The Tennis Player from Bermuda

by Fiona Hodgkin

  THE TENNIS PLAYER FROM BERMUDA

  The

  TENNIS PLAYER

  From

  BERMUDA

  FIONA HODGKIN

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  BERMUDA

  AUGUST 1961

  CORAL BEACH & TENNIS CLUB

  PAGET PARISH, BERMUDA

  I tossed the tennis ball high and out, cocked my wooden racket deep behind my shoulder, went up on my toes, whipped the racket forward, slammed the ball and ran toward the net.

  Rachel Martin – Mrs Martin to someone my age – returned my service with her forehand, hard and low, to my feet.

  I was already into the deuce service court alongside my father, and I bent down, so low my right knee was almost on the clay, and half volleyed, a bit too high, but angled away from Mrs Martin toward her husband, who was her mixed doubles partner. Usually, I would hit to the woman in mixed doubles, but Mrs Martin was a much stronger player than her husband. Earlier that summer, she had been a finalist in the Bermuda ladies’ singles championship match. So when I could, I hit to Mr Martin.

  He got his racket on it, just barely, and hit to my father in the ad service court, but I yelled “Mine!” and backhanded a hard volley straight down the centerline between the Martins. Our point.

  Father bent his head down beside my cheek. “Rachel’s forehand is so good. Why serve to it? It’s match point, let’s be careful,” he said quietly. I didn’t tell him what I thought, which was that I could volley her returns from either wing easily. He would regard that as cheeky. Instead, I smoothed down my tennis skirt and whispered, “I’ll go down the middle to Mr Martin.”

  I went back to the baseline. I saw Father line up a bit closer to the far side. He was trying to fool the Martins into thinking that I would go wide again. I didn’t bounce the white ball. Mrs Martin felt that bouncing the ball before serving was an affectation and had told me not to do it. I just set up, tossed, served, and ran forward. My serve hit the tape on the service line exactly and skidded a bit before coming up. Mr Martin bobbled his return and hit a lob, high but not deep.

  “Mine!” I yelled. I backed up a few steps, set up, left index finger picking out the ball against the Bermuda sky, right elbow up, racket head brushing my back, kicked my left leg out for balance, and swung hard – what Bud Collins would call a ‘skyhook.’ The ball went fast down the line between the Martins. Neither of them got near it.

  Game, set, and match to Dr. Hodgkin and his daughter, Fiona. I was 18, and that summer I was the ladies’ singles tennis champion of Bermuda.

  JULY 1957

  CORAL BEACH & TENNIS CLUB

  PAGET PARISH, BERMUDA

  My parents both loved tennis and played often, usually at the Coral Beach & Tennis Club on South Road, but they were not what today we would call ‘tennis parents.’ I was their only child, and they began teaching me to play when I was perhaps five or six. The thought of pushing me to play tennis would not have entered their minds. I never had a paid coach; my parents would have felt that paying for a coach was unsporting and Not Done. Still, I loved tennis from the start. I just wasn’t good. Father and I would play as mixed doubles partners on weekends and have great fun. When I served, even though I would hit a child’s puffball over the net, Father would yell, “Come up, come up! Don’t stay back!”

  In July of 1957, I had just turned 14, and on my own I entered a girls’ tournament at Coral Beach. I had never played in a tournament before. I knew all the girls who had entered, and perhaps one of my friends said she would enter if I would as well. In any event, I entered.

  Private autos had been legal in Bermuda since just after the second war, but my parents, like many Bermuda families, did not own an auto until the mid-1960s or so. We rode pedal bikes, or took the ferries or the bus when we moved around. So my friends and I cycled to Coral Beach on a Saturday morning for the tournament, with our rackets in the baskets of our bikes.

  I played two matches in the morning and won both. The Club served us lunch – cheese sandwiches and Coca-Cola – on the terrace above the courts along South Road. Then, after lunch, I was to play Sara Martin.

  Sara was further along in puberty than me – I was quite envious of her – and larger and stronger. I didn’t know this at the time, but Sara’s mother, Rachel Martin, had played at Wimbledon in 1939, the last Wimbledon before the war. As a 14-year-old in Bermuda in 1957, it’s possible I hadn’t yet heard of Wimbledon.

  Sara blasted me off the court. I would serve and run to the net, and Sara would easily hit the ball past me. She won 6-0, 6-0. Sara went ahead to play two more matches and win the girls’ side of the tournament. Her mother had taught her to play tennis well.

  Later that afternoon, I was sitting on a metal folding chair in the ladies’ dressing room at Coral Beach. I had my head in my hands. I was sobbing because I couldn’t bear losing. Mrs Martin walked into the dressing room, looking for me.

  “Miss Hodgkin, why are you crying?” I looked up at her but couldn’t answer. She was wearing a simple, white tennis dress that looked so old it was almost ragged. Just above her left breast, a small, faded Bermuda flag was sewn onto the dress.

  “Your father has ruined your game by making you play mixed doubles with him. Come to the net, that’s all you do.”

  I was still sobbing. “I like playing with Father.”

