Thoughts of an L.A. Open tennis ball:

Written by: Staff on 24th July 2012

Thoughts of an L.A. Open tennis ball:

epa03279594 Novak Djokovic of Serbia in action during a training session for the Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, in London, Britain, 24 June 2012. EPA/JONATHAN BRADY |

By: Craig Cignarelli

…I’ve been suffocating with this band of brothers for nearly three months, bounced across rough seas on our way from Shenzen,Taiwan to the States and finally able to breathe when the tournament referee popped our top and thrust me out into the ninety-degree temps of L.A.’s sports entertainment world.

…Some of the fellas got stuck on the practice courts, battered and bludgeoned for the pleasure of a few fans who spend more time watching the player’s abdominals than anything they do with the ball. Not me though. I’ve made it to the show. I’ll have thousands watching my every turn and bounce, and then cheering when I’ve hit my lines.

…Traveling 130 miles an hour makes my seams spread wide and I can feel my hair being ripped back as I scream my way across the net and tuck and roll so I don’t bang my nose upon a scuffed white line or grainy court paint. The youngest among us have heard stories, from our grandfathers, of three-shot rallies and smoother courts, but no one under twenty-one believes any of it. These days we take an awful pounding, thumped twenty times by thinly-threaded strings before being sledgehammered into an umpires thigh or a windscreen.

…It doesn’t take much to kick our feet a little left or right during landing so we tend to aim for the outside edge of the line if a player cuddles us a little before the toss. That guy Djokovic has this cranky habit of banging our heads against the turf some gawdawful odd number of times before tossing us up, so he’s not earning any friendship points from us. That probably explains why he stays so far inside the lines with his shots. Just once I’d love to break right on a big point and cause him anguish. Luckily, he’s in London this week and those British fellas get the benefit of well-manicured grass, which is like a pillow compared to this American hardcourt crap.

…Can I just comment about the level of beauty watching us out here! Grown males with botoxed foreheads and hair designed by men with French names. Absurdly attractive women who’ve apparently left the Maxim modeling shoot to strut their Louis Vuitton handbags in front of the world’s elite athletes. I’m about thirty minutes from going bald so unless someone out there has a Halopecia fetish, there’s little hope for me.

…A quick shoutout to the stringers who stencil the rackets two minutes before play. You know that ink is carcinogenic right? Would it kill you to let it dry a little before you choke us out? Just sayin…..

…For most of us, the sunset of our athletic career takes place at local country clubs, pelted back and forth by men whose strokes look like a doctor wrote them. After that, we’re destined for some school kid’s chair’s bottom, or a tireless hound’s dripping mouth, or the distal end of an old woman’s walker. But the lucky few rage against the dying of the light, and seek the Holy Grail of tennis ball retirement. Autographed by a winning tennis star, we are sent up into the evening sky and drift down into the awaiting hands of some adoring fan who will caress us for the rest of the night and then place us upon some fireplace mantel for all the world to see, and then fawn over us at cocktail parties and tell stories about the “night that was.”

Topics: 10sballs.com, Craig Cignarelli, Farmers Classic, LA Open, Novak Djokovic, Sports, Tennis Fan, tennis writer