I stopped cold walking through Fitzrovia on Monday and saw the sign of this lovely local. I wanted it for my living room. I actually have an old pub sign in my apartment, purchased early in my tenure for £250 at an Islington Antique Shop (first bargain). You can find a few on ebay, but I was proud of my purchase of « The Walkers » — two hikers pointing to Whitehall from the London marshes.
The Champion started life around the 1860s, indicated by the curved corner to the upper floors — a key feature of many 19th century London pubs. They were meant to advertise the pub, so the name could be seen from a distance on crowded streets. The first post-war renewal came in the 1950s, adding some frosted glass on the external windows and mahogany paneling. In 1989, however, Ann Sotheran, a well-known York-based stained glass artist, added remarkable windows featuring a series of 19th century “champions”, with figures such as Florence Nightingale and the cricketer W.G. Grace. But one key Victorian feature does remain: the “snob screen.” This device was made of an etched glass pane in a movable wooden frame and allowed middle class drinkers to see working class drinkers in an adjacent bar, but not to be seen by them. Just another feature of England’s weird class system.
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Speaking of Champion! Now for the Serial Story…
Smacked with a Racquet: My Tennis Rebirth (Working Title)
About two years into my return to tennis following a twenty-year absence, I began to notice that with every match I played, I had an internal dialogue running in my head — it didn’t want to take a cue from the silent stands or the players in ready position. Topics often ranged from lustful moments with ex-girlfriends to the ugly wind-up of my opponent’s serve. On a particular Saturday in March 2019 — the early shoulder season for tennis — at a club somewhere in Long Island and while competing against a twelve-year-old during a tournament to raise my Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) (whatever that heartless data-driven, Microsoft statistic was that ignored the grace and beauty of my well-honed strokes) the two halves of my brain were having a dueling conversation that went something like “if I go for the kill, will I ruin her chances for a college spot” to “what the fuck are you doing? Close it out,” to “why are you doing this to yourself… again?”
Had my the more cut-throat and composed side of my brain sent the proper signal down my spinal cord to the leg for balance, the arm for control and the wrist for snap over the ball — as it should have — I would have jumped on her serve, hit a cross-court into corner of the baseline and boom, done and dusted, back to my Saturday afternoon. Instead, this kinder, gentler, chokier side prevailed. I started to care about her future and my tiny, diminishing role in it. And then I started to care about my own tennis prowess and the fact that I never lived up to any kind of achievement with it. I had concocted the noxious gas of tennis asphyxiation. The neural impulse stopped short somewhere between my legs and feet, which turned to cinder blocks, and my arm, which became a battering ram, determined to bang every ball with as much velocity as Serena Williams on anabolic steroids. We dragged out the match to three sets, with her finishing me off by two points in a 10-point championship tiebreak. I missed my train back to the city and had to Uber to another station, run to the train, Uber again and then home to finish out the 28 hours I had left of precious weekend “relaxation” time before the Monday commute and my editorial job at the United Nations.
What the fuck was this? I recalled thinking about my quest to rejoin the competitive classes of tennis in one of those Uber rides. My mid-life crisis? The second-chance I wanted after blowing my twenties and thirties to the New York work-hard, party harder (and drunker) life? Maybe it was some sort of extracurricular redemption, since my once promised journalism career (hello, Columbia Journalism School Class of 2002 — the one that survived to cover September 11, 2001) was going nowhere? I couldn’t quite square it. But the next weekend, during a USTA league match in the damp grit of the HardTru courts inside the West Side Tennis Club bubble, I dropped my first set 5-7 and went down in the second set 1-4, 0-30 when a primal instinct seized the hunk of meat in my cranium and said “fight.” I hit two winners, took that game and the next four and tied up the match, one set apiece. I won the tiebreak and felt something which I had become unfamiliar in recent years: exhilaration. In a year back on the circuit, I had won my first match.
I found my way back to tennis after twenty years away in a roundabout sort of fashion: I drank to the point of almost no return in my twenties, got sober in my early thirties and started running marathons as an alternative to the AA meetings I abhorred in my late thirties. Why sit in a chair and wait for a turn to gripe about your sober life when you could show up thrice weekly to the Hudson River footpath and exchange gripes while getting fit and, maybe… a runner’s high. Bonus: new running buddies and possibly weeks later another bronze finisher medal on my doorknob. After my ninth or tenth marathon, including one in Beirut and one in Lagos, Nigeria, I felt nearly invincible. My toes lost their nails and my arches ached, so possibly too invincible. But when you run and finish a long race — competing against yourself — as dozens, even hundreds of well-wishers greet you with signs, cookies, and a participatory medal at the end, it’s like hitting a ball against a wall as a kid with hundreds of cheerleaders on the sidelines. You have to be a hard-earned cynic not to feel good, and I was a converted cynic.
Still, something didn’t feel complete. I hadn’t won that medal. I hadn’t bested anyone with smooth, rhythmic strokes mano-y-mano, or in a battle of wits and muscle memory to the very bitter end. I had just shown up and run until I wanted to drop. On the day my Northwestern tennis coach cut me, the “walk on” loose, I swore off tennis for pretty much the rest of my life. Yet a hunger for the whack of the clean, crisp ball that bounced just inside the baseline remained. So did a niggly little feeling for one of those cheap gold trophies with the racquets and the servers or whatever ugly figurine the shop dreamt up. At age forty-two, I dreamt of being a middle-aged tennis champion….
Tune in next week for the next installment…