The Saith Seren (Seven Star) + Serial Story Part Two
Smacked with a Racquet: My Tennis Journey (Part II)
In November 2020, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the new owners of Wrexham AFC, sent three cases of Aviation Gin, Reynolds’ own brand, to the pub Saith Seren, or Seven Stars. Possibly to win them over to the American version of the English drink of choice, but most likely to get their approval of Wrexham AFC’s new sponsor (it had previously been Ifor Williams Trailers, when the team was in one of the lowest divisions), the gin probably didn’t replace the Welsh’s thirst for Wrexham Lager, a beer made by German immigrants beginning in 1881.
Records show that the Seven Stars was first licensed in the 1750s, as The Stars Inn, and a public house has stood there for at least 200 years.In 1880, the Seven Stars Inn was sold to its tenant, James Marshall, at auction for £2,500 and was later rebuilt in the increasingly popular Arts and Crafts Style of Thomas Price, an architect in Liverpool. By 2013, the pub was the only community-owned pub in Wrexham, one of six in North Wales. In taking on the added component of a community centre, Wrexham aims to foster a Welsh-speaking environment through Welsh food, real ale (and Aviation Gin) Welsh classes and a occasional Welsh market.
Smacked with a Racquet: My Tennis Rebirth (Working Title) Part II
From the time I turned eleven, I had wanted to be a pro tennis player. Not Venus or Serena. Not Lindsay Davenport. Not Gabriela Sabatini (although later I would have a mad crush on her and her Sergio Tacchini crinkled nylon track suits). I wanted to be Jennifer Capriati. When I was twelve and smacking forehand-and-backhand drills at Shadow Mountain Racquet Club, Jennifer, age thirteen, had worked her way into the heart of Nick Bolletieri, the grand-master of junior tennis. When I was fourteen and negotiating my way to par on a tennis court with the snobby girls of my Catholic prep school in Oklahoma, Jennifer was the talk of the United States Tennis Association. When I was fifteen and driving to lessons with my learner’s permit and my mom, Jennifer was sixteen and deciding when to go pro. When I was seventeen and competing for the number one spot on my school team, Jennifer was on the cover of every national magazine, gunning for number one in the world.
I don’t rightly know what Jennifer had to prove… self worth? But she also had an obsessed tennis dad whose own dignity was tied up in hers. I didn’t. My parents were attorneys, obsessed with their own career achieving. However, in a similar fashion, I was mirroring them. As a law school education was the great equalizer in a smallish Southwestern city still flooding with the slick, viscous profits of oil, tennis would prove my ticket to attention, respect, and maybe just a smidgeon of confidence. Although short and a bit stout, I had always been the “athletic” one in my family; if not always graceful or adroit, at least hard-working and tenacious.
But I didn’t necessarily choose tennis. Rather, I think tennis chose me. From age six, I had tried out just about every other sport: soccer, softball, basketball… coaches always pushed me to the periphery of the team. I was a mid-fielder, never a striker; outfield, never shortstop; post, never shooter. When I picked up my first tennis racquet and set foot on a court, however, I was striker, pitcher and shot-maker. I controlled my fate. It wasn’t up to the coach as to whether I played or even won. It was up to me, and me only.
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I dipped my toes back into tennis competition in the summer of 2017. Before then, before the marathoning, the only bright spot during anything Alcoholics Anonymous meeting came when one of my “fellows”, a writer and high-school player from Michigan, Johanna, asked if I wanted to “have a hit” at a secret court we had found near the Atlantic Station in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. My faded purple, torn Prince bag adorned with strips of yellow-and-red confetti still had a little plastic trowel keychain on the zipper, reminding me to “dig deep” — the words of my Northwestern coach, Lisa. Lisa liked something in me, my tenacity and my work ethic, I think, as proved by my daily bicycle rides three miles from my dorm on the South Evanston campus to a tennis bubble near the football stadium in sun, rain and snow every day to practice with never a promise to actually play. And I never played a match for Northwestern. I was the warm-up girl, the end-court solution if, one or, Allah-forbid two players got injured or sick. A season later, Northwestern gained two recruits, and I had to somehow recover from a one-point-nine GPA. I left the team. My mother wasn’t happy, but god, for sixth months of my life, I could say I was a college player. I had the keychain trowel and a thick, white sweater with an embroidered “N” to prove it. And every time I took on Johanna the writer — the two times per year I pulled out my purple bag for two decades — I could prove I had something, even though my unfit body, meant our matches were always close.
