Rafa's Getting Older

The first thing I notice is I am the only player without a tennis bag. Everyone else has tennis bags: bags either shaped like rackets or made so the racket has a designated racket-pocket. This is no exaggeration—I am the only player sans tennis bag. My bag is nice, absolutely: an old Nike backpack from my college volleyball days, roomy and gray and official. But it’s stuffed with sweat towels and Gatorades and water bottles and new cans of tennis balls. There's no room for my Babolat. I carry it separately, in the free, flimsy case it came with, already holed at the seam. And in this room of adult recreational tennis players, many of whom seem acquainted through their participation on the USTA Austin-Waco-Dallas tournament circuit, I’m immediately marked as a novice. Or—I mark myself a novice. I feel new. I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I check in and get my free bucket hat. Well—not free. I paid thirty bucks to play in this tournament. But the hat feels free, and that feels good. I thank the young woman at the registration desk, and take my seat in the lobby to wait for my first match. The AC blasts and the French Open plays on the big screen. I don’t pay close attention. Rafael Nadal, or “Rafa,” a favorite since adolescence, is not playing—he withdrew from the tournament a few weeks ago—so I don’t care much about the Open this year. Without a doubles partner or acquaintance to chat with, I pull out a small notebook and scribble observations. A man wraps the grip of his racket in an electric blue, and when he finishes, he springs to his feet, performs a few jumping jacks. The room smells of sunscreen and of cans of tennis balls—coconut, rubber, tin. And tennis bags, everywhere, with every person, most stuffed with multiple rackets. Knotted fingers glide over veined, muscular calves, and I can almost feel the cool burn of menthol on sore muscles. Folks wrap wrists in white tape, or slip braces over a foot and fasten support around an ankle. A woman in what I guess is her fifties makes her way around the room, chatting with friends or acquaintances. She knows the people she talks to, and it seems she knows them through these tennis tournaments. Her voice carries, and I learn from my eavesdropping that she played last weekend in Dallas or Austin or somewhere else, and it was hot then, too. She carries a small dog who also seems like an old pro—relaxed and unbothered, completely used to the hubbub. Throughout the weekend, I’ll see the dog parked in the shade in a stroller near the woman’s court, ears perked toward her raspy voice. 

 As my match gets closer, I jot down mantras and a game plan, though calling what I write a game plan feels silly. I write: first serve in—a priority. Breathing + affirmations lol. Staying light on feet as much as possible. Have fun :) play one point at a time.

Finally, my opponent arrives, there’s a free court, and I’m playing in the sun with no shade. Though it’s still morning, it’s Central Texas in early June, and the temperature nears ninety-five. 

My opponent and I do not talk much during our match. She’s different from the dog woman. She’s not here to chat. It seems she plays tennis often, but tennis weekends are for tennis only. She’s all business. She’s placed her stuff away from the benches, away from my stuff. Away from me. In between games and sets when we switch sides, she retreats to her corner alone, fishes for her water and chilled towel and reapplies sunscreen. I also go to my stuff, alone. I suck water from my jug and wish desperately for a chilled towel of my own, or an ice cube to drag across my face or drop into my sports bra. 

Good news: I can’t bore you with a play-by-play of this match because I can’t remember the details. Here is the match in memory: heat. Wrapped in heat, air so thick with heat and humidity it’s heavy. I do not stay light on my feet—I drag my body around the court, let lots of shots go because I can’t be bothered to move and perform a semblance of hustle. I have another match that afternoon and I know it will only get hotter, so I tell myself I am just conserving my energy. But this is a lie. I’m trying to convince myself of bodily agency. The fact is, I do not force myself to slow—no. My body chooses slow for me. I am not in prime tennis shape, and it’s too hot to fake it. My vision blurs with blue, spikey blobs of static, and in between points I let my hands rest on my knees. I try to breathe deeply and think in affirmations—You’re going to win the next point—but really, I just want to be done. 

