The Handmade Court

86 The Handmade Court Gary Fincke Building a tennis court was a dream I shared with my father. Constructing it ourselves was his dream alone. But it seemed so easy standing beside him in the middle of June on the land he’d just bought that I estimated the end of July, August tops, the two of us would be spinning out lime along the boundaries, getting things ready for play. He had me captive, because tennis was all I had wanted to do since May when I’d reached the quarterfinals of the biggest junior tournament in Pittsburgh, my rocket-flat serve and forehand good enough for the fourteen -and-unders,eventhekidsnearlyayearolder,theonesluckyenough to have birthdays a month or two after the cutoff date of October 1. The nearest house was a hundred yards away up a dirt road, and my father said there weren’t any zoning ordinances that discouraged using your land any way you pleased. “Look at all that clay,” he said, and I agreed it looked like we could hold the just-finished French Open right there on our new property if they had postponed it until September. “And this place is nearly level to begin with. We just push this bank over to there, fill in this low spot here, roll it, get some fence, and we’re in business.” “All right!” I blurted. I was willing to give up a month of my weekends if it meant using shovels and wheelbarrows and the heavy, waterfilled roller that the residents of that nearest house allowed us to store in their garage. This was going to be country club stuff: a clay court, privacy, hours of play without some jerks wearing street shoes telling me and my friends to “get the fuck off the court,” meaning any of the only three public courts in Shaler Township in 1959. A month earlier, my first time in a tournament, I was dressed in plaid swimming trunks and the same white T-shirt I wore under dress shirts on Sunday mornings. Up until that Saturday I’d never worn shorts to play tennis because I didn’t own any. I played in old black chinos faded 87 Gary Fincke to near-white at the knees, mostly with my father, who wore his green work pants to the pay-by-the-hour county courts ten miles from where we lived. I had a pair of high-top tennis shoes, and that first Saturday at a tournament I learned that “tennis shoes” was a figurative expression. I wasn’t allowed on the clay courts where the youngest entries were being shuttled, so I had to wait (and so did my angry opponent) for a default to occur on one of the hard courts so that we could play. Tennis shoes, I was told by the tournament director, had flat soles. They were low-cut and lighter, and they weren’t black like my Keds. I had two tennis rackets at least, the ones my father and mother used. They were right off the discount store counter, pre-strung with string so cheap it shredded into what looked like unraveling cardboard. No one else in the tournament wore shorts that weren’t white. Fourth of July weekend, a couple of days before my fourteenth birthday , I found myself starting the first work I’d ever done that amounted to anything other than earning an extra dessert. As soon as I filled one wheelbarrow and hauled the clay to be dumped, I was sweating. In half an hour I had blisters, and there was no sign of an ice cream break. Because my father’s new property was nearly an hour’s drive each way from our house, once there he was committed to a full day of work. This early in the project, whining was out of the question. The only antidote to pain was planning lines I could use on girls when the muscles that would surely come from the hardest work I’d ever done bulged and rippled beside every swimming pool I could get myself invited to. Where I played tennis with my friends, there were nets with...