Breathe
By Edmée Pardo
It wasn't until I was 50 that I picked up a paddle racket. I did it to build another angle in my relationship with my dad. At 76 years old, he was running out of contenders and so I asked, "Can you teach me? It opened an emotion, a dialogue, a door, another edge to our relationship. We played during the vacation periods we spent together, just a few weeks a year, just enough to always be in a good mood. On the way to the court we chat about the book I'm reading, we thank life in front of a ceiba tree that guards the area, we gossip, I ask him something concrete, I learn. We bowl a little and the game begins. I would like to say that we play, but that would be hyperbole. He plays with me: he corrects the racket holder, he forces me to run from one side to the other, "use your backhand, firm hand" he tells me while he makes some wizard serves. Zero six, one six, zero six. Today, at 84, he has at least 70 years of playing racquetball: tennis, squash, paddle, pin pon; and I have barely eight years of slipping on the synthetic grass. But as I am enthusiastic, I continue with our meetings, which above all are fun and joyful.
It was only last summer that I decided to hire a local paddle tennis instructor to make me a worthy contender and not just the object of my father's exercise. You have to learn to read the enemy, the teacher told me. I stopped the game dumbfounded, what was he talking about? Yes you have to control the ball, yes you have to measure your strength, yes you have to know where to put your serve, but above all you have to learn to see the opponent, read the court and not let the opponent anticipate. That, if we want to win. I had never thought of beating my dad, I had never thought of him as the enemy. The opponent, then, the teacher explains to me. If you learn to see where he is going, you build an offensive strategy and you don't just respond to his game. You have to attack.