Eventually, it’s done. I lose 0-2. I trudge back to my car and drive to the nearest Sonic, inhale a Route 44 iced water and nibble chunks of grilled cheese. My shoulders and hips ache. Goosebumps sprout all over my body, though I haven’t yet cooled down. I have another match in a couple of hours, and I can’t fathom doing it all again. I am exhausted. I am almost embarrassed. The game itself wasn’t too bad—I think I lost 4-6, 3-6. Not terrible. But I remember an old self. A college volleyball player. She used to push her body this hard all the time. Except not really—she pushed her body harder. Or—her body was able to withstand more, and recover more quickly. She was in shape and calloused, physically and mentally. She would have known how to push through, win more points, urge her body to move faster despite the protestations from her feet, hamstrings, arms. She could have still lost—sometimes an opponent’s just better—but she’d be in this car wired, not withered. I, on the other hand, have played one measly, sticky-slow match, and I feel as if I’ve spent every ounce of energy.

Just a year ago, Rafael Nadal won what might have been his last French Open. The win was his fourteenth at Roland Garros, solidifying his status as the King of Clay. He was thirty-six years old, an old man in the professional tennis world. Despite his age, he was brilliant. A bona fide champion and legend of the sport.  

How much can change in a year. There’s talk of his retirement soon—anticipatory. How long can he hold out, play at such a level? How quickly a body refuses. 

It’s been eight years since I’ve played my last collegiate volleyball match. My retirement from semi-elite sport has come and gone. What to make of this return to competing? A comeback? A return-to-self? Or, perhaps: a reimagining? 

*

My second opponent wants to talk. She shakes my hand when we meet, and we make our way over to our court with a fresh can of tennis balls in tow. I won’t remember her name, but I will remember she’s a lawyer from Austin. She says her husband is sightseeing with their small child, and she hopes they’re at the museum right now, where it’s cool. She carries a tennis bag and a cooler full of water and ice packs and chilled towels. I make a note: tomorrow, for my last match, I will bring my own insulated lunch box chock full of sweet, sweet ice and cold, dripping washcloths. 

The temperature has climbed to 104—or it feels like 104—but at this point, it doesn’t matter. It just feels cruel. But we’re only cruel to ourselves, because no one is forcing us to play. I tell myself this, fight with myself, coax my mindset closer to the mindset of that old volleyball self.  I want to play, I think, lying a little. Every match is a new chance. Every match was a new chance, back then. Every practice, too. But a new chance for what? It seems when I was a volleyball player I was always wanting new chances, fresh starts. What did I need a fresh start from? 

This court has a bench beneath the shade, and my opponent and I share it. We’re slow to begin our warmup, hesitant to leave the shelter of the awning. But we do, and we begin play, and I surprise myself—I don’t play half bad. The first set is close—we need a tie breaker to decide it—but I take it. I’m up 1-0. Suddenly, I am winning. This is the new chance, the fresh start. To feel this way feels undeniably good. It’s lovely when your winning is a tangible thing. The score board becomes an affirmation of your worth.  When you’re winning, you’re in control. The game is yours to lose. 

Bolstered, I’m chattier on the bench between sets. My opponent offers me ice from her cooler. I greedily drop the cubes down my shirt, down my sports bra. 

The second set starts and the script flips, fast. My opponent moves better, plays better, and I become slower. The sun has shifted, and every serve means I’m serving blind. I can’t see the ball on the toss. I can only guess where and when to strike. I feel it fine, though, and I serve fine. It’s after the serve I can’t recover from. My serves are soft, and my opponent’s returns are not, and the sun or heat spots my vision. I quickly drop games, and suddenly I’m down by a lot. The game is mine to lose.  

Here is where my brain goes haywire, because I am not programmed to lean into losing. I’ve lost plenty of times—my first three seasons of college volleyball were all losing ones, statistically—but I’ve learned to never be ok with loss. I’ve learned how to deal with loss. Quite well, actually. Dealing with loss and being ok with loss are two different things. Dealing with loss means acknowledging the loss after-the-fact, but quickly letting it go. You let the loss unstick itself from your body to drift into the ether. Being ok with loss—you absorb the loss instead, live with it, wrap the loss into your being and set a place for it at the breakfast table. To be ok with loss, with losing, means to admit you are a loser. To lean into losing while the game is still being played means to commit the ultimate sin of sport: forgoing the belief you can win. Dealing with loss means you don’t forfeit belief. 

