Page 77 - REALLY What A time Book IX

REALLY SO WHAT
What A Time

TENNIS

Nylon, wouldn’t be used, for almost as many years as
composition courts or two handed strokes.

There’s a real difference between gut and nylon as well as how
tight your racket was strung. Tightly strung rackets cause the
ball to bounce off faster, and you had less control. A little
looser meant you had more control. Gut on the other hand
gave more flexibility regardless of how tight it was. It gave
more control. Nylon became popular because it was so much
cheaper, and the racket heads got so much larger.
Tennis started for me by chasing after the balls. They were
always white, and in the beginning, fuzzy. We played with
them until all the fuzz was gone and their bounce was weak.
In the beginning they would bounce about thigh high when
dropped from the shoulder.

The older boys liked having me around. They could knock a
ball over the fence on to Abbington Street and across into the
apartment quadrangle. Sometimes the balls would go over the
other way, up onto the maintenance building roof and out
onto the baseball, model airplane flying field. My specialty,
really, was running, so for a while it was a win-win experience.
But, it didn’t last so long that they totally took advantage of
me.
By the time I was 6 or so I began hitting some balls. Joe
would take time with me to practice. So in addition to hitting
balls against a wall he would hit them to me, or sometimes just

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