Dear Reader,
Below is a letter I sent to my league teammates at the end
of our tennis league season along with the photo you see. We made it to the district championships that
lasted 3 days and the photos correspond to the 6 of us that played each successive
day, from top to bottom. Be aware it is
crass and contains cursing so if you want to abandon ship now, I shall think no
less of you. I have also written
footnotes at the end of the letter to better illuminate who these people are
and help with the “inside” jokes.
A tennis league is similar to any Bowling, hockey, or
softball beer league. You have a goup of
dudes who played sports their whole lives and want to continue to have a
competitive outlet and sense of camaraderie (outside of work) that can only be
found amongst other athletes. Guys tease
each other mercilessly in these situations, but it comes from a place of
goodwill and trust that is established over time. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. This letter was
written in that spirit.
For the record, we went 0-3 in Districts, winning only 2 out of 9 matches.
An Open Letter to My 8.5 Districts Teammates
“Gentlemen, it was an honor getting my ass kicked with you
in 8.5 Combo Districts. As you know,
this was my maiden voyage down the districts road and I was forewarned that an
ass kicking was likely, regardless of my optimism and enthusiasm. I personally took two ass kickings, but
strangely enough I managed to win a match with my 60 year old gay lover, CoCo.
You can never predict how things might pan out when the
season starts. There are just too many unknowns. Nobody, however, could have
predicted the season long love affair that developed between a 60 year old
Billy Idol wannabe and a wholesome kid from Colorado. Hell, I hated him the first time I first met
him several years ago as a new member of the club. After 15 minutes of not shutting up, he left
my wife and I alone and went his way. I
turned to Nikki and said, “Who the fuck was that douche”? Incredibly, despite the shaky start to our
relationship, we flourished together and went undefeated in match play, leaving
every single opponent with a bewildered look on their face, slowly shaking
their head and asking, “What the fuck just happened”? My favorite was the pirate “Z” from the Napa
team telling Chris (in his heavy accent), “You are shit, your partner is the
4.5. All this slicing and dicing
bullshit…” I don’t know if T-Bone and
Coco will thrive in the future, but it was one hell of a run.
As for our midget Co-captain, I expected a little bit more
from a guy who claims to have played Sampras and Todd Martin. Perhaps the results were the same then as
they were this weekend, I don’t know, he’s never mentioned the scores. I’ll forever be grateful, though, for his
unending reserve of wisdom in regards to tennis. He’s always analyzing, always thinking, and
I will take that with me moving forward.
One of my favorites from him is this:
“You remember that incredible Davis Cup match between Mcenroe and
Wilander? Boy, that was a great
match”. That will always be incredibly
useful for me on the court moving forward.
Thank goodness he’ll be the Captain for the next 4.5 league.
In regards to our other Co-Captain, Pedro Seck-A-Leck, I will
never forget the wisdom he imparted on us about how to beat a traffic
ticket. Nay, how to “lessen” the
financial impact of a ticket. In a
nutshell, the key is to show up and argue just long enough until the exasperated
judge says, “Will you shut up if I reduce the ticket amount”? I think we can all relate to the judge. I’m
glad I learned this on the ride down to districts Sunday morning so the trip
wasn’t a complete waste of time. The
time spent talking about the tickets was longer than the amount of time we were
on the court together. It’s unofficial,
but we think we may have set a districts record for shortest time playing. I’m sure Pedro will research that and lay it
all out for us in the upcoming weeks.
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the fantastic
matches I played with the Massage Therapist, Mike Wilson, and rabid ABBA fan
Alan Johnson. Mike and I managed to get
to a third set tiebreaker before succumbing to the precision volleys of
Yoshi. Despite the loss, I can take
solace in the fact that Mike offered Coco and I one free couples massage valid
for one year. As for Alan, my greatest
regret for the season is that we didn’t make one tightly strung Frenchman cry
during the Silverado match. Not every
wish comes true, I guess. We were so
close.
I never got to play with Fernando, but I can thank him for
being the inspiration behind the never-ending ABBA loop that plays in my head
every second he’s around. Check out his
song, “Fernando”, you’ll dig it. Lance,
thank you for being the multi-talented utility player for the team. You can do it all. I’ll never forget the day you played a home
match and then immediately came over and cut my grass. It’s pure creative genius that you would
think to play in cargo shorts so you wouldn’t have to change uniforms for your
landscaping business. Although we never
played together, I’ll always have fond memories of playing on the court next to
yours and watching John Daly fire forehand rockets mercilessly at your
head. It still brings a smile to my
face.
Although I’m sad to see Lewis leaving tennis, I’ll be
intently tracking his new career as an ice dancer. Against all odds, he managed to lose a
match while playing with Drew. Again,
we’ll need our statistician, Pedro, to check this out, but we’re pretty sure
this has never happened before. I
suppose, Like Andy Roddick, he knew there was no point in continuing to play
against the best if he couldn’t win with the best. Good luck and godspeed, Lewis.
James, I’ll be sad to see you leave as well. Your loyalty to Rancho Solano tennis is
legendary. I know you had a lot of
opportunities to play for other teams over the years, yet you remained
steadfast in your commitment to Rancho.
I can’t thank you enough for drinking all of our free beer and never
bringing anything in return. I know your
SoCal teammates will love that quality as well.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge our 21 year old
illiterate, virgin, Team Captain, Drew.