  “In singles, you must stay close to the service line. Don’t come to the net unless the ball lands quite short.”

  “I like coming to the net.”

  Mrs Martin snorted. “You don’t have the service to support a serve and volley game. You have to stay back.”

  I kept sobbing.

  “Stand up,” she said. She reached down and took hold of my arm. “We’re going down to the courts.”

  She marched me down the steps to the lower courts. No one else was there; the tournament was over. The only bicycles leaning against the wall were Mrs Martin’s and mine. She picked a tennis ball up off the court.

  “Toss this,” she said.

  “I don’t have my racket.”

  “I didn’t ask you to hit it. I want you to toss it.”

  I tossed the ball, and it landed at my feet.

  “Pathetic. It went straight over your head.”

  She reached under her tennis dress and pulled out a ball she had tucked into her tennis knickers. She raised her left arm with the ball in her hand, and when her arm was fully extended, she simply opened her fingers and let the ball’s momentum carry it up. The ball went up about two meters and landed well out into the court.

  “Like that,” she said.

  “But I can’t – ” She interrupted. “Toss it.”

  I did.

  “Better. Again.” I tossed another ball. “Higher. Farther out.” I tossed again. “Better.”

  “But I can’t hit it that high and out!”

  She glared at me. She must dislike me, I thought, but I had no idea why.

  “If you want to follow your serve in, you’ll have to toss the ball high and out, and then extend your arm to hit it. You’re not strong enough to do it any other way. Now try tossing it high and out and then hitting it.”

  I found my racket. I stood at the baseline. The sky was the blue that you see only in Bermuda. There was a farmer in a horse-drawn cart, slowly moving along South Road. Other than the hooves of the farmer’s horse clopping on the road, and the barely audible waves landing on Coral Beach far behind me, the court was silent. Mrs Martin looked grimly at me. I set up,
took the white ball and tossed it.

  I drew my feet together and whipped my arm forward and out. I pulled the racket through as hard as I could and hit the ball with all my weight. The ball skidded on the tape of the service line of the opposite service court and then hit the concrete block wall at the back of the court, just under South Road. It ricocheted high in the air and finally landed back in the court. I turned to look at Mrs Martin.

  She looked back at me for a few moments. It was as though I had confirmed something bad about myself that she had already suspected, but I had no idea what it could be.

  “Like that,” she said finally. She said nothing more, turned on her heel, took her bike and left.

  I was alone on the courts. I gathered about twenty balls that I found on the courts and practiced my serve until dusk came. Then I rode my bike home.

  A week or so later, Mrs Martin called Mother and arranged to play tennis with me one afternoon. Over the next four years, until I left the island for college at Smith, we played tennis with one another four or five times a week, and more often during school holidays, but she usually arranged these meetings through Mother.

  Mrs Martin was careful to avoid any appearance that she was coaching me; that was Not Done. For boys on a football or cricket team, yes. For a young lady like me playing tennis, no.

  But she was coaching me, though her style of coaching was unorthodox. She cared nothing for drills or exercises. We warmed up – she called it ‘knocking up’ – for ten minutes, and then we played a match. After a year or so, I would sometimes win one of the first two sets and then we would play out three sets.

  She cared little about the form of my strokes, whether I was using an Eastern grip or was simply hanging on the racket handle any way I could. Occasionally, she would reach over the net and twist my racket in my hand, or bend my elbow up and say, “Like that.”

  She was reserved and quiet, and I eventually realized that she was extremely shy. She spoke little and had almost no sense of humor. She took the game of tennis with a deadly seriousness.

  The first time we played, I either hit the ball into the net or made some other error, and I said out loud, “Oh, no!” At the next changeover, she was drying her hands with a towel when she said softly, “Never speak or make an unnecessary noise during play. It is unfairly distracting to your opponent.”

  I slowly learned that what fascinated her was strategy, although she never would have used that word. During one changeover, she asked, “Why did you lose that last point?”

  She had made a backhand winner that she hit so hard any full-grown, accomplished player would have struggled to reach and return. I had no chance whatsoever. “Your shot was too good.”

  “No.” She picked up a ball by pinching it between her tennis shoe and her racket head, popping it up into the air and catching it with her left hand. She tossed it into the court. It landed just beyond the service line and about half a meter inside the sideline. “That’s where your shot landed.” She popped up another ball and then tossed it. The ball bounced exactly on the baseline. “If your shot had landed there, my return probably wouldn’t have been a winner. I would have returned the ball, certainly.” She looked at the court, and I could sense that she was replaying her shot in her mind. “Possibly a winner. But unlikely.”

  “You mean I lost because my shot was too short?”

  “In part. But why was it short?”

  “I should have hit it harder.”

  “No. Where were you when you hit the ball?”

  I pointed in the general direction of the deuce service box on my side of the court. “There.” I had no idea where I had been in the box.

  “No.” She popped up another ball and threw it softly into the deuce box. It bounced precisely on the centerline two meters back from the net. “You were there. Let’s resume play.”

