SPORTS LADIES WHO LOB

Sweating-partly from two hours’ play in the 90-degree heat and partly from nerves-the server looks at the T-spot in the middle of the court where the service boxes meet. She throws the ball three feet in the air, whips her Wilson Profile up and over the ball, and smashes it into the net. The woman returning the serve smiles at her partner and moves in two steps closer to the service line.

The server takes a deep breath and glances at her partner’s signal. She’s staying put. The server swallows hard, chokes, throws the ball too low, and mishits it for a double fault. “Ad out,” she calls, loudly enough for all to hear. Her partner signals a switch, which means the server must cover a possible return down the line. She serves a careful, half-paced ball to the ad court’s backhand as her partner moves to volley the expected cross court. But the return zings down the alley too fast and deep for the server to cover, and it’s over.

Paint, game, match to the Canyon Creek Can-Dos. The two women are laughing in relief and congratulating each other as they move to the net tor the customary handshake with their opponents, the Line One team for the Fair Oaks Frill Seekers. The frazzled Frills manage to complete the ritual with glued-on smiles; they exit mumbling about losing lobs in the sun and reinjuring knees.

This is not the Virginia Slims finals, or even a high school exhibition match. All this panting and pursing of lips, this concentration and coaching is done in the name of the Ladies Doubles League, the biggest and certainly the most intense branch of the Tennis Competitors of Dallas. Nearly forty private clubs and city parks, utilizing approximately fifty different playing facilities in the Metroplex, sponsor almost 200 ladies’ teams made up of eight regular players and anywhere from two to six registered substitutes. The players practice at their clubs with their coaches at least one day a week and play their TCD matches every Thursday, barring rain or ice storms, during their spring and fall seasons. And these 3.000 ladies better be on time.

The extensive bylaws and rules governing the league are explicit when it comes to tardiness. If a team is fifteen to thirty minutes late to a match, they start play one set down. If the whole team of eight players shows up at the opponent’s club more than half an hour late, they lose by default and are “deleted from competition” for the rest of the season. Moreover, everybody on the delinquent team is barred from playing in the next season. This is serious business.

Each team is assigned to one of ten “regular” flights or to the “Championship” or “Open Championship” flights. Each flight is made up of nine other teams from other clubs who play tennis at more or less the same level. Each team then further divides its members into doubles marriages, and, according to their ability to win matches, assigns them to play at line one, two, three, or four. Match scoring is traditional, but the point scoring system for team tennis is a pretty complicated affair, usually mastered only by the team captain. Line One gets the most points for winning, and Line Four the least. Teams get points not just for winning, but also for winning a set (even if they lose a match) and so on. Obviously, Line One teams are considered the prestigious slots for women’s play, whether the teams are competing at Championship level or all the way at the bottom, in Flight Ten. If. at a cocktail party or other social gathering in Dallas, you mention that you play tennis, the first question other women ask in response to this news is whether or not you play “team tennis”-to establish if. in fact, this conversation is worth sustaining. The second question is, “What flight are you in?” Women who play Line One invariably tell you so whether you ask or not.

Most of the women competing in the Ladies Doubles League can appear at first glance to be deeply into Yuppie female frou: frou: we-have-to-go-to-a-veggie-barate-a-cinnamon-roll-this-morning; that’s-a-great-looking-warmup-Liz-where’d-you-find-it, and so on. In spots for lunch and the latest Fila T-shirts do matter, but most of the frou frou is cover noise. These women who give their teams names like the Sotogrande Hot Flashes and the Wimbledon Mini Pauses, the Brookhaven Terminators, and the T-Bar-M Terrors are. in fact, much more interested in beating the hell out of their opponents on any given day than in finding a restaurant where “the dressing is not quite so garlicky, but a little more on the cilantro side.”

Some players, particularly those affiliated with teams that tend to win the sportsmanship awards rather than the first-place trophies handed out at the yearly awards bash, continue to insist “it’s just a game,” that they’re playing tennis “to stay in shape” or “just for fun,” or “because Mark loves to play a mixed doubles on the Sundays he’s in town.” Most of this is hogwash. TCD players, in their hearts, regard tennis as “just a game” in the same way that love is “just a game” or success in politics is “just a game.” And women who “just want to stay in shape” will probably walk or swim or work out in spas. Tennis is an anaerobic sport noted for sudden, knee-wrenching stops, built-in elbow and shoulder injuries from ground-stroke and service deliveries, and a variety of back pains.

The last claim-that the woman is working to lift the level of her game because her spouse is an ardent weekend mixed-doubles player-has some validity. Tales (not all apocryphal) abound about couples divorced or reconciled on the basis of the weakness or strength of their doubles partnership. I know a charming, middle-aged North Dallas veterinarian who admits he married his second wife because she didn’t argue with him on the tennis court and she had a good serve. Problem: while they were great on the court, they were completely incompatible when locked inside a house together. The marriage lasted less than a year.

Typically, the women who play team tennis in the TCD League are between thirty-five and fifty, married, with no preschoolers and no full-time jobs and a powerful and under-used competitive urge to win, usually discovered long past their teen years when serious professional athletes must begin development. Circumstances permit them the time and the money to develop a tennis game, and they go at it with the passion and enthusiasm of high school cheerleaders pulling with all their hearts and souls for The Team. They have the same pleated skirts, the bright socks, the tennis shoes (“Give us a T!”). But now they are the team. And that makes all the difference.

