway: a vast, branchy tree of nerves with impulses flowing down into a narrow trunk." Tennis is a final common pathway. All sorts of personal and psychic stresses converge in it. All sorts of personalities come into conflict with others and with themselves, all sorts of characters are on display.