by Ken Witty
With his overage, overweight racquet that he refuses to replace, he wallops a convincing serve deep to my backhand. I am barely able to return the serve, and he is ready at net to put the ball away down the opposite line. Thirty-love. His next serve hurtles into the corner. I’m able to get a good look at the ball and hit a forehand, my best shot, down the line. No chance to return the ball. Thirty-fifteen. Peter’s next serve is again deep and well-placed to my backhand. I’m only able to hit the ball back towards the center of the court. Peter is at net where he is ready to put the shot away. As long as he hits a good serve, he can dominate the net and keep me on the defensive. When I am able to get him to play my backcourt game, then I have the advantage. Two very different kinds of tennis games; two different personalities facing each other across this hard court. And so it goes, every Wednesday morning from eight to nine in the morning.
It all began in the fall of 1977. Al Wasserman and John Sharnik at CBS News asked me to join them in a weekly morning tennis game, and wondered if I knew anyone to join us to play singles on Wednesday mornings. I suggested that I had a friend, Peter Wolf, a very good player who might be interested in joining the group. When asked, Peter accepted immediately. We would play singles and, in principle, play every other week. Al worked up a schedule so that we would all get a chance to play each other in rotation, with the proviso that if anyone couldn’t make it that day, he would call the others to swap turns. If no one was available, then it was up to the player who couldn’t come to find a replacement or a hitter from the club in extremis.
The Wednesday game worked out incredibly well for many years. We played from nine to ten in the morning from September to June. We were well matched and compatible. But time took its toll. John Sharnik had a heart attack weeks after he retired from CBS News. It happened while he was on a treadmill at a doctor’s office. He could no longer play on Wednesdays.
Dan, a friend of Peter’s from East Hampton, joined us the following year. He was a good athlete, a gifted tennis player and a good companion. But after three years, he shocked us all by suddenly announcing that he had to have a triple bypass. Now we were three.
The threesome lasted a few years, but age was creeping up on Al Wasserman. When we began, he ran like a deer. At one time a professional dancer, before he became a pioneering documentary filmmaker, Al’s legs were not the same in his early seventies. A couple of cataract operations hampered his vision. His smoking habit made him gasp for breath every game, playing against two players a generation younger. Peter and I began to worry that Al was going to drop dead on the court after a challenging Wednesday match. And that last year, the scores were regularly 6-0, 6-1. Al never mentioned making any changes. Peter and I began to wonder how this lopsided competition could be resolved. I asked Peter whether he might talk to Al and persuade him that the Wednesday game was not working any more. Al consented to quit our morning game. Peter and I decided not to replace him. Now we were a two-some.
And by now we were becoming an institution at the Manhattan Plaza Racquet Club. If it was Wednesday morning, Peter Wolf and Ken Witty would be there blasting each other, as though they had never met on the court before. Of course, Peter arrived a long time before Ken. There were stretching exercises to be done, there was a whole ritual of preparations to be taken care of. First the laundry. By the 1990s few club members were still able to get laundry done at the club using net bags distributed by the club. But we had been grandfathered into a club service that had been halted years before. This laundry service allowed Peter to play in the same tennis clothes for many years. Their age matched his racquet, which had become a relic of the first years when manufacturers used composite materials for tennis racquets. In the intervening years, technology had made tennis racquets lighter and stronger. But Peter, not a large person, liked the heft of his racquet, which seemed to me more like a war club. Wednesday morning preparations also included putting on a knee brace. Over the years, the Wednesday game had been interrupted by injury. First there were groin pulls contracted in the course of successful campaigns to win the men’s singles championship at the East Hampton Tennis Club. Then Peter’s knees began to give way under the stress of competitive tennis. But after months of intense rehabilitation, Peter would be back on the court. After his second knee operation, he was accompanied by a space-age knee brace that made him look like a bionic man, but the brace did not seem to hamper his ability to scamper around a tennis court.
Recovering from these injuries underscored a side of Peter’s character that comes out on a tennis court – a fierce determination to perform at a very high level. Some might call this the will to win. His competitive spirit is part of his core being. Winning is better than losing. But the Wednesday game has a standard that is different than other games on other days. The goal is not necessarily to win, although that is always on our minds, it is to remain competitive. Parity is at the heart of the Wednesday game. When people ask us, who wins more often, we can say with candor, that over all these years, we are sublimely well matched. On any given Wednesday the outcome is unpredictable. That is the remarkable nature of this hoary tennis match up. No matter how we feel, how hung-over we might be, how ill we are, how sleepless we may be, how distracted we might be by work or life or love, we face each other on court two of Manhattan Plaza Racquet Club and after a ritualized warm up, we go after each other with vigor and intensity, and no matter how well we know each other’s game, we really don’t know how the match will turn out. What joy we experience each Wednesday morning. May the Wednesday game continue forever.