Testing the Waters
Linda Colwell
Section / Genre: Memoir / Essay
One day in the early 1970s, when my mother Boots was 42, she walked down the hill to the Washington Park tennis courts with a wooden racquet on her shoulder, leaned against the chain link fence covered in climbing red roses, and asked the Buffs if she could play with them. The Buffs were a cadre of four to six older men who could be found at the courts most dry days. One of them, Pearl, played shirtless, with white shorts and Stan Smith sneakers. His buff chest had the sheen of well-oiled cherry wood and the wrinkles of dried plums. His white hair, slicked back with pomade, matched his smile. I’d say he was in his eighties, but I was a tweenager and anyone over forty looked ancient to me. Pearl knew the rules, and he invited my mother in to play with him and the other Buffs.
She didn’t know it at the time, but she was about to make a dramatic leap in her tennis career, which would go on for over 40 more years, and include playing in local, national, and international tournaments. Her USTA doubles ranking eventually soared to the top of her age group—the 85s—and bronze, silver, and gold-ball trophies lined the shelves in her bedroom. She would have played into the 90s if the pandemic hadn’t stopped her in 2020.
The first tennis court Boots remembers is the one near the baseball field in her hometown of Yukon, Pennsylvania. She didn’t play on it, but the construction of the court made an impression on her, the opening knot in a lifelong thread. At 23 she picked up a racquet for the first time, in Cleveland, Ohio, for a hit-around session with her husband- and in-laws-to-be. She remembers feeling elevated playing tennis, and how good the racquet felt in her hands.
In 1961, my father accepted a job in Portland. The move took Boots away from family, isolating her with children to raise and a house to keep. Weekends were for shopping, chores, and if time and weather permitted, afternoons at parks, picnicking and playing tennis. We lived in the foothills above downtown Portland. She and my father walked me, my three siblings, and our dogs through the Hoyt Arboretum. We were a long straggle, picking up pinecones and sticks as we wound our way through the Doug firs, down past the Japanese Garden to the row of six tennis courts. The ping of a tennis ball hitting the fence, the thut of a ball well hit, and the slap of a let serve called to Boots more than those sounds called to any of us.
Which was okay—by the time my mother joined The Buffs, my brothers and sister and I were old enough to be left alone. Boots soaked up the skilled and mannered style that Pearl and his friends offered. Playing tennis with the Buffs was a way for my mother to get out and be on her own.
With the confidence she gained from the Buffs, Boots began to play with friends on weedy, line-faded courts with low nets. She played on courts in the Columbia River Gorge and on the Oregon Coast, where crosswinds blew and rain threatened to end games early. She calls those years the “hit and giggle” years.
Boots wasn’t fancy and didn’t need fancy to have a good time. Those public courts at Washington Park gave her entry into a sport, a community, and a pocket of life that became the trifecta of physical, mental, and social engagement that bolstered my mother through my father’s retirement and his long, slow decline. In the last few weeks of his life she continued to play three times a week. The game, I have no doubt, became prayer, and held her together as her role as wife unspooled.
Boots married out of Dogpatch and into the upper middle class when she married my father. There’s a note of pride in her voice when she describes her job of raising children, keeping house, and taking care of her husband for their sixty-plus years together. But when she talks about tennis, she is another person entirely—one none of us knew. She is self-satisfied. She knows something about herself that she didn’t know as a daughter or wife. Her oldest friend observed all this, and noted how tennis gave Boots a voice of her own. It’s understandable. She married a man in charge who minimized her desire to go to college; a traditionalist who believed her place was in the home.
My father’s serve was a short slice from the front of his face, with so much backspin on the ball that it’d drop in the net if you managed to get a racquet on it. His short, stalky body moved clumsily on the court, and the points he won were won dirtily. He was an aquatic creature to her terrestrial character.
I’ve puzzled over what Boots found so interesting about tennis and what drove her to play more and more as she aged. Boasting about a 90-year-old mother with a national ranking isn’t interesting on its own. I’ve come to see that she was someone on the court who she couldn’t be at home, in the family, or married to my father. On the court, she found that part of herself that she hadn’t previously met or thought she could be. She had agency, proficiency, and strategy, aspects of personhood she couldn’t achieve in her off-court roles.
In 2016, Boots and I attended the premier of Gold Balls: The World of Ultra Senior Tennis at the Portland Film Festival. After the screening, my mother, a tiny 85-year-old, posed for a photo with the film’s director, Kate Dandel. Boots congratulated Dandel on her work and told her she enjoyed the documentary. Then, she leaned in close and shared that the film would’ve been far more interesting if it had been about the women. “That’s where the story is,” she said.
This story originally appeared in the Portland Tennis Courterly’s Wet Issue. To purchase a copy, visit our online store.