Now, I lean into losing. I want to lose this set. I guess it makes sense to lose this set—it’s not the end of the game, and I could still win the next set. I could still win the match. But it goes against a learned instinct. It is forever the right thing to fight until the end. To never give up. When Rafael Nadal plays, every point is the only point. He pours every ounce of try into the moment. 

But Rafa’s getting older. Rafa’s not playing on the television back in the field house. 

I give up. I lose the second set. I move on to the next. 

*

It’s a new morning, the last of the tournament. Since there are only three other women in my division, today I’ll play only once. I drive across town and listen to pop music from my college days. I gulp heaping helpings of water. I am hopeful that the water and bubblegum pop will animate my stiff limbs somehow. The lobby is deliciously cool on arrival, and the big screen plays the final of the French Open—Novak Djokovic plays Casper Rudd. Djokovic, with a win today, could surpass Rafa’s record of twenty-two Grand Slams. I don’t want that to happen. I want Djokovic to lose, though I know he won’t. He’s too good. And, unlike Rafa, he’s got more years left in him to play like he’s playing—too good. 

Marsha is my last match of the tournament. Marsha, from what I gather, is in her sixties. I am thirty as of last month. We shake hands. She shakes a little. Her skin crepes and is sun-spotted. I relax. I think maybe I can beat Marsha. And maybe I can do it quickly to avoid the heat of the day. 

I immediately feel guilty—is it unethical to want to beat an older woman, her grip loose, trembling? But I talk myself out of guilt. We both signed up for this tournament to compete. It’s ok to compete. We’re all adults here. Willing. I’m allowed to compete again. I’m allowed to beat someone at a game if I can win the game.  

We chat on our way to the courts. She normally plays 3.5, she explains, but she lost her ranking last year due to an elbow injury. She’s slowly but surely working her way back to her 3.5 level. “I almost have everything back but the serve,” she says. “I still can’t get any power on the serve.” 

She teaches math education at a university in the DFW area, and she has a daughter working on her PhD in history. We bond immediately, two members of the cult of academia. I ask about her daughter’s research, and Marsha, glowing, obliges. “She just got back from her research trip in Mexico,” she says. “She’s studying the impact…of a couple of Russians? Or something. I don’t really know. But she loves it.” Our small talk continues easily throughout the match. We share a patch of shade against the fence away from the sun washed bench. We take our time on the switchovers, learn about each other’s lives in between sips of cool Gatorades and toweling the sweat off our arms. I learn why Marsha plays—she needs exercise to mitigate specific health concerns—and for how long she’s played: a little over twenty years. I began playing tennis a couple of years ago. I wonder if I’ll still be playing in twenty years’ time. 

The dog woman is a court over—her voice carries as she loosely laments her mistakes, laughs at herself for misses. She wears hot pink today—all pink or accents of pink, from visor to tennis shoe. Her dog watches from beyond the fence, perched in her stroller beneath the shade of a tree. Maybe twenty years from now I’ll have my own tennis bag, dog in tow, and compete against a young woman twenty years my junior. Maybe my opponent will be a young woman new to tournaments, sans tennis bag, on the cusp of wherever she’s going. 

I’ll think about the dog woman after this tournament, but mostly I’ll think about Marsha for months. I’ll wonder what she’s doing, and if she’s regained her serve, and if her daughter has begun her dissertation, or maybe even finished her PhD. I’ll think about Marsha because there’s something about her that makes me ache inside, like I’m feeling nostalgic for her, for our brief time together. Though I’ve just met her, I like Marsha very much. 

