A Tennis Hater Makes Jewelry for Tennis Lovers

Hazel Nussbaum and I at the New Haven Open last August. Her jewelry line is titled Love Tennis by Hazel, but Hazel Nussbaum comes by her love the hard way, like me, with lots of Hate mixed in.

"My coach said, 'I love hitting with you because we've hit 100 balls and you've probably only missed five, but you got pissed every time you missed those five balls.'"

We shared a knowing look.

"I forget the 95 that were good. I'm focused on the five that were bad."  Oh, yeah, she's a Hater, all right.

I met Hazel at her vendor's booth at the WTA's New Haven Open in New Haven, Connecticut last August.  But I knew of her before that.  

My bracelet. Great gift! Glad I thought of it!Around June, I was searching online for ideas to field to my husband for my birthday (further proof that behind every great man is a smarter, better-organized woman) and I found her sophisticated line of tennis-inspired jewelry.  Mark had dutifully ordered one of her bracelets for me, but it had not arrived by my Red Letter Day (August 19, Haters.  Note it in your calendars. Address provided for flowers and gifts upon request.)  

"Guess who's one of the vendors this year?" Mark had asked me while we watched Marion Bartoli and Sloane Stephens slug out a 3-setter.  "The lady who's making your bracelet!  Maybe we can pick it up at her booth."

We could not.  Nussbaum has been swamped by orders since launching her line in May.  By the end of June, she had received 100 of them, based solely on word of mouth and people like me trolling the Internet for something beside a T-shirt that would express our love of tennis.

Nussbaum came up with the idea for her business two years ago while conducting a similar search. Her mixed doubles team had reached the USTA League nationals in their division (more on that in a moment) and she was looking on site and online for a piece of jewelry to mark the occasion.

You could almost take it off the chain and hit with it."When I travel, I buy jewelry as souvenirs," she said.  "I could not find anything decent.  It was either $2 and wasn't enough for me about tennis, or it was expensive but ... over the top, very literal." 

"They were not stylish, in my opinion."  

Exhibit A: the necklace at right. It takes Tennis Hate to a new, visceral level.    

Nussbaum noodled around with some designs, relying on her background at Unilever as a senior brand manager for St. Ives, which makes deodorants, body washes and lotions.

Encouraged by tennis buddies, who were ordering  Hazel Nussbaum found a manufacturer in Rochester, quit her Unilver job and poured her savings, and passion, into Love Tennis by Hazel.

Love Tennis by Hazel's racquet and ball lariat necklace. So pretty."I'm a tennis nut.  I love it, love it, love it.  It's a borderline obsession, in a bad way.  And I love jewelry to the same degree."

Hazel Nussbaum came by her tennis obsession the way most of us develop our fixations and disorders: her mother.  Her mom was crazy about the sport and taught herself and her daughter to play. "We lived on a dead end in New Rochelle and I had my baby racquet and we just hit."

"Just hitting" with mom was apparently pretty good training. Nussbaum competed in high school and earned a walk-on spot on the Manhattan College tennis team in Riverdale. "I showed up with my Spalding racquet with the zipperhead bag," she recalled.

I swear like a trucker!  People are like, 'Did she really just say that?'"

She had not had any pro instruction up to that point. Her teammates, meanwhile, had played the junior circuit. They called her their "sleeper cell." They showed her how to use different grips and taught her strategy. And they policed her gear. When Manhattan College advanced to the finals of its Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, Nussbaum says they demanded that she get a "real" racquet and bag.

Hazel and her mom at her booth at the 2012 New Haven Open.Today, Hazel Nussbaum is a 4.5-level player.  She's playing on two women's doubles teams in the USTA Southern Connecticut District this fall, and, combined, has a 6-1 record so far.   

Nussbaum's 2012-2013 mixed doubles season also is off to a great start.  She's got a 5-1 record with Winners All Too.  That's the team that made it to USTA Nationals in 2010, the trip that launched her business.  

Nationals? 4.5? Just TWO losses in 11 doubles matches? Haters, I'm Har-Tru green with Tennis Hate. 

What I love about Hazel is that she gets this, gets the obsessive, perfectionist, critical voice that can get in the way of enjoying and flourishing in the game.  Even now, with all her achievements, Nussbaum says she still must manage the Tennis Hate that drove her to berate herself for missing 5 out of 100 balls.  

"I swear like a trucker!" she confided. "My partner laughs.  People are like, 'Did she really just say that?'"

Oh, no, she didn't!  