The pressure to win in women’s tennis leagues around the country is astonishing, considering that it’s an amateur sport played mostly by middle-aged women. But that pressure reaches marvelously comic heights in Dallas, where the socioeconomic name of the game is “Win or Walk.” Hanging on the wall of one pro shop is a big wooden sign reading, “Tennis is not a matter of life or death; it’s more serious than that.”



Some players have mixed feelings about the intense pressure in TCD tennis to win no matter what. Paula McLeod, a Flight One co-captain with the T-Bar-M TNTs, has risen several levels since her husband gave her the club membership two years ago. “I feel a tremendous pressure now when I’m playing Line One,” she says. “I started in Level IV. Each level I move up I see a little more competitiveness, a little more viciousness. You get hit with more balls; there’s no joking between games or saying, ’Good shot.’ I love the camaraderie of my team, and my tennis partner has become my very best friend. But I think wanting to win the point has become extreme: it’s just gone crazy.” she says.

“Some people want the point, regardless.” says Judy Traylor. co-captain of the Royal Oaks ROCC Stars, an Open Championship team. “I’ve been playing tennis twenty years, and my feeling is that it (TCD team tennis| has gotten almost too intense. You should be there at least partly for the camaraderie. We all go out on the court to win. but I am not there to try to hit my opponent with the ball. Not everybody on my team feels that way. of course, but I never intentionally hit anybody,” she says.

A woman who once chaired TCD’s Rules Committee says the impulse to “get out there and go for blood” has swollen the TCD rule book to mammoth proportions. “Women can be so devious. Those rules are there for one reason or another, because several people complained about somebody taking advantage of a situation, and so a new rule is made. I remember we had somebody get upset one day because a lady left the court to go to the bathroom and it wasn’t during one of the breaks allowed. Now we have a rule saying a player may leave the court for a bonafide bathroom visit.’” she says.

“Many team captains have file cabinets that go back four or five, even six seasons.” says one team tennis player who wishes to remain anonymous. These executive-style captains keep win-loss records on all the teams and notes on the individual players. “They keep those files up to date. too. and they can tell you at any time who’s beating who and who’s doing what,” she says.

The tennis pros working in private clubs and public park facilities around town teach private and group lessons to team tennis players, listen to their complaints, encourage them when they’re down, and are there to lean on “in victory and defeat,” as one pro put it. Women players usually take up the bulk of the pro’s daytime teaching hours, and most of the pros around Dallas are very familiar with TCD. “Every day is ladies’ day here,” laughs David Redding. Northwood’s twenty-eight-year-old head pro.

“TCD gives players a chance to play somebody besides the same people at the club.” Redding says. “But it’s become as serious as going to war-out there armed in your knee braces and elbow bandages. I think tennis may be the one outlet where these women are permitted to be aggressive.”

Phil Lancaster, an Aussie in his thirties who’s been coaching TCD teams at Bent Tree for three years, says he experienced “cultural shock” when he first encountered the “rigamarole” involved in a TCD match, from selecting which eight players of the fourteen team members will play to ruling on controversial calls. “When I first came here, I walked down along where a match was going on and waved at a player I knew. Suddenly all these women [from the visiting team] were hollering at me and telling me I was not allowed to coach during a match, and so on,” Lancaster recalls.

Brookhaven’s director of racquet sports, Fernando Velasco, forty-five, has seen the number of TCD teams double in his three years there. “There is a difference in the play of working men and women who are in competition every single minute at the office,” he says. “For them, tennis is a release, an enjoyment, a hobby. But a lot of our ladies are baby boomers who did not participate in a lot of athletics, unless they were tomboys. Competition is so new that winning is interfering with having a good time.”

Donny Rains, a twenty-eight-year-old pro at Fair Oaks Tennis Center, has been coaching TCD teams three years. “1 think they like it strictly because it’s different from what they usually do.” Rains says. “You can get out here and forget about husbands, kids, whatever, and concentrate on a ball. And I’d say that tennis is also a kind of status thing, like wearing a gold Rolex. Nobody sits around at a cocktail party and says, ’Hey, I’m on this terrific bowling league.’”

Handsome pros and ladies with time on their hands. What does this equation add up to? Most of the pros laugh in recognition of the syndrome, but all agree it remains at a fantasy level for the most part. Rains, a laconic, easy-going man with a slight Don Johnson-style stubble, says it’s not a prob-lem: “Somebody’s gonna hit on you no mat-ter where you work. You just have to explain to them that it’s not going to happen.”

Royal Oaks pro Barry Laing concurs: “I suppose there are some pros attracted to that type of person. We have had it happen, but not nearly as much as people think it happens. That’s mostly in soap operas.”

More than anything else, however, the ladies want a pro who can help them win on Thursdays. Redding says he’s been teaching “eight big years” and he knows at least one thing: “Those ladies want to look good on the court-from their strokes to the clothes they wear and the rocks on their hands. An they shop around for a pro. too. Sometime: I feel like a pair of pants or a dress.” he says as he prepares his ladies for their weekly court battle.