So, we had this idea, right? Let’s put on an exhibition tennis match. Sounded pretty cool, a bit of fun for the local folks, maybe get some players to show off a little. We thought, easy peasy.
Boy, were we in for a ride. You see these things on TV, all smooth and professional. Our little venture? Not so much. It started with just trying to get a date pinned down. You’d think that’d be simple. Nope. It was like trying to get cats to line up for a bath. Everyone had something. Player A couldn’t do weekends, Player B had a cousin’s birthday, Player C was only free if the moon was in a certain phase, or so it felt.
Then Came the “Stars”
And the players themselves! We weren’t talking about pros here, just some decent local talent. But the requests started rolling in. One guy needed a specific brand of water, chilled to an exact temperature. Another wanted his own special chair on the sidelines. I’m not kidding. A chair! We were just happy to get a court that didn’t have a giant crack running through the service box.
We eventually got things sorted, kind of. The day itself was… an experience. Here’s a list of some highlights, if you can call them that:
- The balls we ordered? Wrong type. Someone grabbed the ones for clay courts, and we were on hard courts. Bounce was all over the place.
- Our “refreshment stand” ran out of cups in the first hour. People were drinking orange squash out of their hands, practically.
- One of the players threw a bit of a tantrum over a line call. An exhibition match, mind you! We didn’t even have proper line judges, just some poor volunteer squinting from the side.
I remember this one moment vividly. We’d roped in my nephew to be a ball boy. Poor kid was trying his best, but he was more interested in a butterfly fluttering by. So, mid-point, one of our “star” players hits a weak shot into the net, glares at my nephew, and sighs dramatically like the kid personally sabotaged his game. I nearly lost it. I had to go over and smooth things over, promising the kid an extra ice cream if he just, you know, looked like he was paying attention.
So yeah, that was our grand exhibition tennis event. Lots of running around, a few decent rallies if you squinted, and a whole lot of “never again” feelings by the end of it. It’s funny what goes on behind the scenes of these things. You see the polished end product, but the journey there can be a real mess. Makes you appreciate the big tournaments a bit more, or maybe just makes you realize that sometimes, just hitting a ball around with a friend is a lot less hassle. That’s what I learned, anyway.