"My husband witnessed me play tennis once, and he was so horrified, he refuses to watch me anymore," admitted Nussbaum. "It's our 'no fly zone.'  He said, 'All your matches, it's either you yelling and becoming a monster or you crying!' He won't come.'"

Yeah, Haters, but at least she's got the good sense not to play with her husband.  One time, that led me down such a rocky road of Tennis Hate, I called my poor husband a mother fucker for executing a drop shot.  (It was on my return of serve! I think I deserve just a little slack here.)  

Nussbaum said her key to shaking off an attack of Hate on the court is appreciation.  She learned this at that 2010 mixed doubles National championship, where her team "got trounced."  

"I'm going to honor the situation," she said she told herself.  "I"m healthy enough to be out here.  I have the time. I've got to put things in perspective."

And when she does, Hazel Nussbaum realizes she's blessed.  She gets to express her love for the game as a player, a fan (Nussbaum, whose mom is Swiss, roots for Roger Federer) and, now, as the founder of a growing business. Sales are robust enough for her racquet and ball lariat necklace, pictured above, that Haters who want their husbands to get one for them this Christmas must wait until January.

Damn!  Yet another thing to Hate my Worthy Comrade, Hazel Nussbaum, for!  

Other People's Children

Dad and his little tennis ace, outside the Prospect Park Tennis Center.I see children everywhere, all of a sudden.  I am staring at them, noticing how small they are standing next to their parents, the top of their heads barely reaching their dad's belt buckle or their mom's elbow.

I stare and I think, is that kid a 6-year-old, like Emilie Parker?  

Or maybe the little boy I saw today heading into the Prospect Park Tennis Center with his dad was 7, like Daniel Bardin, who, with Emilie and 18 other little ones, was shot to death by a man with a semi-automatic rifle in their classrooms in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday. (The latest New York Times headlines are here, if you haven't been following them already, which I doubt.)

Children are a steady presence at the Tennis Center. They pour into the lobby with their often-harried parents a few steps behind them for their Pee Wee lessons .  They take the courts as I and my league teammates leave them at 10:00 AM on Saturday mornings, the more Type-As diligently doing warm-up laps.  Some kids head right to the service line and begin hitting red and yellow foam balls across the net to their Type-A parents.  I feel like a bumper car at Coney Island as I steer my way toward the front door through clumps of little people.

Mostly, I pay no attention to them, except to avoid colliding with them or their racquets.  But today I can't help but see them.  They stand out even though they do not stand very high at all. They are striking in their smallness and vulnerability.  Their skin looks translucent.  I'm stunned by how beautiful they all are.  I catch myself staring because I'm trying to understand just how Adam Lanza could have looked at a human being this young and soft and vibrating with energy and kill him (James and Dylan and Noah, Jesse and Chase) or her (Jessica and Ana, Grace, Josephine, Olivia). 

I am not alone in this mental effort.  The whole nation is seeing children, theirs and others, with fresh eyes and trying to understand.  I hope it leads to more than understanding.  I hope it leads to action.

USTA Moves US Open 2013 Men's, Women's Finals

God rested on the seventh day, Sunday, and now the men's finalists in the 2013 US Open will, too. The United States Tennis Association announced it is moving the men's final from Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon.

It's a familiar position for the men's championship match. It's been held on Monday for the last 5 years because of rain.

The women 's final will be moved from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon. That puts the kibosh on a "Super Saturday" lineup in which the men's semi-finals and the women's championship were played on the same day.  

"Super Saturday," a tradition at the US Open since 1984, is now "Snoozer Saturday." 

By spreading out the US Open's finish over four days, the USTA has brought the final Grand Slam of the season in line with other Slams.  The organization made the scheduling changes after players had complained.

"We listened to the players and understood we needed to accommodate their request for an extra day of rest between the semifinals and final," said USTA spokesman Chris Widmaier.  

Practice Makes Better

My very first tennis vacation was at a well-worn resort in Safety Harbor, Florida, near Tampa. The hotel was a sprawling assortment of buildings, linked over the years with ramps and stairs and long passageways dotted with bland artwork.

 

The tennis pro was well-worn, too. Terry had spent so many hours in the sun that his skin had hardened and cracked into a series of maroon-colored plates. He may have been in his late 40s or 50s, but the sun had ripened him by 30 years.

One afternoon, I found him in his office, setting up the schedule for a USTA League tournament he was hosting. He told me many of his local clients participate.

"Like the woman you were hitting with at lunch today?" I asked. I had watched their practice session. I had watched several of them. She took a lesson every afternoon with Terry. She was focused and serious on the court. And she was, to my beginner's eyes, very good.

All my fantasies are about practicing."