Your leadership in guiding our team was absolutely instrumental to our
success. Your delegation skills will go
down in Rancho history as the greatest ever.
It was truly inspirational watching you shirk your duties until the last
minute each week until Pete jumped in and took control of the scheduling and
lineups. I’m sure the entire team will
echo my sentiments as I raise my glass in a toast and loudly declare, “Drew,
this won’s four yu!!”
In closing I think it should be known that this season has
been the most fun I’ve had in league play ever.
I sincerely enjoyed the camaraderie and the tennis. Enjoy the photos and I hope they bring a
smile to your face from time to time.”
Chris Cole (Coco)
– Top photo (First on left) - I really didn’t like Chris the first time I
met him. He comes across as somewhat
smarmy and overconfident. It’s not until
Nikki and I watched him perform as the lead singer of a working band that I
came to understand his personality. He’s
a showman, and he’s good at what he does.
This skinny white dude cranks out jazz standards and old soul music with
incredible ease. He and I got paired up
as a doubles team and had early success (we were undefeated when we played with each other).
Very quickly we became known as Coco and T-Bone, the lovebirds. These things develop organically and you
can’t fight them. The more you fight the
worse it becomes, so we went with it. The "pirate" I reference is a foul natured guy with a pony tail. Chris is unconventional in the way he plays and it pissed "Z" off. He was insulting Chris by telling him I was the 4.5 player (This is a combo league that paired up one 4.0 player (me) and one 4.5 player).
Brad Mills (midget)
– Bottom photo (First on left) – Brad is a sweetheart of a guy, and short
(5’5”). He played junior tennis is Southern California and says he played
against some future pros, notably Pete Sampras.
He is full of trivial facts (string tensions of players) and says
blatantly obvious things, but we all love him. He sales and manages real
estate.
Pete Sekelick (Pedro
Sek-A-Lek) – Bottom Photo (Third from right) – Pete is a lawyer and loves
to argue. He’ll argue about anything and
everything. If you say the sky is blue,
he’ll do the research and provide the documentation as to why it’s actually
“light blue”. In addition, he provides weekly scouting reports on upcoming opponents, breaking down their records and tendencies. He's into minutiae. He butts heads with every
single team captain in the league. Go
figure.
Mike Wilson (Massage
Therapist) – Middle Photo (Third from left) – Mike is a chiropractor so
naturally he gets teased as being a “massage therapist” in the same way a
dentist gets ribbed about being a “Medical Doctor”. He is
one of the most positive guys you’ll ever meet.
Alan Johnson (Medium
Al) – Middle Photo (Third From right) – I originally knew Alan as “Big
Al”. That’s what everybody called him
when I was new to the league. He lost a bunch of weight and now he’s
affectionately known as “Medium Al”. In one match we played a doubles team with a French guy. He was a big hitter, but also a head case. At one point he missed a ton of consecutive serves and had to be consoled by his partner. We're confident that if the match had gone longer he would have cried. Alan does some sort of work in the IT field.
Fernando Delmendo
(‘Do) – Top Photo (Third from left)- Growing up in our house there was a
lot of ABBA being played. I must have
heard “Fernando” a million times so that’s the first thing that pops into my
whenever I hear the name. I was playing
with “Big Al” one match and I started singing that song because Fernando was on
the court next to us. We had a good
laugh about it and I ended up making a copy of ABBA’s greatest hits for
him. I don’t think Fernando likes it,
but as I said, you can’t fight these things.
Fernando is a lawyer for a big corporation.
Lance Wong – Top
Photo (First on right) – For some reason Lance wears cargo shorts when he plays
tennis. That’s the kind of thing you
would expect to see at the public courts, not at a fitness club. To his credit, he has stuck with the shorts
despite our protests. I don’t think we
have a nickname for him, we just like to make fun of his shorts. He and Fernando played against a guy in districts who looked quite similar to the golfer, John Daly. This guy was hitting absolute missiles from the forehand side. Lance said his only goal for the match was to not move backwards from the net, lest he appear intimidated. He’s the CFO for a building materials
company.
Lewis Broschard –
Middle Photo (First on left) – Lewis has a great sense of humor and is
extremely self deprecating. Last year
he went something like 0-8 in League play because he was paired with a super
senior (65+) who didn’t move well. He
didn’t enjoy it. This year, for
districts, he got to play with the best player (Drew), by far, at the
club. He said if he couldn’t win a match
with Drew he was selling his rackets and taking up ice dancing. He promptly lost. Lewis is a Fire Chief.
James Lee –
Bottom Photo (First on right) – James is in the process of moving to Southern
California for a new job and this will likely be the last season he plays at
our club. In a desperate attempt to move
up to a 4.5 rating, he played with several other 4.0 teams that he thought had
more potential. He did eventually make
it to 4.5, but we have to give him crap about it. In all fairness the talent pool at any given
rating ebbs and flows with time so sometimes you have to make a jump to another
team. It’s quite common.
Drew Collin – Bottom
Photo (Second from right) – Drew was the team captain for this league in name
only. I’m pretty sure Pete and/or Brad
did most of whatever a captain has to do for these leagues. All the e-mails came from Drew, though, and
they all contained gross misspellings and grammatical errors. As far as we can tell, Drew hasn’t had much
success hooking up with women so we like to give it to him a little bit. He’s a good kid, though.