But for now, I stuff some of my own ice down my bra—fished from my own insulated lunch box like the hobbyist tournament pro I aspire to be—and begin play. The ice rattles for minutes and then melts against my skin, seeps into the polyester cotton of my tank top. For a moment the breeze feels cool, like it might provide relief. My serve is strong, and on some rallies, I brave an approach to the net, chance a volley even though I’m no good at volleying. But the chances pay off. The strong serves pay off.  I win the first set, 6-4. 

I play okay the second set, but Marsha—no longer trembling—plays better. She’s more consistent. Her play is unlike mine—I have wild moments, strike the ball far and out of bounds in a desperate attempt to put it away. Marsha is patient. She returns, and returns, and returns. She makes fewer mistakes. And when she can, she places the ball exactly where I am not, in places where I can’t—or won’t—reach.  I lose the second set, and I kick myself for underestimating Marsha on our walk over, even for a second.

Because of the heat, we skip a third set and head straight to a tie break. The first to ten will win the match. 

*

Yesterday, in my match against the lawyer, we also played a tie break. 

There’s something about being at the end of a game, especially a tough game—in volleyball, a tough game is a five-set match, a game that might last close to three hours. If the rallies are long, your body gets worn down—at least mine did. I remember playing so hard I had to ration my after-point celebration. I’d get lightheaded if I yelled too loud and too much, see spots against the arena lights. I’d conserve my energy where I could, save it for the hard points. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t help myself. As libero, my job was to defend, to keep the ball from landing on our side of the court. That meant throwing my body toward tips, running down shanked passes, diving across the floor for the chance at simply earning a touch. These moments add up. At one point in a match, you’ll know if your body will feel like it’s been hit by a truck the next morning. When I watch volleyball now, mostly livestreams of my alma mater’s matches, this effort feels so distant—the player’s bodies are so far removed from mine. I can’t really hear their toes strike the court as they sprint after tips, or the thud of soles after blocking. Because of my removal now, I can see how those who never played the game might not understand the toll it takes. A sweet toll, for the most part—to wear your body down at will is a distinct sort of privilege. 

At the end of a hard match, though, you know the effort is almost over. That knowledge is a sort of salve. Though your body is tired, you can will it to move, to fight. You may transcend its protestations to sprint or jump or perform how you need it to, make physical the phrase “mind over matter.” At the end of a game—if you’re tough, at least in the sense that you tell yourself that you’re tough—you split from your body. Conquer it. You wield your body instead of your body wielding you. 

Yesterday, in the tie break, I wielded my body, used it as a tool. Not quite like I used to—the transcendence didn’t feel effortless, numb. But I outlasted the lawyer, put mind over matter. I didn’t lean into losing. I won because I knew I could. 

*

Now, I play a tiebreaker against Marsha. Winner takes the match. The sun is high—the day creeps closer to noon, to lunch, and to blessed rest. I just have to outlast Marsha for a little while. 

I do not play badly, but I do not play well. I am tired, and because of it, my skills aren’t holding up. I am wild. I double fault. I come in for a volley at the net as a last-ditch attempt at cleverness. Marsha sees through it, easily places a shot where I am not. 

I try to muster a belief that I can still win. I think, Come on, Kaila. Keep fighting. If you think this inner dialogue sounds straight out of a sports movie produced by Disney, you’re probably right. I was raised on this kind of rhetoric. You can do it, Kaila. Don’t give up, Kaila. One point at a time, Kaila. 

But the rhetoric’s not working. The points tick past, most not in my favor. And I’m beginning to believe I cannot win. 

I can’t tell if I care if I’m about to lose. I don’t think I do. And that’s new. In this state of not caring, I can’t tell if I gained wisdom or I’ve lost something. What would the old me feel—a desperation when she was down, a frenzied push to claw her way back into the game? That old me might still might have lost, yes, but there’d be a distinctive fight to not let up in the face of failure. There’s a fight to not forfeit belief. 

Or perhaps this old, fighting version of myself is a fantasy I’ve constructed from fragments of my athlete past. Maybe I’ve always been the person I am now. Maybe I was never as tough as I thought. 

None of this matters right now. Today, Marsha is better than me. She wins the tie break. She wins the match. 

