Love at the tennis court by Marcia Henin

Sport is one of the most notorious group activities. It brings people together. It makes people aware of each other’s strong and weak points. Sport also has a way of bringing people closer. Many couples around the world met in the sports field. While competing against each other, people begin to form attractions and even fall in love. Competition and rivalry in sports sometimes turns into a whole different set of emotions, which then becomes evident and reveals itself in the outskirts of sports field.

Tennis is an evident example in this matter. Many boys and girls first meet at the tennis field. Even if they aren’t as beautiful as Maria Sharapova, or play with such physical strength as Roger Federer, they still catch the attention of viewers, plunging into the love story, which begins in the tennis game. There are more than several examples to this phenomenon; I shall name two.

In an old American film called “Nobody’s perfect” a guy (played by Chad Lowe) falls in love with a girl (played by Gail O’Grady), while watching her moves at the college tennis court. He tries to get closer to her and ends up dressing up as a girl, playing in her team, as they get ready for an important tennis match. When she finds out the truth about him, she leaves him, but later is forced to ask him to come back and play with her in the important tennis match. Naturally, they play and win, kiss in a happy-end right there at the tennis court, thereby only strengthening the main idea of this tennis article.

Another, far more known example, is the case of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”. When Humbert takes Lolita with him to his hopeless journey, he tries to engage her in sports activities, such as swimming and playing tennis. He describes in very small, exact details the picture he gets watching her play: "She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the tennis scores, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home”.

Needless to say, no one would like to raise the kind of emotions Humbert feels for his beloved; nevertheless, it is hard to argue with the notion that love often sparkles and grows at the sports field.