RandomPokesPlaying RacquetballSteve Dennie
I love playing racquetball. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, racquetball is played in a little room with one unmarked exit and no fire escape. To start a point, someone whacks a little blue rubber ball against one wall. The object is to run full-speed into as many walls as possible before the ball stops bouncing.
While caroming around the room, you may accidentally come near the unpredictably bouncing ball. That is why you carry a sawed-off tennis racquet. You swing the racquet with all your might and smack the ball at your opponent, trying to imbed it in his ear or at least make a satisfying whop on a thigh. This can be difficult when playing experienced opponents, who wisely present a small target by cowering in the corner in fetal position.
At the end of the hour, you divide the number of wall collisions by the number of welts on your body. The person with the highest score wins. Then you mop up the sweat on the floor, which after an hour usually lies ankle deep, go home, and enter a coma.
It's a great game. The only problem is, I keep getting hurt.
First, there's my lower back. Years ago, a last-second three-quarter-court shot in a church league basketball game landed me in the hospital for a few days. I've had occasional minor back problems ever since, and sometimes after playing racquetball, I hurt. After one particularly painful bout, I gave up racquetball for about six weeks, went sedentary, and got fat. I felt much better.
A few months later, I took to the Field of Battle again--and promptly pulled a hamstring, which took a week to heal. Then I severely sprained my ankle during one especially artful wall collision (I won the point). That took a couple weeks. I pulled something in my left side, but played anyway, since my partner threatened to recruit a healthier opponent from the city morgue.
But my Ultimate Racquetball Injury was the time I got whiplash. No kidding.
We were playing three-way Cut Throat--me, Denny, and Tim. I served the ball to Tim and, like everyone with half a brain says you absolutely shouldn't do, I turned my head to follow the ball. Tim hit it straight at my face. I instinctively jerked my head back, as the hurtling ball struck the nob of my nose and continued on its merry way. No harm done. We kept playing.
The next morning, I began feeling pain in my shoulder and neck, and it got worse as the day progressed. All the second day, I did my critically acclaimed Hunchback imitation. And on the third day, my chiropractor confirmed my amateur diagnosis: whiplash. She said she'd treated people suffering whiplash from major auto accidents who were in better shape than me. And all I did was get bumped on the nose with a rubber ball.
Actually, racquetball's effect on my body is more good than bad. I'm in better shape than I've been for years, and I'm losing weight in the process. The trade-off is that certain key areas cry out in torment now and then.
At the moment, I am injury-free, knock knock. Oh, my back occasionally makes me grimace, my left knee seems a bit weak, and I've got a minor case of Bubonic Plague. But in general, I'm healthy. For now.
But I don't know how long it will last.
Charlotte Elliott, who wrote the hymn "Just As I Am," began losing her health at age 30 and ended up a bed-ridden invalid until she died at age 82, writing her famous hymn amidst physical suffering and despair. The way things are going, I'll be writing songs before too long.
Copyright 2005 Steve Dennie |
