Tennis: It’s In the Bag
Teresa Merklin
I was on a quest during the National Senior Women's Clay Court Championships in March. Knowing that the National Women's Tennis Organization (NWTO) was planning a forthcoming issue centered around spring cleaning was a great spark for conversation. I was looking for two specific nuggets of information. First, I was seeking the most unusual item found in their bag. My second objective was to uncover who was carrying the "most expired" shelf-stable food item at the tournament. In the process, I heard a hilarious story of tennis ingenuity.
I was surprised to discover that the players I talked to at the Clays don't regard many things they have in their bags as unusual. If it has occurred to them to carry it in their bag, they assume that other players are doing the same. An alternative explanation is that if they had something unique that they believed gave them a competitive edge, they were unwilling to share it.
Even switching the question around to the most unusual thing they ever found in their bag didn't elicit much information. Carolyn Nichols shared that she usually carries a knife in her bag, which is a challenge given current TSA regulations. I think we can all agree that Carolyn is a player not to be trifled with on or off the court. A more innocuous, and as it turns out, accurate, explanation is that Carolyn uses her knife for cutting up fruit.
My quest also resulted in many tales of liquified bananas and mummified fruit. (If you haven't ever allowed a banana to rot in your bag, are you even playing recreational-competitive tennis?) Andi Polisky once found an orange that had withered to the size of a golf ball. I did not find a single person who currently had an expired food item in their bag. Many people observed that they routinely check and refresh the contents of their bags before traveling to Level 1 Championships.
Next year I plan to repeat the quest looking for tales of the most ingenious ways the things in our tennis bags have been pressed into service. That topic is directly inspired by Canadian Anne Rungi, who shared a hilarious account of how an item in her bag was used when returning home from a Level 1 Indoor tournament in the post-Covid era.
Anne couldn't find the mask she thought was stowed in her tennis bag when she arrived at the airport. However, she found a spare pair of panties, which is a universally standard item for Senior women's tennis players. Fast thinking led her to use the undergarments as an improvised mask for her return flight home. Anne was kind enough to share a picture with me. I have to say that if you don't know what you're looking for, it looks perfectly normal.
For this reason alone, the "bag quest" line of conversation at tennis events is now firmly ensconced as a standard practice for me. It is exactly the kind of story I love to hear.