Personal Website for TED HENRY
I’ve experienced all kinds of athletic competition but never one as bizarre as this.
During graduate school I picked up a newspaper to read that the largest tax accounting firm in the valley with three branches had lost all of its senior partners but one in a charter plane crash with tax season looming on the horizon. Knowing they were going to need help I hopped on my bike and rode to their office to offer to do grunt work on a part time and temporary basis. After all I was taking a full load of classes. My offer was accepted immediately and boy did I get an education about that kind of business.
I quickly made friends with the staff accountants which were a good bunch. However there was a large female aggressive office manager of Amazonian proportions that put me off a bit. She had two brothers who played football for major universities, so I suspected she also inherited significant athletic abilities.
After a week or so she entered my office and invited me to come play a tennis match at her tennis club. It seemed like a nice welcoming gesture so I thought sure, why not. After all, I had played recreationally since high school and had worked my way 3/4 up the tennis ladder on the Navy base where all the players were athletes. She didn’t know me from Adam but I was no slouch.
News got around quickly and the whole accounting staff crowded into my office to warn me that she does this to all new hires and proceeds to crush them to the full extent of her abilities. OK, I know that type.* They really don’t like to lose so they pick on the least competitive players. I assured my new friends that I thought I could do OK. They were not so sure. I would be up against someone with a club membership that worked out regularly with a tennis pro. I was not concerned that I might lose, I just didn’t want to get embarrassed. So I went home and told Holly it was time for us to head to a court for some serious practice. Holly was a pretty decent player herself.** There would not be any of our usual silliness while I refreshed my timing.
The day of the match was beautiful sunny and calm. I had never been in a tennis club before and it was really quite nice. And I had a gallery. All of my office mates had shown up to watch and were clearly hoping I could pull off a miracle.
As we warmed up batting the ball back and forth I could see she had a very solid ground game but I resisted the urge to show her what I had. Then the best two out three match got started. Yep, she could really pound the ball from the baseline and had a really long reach. I began by playing power against power and neither of us could break the others serve. To me, even though she was large, she looked a bit soft so I figured she would eventually fade. But when the first set was tied at 8 games all I got impatient and decided to hit some off-speed shots, strong slices, and drop shots to see what would happen. Bingo! Making her run forward for drop shots and then back for the lobs I put over her head had her discombobulated. She was not very quick. She absolutely hated scrambling to the sideline to reach for sliced serves. I closed out the last two games in nothing flat. The gallery was now openly cheering and my opponent was clearly disgruntled. Now that I had her number, I stunned her by closing her out in the second set 6-0. I had discovered the serious weakness in her game. Had it been a normal friendly match I would have let up a bit, but you know, her intentions had been way less than honorable and she was getting more profane with each game she lost.
At the end of the match it got interesting. She had an over the top, screaming temper tantrum, yelled that my play was unsportsmanlike and that I would not be invited back. Then she proceeded to demolish her racket by smashing it repeatedly against the net post until it was just a bunch of fragments loosely held together by the strings. She sure as hell wasn’t going to shake hands. Wow! I don’t know if I had ever seen anyone totally lose it like that. Thankfully the gallery at that point was respectfully silent and did not fan the flames. Frankly I was a bit embarrassed by it all. I wondered later if she had some kind of underlaying pathology. It was outside the range of my experience so I failed to understand her behavior. I wondered how hard it was going to be for her to come into work on Monday.
After the match my new friends took me to the pub and they were in a very good mood. Grinning from ear to ear in fact. They were really happy that someone had finally taken her down. Doesn’t sound like a highly functioning office though, does it?
One of the lessons here is that the incurious eventually get schooled. Much to her chagrin my opponent made a gross assumption that I would be no more skilled than the rest of the accounting staff. This reminds me of an incident when I was going to Naval Justice School in Newport, Rhode Island. I had a friend there who had been a PE major and could wipe the floor with me at everything we tried; tennis, badminton, handball, racketball, and squash. He was a gifted athlete and I didn’t mind losing and learning a few things from him. One evening we were at a pub throwing darts in a casual sort of way and he was playing left handed. Soon a cocky looking guy who had been watching us for awhile stepped forward and slapped down some money to play the winner.
My friend, having barely lost the first game to the cocky guy while playing left handed, goaded the him into double or nothing. I knew this was about to get interesting. The goading went back and forth with lots of bluster and soon they agreed to play the next game for some real money. You can see it coming. My friend switched to his dominant right hand and had him for lunch. The cocky guy got extremely angry but there was not much he could do. He was really worked up about my friend switching hands. But hey, it was a bar scene. All kinds of shenanigans happen in bars. Anyone who has played poker with unknown opponents, or pool, eventually learns there are people ready to lure you in with their apparent ineptitude only to clean your clock in the end.
*= Isn’t someone who seeks out the weak in order to pick on them properly categorized as a bully?
**= I am not the worlds greatest tennis player, just better than the average joe. I had a fraternity brother who had won the state high school tennis championship who showed me that playing someone of his caliber will put me in my place real fast. It didn’t matter. Holly and I enjoyed playing tennis everywhere we lived from the very beginning. We played a lot. We rarely found another couple that were skilled enough to play recreational games with us. Oh sure, there were tournament oriented organizations where we could have found better competition, but we wanted a more casual and friendly experience. For serious competition we both had soccer.