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Saturday 14 July 2018

Wheelchair tennis


I stumbled across a Wimbledon wheelchair tennis match on TV today. Although I played tennis in my younger days I am not interested in watching the dull routines and middle class ghastliness of Wimbledon fortnight. However this wheelchair doubles match was surprisingly watchable.

What impressed me was how good the players are. I was never more than a lowly club player and wouldn’t have stood a chance against any of those guys. Their court craft alone would have run me ragged.

To my mind it is a reminder that tennis is just like many other sports, a game to be played rather than watched. Why watch the dull mechanical grind of uninteresting tennis professionals? Why not dig out the rackets, hire a court and just play the game? It’s fun.

2 comments:

Scrobs. said...

When Mrs O'Blene and I lived in a smaller place, we had a garden with a concrete path right through the garden.

That was the net...

Mrs O'Blene is a tennis fanatic and taught the sport at schools around here. We played with a yellow sponge ball and a couple of garage rackets, and had a lot of fun from prancing around our first house, pretending to be Margaret Court and Ken Rosewall...

These guys are fabulous, and here I have a link to a similar sport, which was in fact a Guinness advert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-g0sLZIqf8

Fills me up.

A K Haart said...

Scrobs - I liked watching Ken Rosewall. He gave the impression that an ordinary guy can play tennis incredibly well. An entirely false impression of course, but it was encouraging.