The occasion of my family’s 2025 reunion presented an irresistible opportunity. With a little tweaking of flights, rental car and hotel we found ourselves in South Eastern Michigan with the Man in Black himself.
The last time the two of us shared a little time we found ourselves on the rooftop of Plaza la Reina in Westwood. The MIB had been generous enough to stay over an extra day so we could play tennis on my birthday. Plus, he got to have breakfast at Henri in Canoga Park, but that is a story for another day.
I think the last time I was in Metro Detroit I was a little kid and my family was on its way to Windsor Ontario and points further east. This time the focus was on MIB’s and his home in Farmington Hills. After we got in town, MIB generously asked if we wanted to go to Ann Arbor.
“Fuck no, brother. This trip is all about spending time with MIB in his native habitat.”
Just when you thought it was safe to step onto a tennis court with a confident stride, you see the MIB looking over the net at you. He’s a great player to warm up with. He likes to start close to the net, refamiliarizing his racket and hands to the variety of shots he likes to play. Then we hit soft volleys back and forth. Then we worked our way back toward the baseline and started to rally. That’s when the MIB Effect starts to take hold. It often seems like his feet don’t interact with the ground with the full force of gravity, he moves with such great ease. His strokes are fine, especially on the angles, but it’s always his footwork that is so fun to watch and listen to. Even the squeek of his Nike Air Zoom Vapor Cage 4 occurs at a higher pitch and amplitude than normal. I especially enjoyed returning serve from MIB (a minor strength of my game). In the end, though, playing with MIB is a reminder of the harsh differential between our games. Still, it was a lot of fun.
I thought about what it was like to play with MIB all the way home to Los Angeles. I knew there was no hope of reducing the differential to zero. Then again, that was never the goal. What I wanted to do was identify as many things as I could to improve in the specific areas that playing with MIB had exposed. So, I did what I always do. I asked my coach, Caesar, he with the unlimited answers to my limitless questions about tennis.
The first thing he said was to focus my attention on the racket of my opponent rather than simply on the ball as it crossed over the net and onto my side of the court. Caesar told me that would help me to identify the kind and the pace of the shot that was likely to be coming my way. That awareness was the first step in preparing for the shot I would need to play very, very soon.
Then he told me of the benefit to moving quickly early and slowing down into the shot. “Bad players are constantly running and stopping. Good players flow to the ball and flow toward their next shot,” he said. Of course, my coach had told me this many times before. But this time it was more urgency and relevant since I’d recently learned I was working too hard creating too little effective movement.
It came as no surprise that three days hanging with the MIB was just not enough. No sooner than we touched down at DTW it felt like we were on our way home. Though time was far too short, I’m glad we made the trip and look forward to sharing a tennis court with MIB again. I will be a little better prepared when that day comes.
Tennis thing 