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Yet, in 2008, 2009, 2011, 12, or 13, I had neither money nor energy to buy new racquets or new clothes or rejoin the USTA or find a teacher or enter any tournaments. But I had Johannah, at least, and every now and again the semi-satisfaction of balls landing with a deep thud on my long dead strings. After four years of running, however, and with a body about as close to age eighteen as I would get — thirty-plus miles per week plus cross-training — I decided I was fit enough to return to tennis. I picked my tournament: the 2017 USTA National Grass Courts at the West SideTennis Club.
I don’t remember why I decided that a nationwide, USTA sanctioned tournament on a surface on which I had never played before — grass — would make an auspicious re-entry for me. Maybe I thought, “ah, Forest Hills,” I know that place. Or I saw the words “free t-shirt.” Back in the days of old, we always got a free t-shirt for every tournament entered — I could have made a quilt out of mine. But bottom line: I was cocky. What would these club “ladies who lunch” have on me: a top-ten Missouri Valley sectional player who practiced with the Northwestern team. Plus, what I lacked in skill, I could certainly make up for in endurance. I would just grind them down in the end. Instead of two, I took ten steps forward — and then twenty steps back.
Tennis was not like riding a bicycle. Jumping back into tennis at age forty was like riding a motorbike on unpaved rural roads through jumps, ditches and knee-high grass while dodging trees and little animals. The sport seemed familiar — I had the basic mechanics — but the style of the hitting and the pace of the ball threw me off at every turn.
My first-round opponent, Christine, had come from Ithaca, New York, which she had never left after playing doubles for Cornell. Despite being married with four kids, she had also never quit playing doubles ,and doubles made her an excellent grass court player. Christine could pop off service returns and come in with the softest of touches to corner a volley or gently slice a drop shot inches from the net. I had expected the standard baseline grinder, like me. In return, I got finesse. Finesse, which in my previous life as a player I had called chip and charge ‘junk’, kept the balls sliding well below my knees and out of reach. I kept thinking I could pound cross-courts and whip down-the-lines like an 18-year-old. Except I was a 41-year-old reformed partier who had not hit a hundred cross-courts, who had not run line drills, who had not sliced a ball since 1996. And certainly not under any kind of pressure.
I learned from the first drop shot that I had woefully relied on chutzpah of the past and not my current ability. And chutzpah would not win the match. By the time she had finished, Christine had brought me to the net at least two dozen times, passed me ten, forced some 20 or so errors and left me in a sweaty, grass-stained heap on the lovely portico overseeing the Forest Hills campus.
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The next hot, sunny, steamy day, with heat advisories in full effect, I played Barbara, a taller, heavier woman in her late fifties who looked a bit tamer and a bit more manageable. Based on my previous days’ battering, I didn’t expect to win, but I hoped to make the match somewhat more competitive. But Barbara had also been in regular tennis competition for about forty years. She also knew how to bait me, and I fell into every trap: over hitting, running through her drop shots, netting my own drop shots, shanking all over the place. For me, an athlete in better shape, probably twenty years younger, it was a humiliating afternoon made worse by the appearance on the sidelines of a woman whom I had been dating.
Following that tournament thrashing, I almost threw my ancient racquet bag back into the back of the closet and ended my own cliche of reigniting undiscovered talent in middle age. I still had plenty of marathons to run, I figured. Yet that drive I had long ago shoved down deep into my core had been reawakened, and I did the unthinkable for a person earning my salary: I bought new tennis racquets and booked a lesson.