Game, set, match

Between having two friends and their thirteen or fourteen-month-old over earlier today and catching up on blog posts I should have read earlier, including the one informing what I'm writing now, I got to thinking about family time.

I suspect that most parents feel at least a little pressure for the big gestures to make memories for their kids--vacations, most notably--but one of the more pleasant times I can recall is something small stretched over years: playing ping pong and (eventually) tennis with my dad.

I don't remember when we first set up a ping pong table in our garage, but I know I spent a lot of hours knocking the little ball around with my dad. We'd play after dinner with 700 WLW's Sports Talk, hosted by Bob Trumpy and then Cris Collinsworth, on in the background. The broadcast would either play over the intercom system in the house--don't ask me why the previous owners installed it--or the old console radio that had AM, FM, and shortwave options.

Kids tend to believe that their fathers are great at everything, and I certainly thought he was accomplished at this game. I also wanted like crazy to beat him. I improved to the point where I could hold my own with him. I learned how to use topspin and backspin, and I developed strategies for where on the table to place my serves and returns. I didn't surpass him, but we could have very competitive games.

The space in which we were playing was less than adequate for a sanctioned set-up. The garage door was close to my back. Anything too far to one side of the table meant I might swat some junk piled up to the sides. The games were often interrupted for rooting out the ball after winning and errant powerful hits. Whether digging around in the board games or in back of the deep freeze behind my dad or the old hospital bed, croquet set, fishing equipment, and lawn chairs down at my end, finding the ball could be a challenge. (Oh yeah, there was also a mousetrap.) If we opened the garage door during the warmer months--the house wasn't air conditioned--there was a good chance I'd have to run into or across the street to collect the ball.

The table wasn't always level and at some point started slanting down at my end, allowing my dad to profit from shots that would clip the edge of the table and be impossible to swat back. The ceiling was low enough that some spectacular saves would be thwarted by being hit into it.

Still, I wouldn't have traded this less than perfect space for a sizable rec room. The garage was sort of its own zone, where it was just the two of us playing and talking.

It wasn't until I got into high school and learned how to play tennis that we traded some of the table tennis time for the big court. My parents must have played tennis together at some point as we did have a couple wood frame rackets around the house. I was a bigger fan of baseball, football, and college basketball than I was of tennis, but I followed the matches on TV on a regular basis. I always liked watching Wimbledon and continue to associate it with the 4th of July. I also associate it with a day that my parents inevitably decided that we needed to trim the hedges and rake and bag the cuttings. (I hated that.)

We had a small park next to our house, so we could walk a short distance to play on one of the two concrete tennis courts. I know that on several occasions we'd play until the sun had set enough that reaction time was severely hindered by obscured vision and the community center's parking lot lights turned on. I played one of my brothers from time to time, although he constantly irritated me with his insistence on hitting everything as softly as he could so I'd always have to run to the net.

We didn't take many vacations when I was a kid, but from this side of things, I can say that it didn't matter. Those countless hours playing table tennis and tennis were more valuable and less expensive than any trips never taken. Last weekend I had a small taste of those days when he and I faced off in the tennis that's part of Wii Sports. (He, my youngest brother, and I spent more time duking it out at the virtual bowling alley.) No, it wasn't the same, but it was nice to be reminded of the time he gave me...and to best him on the court again.