The Bad Year
There is no dignified way to be worse at something than you were last year, in front of people who remember. You keep turning up, because it's the only move available.
Somewhere in the middle of last season my forehand left. Not dramatically. It didn't collapse in a match or disappear after an injury. It simply stopped arriving at the same moment as the ball, by roughly the width of a thought, and it has not come back since.
Several explanations have been offered. My contact point had drifted. I was late on the shoulder turn. I was, and this was said kindly, forty-four. The explanations were all probably true and none of them helped, because the problem with playing badly is not a diagnostic one. You know exactly what is happening. You are watching it happen in real time from about a foot behind your own head.
What nobody prepares you for is the etiquette. There isn't any. There is no established, dignified way to be visibly worse than you used to be, in front of people who remember you being better, twice a week, for eight months.
The available responses are all bad. You can apologise, which is unbearable for your partner. You can go quiet, which is worse. You can make the joke about it before anyone else can, which works for about three weeks and then becomes a bit that everybody has to keep laughing at. You can take a lesson, which is sensible, and which I resisted for four months on the grounds that a lesson is an admission — as though anybody hadn't noticed.
Or you can just play. Which is what almost everyone does, because the alternative is not playing, and not playing is a decision you appear to make once and then discover you have made permanently.
Almost nobody quits during a bad patch. They quit during a perfectly fine one, by getting busy.
That, I think, is the actual mechanism. The bad patch is loud and it feels like the crisis, but it is survivable precisely because it is irritating, and irritation is a form of interest. The dangerous stretch is the flat one that comes afterwards, when you are playing perfectly acceptably and cannot remember why it mattered. That's when somebody misses a week for a work thing, and then a second week because the first one was fine.
The forehand hasn't returned. I have built something else in the space where it was: shorter, cross-court, reliable, and entirely incapable of the thing the old one did, which was occasionally win a point outright and thereby justify the eleven it had just lost. Statistically I am probably a better player. It is nothing like as much fun.
What I got instead was a season in which I learned to volley, because I had to, because standing on the baseline had become an experiment in disappointment. I am now a mediocre volleyer where I was previously not a volleyer at all. This is not a redemption arc. It is a substitution made under duress, and it is the only kind of improvement I have ever actually managed.
There is a man at our club, well into his seventies, whose game consists almost entirely of slice and apology. He is beaten comfortably every week by people thirty years younger and shows no sign of minding. I used to read that as resignation. I have revised it. He has simply been round this more times than I have and knows what it is: a thing that is happening, and then a thing that happened, and then Tuesday.