"No, she just likes to practice," Terry said, not looking up from his computer screen. "She never competes, never plays a match or even a game. Just takes lessons."

At the time, I thought that was strange, and told Terry so. "What good is practice if you don't take what you've learned and use it against somebody in competition?" I asked him. He said he didn't know.

Now, 8 years later, I think I understand her. Practice offers its own victories and losses, winners and errors, without consequences. Practice offers freedom from Tennis Hate. I hate tennis, a lot, when I'm competing. I love it madly when I'm practicing.

Gerald Marzorati loves practice, too. Marzorati, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, is writing a book about learning tennis late in life. (keep up with me, Haters; read about Marzorati here.)

"All my fantasies are about practicing, pleasing Kirill [Azovtsev, his pro] and myself, and not about beating anyone," he said.

We both agreed our favorite vacations are at tennis camps, where we play 5 hours a day, every day, until our legs are rubbery, get a deep tissue massage every night and hit the bed in a way that gives new meaning to the phrase, "fall asleep."

Don't get him wrong, Gerry Marzorati loves to win. Heck, the guy wouldn't be where he is in journalism if he didn't have a jones for beating the competition to a story and owning it.

"When I’m actually playing, I want to win and when I win, I feel better than when I lose," Marzorati said. "But I never feel better than when I leave a lesson where I've hit some shot better than I hit it last week."

I got that feeling recently during my monthly doubles clinic with Saintly Pro Anne Hobbs. We were practicing consistency with a forehand drill in which we were supposed to read the ball, prepare early for the shot, line up our feet in a closed stance and slowly swing the racquet out through the ball and up, catching it in our other hand. We were to say "yes" if we thought we executed the shot correctly and "no" if we felt we screwed it up. Anne would either agree with us or disagree, and we got points if our self-analysis aligned with her observation of our shot.

I was a metronome of "No's."

I rode a wave of emotions. First was the anticipation and excitement of trying the drill.  Then, anxiety, wanting to please Anne.  More anxiety because I wasn't succeeding. Then a tsunami of Tennis Hate, of anger and despair. I can't do this! What's wrong with me? Then, gritty determination. Keep trying! Do it again! Don't give up. Then, success -- the ball flew through the air with weight and purpose and good direction, and my swing felt easy and free and effortless, not tight and muscled -- and a big bubble of hope. Hey, Anne! Did you see that?!

I love those moments in practice.  I love when the moment of grasping something new happens.  I enjoy that state of Beginner's Mind. I enjoy tennis -- and any endeavor -- most when I give myself permission to be a work in progress.

That permission is a good guideline for life off-court, too.  Perfection is chemotherapy for the soul, sickening and weakening it under the guise of saving it.  True salvation comes from beginner's mind.  

Marzorati, like me, a latecomer to the game, relishes the beginner's mind that tennis gives him.  It's one of the gifts of having a passion for the sport.

"There’s a focus it brings to my life about improvement and physical well being and the potential to do something remotely beautiful that is a way of living," he said.  "I’m just loving the place it has in my life.  I like that it’s increasingly the white noise my head."

Me, too.

Worthy Comrade: Gerry Marzorati

The photo instantly caught my eye: a middle-aged man in tennis whites doubled over at the baseline of a greenish-grey Har Tru tennis court, hands on his knees, racquet dangling, limp and useless.

Robert Caplin for the New York Times, courtesy nytimes.com 

It was the same tennis asana I've practiced many, many times on the court: Downward Facing Blown Shot.

 Were Gerald Marzorati and I separated at birth? Photo: Stephen Nessen

Then there was the opening line of the accompanying story in The New York Times:

"There is seldom an hour I spend alone with Kirill when I don’t come to feel worn and inadequate."

Worn and inadequate! Thus was I convinced: Gerry Marzorati IS my tennis soul mate.   

Marzorati doesn't need tennis to feel adequate and accomplished.  He edited The Times Magazine for seven years. Since 2010, he's been the managing editor of digital initiatives.  He was an editor at Harper's Magazine and the New Yorker.  In short, Gerald Marzorati is at the peak of his career and his powers. Except when he's on the tennis court, as he described in oh-so-familiar detail in his article last August:

Come on, I whined to myself [he had just blown an overhead], having walked to the side of the court for a towel and a gulp of Gatorade.  Come on.  What was I doing, thinking I could be a tennis player?

Since taking up tennis five years ago, what Marzorati's been doing, as he explains in his piece and in an forthcoming book based on it ("The working title is 'Late to the Game,'" he told me), is trying to stay mentally young, even as his body bends toward 60.  

