I took a nasty fall last night playing tennis. It was the last set of the night and we were playing a tie breaker. My partner and I had lost every set up to that point, so we really wanted to finish the evening with a win. The courts at the club where we play are very close together and seperated by curtains of netting. It’s possible to hit an angled shot that’s would normally be playable, but impossible to return on these courts because your racquet gets hung up in the curtain.

Our opponents made just such a shot to my side of the court. I chased it down, figuring that if I made just the right chopping stroke, the racquet would push the curtain out of the way before I made contact with the ball and I could return it. It almost worked, I made contact with the ball but I didn’t get enough on it to get it back. Simultaneously, however, my feet were getting tangled in the netting. They stopped, the rest of my body kept going. I tried to extricate my feet to make a recovery but they were hopelessly stuck. Cut to slow motion. “Well,” I says to meself, “it appears that I’m falling. I wonder how badly I’m going to get hurt? I’m too old for this. No, she’s that xanga softball woman.”

My pal Jules, who I think of as Groucho McEnroe, because of his sense of humor and his resemblance to the comic genious, not his tennis game, was watching on the sidelines. I caught his eye as I went down. He looked like he was witnessing a train wreck.

BAM! I hit the court, my hip taking most of the blow, and the rest on my left elbow and knee. Jules was the first one to get to me. I was laying on the court, taking inventory of my injuries. I quickly concluded that it was only a major case of road rash.

I lied there for awhile deciding how much pain I was going to be in and recovering from the jolt of fear I’d experienced. The other players suggested that we just call it a night. I insisted that I could continue and we went on to close out the set in the next three points. I AM SO MACHO!

And the next time I do that, it’s probably good for a broken hip.