The Tennis Player from Bermuda (2 page)

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.”

After I had played tennis with Mrs Martin for a year or so, I asked Mother about Mrs Martin’s tennis career.

“Go ask your father, he knows about it.”

I found Father in our sitting room, where we spent most of our time together as a family in our house – ‘Midpoint,’ it had been named for 200 years or so. There was no air conditioning in private homes in Bermuda at that time, and the sitting room was the coolest part of our house. The incredibly thick masonry walls and our water tank, which collected rainwater from our whitewashed limestone roof, kept it cool. The water tank was just underneath the sitting room and acted as a passive and quite effective cooling system. As in most old Bermuda homes, the plaster ceiling simply followed the inside pitch of the roof, creating the famous Bermuda tray ceiling.

From the windows on the north side of the sitting room we had a spectacular view of Hamilton Harbour below us, which no doubt is why Midpoint had been built in precisely that spot.

Mother and Father kept the back issues of their medical journals stacked on the floor of the sitting room. When Father decided he needed to see an article from an issue of
The Lancet
from a year or so year earlier, he would try to slide it gently out of the stack, but usually the entire stack would come crashing to the floor. In her favorite chair, Mother spent evenings writing notes in her patients’ medical charts, which she kept in neat piles on the floor.

Father said, “Rachel? She was an honor for Bermuda in tennis, before the war. When she played overseas, she would sew a small Bermuda flag on her dress, just above her left breast. That pleased us all.”

He thought for a moment. “Rachel was invited to play at Wimbledon in ‘39, the last championships before the war. She was only about 19 then. Rachel went all the way to the final. She lost in a long match with Alice Marble. It was a chilly, rainy day. Early July, but you know London weather. Rachel pulled on a sweater during the match, but she couldn’t have been comfortable. She wasn’t used to the cold.”

“How do you know it was cold?”

“I was there. I had just begun my medical internship at Guy’s Hospital in London, and Rachel found me a ticket for the players’ box. I got the afternoon off from hospital and took the Tube to Southfields. Rachel had no family in London except me” – Father and Mrs Martin were cousins – “and I thought I should be there for her. I sat beside Teach Tennant, Marble’s coach. Teach is probably the greatest tennis coach ever, except for Rachel.”

“What happened in the match?”

“It lasted from two in the afternoon until it was almost dark. They suspended play, twice, I think, for rain. Difficult conditions. I can’t recall the score, but the last two sets went to extra games. Rachel played so well. She held off several championship points in the third set before she lost. She came close to winning. If the third set had gone on a few more minutes, the umpire would have had to suspend the match for darkness.

“It started to rain again, hard, just after Marble won. Rachel was just standing there, beside the umpire’s chair, in the rain. I went down to the court, but a Coldstream Guardsman stopped me. I told him I was a physician, and he let me through. I walked over to her in the rain. She was crying. The groundskeepers had taken down the net and were pulling the tarp over the court. I told Rachel we needed to get out of the rain, and I led her over to the players’ entrance to Centre Court, just under the Royal Box. Teach was just coming back out. She was looking for Rachel. Teach took Rachel to the ladies’ dressing room.

“The London newspapers were full of it the next morning. Everyone in Bermuda was proud of Rachel. After the war, Rachel and Derek” – Mrs Martin’s husband – “moved to London for some years because of his position with Butterfield’s” – Butterfield’s was our bank in Hamilton – “but by then she had her family and she never went back to international competition.”