  I had already learned it was useless to ask her to explain.

  One rainy afternoon, when we couldn’t play tennis, I walked over to Mrs Martin’s house and knocked on the screen door to her kitchen. She let me in, made me a cup of tea and sat at her kitchen table. I sat beside her. Mrs Martin took out a scrap of paper and a pencil and began drawing a rough diagram of a tennis court, with lines showing the paths a ball might follow.

  “After being struck by the racket, the ball gradually begins to slow,” Mrs Martin said. “But it slows at a faster rate before it goes over the net.”

  “Why?”

  “Air resistance is proportional to the square of the speed of the ball. There’s much more air resistance when the ball is traveling faster.”

  “Oh.”

  She sat quietly looking at her drawing of a court.

  I asked, “What if I put topspin on the ball?” I had just learned how to make the ball spin, and I had been experimenting with this new skill.

  “Because of the Magnus effect, topspin makes the ball curve sharply down to the court.”

  “Oh.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “A ball that spins in the direction of its travel creates a whirlpool of air and is forced downward. Isaac Newton realized this in 1672 while he was watching tennis at Trinity College, Cambridge. Real tennis, of course. Lawn tennis wasn’t invented until the 1870s.”

  I’d never heard of ‘real tennis’, which later I learned had been played on enclosed courts for centuries.

  For that matter, I’d barely heard of Isaac Newton.

  She continued. “The spin of the ball affects its trajectory, not its speed. Until it bounces.”

  “What about after it bounces?”

  Mrs Martin shrugged. “Depends on the court. On grass, there’s not much friction between the ball and the grass, so the bounce doesn’t slow the ball much. On clay, there’s more friction and the ball slows more. Grass is a fast court, clay is a slow court.”

  “With topspin, I feel the ball doesn’t slow after the bounce.”

  “It slows, usually. Just not as much as a ball hit flat, without spin.”

  “Why not?”

  “When a ball hits the court, friction slows the bottom of the ball but not the top, so the ball begins to spin in the direction of its travel. But a ball hit with topspin is already spinning in that direction. So friction converts less of the speed of the ball into spin.”

  I was fascinated. “How do you know all this?”

  “I thought about it a great deal when I was your age.”

  “Oh.”

  She took the scrap of paper on which she had drawn a court and drew an ‘X’ on the ad court baseline, right at the corner with the sideline.

  “That’s you.”

  Then she drew two lines, one following the ad court sideline, across the net, and down the deuce court sideline of the opposite court, and the second going crosscourt over the net to the ad court baseline.

  “You would hit down the sideline,” she said, pointing to the first line, “when your opponent is out of position. Here. Or here.” She drew two ‘Os,’ one on the ad side of the baseline, the other in the ad service court. “From these positions, your opponent might not reach a down the line shot.”

  Then Mrs Martin asked, “Where would you hit when your opponent is well positioned?”

  “I know!” I practically yelled. “I would hit crosscourt, and I know why, too. Father told me. The net is lower in the center, and a crosscourt ball goes over the center of the net.”

  She snorted. “Incorrect.”

  I was crestfallen.

  “Miss Hodgkin, I spoke without thinking. I did not mean to sound as though I was contradicting your father.”

  “It’s all right. But the net is lower in the center. Doesn’t that make it an easier shot?”

  “Which of the two lines I’ve drawn is longer? Down the line? Or crosscourt?”

  I put my finger on the crosscourt line.

  “Correct. It’s longer by more than a meter, but both crosscourt segments are longer. The segment before the line intersects the net is longer,
as is the segment after the intersection.”

  I was mystified.

  “Over which segment does the ball slow at a faster rate?”

  I put my finger on the segment before the intersection with the net.

  “Correct. So you’re hitting the ball a longer distance, and it’s slowing at a faster rate before it reaches the net.”

  She paused. “When I was your age, I spent weeks at Coral Beach, on the court by myself, hitting balls and thinking about this problem. The net is lower in the center, which is an advantage to hitting crosscourt, but this advantage is basically negated by the greater force and the wider angle of attack needed to make the ball travel a longer distance and still clear the net.”

  “So I should hit down the line?”

  “No, not when your opponent is well positioned. You were correct to say that crosscourt is the proper shot in that situation. It just doesn’t have anything to do with the height of the net.”

  “So why do I hit crosscourt?”

  “Because the second segment of the crosscourt line is also longer.”

  “You mean the segment after the net?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Because a longer line crosses a larger area.” She put her finger on her drawing. “Look at all this space in the ad court you have to make a crosscourt shot.”

  “So I should hit crosscourt to just within the lines?”

  “No.”

  “Father told me to aim about half a meter inside the lines, to be safe.”

  “I told Sara the same,” Mrs Martin said. “But I want you to aim for the outer edge of the line. Not the line itself – the outer edge.”

  “Why?”

  Mrs Martin had a pained expression on her face; I worried that something must be wrong.

  Finally, quietly, she answered. “Because you are one of only two girls I’ve ever seen with the natural ability to hit the exact outer edge of the line, almost every time.”