*

Last year, Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, announced his retirement. He played his last match—a doubles match, easier on the body—with Rafael Nadal in the Lavar Cup. I think they lost to a pair of Americans, maybe Tiafoe and Fritz. But the media awarded no space in the headlines to the victors. Instead, they focused on the meaning of the match itself—the sport lost a legend. I didn’t watch this match live. Unless it’s a Grand Slam, tennis is so difficult to access. Instead, I read stories and watched highlights of the match after-the-fact. I paid close attention to Rafa in the stories, videos, and photos. With Roger retiring, a part of Rafa’s competitive life retired, too. Roger was a great rival; is a great friend. I imagine a sharp grief that accompanied this change in the tennis landscape. Roger’s retirement was also a foreshadowing. Rafa and Roger are contemporaries. Rafa is just a few years younger than Roger. Rafa must have known he couldn’t go on playing forever. 

At the conclusion of the match, Rafa and Roger cried. Maybe wept is a better word. Or sobbed. You’d call it that too, if you Googled the images and videos of this moment. The pair sit side-by-side on the bench after the loss, before the speeches, the fanfare. In some photos, the pair stare in opposite directions, legs and arms crossed, faces twisted in grief. There’s another photo, circulated widely, of the pair holding hands on that same bench, tears visibly stacked atop sweat, eyes red and wet. And there’s the photo of Rafa cupping his face in a hand, thumb and forefinger pressed into his eyes, desperately willing the tears to stop.

I find myself affected by this display of heartbreak. I’m easily moved by the spectacle of sports—emotions run so high. Emotions in sports are rarely solely tied to the outcome of a game. What Rafa grieves is the loss of a friend. This loss transcends winning or losing on the tennis court. 

When I grieve volleyball, I often grieve the person I was, or who I thought I was—the fighter, the athlete, the girl who never gave up. Recently, though, on a therapist's couch for the first time in my life, I cried not for the person I was as an athlete, but for the people I was no longer around. A team. A group of people knitted together. A place to go each evening for practice. I miss the rituals so richly idiosyncratic to the season. Bus rides spent in easy silence or raucous joke. Pregame dance parties in the locker room. The cocktail of deodorant and body spray and sweat and air freshener. I so badly miss the feeling of team. This feeling was hard to describe to my soft-spoken, patient therapist. The more I tried to, the more I cried, apologizing for every bit of tissue I plucked from the box. No need for apologizing, the therapist said. But I did anyway, as I tried to explain it wasn’t the individual teammates I missed. I don’t have any lasting, deep friendships from the volleyball teams I was part of as a collegiate athlete. But it is team nonetheless I ache for, that feeling of standing together in a tight circle, heads bent in prayer or arms woven through the spaces between shoulders and elbows. I miss the assurance of a group of people. 

 Of the matches I played that weekend, it’s the Marsha match that stays with me. That match was a microcosm of what made the weekend fun—I was a person among other persons, playing a game, swapping small talk, and sharing moments of connection. The weekend didn’t replace the feeling of team I so deeply miss. But if I continue to go at it enough, it might. I think of the woman in green and pink and her little dog making the rounds of the registration room. Her easy conversation with people she knows well enough to ask about their families or last weekend’s tournament. I think of Marsha and our morning of camaraderie. Perhaps this is a version of team I could cultivate.  

*

Because of the set I won against Marsha, I “win” third place—out of four total competitors—in my division. I’m given a medal that I immediately loop around my neck. Djokovic gives his winner’s speech at Roland-Garros on the screen in the lobby, and my shirt’s so soaked with sweat that I’m suddenly freezing. I pose for a photo with Marsha, the first-place winner, and the woman I first played against, the silver medalist. We scooch close, lightly place our hands and arms around each other. We smile for a picture I’ll never see.

KAILA LANCASTER holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in Brevity, The Pinch, Third Coast, and Puerto del Sol, among others. A former collegiate volleyball player, Kaila now dabbles in tennis, pickleball, freestyle jump rope, and occasionally returns to the volleyball court on Tuesday nights with the VolleyGirls.