Zain Is Listening To - Neopolitan Dreams by Lisa Mitchell
Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I guess you could say I've been on a sort of cyber hiatus - the cause of which may be a number of things but one of the most significant reasons stems from my trip to melbourne to watch the australian open ! I've always been a big fan of tennis since from whenever i can remember. It really is a very entertaining game filled with its fair share of sporting personalities. Anyways i went to see the semi final between murray and cilic. I'm not sure what it was but being seated in the historic Rod Laver Arena and watching some of the titans of tennis clash heads proved quite an overwhelming experience. That's when it hit me. Why have i never pursued tennis, even as a recreational activity ? Ask the other writer on this blog, what's his name again...zaynn i think ? ;P
whenever I watch a major sporting event, i get quietly geed and the next day I want to be the best player to have ever played the respective game.
So after watching the pro's play, (they always make it look so much easier than it looks - thats why they're professional DAMMIT !) So anywho i went to rebel sports soon after and talked to this little asian dude called Filipe and he basically taught me all the dynamics to the art of tennis racquets...those little buggers are the most complex pieces of metal ever ! So i bought a tennis racquet but this is where i start realising why all these years i have not played tennis ?! Let me lay out the finer nominal details involved in playing tennis :
- tennis balls - packs of 4 - $15 (requires repurchase as those lil green balls of fluff have a limited lifespan)
- tennis racquet - 3 digit sum
- racquet restringing - $30, occurs about every 6 months
- court hire - $14 per hour (and no there's no such thing as free tennis courts !?)
- requires a partner, or the nominal alternative - $35 per hour to use a machine that shoots out balls
- generally some form of coaching is recommended to be able to have fun even on a social level (unless your partner is as shocking a player as you are) - at a hefty price, who would've seen that one coming right. Luckily for me, I and my uncle are on the same level of shocking - if we can contain the number of tennis balls flying out of the cage to single digits we're having a good day :)
Im sure there are more monetary limitations to playing tennis which i have yet to discover but these highlight most of them. If you cumulate the number of hours of practice and hardwork required to make it professionally, that sum total can turn out quite nasty. What i mean by all this mumbo jumbo is that all these financial obstacles I feel may be a major reason why Australia can only produce the Lleyton Hewitt standard of professional players, maybe if they made tennis more accessible to the wider demographic, perhaps one or two bright stars may just shine on the international stage. I don't know, it's just a thought hey.
ZaiN ;)
0 comments:
Post a Comment