I wanted to do something difficult. That was why I wanted to try tennis. I had been good at things. I was still good at things. I didn’t need a hobby, or a way to meet people. I wanted to get better at something; it had been a long time since I’d sensed that. I wanted to learn something that I would not be learning by reading; I had been reading all of my life, had spent the better part of four decades reading for a living. I wanted, one last time, to struggle at something I could control because the last real struggles were going to be ones I could not.

"I’m seeing that with my own parents now," he told me over bottled water and herbal tea in the Times' 14th floor cafe.  "They’re in their mid-80s.  At some point you lose the ability to make meaning with your body and that seems a terrible goodbye.  And you’re facing your mortality on death’s terms, not your own."

Marzorati initially tried taking up a foreign language.  "I did actually take French lessons for a few years.  Then I saw I was just transferring my ability to read to this task.  What I realized was I wanted to do something physical."

Marzorati getting drilled by Saintly Pro Kirill Azovtsev. Photo, Robert Caplin, courtesy New York Times.He was an athletic kid, playing football, basketball, baseball.  He wasn't very good. "I was the shortest, skinniest kid in my class.  I just got the crap beat out of me in whatever sport I played."

Marzorati says he always liked tennis, got to love it, as many Americans did, watching men's tennis in the 1970s.  "I was a Borg guy," said Marzorati.  "I thought Borg was cool.  I didn't hate McEnroe, though."

His favorite player now is Roger Federer.  "Watching Roger Federer is a gift," he said.  I nod. We are in agreement here, both feeling lucky to witness The Greatest of All Time.  "He’s the most beautiful shot maker and has the most beautiful footwork.  He’s so light on his feet and balletic and has so many ways of making the most minor adjustments to his grip in the middle of an intense rally."

Marzorati helped birth one of the best articles written about Federer's superior skill and artful genius.  That piece, by the late David Foster Wallace, appeared in the short-lived sports magazine Play that Marzorati launched.  

"I’m drawn to beautiful things," he said.  And the elusive beauty of tennis is part of what drives his love of the sport.  "I'm drawn to, can I do something beautiful by hitting this ball properly?  That’s part of it."  The other part is what he calls an "Emersonian aloneness" of tennis.  "It's the idea of being self-reliant and also just really self-conscious, in an interesting way."

I spend a lot of time losing.  I don't think you can get better unless you play people who are better than you."

Interesting self-consciousness?  Mine is more immolating than interesting.  But Marzorati is not a meltdown kind of guy.

"I’m not a self-hater.  I’m not racquet smasher," he said. Even though he loses a lot.  Just like when he was a kid.  Only this time, his failures are part of a deliberate strategy.

"I only play people who are better than me," he said.  Marzorati said his Worthy Opponents are all younger than him.  Some even played Division A college tennis.  "I spend a lot of time losing.  I don’t think you can get better unless you play people who are better than you."

Okay, Haters, Marzorati's ability to metabolize losing, to embrace it as a necessary byproduct of his learning process, is rocking my time-space continuum.  How does he do it?  

It turns out he employs a glass-half-full outlook and a little bit of schadenfreude.  

Me, drilling my pushy backhand. But, like Marzorati's game, it's better than it was last year. I think...."One of the key things for me is this idea that I am still improving," said Marzorati.  "There aren’t any places in my game that I’m not better than where I was from a year ago."  There's a lesson for us, Haters.  Stop comparing yourself to the pros, or to your peers, or to some idealized version of yourself making the perfect strike on the ball, and appreciate how far you've come from Day One on the court.  

Now the more delicious part, the schadenfreude!  Marzorati told me he has a mental advantage against his younger, more skilled opponents: "I'm playing people who already know their game has diminished remarkably.  Their frustrations with themselves are with shots they routinely made that they can't do anymore. It’s disturbing.  A fair number of them give up."

He didn't cackle with glee and twirl a racquet in his hands with twitchy, joyful anticipation, but he might as well have.  Ah, he's a Hater after all!

But his love/hate relationship is really with aging, not tennis.  That's what his new book will explore, "neuroscience and the physiology of aging."  (That's good, because I thought it was going to be about his love/hate relationship with tennis, and the psychological challenges of the game.  That, Haters, is my book. Some day. When I better understand my love/hate relationship with writing.)

"My goal," explained Marzorati, "is to be as good as I possibly can be, given the limitations of who I am and where I began.  When will I hit the wall, when my age simply means no matter how much I’m practicing or learning, my game, too, is diminishing?  That will be interesting.  [There's that word again.  I'm going with "devastating."] 

"I’m hoping," he said, 'to keep that at bay for as long as possible."